You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

by Alan Noble

We weren’t made to live like this, and most of us know it. But either we don’t care, or we don’t think we can do anything about it.

Existence is a thing to be tolerated; time is a burden to be carried.

We just accept as a fact of life that our world is inhuman, and that the human body will be objectified to sell products.

I am responsible for living a life of purpose, of defining my identity, of interpreting meaningful events, of choosing my values, and electing where I belong. If I belong to myself, then I am the only one who can set limits on who I am or what I can do. No one else has the right to define me, to choose my journey in life, or to assure me that I am okay. I belong to myself. But the freedom of sovereign individualism comes at a great price. Once I am liberated from all social, moral, natural, and religious values, I become responsible for the meaning of my own life. With no God to judge or justify me, I have to be my own judge and redeemer. This burden manifests as a desperate need to justify our lives through identity crafting and expression.

competition between individuals

NOT ideas or products competing but individuals competing. Not in a race with a finish line but a constantly moving standard. Not a game or even material success or comfort but a competition where one merits their human existence.

Unlike animals, who can survive by instinct, humans have the capacity to question our own existence, to ask why we should live, and why we should put up with suffering. Mere survival isn’t enough. Living for the sake of living and having children doesn’t cut it for most people, so we adopt visions of the good life to work toward—reasons to live and ways to make sense of our life stories.

We’re all confronted with the challenge of justifying our lives at one point or another.

You aren’t going anywhere. And there doesn’t seem to be much of a point to any of it. Life is stressful and exhausting, and despite moments of pleasure and a few notable successes, you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve been just “going through the motions” your entire life. We

The great difficulty is that if we are our own, then our moral horizons cannot be given, only chosen. And that means that the only assurance we can ever have that we are living morally must come from within ourselves.

Whatever identity they choose (which is almost always defined by the market) will be contested by those with other, different identities, so that they never quite feel secure.

are responsible for discovering and expressing our identity, the moral pressure to be true to yourself regardless of how it affects others makes perfect sense.

What these implications have in common is that they all come with a responsibility: the responsibility to justify our existence, to create an identity, to discover meaning, to choose values, and to belong. We might collectively refer to these as the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging.

there is another to whom we belong, and living before Him frees us from the unbearable burden of self-belonging.

The burden of justifying your own life is too much to bear.

First, even if we advocate for some oppressed groups, how can we be “good people” when we still ignore the vast majority of evil and injustice in the world?

Whenever we use reason to create methods to achieve efficiency, we are practicing technique. For Ellul, one defining characteristic of technique is that in the modern world it subsumes all values under efficiency. Efficiency becomes the greatest good and a way of reassuring our conscience: “Technique provides justification to everybody and gives all men the conviction that their actions are just, good, and in the spirit of truth.”

In fact, ignoring the oppression of particular identity groups is not a retreat from identity politics, but the defense of a dominant identity group.

But what I’d like you to see is that contemporary pornography puts the individual user at the center of the universe. We have a godlike freedom to pursue any fantasy we wish. We can consume the most intimate human experience, taking in image after image after image, amassing a collection of human intimacy so vast and diverse that you come to feel that by rights you should have access to anyone’s body for your own pleasure.

One reason society fails to fulfill its promise is that a society premised on the sovereign self has no discernable ends, only an ever expanding and ever demanding number of means.

Let me encourage you to spend a day looking for examples of competition in society. Once you start looking, you quickly find that almost all our interactions are framed in some way as a competition, often aided by technology (like the fitness apps that automatically post your workout results on social media).

Busyness feels satisfying to the affirming. They may even feel a sense of moral justification when they are exhausted and overwhelmed. There is a rightness to it. That’s not to say that they exactly enjoy being busy all the time, but it does feel less distressing than rest.

To work is to feel your life justified existentially; to pause from your labor is to risk a life of failure.

The standard explanation is that a generation raised on positive self-esteem and participation trophies is too fragile and sensitive to exist as adults in the “real world.”

Contrary to many criticisms of the younger generation, young people in college tend to be achievement-driven and goal-oriented.

If you are not currently in the position to decide what the rest of your life will be like, choosing a career doesn’t seem all that difficult. Pick something that you enjoy doing and pays well, we’re told. But the more options that are available to us in life, the harder it is to be confident in your choices.

Our lives are our own responsibility, it’s our own fault if we make nothing of ourselves, and the easiest way to make nothing of ourselves is to choose the wrong career. Everything hangs in the balance.

Technology expands to fill up the time it saves us.

As a consequence, we're doing more and more things--probably too many

When you choose to follow God’s laws out of personal preference, you will eventually discover a breaking point where your desire for experiences or self-expression comes up hard against an ethical law. And at that moment, you can choose to abandon Christianity as an inadequate or antiquated lifestyle, find a more inclusive style of Christianity, or you can accept that Christianity was never meant to be a lifestyle and with the aid of the Holy Spirit deny your desire. Only if you truly belong to someone else does the latter option make any sense. If you belong to yourself, then it is foolish and perhaps even abusive to deny yourself. But if “you are not your own,” it matters what you do with your body. It even matters how you do something as personal and intimate as making love.

Their identity is grounded in their personhood, even when they run themselves ragged seeking to cultivate a public image. Their experiences have meaning, even if they think they are entirely subjective emotions. Injustice and evil and beauty and goodness are real, discernible values, even if those who deny Christ believe them to be arbitrary assertions of power. And their place in the cosmos is known by the one who made them and gives them breath, even if they feel as if they were floating through empty space.

Our desperate efforts to justify our existence are striving after a state we are already in. But that doesn’t mean we no longer feel the need to justify ourselves. The felt need remains and even intensifies as society grows increasingly secular and the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging weigh on us more and more.

This means knowing that we are spirit as well as body. It means living in light of eternity without the effacement of earthy life. It means knowing that we are a miraculous creation, a pure gift from a loving God. It means that we have limits, we have duties, obligations, and commandments that we must obey. It means we are contingent and dependent upon God.

One of the challenging aspects of living in the contemporary West is the feeling that your labor is pointless at best and harmful at worse.

If we are our own, we need to justify everything we do. We need to know that we are optimizing and competing and improving. But if we are not our own but belong to Christ, things can just be good. And that’s enough.

In a society that despises limits, we must be willing to accept limits for ourselves and encourage them for others.

As Kierkegaard argues in The Sickness Unto Death, we can only be our true selves when we live transparently before God. In the language of this book, we must live aware of our belonging to God. At the center of living before God is living—the acceptance that life is fundamentally good and worth experiencing, even when it is painful. Life is a gift that we steward rightly when we understand it as a gift from God. This means that when we get out of bed each day, a choice to live in this world, it is a testament to our belonging to God. Choosing to live in an inhuman world bears witness to the essential goodness of life, which can only be essentially good if it is grounded in God.