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

by Alan Noble

Like the rest of western society, the church in the West tends to be good at helping people cope with modern life, but not at undoing the disorder of modern life. Too often the church’s response to deep societal ills has been, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled.” We offer spiritual self-improvement, prayer, counseling, medication, exercise, discipline, wealth, government aid, charity, education—all of it a Band-Aid, but we leave the disease untouched, or perhaps muted, anesthetized.

In some ways, history is the story of civilizations misunderstanding anthropology in one way or another, leading to terrible results. So my argument is not that the modern world has done something new by misinterpreting human nature. Instead, I’m asking how modern society has misinterpreted humans, and what are the implications of that false anthropology.

Who are you? What is your personality? What motivates you? What are you passionate about? How do you perceive yourself? How do you want the world to see you? These questions are not easily answered, and our answers often change during different seasons of our lives. But what doesn’t change is the obligation to answer them, to define who we are—publicly. When that obligation feels overwhelming, we call it an “identity crisis.” Many people suffer from a chronic identity crisis, shifting from one identity to another throughout their life.

the defining dynamic of our modern anthropology is the tension between the excitement and terror of radical freedom.

it seems clear that a kind of latent, unacknowledged existentialism is the defining philosophy for our time: we come to feel that our existence is the only thing we can truly know, and to live authentically to that existence means to choose our identity. It’s not that people are reading Sartre and becoming convinced of his arguments. Instead, we naturally adopt our society’s understanding of the human person as we grow up in society, and that understanding leads to a kind of existentialist outlook.

The average preteen in America has the same basic tools for publicity that only the biggest Hollywood stars had sixty years ago.

The darkest part of the unspoken logic of pornography is the idea that the porn actors are free, consensual, aware, liberated individuals, using their freedom to express themselves, make money, and please others. Because they are their own and belong to themselves, they are free to treat their body, their intimate personhood, as a tool, a commodity, to objectify it and use it instrumentally for personal gain.

My experience teaching millennials and the following generation has taught me that this is far from true. When a young person stops coming to class, binge watches Friends for thirty-six hours, and can’t seem to get out of bed, it’s almost always because the student cares too much, not too little. They don’t choose to tap out of life because they think winning is meaningless. They tap out because they are taught that winning means everything and they cannot envision any path to winning.

Rather than a solid sense of what the good life looks like, we are left with ever-shifting values as our choices multiply.

For all of us the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging, whether consciously accepted or unconsciously absorbed from culture, are experienced as perpetual inadequacy. Your life is never justified, you are always in the process of validating your existence. Your identity is never secure, you are always in the process of discovering and proclaiming and defining who you are. Meaning is never given; it is always being reinterpreted or reasserted. Values are never certain; they are always being renegotiated. And belonging is never attained; it is always dislocated. Society promises to provide us with the means to live full and satisfying lives through self-belonging, but these tools only increase our burdens by giving us new ways to work toward an unachievable goal. Social media offers to help us create and express our identities by giving us ever more tools for self-expression and promotion, but these tools only become more things for us to do. Technology always claims to be optional even as it becomes impractical to reject. The distinction between tools to facilitate self-belonging and tools to cope with our inability to belong to ourselves blurs the more we look at it. Do we take antidepressants to become our “true self” or to cope with our failure to become our true self? Do we shop for clothing to express our identity or as a form of therapy? Rhetorically and in marketing, strategies for self-actualization and coping often appear the same, using the same sales appeal and the ...

Instead of tightly regulated state and church laws that limit our behavior, we have an expanding number of institutions that use modern psychology, microeconomics, and mass communications to “nudge” us toward certain behaviors—to incentivize and pressure us to act in particular ways, often without our knowledge. The most obvious example is the way that smartphones “nudge” us to pay attention to them with sounds, vibrations, and rewarding interactions. Health insurance companies “nudge” us to eat healthier, governments “nudge” us to graduate from high school and read to our kids, and corporations “nudge” us to desire and consume products. Instead of the Roman Catholic Church’s Magisterium definitively declaring God’s revelation, we have a scientific community that interprets and declares what is fact.

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.

If we are not our own but belong to Christ, then the values that give shape to our culture and personal lives rightfully place limits on us. There remains a personal dimension to morality, but it is always grounded in the existence of another, namely, God

But belonging to Christ means that there is always a being before whom we find ourselves. It means that no matter how disorienting society might become, no matter how dislocated we feel in a shifting world, the God of the cosmos knows us. He knows precisely where we are. This is not mere theological abstraction, either. Christ’s body here on earth is the church. When you accept your belonging in Christ and His sacrifice for your sins, you are united with His body. You have a place, a role, a purpose within a community across space and time. Human institutions will come and go, communities will form and disintegrate, congregations will grow and wither—but your union with Christ remains secure.

We are not free to pursue whatever brings us the most personal fulfillment. We are not free to define our identity in any way we wish. We are not free to use people or creation as tools for our own ends. We are limited. But it is in embracing and respecting these limits that we testify to our belonging to God and oppose the false promise of Self-Belonging. Rejecting the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging that so onerously burden us actually frees us to desire the good of others.

The great comfort found in belonging to Christ is that we are accepted and loved without reservation. It is the comfort of living before God. That love is not the ignorant love of a human who can never really know us. That acceptance is not the cheap acceptance of modern social psychology, which is only really concerned with producing productive and well-adjusted consumers. Christ truly knows us and His acceptance unites us to Him, sanctifying us by teaching us moment by moment to love what is true and good and beautiful—to love His will.