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

by Alan Noble

we’re really quite good at hiding our suffering. Our communities rarely ever require us to be vulnerable.

When you live in close community and have obligations to others that transcend your personal preferences or emotions, eventually you have to be vulnerable and make them aware of hardships you’re facing.

When communities (like churches, neighborhoods, clubs, and so on) are voluntary and “liquid,” they become places we visit rather than dwell. So when a church community or a group of friends or neighbors pressures us into vulnerability, we can retreat to our homes or smartphones.

The result is that our moments of vulnerability are often carefully cultivated and prepared for public consumption to maximize attention and develop our image.

Given how easy it is to avoid vulnerability in the contemporary world, we can’t assume that just because people around us haven’t shared their trauma and suffering, they are okay. You are better off assuming that everyone you meet is bearing some unspoken burden.

What surprises me is that I keep being surprised by the depth and breadth of human suffering.

Efficiency is not a human virtue. It’s not a traditional virtue at all. It’s a metric for machines with clearly defined purposes—but not for humans.

technique’s reliance on efficiency produces tools that are highly effective and profitable while also being dehumanizing in one way or another. Sharing photos online aids us in defining and expressing

You are not your own;

But none of these reasons make it into Paul’s letter. Instead, he grounds sexual morality in our belonging.

the foundation of the spirit of human cities: self-reliance and autonomy.3

In this sense, building a city is not merely a way to protect a community. It is an attempt to reject God’s provision.

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.

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.

That I am not my own,

the Heidelberg Divines (the formal name for the authors) frame the essential doctrines of the Christian faith in existentialist terms. The question assumes that the reader feels discomfort both at the prospect of living and the prospect of dying. It assumes that life requires some comfort to make it tolerable. This assumption follows the central biblical theme of “shalom” or “peace” as a basic human longing.

good? If we were honest with ourselves, we’d have to admit that on average we aren’t much better than anyone else at desiring what is truly good for us.

If you are not your own but belong to Christ, then there is nothing you can or must do to justify your life. The whole project of actualizing, validating, fulfilling, vindicating, establishing, or justifying your existence is built on the faulty premise that your existence is something that needs justification and that you are capable of providing that justification on your own.

It’s not that your life is existentially validated because you choose to see it that way. No, your existence is good and right and significant because a loving God intentionally created you and continues to give you your every breath. Your life is significant whether you choose to see it that way or not, which is almost the opposite of the responsibility to self-justify.

At its best, the church will be a sanctuary from this idolatrous babble, and here, if nowhere else, you should find other souls who will remind you that your life is not a quest for significance or self-actualization, but an act of joyful participation in God’s grace. In the liturgy of church, in sacrificially serving each other, in reminding each other that we are not our own, and in coming to the Lord’s Table we can push back against the contemporary anthropology as a community. Too often churches in America fail to live up to this standard, even though we have the resources in our tradition and theology to correct the lie that we are obligated to justify our own lives.

some people respond to the standard of righteousness with Affirmation and others with Resignation.

The affirming may also give into a kind of despair, believing that while they cannot attain righteousness, they are obligated to ceaselessly try harder. If they just have a little more self-discipline and perhaps better technique, maybe they can purify themselves, perhaps God will look upon them in love. They continue to seek God’s face through disciplined righteous action.

The resigned consider their own hearts in light of God’s law and cannot imagine ever drawing the assurance of God’s face.

The danger for Christians who urge others to find their identity in Christ is that most modern people have a secular understanding of identity, one rooted in that contemporary anthropology, where identity has more to do with lifestyle and image than personhood. “Christ” becomes just another, better identity. You’re still pouring water into a cup, you just had to find the right cup.

When we encourage people to find their identity in Christ, what we too often mean is that all the other cups we choose to pour our identity into are idols that can never give us the solid identity we desire. This is true, but it’s equally true that if we consider Christianity just a different cup, then it is no better. In fact, it can become just as much of an idol.

If you are your own and belong to Christ, then your personhood is a real creation, objectively sustained by God. And as a creation of God, you have no obligation to create your self. Your identity is based on God’s perfect will, not your own subjective, uncertain will. All your efforts to craft a perfect, marketable image add nothing to your personhood.

This does not mean that you don’t have a “true self.” You do. But it is just not one that you are burdened with creating.

The self’s task is “to become itself, which can only be done in relationship to God.”

It is only in God that we can find someone who can know us without any deception and love us still. Our identity is grounded in the loving gaze of God. When we stand transparently before God, abandoning our efforts of self-establishment and confessing our sins and accepting His grace, we feel that loving gaze upon us.

Your true identity is not a publicly projected image that requires regular maintenance, upgrades, and optimization. Your identity is who you are before God, your personhood, your existence in the world.

Our tendency is to conceive of our life and our identity as related but separate things. We have life in the sense that we are not dead. But we have valid identity in the sense that we have successfully defined ourselves against everyone else. In this way, our identity is dependent on continually competing with and presenting ourselves against others.

