David T. Koyzis
Few post-biblical statements have been as clear and as winsome in summarizing the status of human beings before God than the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism, published in 1563:
Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A. That I am not my own but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.
Clear and winsome, yes. But also counter-cultural, because our western societies are increasingly anchored in the conviction that we belong to ourselves, liberated from all sorts of restraints to follow our personal predilections and thereby discover our authentic selves. But anchored may not be the best word to use here because our own highly mutable desires offer no firm foundation for either personal happiness or healthy community.
Far from making us freer, the conviction that we belong to ourselves has succeeded only in increasing society’s general levels of anxiety before an ever-expanding array of options that hold us in thrall. This has produced a paradox: the more we seek liberation, the more we find ourselves enslaved, living in ways that are less than fully human.
Even in the sixteenth century, the authors of the Catechism may have been aware that they were declaring a truth that many would find difficult to accept. Nearly five centuries later, as secularism has emptied the churches and produced a culture devoutly attached to the sovereign self, this truth has become even less palatable. Into this current state of affairs, Alan Noble, who teaches English at Oklahoma Baptist University and is the editor in chief of Christ and Pop Culture, has written a book that echoes the Catechism’s affirmation, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World.1
Noble begins by observing that we live in a culture systematically organized to deprive us of our humanity. Of course, our society does not aim at this result, which nevertheless flows logically out of a defective anthropology exalting individual autonomy. In what has come to be called expressive individualism (Charles Taylor and Robert Bellah), we are under pressure to shape our own individual identities and to express them in as many ways as possible.
From social media profiles to our in-person interactions with others, we try to appear distinctive and important, while the world continues to treat us in increasingly standardizing ways. The numerous paradoxes flowing out of this constant quest for authenticity leave us perplexed and even angry at times. We want to define ourselves by ourselves, no matter the consequences for others, and yet we crave those others’ recognition of that identity. Thus, we are left feeling insecure and anxious as we seek to belong while keeping our communities at an ostensibly safe distance to protect our increasingly fragile sense of self.
Given this dark reality, it is remarkable that anyone would find self-belonging an attractive ideal. Yet our society implicitly encourages us in our quest to be our own. All inherited identities are increasingly regarded as oppressive, and the popular media celebrate the apparent nonconformist, the person who flouts traditions and communal expectations and thereby finds her true self.
So ubiquitous have such stories become in literature, theatre, and film that the notion that such heroic figures are nonconformists seems decreasingly credible. After all, as I regularly told my students, the rebel against tradition only succeeds in relocating himself in a tradition of rebellion against tradition, complete with leather jacket, black beret, and unfiltered cigarettes. Marching to a different drummer in no way eliminates the drummer; it only exacerbates the cacophony of percussive rivalries with no greater principle at stake. Lacking a proper sense of ends worth pursuing, our society is disproportionately preoccupied with means serviceable to self-ownership.
Even our churches have at least implicitly imbibed this ethos of self-possession. Insofar as they “remind us that we are not our own but belong to God . . . they disrupt contemporary understandings of meaning and identity” (48). Nevertheless, like so many other institutions in our society, they have taken on the ways of the market, providing us with various options for finding meaning and identity.
While Scripture offers a high view of the institutional church and its authority over members (e.g., Matt 16:18, Acts 15), today the church has evolved into one more voluntary association which we can join and quit at will. We choose a church community because we feel at home there and it accords with our own identity. “But then one Sunday morning the pastor denounces as sin some behavior that you hold quite dear” (49). At that point it infringes on our self-ownership, and we go elsewhere to find a more affirming setting. In this way, the institutional church becomes one more option in a marketplace of potentially supportive associations. Its authority can be no greater than we are willing to accept. The individual remains sovereign.
But perhaps this is the price that our society demands of all such institutions. Under the dominant liberal paradigm, all communities are in principle reducible to voluntary associations. Those confessing that, say, marriage, family, church, and state are authoritative institutions transcending our wills are compelled to treat this conviction as a mere personal preference with no binding authority on other sovereign wills. This includes the adherents of the major religious faiths such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which must be properly domesticated to fit within the ruling paradigm.
Of course, no society can exist, much less flourish, without norms transcending the individual. For generations the preeminent norm has been efficiency, whose general application adds up to what Jacques Ellul labels technique, that is, “the totality of methods arrived at and having absolute efficiency . . . in every field of human activity” (51, citing The Technological Society). Because the demands of technique are unrelenting, they subsume all competing values under efficiency. When we are confronted with competing means to a chosen end, we consider ourselves morally obligated to opt for the most efficient, even if it entails sacrificing other worthy considerations.
