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

by Alan Noble

Durkheim concludes that one of the primary causes of suicide is not suffering but disequilibrium. When societal values rapidly change, including economic values, people lose the ability to clearly evaluate their lives.31

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.

As Ehrenberg notes, “Depression and addiction are the two sides of the sovereign individual, the person who believes herself to be the author of her own life.”

In the modern world, public vulnerability is always a choice, and therefore it takes on an overwhelmingly performative quality. Here’s what I mean. 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. You don’t have to stick around and share your burdens with anyone, ever. One day you may “break” or be “exposed,” but you still don’t have to share. The result is that our moments of vulnerability are often carefully cultivated and prepared for public consumption to maximize attention and develop our image.

Life is much, much more trying than we publicly acknowledge. A lot of people struggle to get out of bed every morning. Some are only functional because of intense psychiatric medications and therapy. Some are only functional because they don’t hold still long enough to bear witness to their own suffering. Some only appear functional. So if you read this chapter and come away thinking, Our society basically works. Most people in America are well-off and happy, I’d suggest that a lot of people you know who appear to be happy routinely wonder why life is worth living. Just because you don’t notice millions of depressed people doesn’t mean that we’re okay. We aren’t.

In great detail, Ehrenberg charts the way depression—its causes, meaning, and treatment—has changed over the twentieth century. His startling conclusion is that we have largely moved from understanding depression primarily as a symptom of inner conflict, often driven by feelings of guilt for violating societal or religious norms, to understanding it primarily as a symptom of inhibition, driven by feelings of inadequacy.11 But why do we feel inadequate? Why are we afraid to act in the contemporary world? Ehrenberg’s answer is precisely what I have been describing as our contemporary anthropology: “The ownership of the self has become our lifestyle; it has been sociologically integrated into our mores and is at the very heart of our intimate sovereignty.”12 But this sovereignty has not liberated us. Contrasting the modern condition with the dream of individual sovereignty he finds in Nietzsche, Ehrenberg writes: “The individual, free from morality, creating herself by herself and aspiring to the superhuman, . . . is not our reality. But, instead of possessing the strength of the masters, she turns out to be fragile, lacking in being, weary of her sovereignty and full of complaints.”13 The title of Ehrenberg’s book reflects this diagnosis. We are weary of trying to be our own sovereign selves.

As Ellul describes it, “[Modern] leisure time is mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man’s ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free than labor itself.”18 Even when we think we are on vacation or relaxing, the spirit of our action is still efficiency. Vacation becomes a project that must be completed on-time and under budget. Even when we try to “veg” by scrolling through Instagram, playing a mindless video game, or watching episode after episode of a mediocre sitcom, the pace of the entertainment is frenetic. Images change rapidly and we get bored easily. 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.

Maybe the worst part about all this is that these societal tools for self-belonging never come close to delivering on their promise. They just offer more promises. Our identities are never expressed enough. Our lives never quite feel meaningful enough. We never feel justified enough, or as if we truly belong. We “just need to” keep trying. When our efforts exhaust us or the new techniques to fix the problems of the old techniques fail, we move from Affirmation to Resignation. In the case of social media moderators, this looks like a move from yoga and group counseling to drugs and alcohol and unemployment. But so long as our foundational understanding of what it means to be a human goes unquestioned, so long as we blame our problems on natural or biological limitations, societal injustices, or personal weaknesses, our only recourse will be more techniques.

From the Garden of Eden, humanity’s fundamental rebellion against God has been a rebellion of autonomy. Adam and Eve were given a clear law and chose to become a law unto themselves. The history of humanity has followed this example.

Contemporary people are obsessed with means for coping with life. We don’t self-medicate because our lives are wonderful, but because we need comfort to continue living. And many of the innovations we might point to as evidence for society’s progress are themselves comforts that we use to get through the day. A good percentage of the other innovations that have defined the shift from the sixteenth century to our own day have done more to create further discomfort than to alleviate it.

