Imagine a lion caged behind steel bars and concrete walls at a zoo. The lion’s habitat, the nutrient-dense food, the overhead lighting—everything has been engineered to prolong the lion’s life and to keep it docile. And yet, although this habitat was built for a lion, the lion it was built for doesn’t exist anywhere, except in captivity. The lion doesn’t hunt, doesn’t roam, doesn’t behave like any lion in the savanna. The zoo is more than a habitat—it has changed the lion into a different kind of animal entirely.
This is the metaphor behind Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. Noble—associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University; cofounder and editor in chief of Christ and Pop Culture—uses this metaphor to illustrate that, like captive lions, humans are caged by modernity. Instead of steel bars, though, it’s modernity’s philosophical assumptions that imprison us.
According to Noble, modernity tells us that we belong to no one except ourselves. No one can choose our journey, give us a purpose, define our identity, choose our values, or determine where we belong. In a modern society, all of these choices are ours to make. While it may seem this gives us freedom to define our identity, meaning, and value, Noble makes a strong case that this philosophical framework leaves us exhausted, discontented, and, ultimately, less than human (38).
Fundamental Lie of Modernity
Noble identifies the idea that we are our own—that we belong only to ourselves—as the “fundamental lie” of modernity (5). For if we are our own, it follows that there’s no one else to justify our existence. The significance of our lives depends solely on the consequences of our choices.
Because of this, we maintain expectations of our jobs, spouses, and children that can never be fulfilled. We seek external validation of our choices in a never-ending competition on social media, to show how well our choices have turned out. We strive to make our lives exceptional in every way; but inevitably, we always feel disappointed. Justifying our existence becomes an impossible burden for any human to bear (58).
We strive to make our lives exceptional in every way; but inevitably, we always feel disappointed.
Instead of questioning the fundamental assumption that we belong to ourselves, modern society creates new ways to achieve maximum efficiency in every area of life—what French philosopher and theologian Jacques Ellul called technique. Noble quotes Ellul’s The Technological Society at length, for Ellul’s critique is that in place of universal meaning or transcendent values, modernity substitutes efficiency as the overriding principle by which individuals measure whether their lives have been worth living (51–52). One example is our contemporary emphasis on leisure activity—not as a goal in and of itself, but only as a way to recharge for greater productivity at work (53).
Feelings of inadequacy, coupled with impossible expectations, inevitably lead us to self-medicate. We use various ways to quell our anxiety when we realize we have failed to redeem ourselves. Most of these methods, like prescription drugs and internet pornography, cause more problems than they solve. Noble contends that trying to redeem our existence based on modernity’s “fundamental lie” is to blame for skyrocketing rates of depression, suicide, and mental illness, particularly among young people (81–84).
We Were Made to Belong to God
Once we understand that our modernist anthropology is flawed (116), Noble points out, we are left with the question of who we belong to, if not to ourselves. His answer is aptly summarized by the Heidelberg Catechism, which answers this question with remarkably clarity:
Q: What is your comfort in life and death?
A: That I am not my own
But belong with body and soul
Both in life and death
To my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. (120)
To Noble, this Christian anthropology magnifies our humanity, because we are drawn to a covenantal relationship with the Creator who designed us and intended us to belong to him. As Christians, we are united to Christ through his atoning death, such that our identity is Christ.
Noble then explores the implications of this Christian anthropology. For one, the quest for self-affirmation and self-actualization ends—and along with it, any attempt to justify our existence, on our terms, as worthy. We have a God-given moral framework, and the resulting realization of our sin before a just God is replaced by the reassurance of Christ’s atonement, that we are “loved, accepted, and adored” (135).
This reassurance becomes part of our identity, and therefore none of us needs to strive to feel unique or worthy. There is no need to invent our own identities or express ourselves or find authenticity. God gives us our identity; he is the source of our affirmation; and in his love for us, we find our eternal and unchanging worth (139–140).
God gives us our identity; he is the source of our affirmation; and in his love for us, we find our eternal and unchanging worth.
While Noble finds practical implications for many areas of modern life, Noble is at his best when he teases out the implications of Christian anthropology for the meaning of sex within marriage. In contrast to technique, which demands we pursue and love the best partner available to us, God intends for us to love our spouse continually and in contentment—not because our spouse is the best option, but because our spouse has been given to us by God:
Learning to delight in sex that is contingent on health and stress and feelings of security and love makes sex more human, not less. . . . 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. (150–51)
Random Acts of Faithfulness
Noble terms this alternative to technique as prodigality, which requires us to depend on God, to “act according to love or goodness, or beauty” (151). At the same time, Noble is clear that this alternative thinking is not a program of social justice, as if we could redeem this world on our own:
We must find ways of living in the contemporary world that insist that we are not our own but belong to God—ways of living that testify to our radical dependence upon God for our existence and preservation. (179)
Noble pictures Christians embracing a radically different set of life values, asking what it would look like if we embodied Christ “not as part of a grand strategy for saving our society, but as simple, faithful, anonymous acts of love” (190). The implications of embodying Christ in this way are vast, ranging from occupational choices to how we engage in politics as faithful Christians. There is much here that bears further reflection.
You Are Not Your Own is an ambitious project, tying together diverse and neglected Christian thinkers like Ellul with familiar literary references to Sylvia Plath and J. D. Salinger. Understanding the book requires a commitment to actively reading and parsing Noble’s philosophical arguments through each chapter.
Those who persevere will be rewarded with a refreshing critique of modernity and its underlying assumptions. In a time of immense cultural shifts in America over issues of race, gender, sexuality, and politics, there has never been a better time for Christians to proclaim a more human way to live and to belong.
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