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

by Alan Noble

Accepting that you belong to your family will almost certainly result in being hurt and taken advantage of by others. Accepting that you belong to the church will almost certainly make you vulnerable and cost you time and resources you could more efficiently use to advance yourself. Accepting that you belong to the place where you live will force you to care about your neighbors when it would be much easier to write the place off and move away. This last implication is particularly difficult for young people who have been brought up to believe that they are free to move wherever they like, to pursue whatever career they like. What would happen if we begin to encourage young people to consider the needs of the immediate community as they explore career options? It takes no small amount of courage and sacrifice to accept that you belong to other people and to serve them accordingly.

Instead, we must “wait without hope,” as T. S. Eliot says.1 This phrase, which we’ll look at more closely in a moment, has occasionally been misinterpreted to mean that Eliot, himself a Christian, had no hope for the resurrection. But the hope Eliot tells his readers to wait without is false hope: a hope that demands results, an impatient hope, a hope that is pragmatic, a hope that rushes to action, a hope that cannot be still and know that God is God.2 This false hope naturally leads to bitterness. 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.

In designing creation, God took our human frailty into account, and blessed us with a number of gifts that help make life tolerable. Understood rightly, these are ways that belonging to God is a comfort in life.

Moral pleasures are manifestations of God’s providential grace to us, reminders that He is good and that our suffering is only for a time. They are reminders that the right order of things, the telos toward which we are moving if we accept Him as the Son of God, is love. In delighting in these gifts, we honor Him.

This is no defeatism or determinism. On the contrary, it’s the greatest possible form of hope: an absolute faith in God’s faithfulness and His ability to bring justice and truth and beauty in circumstances where we can no longer imagine them.

But 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. As Paul reminded the church in Corinth, “Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:7). Or, as Eliot said, “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”5 And it isn’t.

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. Such a courage is the paradox at the center of this chapter, this book, and the Christian life. In action we try to be self-sufficient, autonomous. Often, we act because we don’t trust that we will be preserved otherwise. But our calling is to “be still and know” that God is God, and not you (Psalm 46:10).

We frantically work all week to take care of ourselves and on Sunday we sit in church anxiously going over all the things we still need to get done. When we sing, we say that He is God, but our hearts are committed to self-sufficiency. We don’t actually know that He is God, we just act like it. This a religious form of Affirmation.

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. As Eliot says elsewhere in “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” our duty is to “take no thought of the harvest, / But only of proper sowing.”

Cain has built a city. For God’s Eden he substitutes his own, for the goal given to his life by God, he substitutes a goal chosen by himself—just as he substituted his own security for God’s. Such is the act by which Cain takes his destiny on his own shoulders, refusing the hand of God in his life.9

Ellul sees the construction of cities as human efforts to belong to ourselves, to create an environment that denies the reality of God’s provision, a space where it grows easier and easier for humans to act without acknowledging their contingency upon God. The city walls keep them safe from animals and enemies. The shelters and collective living reduce the threat of natural disasters. The importation of food and other supplies frees city dwellers from the whims of the natural world. And the progress of the city, its laws and buildings and economy, gives hope for tomorrow. From the beginning cities have worked for this autonomy, but the modern world makes it even easier to refuse “the hand of God” in our lives: “It is only in an urban civilization that man has the metaphysical possibility of saying, ‘I killed God.’”10 Ellul uses the term “city” to refer to civilization broadly—both ancient walled cities and modern urban spaces, places where people live overwhelmingly surrounded by a humanly built environment.

The city is seductive—governed by logic and technique, but rejecting critiques of its own logic. It is vampiric—it turns people into machines and merchandise and enslaves them. People are seduced by the city because it promises to meet their every need (and thus make them independent of God) and enable them to meet the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging.

Our egotistical temptation is to think that what matters in life is what is big and visible and political. So we make grand plans and join national movements in hopes that we can make a “real” difference. And no doubt, some political movements can make a real difference. But for the most part the answer to the city is found in millions of tiny decisions to live faithfully even while living in the city.

the only righteous action Christians can take, the only thing we are obligated by God to do, is to glorify God in the city where we live.16 We are not called to save the city because we can’t. Our social engineering won’t solve the problem. Our justice initiatives won’t stop the city from eating people. Our evangelism won’t slowly convert the city into Eden. But neither can we flee. Ellul points out repeatedly that God has not called us to leave the city. So long as we can remain and glorify Him, then we are obligated to stay and live.