No, the need for comfort in the face of life is not restricted to a particular moment in human history. It is a part of the human experience. But it is the case that the need for comfort manifests differently at different periods. 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.

If you are in the middle class and therefore less susceptible to deaths of despair, it is not at all difficult to avoid seeing a dead body or attending a funeral until you are decades into your life. Death is simply not present to contemporary people in the way it was for nearly all of human history. The experience of death is largely a choice for many of us until it ultimately isn’t. 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.

Between systemic abuses in the Medieval Catholic Church (see Dante or Luther on the subject) and a nobility whose way of life largely depended on brutal living conditions for serfs, there were plenty of reasons to embrace not only liberal democracy with its political freedom for the individual, but also what we might call metaphysical liberalism—the holistic belief that you are your own. There is a historical progression from political to metaphysical autonomy.6 Whether this progression is inevitable is a separate question. The reality is that as, or soon after, individuals in Europe begin to attain political liberty, they also begin to think of themselves as free from other sources of authority: God, the church, tradition, cultural norms, family, nation, biology, and so on.

Despite the widespread acceptance of autonomy, the modern world does not lack for abusive authority figures. Contemporary abuses of authority may be less overtly coercive, but they remain coercive. In other words, autonomy does not get rid of abuses of authority, it just changes their appearance.

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 danger of rejecting individual sovereignty is that if we belong to anyone who does not actively and truly desire our good, we will be abused. 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.

Do we actually desire our own 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. We regularly desire and pursue self-destructive experiences and goals. I know what I need to do to care for my body and yet I regularly do the things that will harm me and fail to do the things that will benefit me. It is not a coincidence that self-destructive behaviors are almost always simultaneously attempts to self-medicate and cope with modern life. Sometimes we only recognize how we have sabotaged ourselves long after the fact, when we can no longer protect ourselves or change our fate. We are uniquely capable of self-destruction and self-abasement. Humans can treat themselves as objects for their own dehumanization all while justifying it as self-expression and liberty. It would be impressive if it weren’t all so terrible.

To belong to Christ, then, means dwelling with Christ rather than trying to exist apart. As we have seen in the previous chapters, none of us can effectively live apart. The Responsibilities of Self-Belonging are cruel and impossible. All of us, without exception, belong to Christ as His creation. All of us owe Christ our love. All of us need His mercy. But not all of us accept that we are His creation or that we need His mercy.

Those who deny Christ’s lordship and mercy continue to belong to Him: it is objectively the case that He made them and preserves them, even when they vainly devote their lives to creating and sustaining themselves. 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. A Christian anthropology asserts that all these things are true about human beings, but our longings are met in union with Christ when we accept our belonging to Him. That is precisely where we find comfort in life and death.

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.

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.

One theme we will discover in every implication of accepting a Christian anthropology is that things are still pretty terrible out there. Almost everyone else you meet will continue to believe that they are their own and so are you. Almost every institution will treat you like an autonomous individual, subject to instrumentalization and valued according to efficiency. Almost every store will still have self-checkout lines. Instagram will not suddenly disappear when you realize that you belong to Christ. There is no magic here, only a confused, desperate, anxious world, and God. There is only technique, dehumanization, self-medication, and Christ’s love. There is only the freedom to accept the truth about your existence, even when it doesn’t change the world or fix all your problems.

The other main reason we strive to justify ourselves despite already being justified is that autonomy is easier to accept than contingency upon God. It’s not easier to live with, but it is easier to accept, because limits feel stifling. They require a denial of the self. 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. But it’s one we all readily take on and then suffer under.

Because of the weight of sin, we cannot look upon the face of God and live. Yet neither can we live without God’s face approvingly turned toward us. That is our bind.

