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

by Alan Noble

But none of these reasons make it into Paul’s letter. Instead, he grounds sexual morality in our belonging.

It seems that Cain did not trust God to keep His word, choosing to rely on the power of walls to keep him safe instead of God’s promise. Ellul points to this as the foundation of the spirit of human cities: self-reliance and autonomy.3 At its core, the impulse to build cities is the impulse to protect ourselves, to be self-sufficient, to provide for all we need to flourish as humans: “The city for Cain is first of all the place where he can be himself—his homeland, the one settled spot in his wandering. Secondly, it is a material sign of his security. He is responsible for himself and his life.”4 Cain’s city is a claim that he is his own and belongs to himself. In this sense, building a city is not merely a way to protect a community. It is an attempt to reject God’s provision.

Because our limits are not determined by inefficiency or measurable harm or even the law, but by the one to whom we all belong, God.

Belonging necessitates limits.

But if these limits are freely chosen, they’re still fundamentally an expression of autonomy. And that’s how one can so easily belong in the contemporary church and strictly follow Christian sexual teachings while still being in absolute rebellion to the reality that you are not your own but belong to Christ.

Christian ethics, like any morality, can be treated as a lifestyle option.

When you choose to follow God’s laws out of personal preference, you will eventually discover a breaking point where your desire for experiences or self-expression comes up hard against an ethical law. And at that moment, you can choose to abandon Christianity as an inadequate or antiquated lifestyle, find a more inclusive style of Christianity, or you can accept that Christianity was never meant to be a lifestyle and with the aid of the Holy Spirit deny your desire. Only if you truly belong to someone else does the latter option make any sense. If you belong to yourself, then it is foolish and perhaps even abusive to deny yourself. But if “you are not your own,” it matters what you do with your body. It even matters how you do something as personal and intimate as making love.

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.

Part of our unease with the phrase stems from being raised in a culture that treats autonomy as sacred. We idolize rebels, free thinkers, and mavericks. Our modern myths are stories of rejecting traditional expectations to discover your true, pure identity. As we have seen, in the contemporary anthropology, to be fully human is to be autonomous.

Liberal democracy and metaphysical liberalism have created legal freedoms and liberated us from spiritual, moral, cultural, and psychological pressures to conform, but the authorities we do retain seem to have only shifted their methods of abusing powers. 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.

For many contemporary people, the phrase “I am not my own” calls to mind not government overreach, manipulative advertising, or the unreliability of the scientific project, but traumatizing spiritual, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse at the hands of authority figures.

Before we can go on to consider how the belief that we are not our own can reorient us toward our true anthropology, we must acknowledge and address the very real danger of this idea. Once we accept that we are not our own, we are vulnerable to those who would take advantage of us.

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.

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.

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.

We need to belong to someone who is perfectly able to desire our own good while desiring their own good, someone for whom there cannot be a conflict between our good and their good (John 3:16; Romans 8:28; 2 Peter 3:9). We need to belong to Christ.

Paul uses the imagery of an ancient slave market to describe the way Christ has purchased us at a price. The implied price is Christ’s death on the cross. We are not told who the old owner was, but we might imagine it was ourselves—enslaved to our passions.

In accepting Christ as Lord, we acknowledge that our belonging to Him is true and good. But unlike ancient slave masters, Christ’s ownership over us does not entail the defacement of our humanity.8 And this is a unique property of Christ’s use of power in contrast to any human’s. The power dynamics of human slavery require that the owner dehumanize the slave in order to achieve dominance. In that sense, people cannot enslave people they view as fully human. They can only enslave people they view as former or conditional or marginal people. God’s ownership of His children is categorically different because our humanity is no threat to His sovereignty. On the contrary, He designed us to worship and belong to Him as people. If God wanted subhumans or mere things to serve Him, He would have only made trees and animals.

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

At its best, the church will be a sanctuary from this idolatrous babble, and here, if nowhere else, you should find other souls who will remind you that your life is not a quest for significance or self-actualization, but an act of joyful participation in God’s grace.

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.

means a major portion of our economy is based on the myth that we need to be someone unique. Expressive individualism is the logic guiding many modern industries, like entertainment, fashion, and social media. These are massive corporations generating billions upon billions of dollars in revenue each year from people who feel an overwhelming burden to be seen so that they feel real and significant—people who have been lied to. 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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Our society will only get better and better at modifying our perceptions and emotions without modifying the conditions that give rise to our emotions.

But here’s the thing: it matters to me that my job actually is meaningful. It matters to me that the joy I feel being with my family reflects a deeper truth about existence. I’d rather feel purposeless in my job and know it is purposeful than feel purposeful and know it is really purposeless. If I am not my own but belong to Christ, then the meaning I experience in life has an objective existence when it rightly reflects the truth about God and creation and my neighbor.

There remains a personal dimension to morality, but it is always grounded in the existence of another, namely, God as revealed in His Word and creation. In some ways, these limits will chafe, not because they are unjust or inhuman, but because any limit to our absolute freedom is costly.

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

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,

Rather than better sexual techniques, our sex should be defined by prodigality—a kind of joyfully over-abundant self-giving, unrestrained by productivity or performance, always in excess of what is strictly necessary.