For some of us, our obligations to others will require us to tolerate loneliness, to accept abstinence for a season or a lifetime, to live where we don’t want to live, to work a job we don’t enjoy, to give up comforts we love, to let go of honorable dreams and passions, to physically suffer, to forgo thanks and recognition, to lend money without expecting repayment, to allow our rights to be infringed upon. In one way or another, we will be called to the renunciation of our desires in affirmation of God’s grace and providence, but never in resignation. Renunciation in affirmation, not resignation.

Learning to love your spouse’s very human body, learning to delight in sex that is contingent on health and stress and feelings of security and love makes sex more human, not less. It submits sexual pleasure to human limits rather than submitting the human body to instrumental use.

But if the Christian account of human persons is correct, where I am matters. By dwelling in a place, I am forming a relationship with it, one with bonds and obligations.

But if we belong to Christ, our default ought to be that we see ourselves committed to our families, friends, communities, places, and the church. This is where we belong, even when it is difficult.

We may not be able to effectively stop the construction of houses alien to the land, or protect the environment from industry, or make our cities more walkable and natural, but belonging to Christ compels us to resist, to advocate for living among the beauty of God’s mighty work of creation.

Accepting that you belong to your family will almost certainly result in being hurt and taken advantage of by others. Accepting that you belong to the church will almost certainly make you vulnerable and cost you time and resources you could more efficiently use to advance yourself. Accepting that you belong to the place where you live will force you to care about your neighbors when it would be much easier to write the place off and move away.

Because I belong to my family, I am free to serve them without the lie that my service makes me important or determines my place in the family. I serve because I belong, not to belong.

Acknowledging a Christian anthropology has basically the same implication for each sphere of life: grace alone sustains us.

If everyone in America suddenly acknowledged that they are not their own but belong to God, we would still be left with systems, institutions, practices, and tools that are designed for the sovereign self, and it wouldn’t take long before we found ourselves right back where we started. We cannot evangelize our way out of this problem. We cannot volunteer our way out. We need a miracle.

Believing that you are not your own but belong to God truly is a comfort in life and death. It is our only real comfort—all others are derivative. But comfort is not peace. And so long as our society is premised on a false anthropology, we will live in deep tension.

But some problems cannot be solved by gathering more data and developing targeted action items—not even if you constantly assess your strategy and fine-tune it with better data. That doesn’t mean that we should lose hope of anything getting better or that we should cease doing good. It just means that we have to think of our role in changing the world differently.

Instead, we must “wait without hope,” as T. S. Eliot says.1 This phrase, which we’ll look at more closely in a moment, has occasionally been misinterpreted to mean that Eliot, himself a Christian, had no hope for the resurrection. But the hope Eliot tells his readers to wait without is false hope: a hope that demands results, an impatient hope, a hope that is pragmatic, a hope that rushes to action, a hope that cannot be still and know that God is God.2

If I were a better man, more spiritually and intellectually mature, maybe I’d only find comfort in poetry, prayer, contemplation, and walks in nature. Sometimes I do, but this society is brutal and there is no shame in finding joy in simple pleasures that ease the burden we carry, even if those pleasures are “less good.”

The inhuman nature of society does not excuse sinful behavior, nor am I absolving us of the responsibility to be discerning about our habits. All I am saying is that in a society that always demands more and more of us, God can use simple pleasures to comfort us, and that is good.

There is a tangential debate about agency with practical implications: how does a belief in agency or determinism affect our actions? Each side frames the argument differently. From the right: “If we tell people that their fate is largely determined by forces out of their control, then we are inviting them to give up on life and blame their failures on the system.” And from the left: “If we tell people that they are largely responsible for their own fate, we are inviting failure and self-loathing, which will lead to them giving up on life when they blame all their failures on themselves.” This argument has less to do with how much agency we actually have and more to do with the power of belief. Some people will argue that even though we don’t control our own fate, we must tell ourselves that we do or we’ll become resigned.

the greatest possible form of hope: an absolute faith in God’s faithfulness and His ability to bring justice and truth and beauty in circumstances where we can no longer imagine them.

The hard thing is to be still and know that He is God. But that is the only way you can know Him. A holy stillness accepts that God is sovereign and rests in His goodness and grace. It accepts that you cannot save the world or yourself. A holy stillness leads to action, but an action in stillness.

When we rest in God’s sovereignty, we can honestly observe how society negatively affects us without making excuses for our sins or denying personal responsibility. When we rest in God’s sovereignty, we can act to do good without deluding ourselves into thinking that we will save the world. When we rest in God’s sovereignty, we can have grace for ourselves and our neighbors as we cope with an inhuman society that will only be saved by God.

we really only have one response to the inhuman conditions of our world: to stretch out our hands in supplication to God.