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 truth is that you are always your person, created by God with your face, your name, and your consciousness. While being a unique person, you have always existed in relation to others, primarily to God, but also your neighbor, and the created world. There is no version of your self that can be extracted from these relationships and your history and your body. You are inexorably embedded in space and time. There is no image for you maintain because you were made in the image of God. There is no identity for you to discover or create because your identity was never actually in question. It felt like it was because we live in liquid modernity, but that feeling isn’t reality. And there is no need for you to express your identity to make it more solid or to compete in the ever-growing marketplace of images because your personhood doesn’t need affirmation from other humans to make it valid.

If some of this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard it in the form of self-help, pop-psychology, or positive self-esteem advice. You may have been told by an earnest high school teacher that you don’t have to try so hard, or you don’t need the approval of others. Maybe your favorite pop star or actor encouraged you (along with the rest of their fans) to love yourself just the way you are. But as we saw with existential justification, secular assurances that we are “all right” always turn out to be based on our own will, our own effort, and our ability to assure ourselves that we are all right because we believe we are all right. Your identity is secure only insofar as you feel it to be secure. No one outside of you can truly affirm your identity. Really the best we can do is remind one another that we each individually have the power to declare that our identity is good. In other words, your identity is a creation of pure subjectivity, sustained and affirmed by subjectivity. But identity always calls for external affirmation, a witness, which is one very good reason why modern people are perpetually in an identity crisis.

On the one hand we are completely dependent on ourselves to determine, create, and affirm our own identities. On the other hand, identity requires some kind of external recognition by its very nature. To have an identity, there must be another being outside of you who can see your face and say your name. The gift of your life assumes both a giver and a recipient. But once we begin to rely on other people to recognize and affirm our identity, it becomes uncertain, shifting according to the whims of other people. I think this is why most of us roll our eyes whenever we are encouraged to “accept” ourselves or “believe” in ourselves or “be whoever we want to be.” T...

There is an important truth here: in liquid modernity, we will try all sorts of means to hold together our identity. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, liquid can only be temporarily forced into a shape, just as our identities can only be temporarily solidified in liquid modernity.15

It is true that modern people, stuck with selves that are more like water than ice, tend to obsessively try out different cups and glasses to give form to our lives. You might “find your identity” in being physically fit or in advocating for a particular social justice cause or in a theology or a style of music—all different kinds of glasses and cups. 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.

The kind of affirmation of personhood I am speaking of in the Christian anthropology is radically different from secular affirmation and from calls to “find your identity in Christ” that do not challenge the modern conception of identity. 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. The reason the opinions of others don’t define you isn’t because your opinion is the only one that counts, but because you are not reducible to any human efforts of definition. The only being who can fully know you and understand you without reducing you to a stereotype or an idol is God.

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.

You have an identity, not because you have invented one, or because you have a little hard core of selfhood that is unchanged, but because you have a witness of who you are. What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held in a single gaze of love. You don’t have to work out and finalize who you are, and have been; you don’t have to settle the absolute truth of your history or story. In the eyes of the presence that never goes away, all that you have been and are is still present and real; it is held together in that unifying gaze.17

Human identity assumes and requires an external person who can acknowledge and affirm us, who can say our name, look us in the face, and tell us it is good that we exist. It can’t be a generic statement or a platitude either.

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 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. 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.

But if all that matters is that you think or feel that your life has meaning, society can just discover ways of increasing those feelings. Ellul believes that this is precisely what society does. In order to retain productivity, the modern worker “must be made to feel a community of interest; the idea that his labor has social meaning must be instilled in him.”20 What is important is the “feeling” and the “idea,” not the reality. For these thinkers, the crisis of meaning raises the question: What methods (techniques) can we use to feel meaningful?

But this is mistaken. Sex has always been formed by someone outside of ourselves. By its very nature, sex involves the self-giving of a man and a woman. Only if sex is conceived of as a technique for personal pleasure or power can we reasonably say that it should be entirely private and free from external limits and obligations. And sex as personal pleasure or power is a perversion. It is an impoverished form of physical love, “tiny and meaningless and—sad-making.”

