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

by Alan Noble

We live as our true selves when we stand transparently before God, moment by moment, as Kierkegaard reminds us: The self’s task is “to become itself, which can only be done in relationship to God.”16 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. 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. In Kierkegaard’s view, this denial is fundamentally despair. Our contemporary drive to be authentic can find its fulfillment in the active choice to recognize our belonging to and before God.