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

by Alan Noble

Here is the paradox. In holy stillness we acknowledge God’s presence and provision. In holy action we acknowledge our moral obligation to God and our neighbor. But because it is action in stillness, we don’t entertain the lie that our actions can ever produce self-sufficiency. Stillness is resting in God’s grace. Action is an extension of that grace and nothing more. Because we are not our own, we can be still. Because we belong to God, we can act in humility.

What have we to do But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards In an age which advances progressively backwards?

True supplication is not passivity or resignation. It is an act of dependence upon God, which always involves obedience to His will. When we reach out in supplication before God, we don’t get to ignore injustice or the dehumanizing structures of society. But it does mean that our actions are done in reliance upon God.

Ironically, according to Ellul, a city that is built to stand apart from God does not make humans freer; it makes them less human. The city is “a world for which man was not made.”12 In our own discussion we’ve seen this principle at work in anthropology. To the degree that the contemporary anthropology centers existence on the individual person, it creates an environment that’s actually less conducive to human life. Ellul ominously concludes, “The very fact of living in the city directs a man down an inhuman road.”13

The city is seductive—governed by logic and technique, but rejecting critiques of its own logic.

If we insist that our society be fixed through a specific political or social agenda, we may grow bitter when God righteously chooses to bring redemption in a way we could never have imagined.

If we are not our own, then our obligation is to honor God with our lives.

To avoid integration, we must first be able to see and reject the seduction of the city. The city’s promise that it can enable us to fulfill our Responsibilities for Self-Belonging demands us to give everything over to making a name for ourselves, establishing our autonomy, and building a good life free from limits. It promises to help us achieve this through its laws, technology, social norms, and stories. But it is an empty and soul-sucking promise. So our first task is to rightly discern and reject the spirit of the city while praying for the city’s welfare.

Our desire to find a proven strategy for perfecting society is another example of technique’s power over our imagination.

You may never see the fruits of your labor in this life, but it doesn’t matter. God did not call you to be successful. He called you to be faithful. However, if you are responsible for your own existence, only tangible, measurable, immediate success can come close to satisfying you. And you will grow increasingly frantic to see your political vision fulfilled, your cause triumph, and increasingly intolerant of failures and of people who disagree with you.

As soon as we start prioritizing the most efficient ways to change society or the most psychologically effective strategies for evangelizing, we won’t actually be representing Him in the heart of the city. We will be representing a fully integrated city-dweller who has accommodated Christianity to the sovereign self.

we may discover that it’s more efficient to seek the “welfare of the city” through dishonesty and oppression. Far too many evangelicals have begun their work advocating for justice and righteousness in their communities or nation, only to abandon integrity for pragmatism when they don’t see immediate results.

You cannot desire the good of your non-Christian neighbor too much. It is not possible. However much you desire for your non-Christian neighbors to receive justice and know God’s love and mercy and to be treated rightly as human persons made in God’s image, you could always desire their good more. In contemporary America, our temptation is to care too little, not too much. Our tendency is to think of ourselves as totally independent of our street, neighborhood, and city. But we have an obligation to them. That obligation is subsidiary in the sense that it is a derivative belonging, rooted in and bound by our all-encompassing belonging to Christ.

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 good of others stands in stark contrast to “progress,” “efficiency,” “self-actualization,” and so on. For one, when we desire the good of others, we cannot reduce them to abstract numbers or statistics or models. You cannot actually desire the good of an abstract principle or theoretical person. Another difference is that the good of your neighbor or the environment may not be the most efficient outcome.

If we are our own and belong to ourselves, it is difficult for anyone to say to another person, “I know what is for your good better than you do in this situation.” The very idea reeks of pride and a violation of our freedom as individuals. But the fact is that quite often we don’t do what is good for us. If we are not our own but belong to Christ, desiring and pursuing the good of our neighbors, even when they don’t agree that it is their good, is our duty. It’s a way to love them and glorify God.