When a scholar like Ellul so persuasively criticizes the roots of our civilization, we expect one of two solutions: revolution or retreat. Ellul emphatically says “No!” to both. It is not in our power to redeem the city. That is God’s task. God convicted and converted the entire city of Nineveh (Jonah 3). God will establish the redeemed city of New Jerusalem. There are no action items for us to complete, no strategies or methods or best practices for converting an entire city, let along an entire society. It is an act that can only be accomplished by God’s intervention. So, too, does the hope for a New Jerusalem seem foolish from a worldly perspective, a city free from sin and sorrow whose light comes from the presence of God Himself. Only God can establish this beautiful, holy city on earth.

Our task is to wait, as Eliot says, “without hope,” because whenever we pin our hope to a specific political or social goal, we end up hoping for the wrong thing: a finite human solution. Whether it’s hope in a pro-life Supreme Court that will end abortion or hope in a perfectly equitable economic system or hope in a party or politician or policy, our vision for how to “fix” society will always come up short.

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. Jonah could not save Nineveh. He couldn’t even love it. Neither could Jonah bring about God’s judgment upon Nineveh. What he could do in response to the wickedness of Nineveh, and what we must do in response to the inhuman conditions of our society, is represent God in the city.

If we are not our own, then our obligation is to honor God with our lives. He has called us to stay in the city and to work for its good—but mostly to pray. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God commanded the Israelites exiled in Babylon to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf” (Jeremiah 29:7).

But our plans, even when they seem just and wise, are not God’s plans.

T. S. Eliot: “For us there is only the trying. / The rest is not our business.” We don’t get to calculate the effectiveness of faithfulness or love. We don’t get to reassess our commitment to justice when we don’t see change happen. If abortions increase and racial justice remains elusive and wars develop in new and even more dehumanizing forms, we don’t get to stop doing good. We have received orders from God to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). 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.

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. Like the ancient Israelites, we may find ourselves supporting a candidate, policy, or party who promises to protect us if we will only “trust in oppression and perverseness” (Isaiah 30:12).

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.

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.

Once you accept that you are not your own but belong to Christ, many parts of your life that once you took for matters of personal preference are revealed to be matters of God’s will.

Consider marriage. If we are our own, then marriage is one of many possible paths to self-fulfillment. Children are an option with which you can accessorize your marriage, or not—like buying a home, opening a joint checking account, owning a pet, or choosing an Ikea bookshelf. For couples who feel a calling to be parents, it can be a satisfying and meaningful experience. But when children don’t fit in with the personal goals of a married couple, we expect the couple to abstain from having children. But if we are not our own but belong to Christ, then God’s design for marriage and sex matters. By design, children are the natural fruit of marriage, as sex is the natural physical culmination of marriage. Marriage isn’t just about the good of the couple. Wendell Berry reminds us, “Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community.”

An essential part of what it means to be married is to pursue procreation. We may not want the meaning of marriage to be tied up with children, but it is, objectively. And when we embrace that design, we bear witness to the fact that we are not our own, that we depend on God for the provision and grace necessary to be a parent. 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. Single people and couples who are unable to have children will face different but no less substantial and important burdens in life, particularly if they actively ...

In the event that our inner quest reveals that we’re altruistic, we tend to look at jobs where we can feel like we’re helping people, whether or not that’s what our neighbors need the most. Even when we’re altruistic, we’re not encouraged to ask, “What do my neighbors need? What does my community need? What problem can I address?” Instead, we ask, “What is a job where I can help people?” And the answer is usually doctor, nurse, counselor, teacher, and so on. Of course, these are all honorable professions, but if we desire the good of our neighbor, maybe none of these are what our specific community needs. Is it really loving your neighbor if you become a doctor so you can help people, but then you have to leave your community to find a place that needs another doctor? Is that better than staying where you are and becoming a teacher at a struggling public school? If you’re a Christian, perhaps your desire to help people motivates you to become a pastor or missionary. But could it be that your city doesn’t need another pastor? Maybe it needs someone working AC repair who mentors youth on the weekends. Could it be that a Majority World country doesn’t need another missionary, but the indigenous churches there could use our financial support? 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.