The anthropology of “you are not your own” is not easy or free from sacrifice. By some metrics it is the less efficient way of living. There will come times in your life when you will be obligated to deny some pleasure, some intimacy, something or someone genuinely lovely because you are not your own but belong to God, and through Him, to your family and your neighbor. It may even be the case that after years of marriage you meet someone else who loves you more and with whom you would have a more pleasurable life and compatible marriage. There are a lot of beautiful, fascinating people in the world and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. But to stand before God, we do not have the freedom to abandon our responsibilities and promises when love grows cold or friendship becomes difficult or parenting is too much or caring for your elderly parents is embarrassing. We should not submit to abusive relationships and there are biblically legitimate grounds for divorce and separating yourself from certain relationships. But you are not free to pursue any desire you have. It doesn’t matter how badly you want it, how good it feels, how much you are missing out on, or how supportive our contemporary society is, we must accept our responsibilities to God, the church, our family, and our neighbors. For some of us, our obligations to others will require us to tolerate loneliness, to accept abstinence for a season or a lifetime, to live where we don’t want to live, to work a job we don’t...

Belonging to God sets limits on our lives. Sometimes they are hard limits to bear. It is not easy to stand before God, even with grace. Moment by moment we must set aside our sinful desires, even the ones closest to our heart, to live sacrificially. I do not want to lie to you. This is a difficult life.

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 presence. Love cannot be always looking ahead or to the left or right.

Efficiency demands that we always pursue the best option available. It asks: Can you use this time more productively? Is this the best person you can marry? Can’t my child do better than this? Is this the best career for me? Is looking at this tree a good use of my time when I haven’t emailed my manager yet? But that’s precisely the point. The reign of technique robs us of the gifts God gives us and leaves us in an inhuman environment. We aren’t free to love anything because there’s always something else. But if we are not our own, then there can be (and are!) higher values than efficiency, like love, gratitude, beauty, and goodness. Then it turns out that delighting in the gift you have is far more freeing than desiring any improper gift you can imagine.

Learning to love your spouse’s very human body, learning to delight in sex that is contingent on health and stress and feelings of security and love makes sex more human, not less. It submits sexual pleasure to human limits rather than submitting the human body to instrumental use. It’s inefficient for the sake of love and beauty.

And what is true of sex in marriage is true of the beauty of friendships, nature, our bodies, art, and all other good things in this life: when we reject efficiency as our meta-value, we are free to delight in the contingent, broken, aging, incomplete, and yet beautiful gifts God has given us.

The Christian alternative to technique is prodigality, which requires the faith to be still, to depend on God for your future. We live prodigally when we act according to love or goodness or beauty rather than primarily efficiency. The overflowing cup which God gives David in the twenty-third Psalm is prodigal. Strictly speaking, there is no need to fill a cup until it overflows. The expensive ointment Mary uses to anoint the feet of Jesus is prodigal. As Judas observed in John 12, a more efficient use of the ointment would have been to alleviate poverty. Our very lives are prodigal. God did not need to create us. But He did, and it was and is good.

We may think of leisure as doing whatever makes us most physically comfortable, but Christian leisure is the practice of delighting gratefully in God’s creation without regard for what is easiest, simplest, or cheapest.

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.

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.

The same may be said for the body of Christ. To follow Christ, to acknowledge that you belong to Him and that He died for your sins, requires accepting the obligation of belonging to the church. And if you have been in a church long enough, you know that this commitment is not an easy cross to bear. People disappoint. It is much easier to cut and run when belonging is unpleasant, painful, or uncomfortable. While belonging to the church, you will be hurt. You will have to learn to love people who look different from you, who have different interests, passions, and languages. You’ll have to give sacrificially to support people who in a strict meritocracy don’t “deserve” your compassion or aid. You’ll have to submit to the right leadership of elders. You’ll have to get over yourself and get out of your head. Maybe hardest of all, you’ll have to do all this while rejecting the lie that it is your love and service that makes you righteous or important or justified. You are righteous because Christ is righteous. You love and serve because He loved and served you.

Our contemporary anthropology tends to make us think of our surroundings as tools for self-development or improvement. If we are our own, then the natural world and the architecture of a city are valuable only if I can use them to get ahead.

But if the Christian account of human persons is correct, where I am matters. By dwelling in a place, I am forming a relationship with it, one with bonds and obligations. I don’t have the freedom to alienate or separate myself from my physical environment any more than it has the freedom to deny me. There may be situations that justify leaving home and recommitting to a new place, but like leaving a church or distancing ourselves from our family, we should approach such decisions with extreme trepidation and prayer. God has created us as mobile beings. There is nothing inherently wrong with moving for work. But if we belong to Christ, our default ought to be that we see ourselves committed to our families, friends, communities, places, and the church. This is where we belong, even when it is difficult.

Once again, the Christian anthropology does not lead to a pain-free life. It requires us to accept our place in the world. We can move and leave abusive churches and cut off destructive family members, but we should see each of these actions as a tragic diversion from the way things ought to be, not as an opportunity to express our individuality or become our true selves.