Parenting will cost you. It will demand energy and resources that you do not possess. While the love of your children will be a great source of joy, many hobbies, pleasures, and career opportunities will be lost. For mothers, your body is dramatically given over to the growth of the child. And that body will never be the same. It is a sacrifice. Having children at the peak of your youth also means that you might fall behind in your career. Without children you could more easily work longer hours—or you could travel or save for retirement. You could make love during the day without fear of the kids knocking on the door and asking why it is locked. Or you could use the bathroom without someone yelling for a glass of water. To be a parent is to belong to another person as guardian. It’s a terribly inefficient and unproductive prodigal gift. Over and over again, in profoundly physical, emotional, and spiritual ways, you will not be free. But that’s okay. You were never your own to begin with.

When you perceive your life to be a hero’s journey, even when you try to be intentional about helping others, there’s a good chance you’ll end up with a career that lets you feel helpful.

Like the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Paul merely observed what was self-evident, but no one wanted to see. Why? When a city’s wealth is dependent on everyone believing a lie, then it’s easy to believe—especially when that lie is also comforting.

To accomplish these goals, we ought to think about advocating for government at a human scale. It may be that governments beyond a certain size become hopelessly inhuman, driven almost exclusively by bureaucratic inertia, data, abstractions, procedures, and technique. Subsidiarity, pushing governance to the lowest, most local level possible for any given policy or issue seems like one practical step toward government at a human scale.

as Eliot reminds us, “For us, there is only the trying. / The rest is not our business.”

A benefit of putting hope for redemption in Christ rather than a political movement is that you are less tempted to compromise with evil for short-term political gains. When you believe that you can save your country, it’s not difficult to justify lying or the use of propaganda or corruption for the greater good. You may tell yourself, “Technically this isn’t true, but the spirit of it is true and we have to save our nation!” Unfortunately, this kind of pragmatic evil has become a chronic illness in American evangelical politics. God, however, does not need or desire our unjust means to accomplish His just ends.

One significant political implication of a Christian anthropology is that identity politics can be replaced by a vision of the common good. If we are all only ever our own, then there cannot be a common good. There may be negotiated tolerance or groups with some overlapping goals, but no good we share in common, no vision of life together that involves desiring and pursuing the good of every member. Most Americans have adopted the belief that human flourishing (which is one of the chief ends of the common good) can only be defined individually.32 But if we belong to Christ, then the common good exists and we have an obligation to advocate for it.

Whenever our neighbors are treated inhumanly, it is in the common good to fight for their justice, even when their oppression personally benefits us or our friends. Because it isn’t really their justice—it’s God’s justice, and because we belong to Him—we must pursue it.

When I study the history of the human race and consider the pace of technological change and our inability to stop it or even contain its unintended consequences, I honestly cannot envision how the world could get better. A world that has cured most forms of cancer is far easier for me to imagine than a world that treats humans as humans. But God is not confined by my imagination. My duty is to remain here, represent God, and wait. That is what it means to “stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards,” to “wait without hope.” He will redeem His creation. He, not you, will make all things new.

belonging to yourself is no real comfort. If the choices are between a Christian anthropology and the contemporary anthropology, then at the very least we are no worse off by believing that we are not our own. Autonomy sounds comforting and freedom is valorized by society as one of the highest goods, but in practice freedom without limits is a kind of hell, as John Milton knew. It’s a hell that we carry within us. This hell may take the form of infinite disappointment in the face of unquenchable desire for wealth or experiences or sex. This is Durkheim’s “malady of the infinite.” Or it may take the form of choice paralysis—Esther Greenwood starving to death at the base of the fig tree because each fig is too lovely to neglect. Or it may feel like the endless project of inventing and optimizing and expressing yourself. Quite often it appears as the need for approval and affirmation, which is always just a bit too uncertain to be satisfying. If belonging to Christ makes you uncomfortable, consider whether you are actually comfortable belonging to yourself, or whether the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging demand more and more of you, leading you to rely on ever more coping mechanisms to make life tolerable.

For myself, the greatest comfort in belonging to Christ is that the things most central to my experience of life find their home. Love, beauty, justice, joy, guilt, pleasure, longing, sorrow, delight—it is these things, not in the abstract but in particular moments and with particular people, that give life most of its grandeur. I know I can find alternate frameworks to explain the love I feel toward my wife or the pleasure I experience reading a great novel or the righteous indignation that fills me when I witness injustice. But none of those accounts can avoid impoverishing the very things I find most true about life. In Christ I take comfort that the truest things in life are real things.