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

by Alan Noble

This burden manifests as a desperate need to justify our lives through identity crafting and expression. But because everyone else is also working frantically to craft and express their own identity, society becomes a space of vicious competition between individuals vying for attention, meaning, and significance, not unlike the contrived drama of reality TV.

Our selves belong to God, and we are joyfully limited and restrained by the obligations, virtues, and love that naturally come from this belonging.

Only someone who’s alive can try to “feel alive,” and if they are alive, then whatever they feel is already what it feels like to be alive.

But self-knowledge is a byproduct of knowing God; it is not the goal. The goal is to know God and become like him.

we want everyone to recognize and affirm our identity precisely as we define that identity at this moment in time. No one has the right to define me, but in order to have an identity, I need them to see and affirm me. And in order to get people to see me, I need to express myself—a lot. The more people who witness and affirm my identity, the more secure I feel.

Everyone is on their own private journey of self-discovery and self-expression, so that at times, modern life feels like billions of people in the same room shouting their own name so that everyone else knows they exist and who they are—which is a fairly accurate description of social media.

Once you begin grounding morality on data, you must be ready to change moral norms and laws when the data calls for it. For

After all, if I am completely responsible for my life, then the greatest moral failure would be for me to fail to pursue what I desire most. I owe it to myself to be happy, and I cannot rely on anyone else to provide that happiness.

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.

Either we believe that we are good people because we identify and aid those who are most disadvantaged, or we are good people because we act as if people are disadvantaged and deserve our aid. At the heart of both frameworks is the assumption that compassion, desiring the good of others, is something that is merited.

the intense personalization of wedding ceremonies is part of their charm (and profitability). They allow couples to define what love and marriage means for them.

Any abuse of sexual intimacy is a uniquely evil affront against someone’s personhood precisely because it treats that personhood as a means to an end.

The goal of our striving cannot be reached because it is self-defined. The image of our fulfilled life is forever shifting.

We know what our obligations are, but there is no model of what the fulfillment of those obligations looks like because there cannot be. All we have are our intuitions.

When you cannot envision the purpose of your life, you must instead focus on the means of getting there.

We are always becoming a fully realized human and never arriving. Nobody ever arrives because there is no destination outside ourselves to arrive at. If we are our own and belong to ourselves, then we are always only who we are. No more. No less.

“Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.”

Because we have taught our children that we live in a meritocracy where the winners are responsible for their success and the losers are responsible for their failure, all of life becomes part of the game.

“Years of anxious striving leave young people with a fragile sense of self-worth, contingent on achievement and vulnerable to the exacting judgments of parents, teachers, admissions committees, and ultimately, themselves.”

Our meritocratic system—which turns competition over efficiency into a judgment of human value—morally malforms both the winners and the losers: “Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment.”

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.

This is precisely why one of the most common experiences of modern life is fatigue and burnout, and why Ehrenberg identifies “inadequacy” as the defining feature of modern depression: “Becoming ourselves made us nervous, being ourselves makes us depressed. The anxiety of being oneself hides behind the weariness of the self.”

Students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about.

You live with the meaninglessness of it all, the impossibility of ever doing anything that matters or is good enough to please your parents or those you admire or to impress your peers and draw positive attention to yourself.

When the rest of the world feels like a tooth-and-nail fight for supremacy, when it feels like everyone is always jockeying for position or fame or power or attention, low-stakes competitions can help us cope by giving us small fields of victory.

all of these things are “tiny and meaningless and—sad-making,” but they help us get through the day by diverting us from higher-stakes competitions.

Our rest is rarely restful. It is an active rest, a rest without silence or stillness, a rest marked by the overwhelming responsibility to make better use of your time.

Eventually you become so aware of all your responsibilities, all the tasks that need to be completed, all the promises you’ve made, all the best practices for your health or to be a good ally or whatever, that you just sort of seize up. The demands for action are so great that your only recourse is inaction. In my experience this looks like feeling so overwhelmed by my to-do list that all I can do is stare at my computer screen. It’s no wonder that so many Americans regularly feel exhausted or fatigued.