To act prodigally also means that you have no need (or, ideally, no urge) to document your actions in order to prove your development to others via social media. Too often our motive for some activity is the benefit we will accrue when others see us. Making a lovely dinner because it's lovely and not to post it to Instagram is leisure. Watching a great film because it’s great and not so you can post your opinion on Twitter is leisure. From our contemporary society’s perspective, there is something wasteful about these actions. We want to know that there is a clear, provable benefit—otherwise, like the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), or like Judas when Mary broke her expensive jar of perfume and bathed Jesus’ feet in it (John 12:1-8), we grow bitter at the waste.

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.

A Christian anthropology explains my daily experience of meaning: that it includes but transcends my personal experience, that the “feeling” of meaning is not the same thing as meaning. A Christian anthropology makes best sense of the joy I experience listening to beautiful music. It makes best sense of the love I feel for other people. It makes best sense of my desire for justice. Between the existence of meaning and validity of value, Christianity makes best sense of the parts of life that mean the most to me. I know alternative explanations for the desire for justice I feel in the face of horrendous human evil. I know how the pleasure of music can come from specific musical intervals, cultural norms, and memories. And I know how love can be explained through biology and evolutionary psychology. But each of those explanations necessarily leaves me with an impoverished version of some essential part of my life. In that way, belonging to Christ does not negate or deny the good things in this world. Instead, it reminds me that those good things don’t just feel good. They really are good.

When we accept the grace of God rather than denying it and striving for self-sufficiency, the basis for every major contemporary anxiety is removed. But because we continue to live in a culture that dogmatically asserts that we are our own and belong to ourselves, we will continue to experience these anxieties. So long as our society is built and maintained for a false idea of humanity, humans will chafe under the disorder. When you go against the grain of nature, you are bound to get splinters. You have very limited control over this disorder, but you have some control over your response, which should be gracious.

Secular affirmation offers what claims to be unconditional hope, but in every case it depends upon us granting ourselves affirmation based exclusively on our own will, which never fulfills for long. We either submit to the tyranny of technique (total work, perpetual self-improvement, success, etc.) or we declare ourselves to be good by personal fiat. Both strategies devolve into Resignation at some point, when total work breaks us or when personal affirmations are revealed to be hollow.

It would be a relief if the problems described in the previous chapters could be fixed by simply changing the way you think about yourself. But the premise of this book is that the damage caused by our false anthropology is much greater than the sum of our individual beliefs. 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.

Our desire for a program of self-improvement, a personal method of accepting that you are not your own, is itself a symptom of the problem. We believe we can use technique to solve the problems of a society governed by technique—but as we’ve discovered, that does not work.

When we are convinced that we have the plan for redeeming the world and that we are the agents of that redemption (whether it be spiritual or political or physical), we won’t have grace for those who aren’t part of our movement or who aren’t doing enough. The inadequacies of others become intolerable because redemption is just around the corner if those people would just get on board. When your neighbor fails to recycle, or they don’t vote the right way, or they aren’t as righteous as they ought to be, you grow bitter at them. It is because we wait without hope that we can have grace for our neighbors.

Leisure is a kind of rest from labor that depends upon God and does not require any utilitarian justification. In fact, it cannot have a utilitarian justification and be leisure. Pieper goes on to explain that at the heart of leisure is divine worship.3 Understood this way, these simple pleasures of life, which do in fact help you cope with the trauma of modernity, find their basis in the worship of God. When we delight in the good things God has given us, with gratitude toward Him and without any utilitarian justification, without any effort to “earn” our joy and pleasure, then it is a form of worship.

if you can get over yourself and stop thinking in terms of efficiency, you can honor God and love your neighbor while having faith that He will set things to right. Don’t let yourself ask, “Is this good deed making any real difference?” If it really is the right thing to do, the efficiency does not matter. Your obligation is faithfulness, not productivity or measurable results.

It is not difficult to work courageously when you believe that your actions will turn the tide and bring about change. It is another thing altogether to act courageously without the expectation that you will change the world.