Noble cites as an example prostitution, which many jurisdictions have legalized and regulated. The decision to pursue such a policy is generally based on quantifiable factors such as reducing “sexual and state violence, incarceration rates, and venereal diseases” and enabling “impoverished women to provide for themselves and their families” (54). Yet such considerations altogether bypass such nonquantifiable moral elements as human dignity, which may argue against legalizing something intrinsically demeaning of women.
What is the alternative to efficiency? For Noble it’s prodigality, “which requires the faith to be still, to depend on God for your future” (151). “Prodigality simply means a way of being in the world that takes for granted God’s existence, goodness, and providence, freeing us from the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging so that we can joyfully attend to what is present” (151).
While the dictionary sees prodigality as mere wastefulness, Noble sees it embodied in Josef Pieper‘s notion of leisure, which we have only “when we stand before God and accept that we are not our own” (152). For the Christian, leisure enables us to delight “gratefully in God’s creation without regard for what is easiest, simplest, or cheapest” (152). It entails recognizing that we do not create our identities but receive them gratefully from God. We allow ourselves to engage in activities that are nonproductive and not subject to the canons of efficiency, spending time with our families and friends, enjoying their fellowship and resting in God’s good gifts.2 Within this larger posture, work has its place, but it is not all-consuming. As I have written in the past, labour, leisure, and liturgy add up to life, and it is the balance among these three elements that puts us at odds with a culture obsessed with efficiency and self-possession.
As a political scientist, I was especially interested to read Noble’s section on “Political Faithfulness” (193–7). His treating this at the end of his book reminded me of Calvin’s treatment of the civil magistrate at the end of his Institutes of the Christian Religion (IV.xx). Politics is important, but it is not all-important. In a treatment of philosophical anthropology, one cannot bypass politics, but one doesn’t necessarily begin there.
When I came to this section, I was pleased to see Noble explore Dutch political economist Bob Goudzwaard’s 1979 book Capitalism and Progress, which I read shortly after it was published. As a one-time professor at the Free University of Amsterdam and member of the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament (1967–1971), Goudzwaard has been the consummate activist, assessing the ills of society and proposing alternatives. But Noble focuses on Goudzwaard’s admission that he has “no ready blueprints” for improving society (194). And even if he did, it would by no means create an ideal society—something that lies beyond our legitimate sphere of responsibility as mere human beings. Nevertheless, our call to faithfulness before God entails doing what we can to advance the common good, even as we recognize that it is God who determines whether our efforts will meet with success.
In the meantime, we can take comfort in the reality that we are not our own and that God will bring his kingdom to its fulness in his good time. When we find ourselves falling back into assuming the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging (note his use of initial upper-case letters!), we must then remind ourselves that “we are not our own but belong to Christ” (202).
My one quibble with Noble may seem fairly minor, but it has rather large implications. On page 150 he writes: “But if we are not our own, then there can be (and are!) higher values than efficiency, like love, gratitude, beauty, and goodness.” Most of us are probably accustomed to seeing these goods as worthwhile—as things to value. But the use of the word values may inadvertently steer us once again into the currents of self-belonging, because values are rooted in our subjective estimation of things.
I would prefer norms to values. A norm points beyond itself to another source. It is lawful and does not depend on my putting a price on it. Efficiency itself can be considered a legitimate norm within its own proper boundaries. Economic life is subject to such realities as scarcity and limits, and good economic activity should see us making the best use of the resources God has given us. In this respect, efficiency is a good thing.
Where we go wrong, however, is in applying a norm proper to economic life to the whole of life as if it were the only factor that counts. When we begin applying this norm to, say, university education, public libraries, recreation, natural and human-made wonders, the arts, sport, and liturgy, we risk subordinating the full array of non-economic norms we require to flourish to the single norm of efficiency, now become a jealous god. Given that the life of obedience before God requires that we obey a variety of norms touching every area of life, we ought not to demote these to mere values.
Before you read this book, do take time to read the Heidelberg Catechism, if you are not already familiar with it. Then pick up Noble’s You Are Not Your Own to discover its implications for how we are to live in an inhuman world before the face of God.
David T. Koyzis is a Global Scholar with Global Scholars Canada. He holds the Ph.D. in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Political Visions and Illusions (IVP Academic, 2019) and We Answer to Another: Authority, Office, and the Image of God (Pickwick, 2014).
Image: Hans Thoma, Loneliness
- (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2021).[↩]
- See also David Koyzis, “Sabbath Rest Amid Plague,” Kuyperian Commentary, April 2, 2020, http://kuyperian.com/sabbath-rest-amid-plague/; “When Sunday Is No Longer Sabbath,” Christian Courier, July 13, 2020, https://www.christiancourier.ca/what-we-loose-when-sunday-is-no-longer-sabbath/; Trevor Laurence, “COVID and Compulsive Production,” Cateclesia Institute, September 9, 2020, https://cateclesia.com/2020/09/09/covid-and-compulsive-production/.[↩]