You feel inhuman because the state and the market view you as a Case or Account Number, and you fear that no matter how hard you work to stay on top of things, there will always be some obligation you’re forgetting.

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. Inevitably, technique’s reliance on efficiency produces tools that are highly effective and profitable while also being dehumanizing in one way or another.

Q. What is your only comfort in life and death? A. That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Where people may have sought comfort to cope with the horrors of plagues and perpetual wars in the sixteenth century, the contemporary person struggles to cope with a loss of meaning, identity, and purpose.

But this only means that the anxiety of death, the fear of sudden and eternal nothingness, shifts to an anxiety of living. Am I living a full and satisfying life? Is it enough? In that way, our avoidance of death only accentuates the anxiety we feel in trying to live adequate lives, when inadequacy means a failed life.

Instrumentalizing human persons is one of the defining features of our contemporary anthropology. When we are all our own, we have no obligation to think of each other as anything more than tools for our personal gain.

The reason autonomy feels safe is that we think we can trust ourselves to look out for our own well-being, whereas others will always look out for their own well-being over and against ours, to some extent or another. I know that I will take care of myself, but if I submit to your authority, I expect that eventually, despite even your best intentions, you will use me in harmful ways to benefit yourself.

If you are not your own but belong to Christ, then there is nothing you can or must do to justify your life.

But if Christianity is true, then your being in the world is fundamentally good because the Creator made you and sustains you and you are made in His image. You are existentially justified because your existence is not random. You were intentionally created. You are intentionally sustained.

Our desperate efforts to justify our existence are striving after a state we are already in.

No matter how much we consciously affirm that our existence is already justified through God, virtually every other voice we interact with will tell us, “No. Keep striving. You haven’t done enough. If you quit now, your life will be a waste. Do something else to make it worthwhile.”

Dependence is humbling and it’s just easier to affirm yourself. The problem is if you go down the road of affirming yourself, you don’t get to choose when to stop. You have to go on affirming yourself forever. It’s a hell of a burden.

And the judge of all assures us that we are loved, accepted, and adored. We live before a personal God, not the mechanical god of proceduralism or efficiency. The relentless, impersonal, litigious, crushing force of progress and self-improvement is ended in Christ. The demands of universal benevolence, which asks us to carry the world on our shoulders, are resolved in Christ and His providence.13 In this way, we are not only able to stand transparently before God without fear of condemnation, but we are only truly ourselves when we do.

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

Anytime we imagine ourselves to be autonomous, anytime we, like Cain, strive to be utterly self-sufficient and deny the hand of God in our lives, we are not merely in sin; we are in denial about the way things truly are.

But if the Christian anthropology is true, our identity is acknowledged by a living God and there is no need for me to compete in order to feel real. It was never my standing out that made me real, it was only my standing before God. My identity has always been secure precisely because I was created by God—the same God who bears witness to my life.

Most importantly for our own moment in history, our belonging to Christ means that efficiency cannot be the guiding value of human enterprises.

You are radically free to delight in the gifts God has given you without the anxiety, regret, dread, or paralysis of infinite choice. Part of that delight comes directly from the contingency of those gifts, from the fact that God gave you a particular gift at a particular moment in your life. And because He gave it to you, it is good. You don’t have to worry or wonder or daydream about all the other figs or women or friends or talents or careers or experiences or children or whatever that you don’t have. They don’t matter.

Love requires us to be still and take joy in the goodness of this moment. And if we are not our own but belong to Christ, that’s exactly what we are free to do. You don’t have to prove anything. You don’t have to acquire more. You don’t have to weigh your options and consider what you might be missing out on. You are free to be present and attend to the gift in front of you whether it’s your spouse, your child, a song, a pleasant talk with a friend, or the wind in the trees.

Then it turns out that delighting in the gift you have is far more freeing than desiring any improper gift you can imagine.

We live prodigally when we act according to love or goodness or beauty rather than primarily efficiency.

Christian leisure is the practice of delighting gratefully in God’s creation without regard for what is easiest, simplest, or cheapest.