EBOOK
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"You are your own, and you belong to yourself."
This is the fundamental assumption of modern life. And, if we are our own, then it's up to us to forge our own identities and to make our lives significant. But while that may sound empowering, it turns out to be a crushing responsibility, one that never actually delivers on its promise of a free and fulfilled life, but instead leaves us burned out, depressed, anxious, and alone. This phenomenon is mapped out onto the very structures of our society, and helps explain our society's underlying disorder.
But, the Christian gospel offers a strikingly different vision. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, "I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ." In You Are Not Your Own, Alan Noble explores how this truth reframes the way we understand ourselves, our families, our society, and God. Contrasting these two visions of life, he invites us past the sickness of contemporary life into a better understanding of who we are and to whom we belong.
This is the fundamental assumption of modern life. And, if we are our own, then it's up to us to forge our own identities and to make our lives significant. But while that may sound empowering, it turns out to be a crushing responsibility, one that never actually delivers on its promise of a free and fulfilled life, but instead leaves us burned out, depressed, anxious, and alone. This phenomenon is mapped out onto the very structures of our society, and helps explain our society's underlying disorder.
But, the Christian gospel offers a strikingly different vision. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, "I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ." In You Are Not Your Own, Alan Noble explores how this truth reframes the way we understand ourselves, our families, our society, and God. Contrasting these two visions of life, he invites us past the sickness of contemporary life into a better understanding of who we are and to whom we belong.
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Reviews
"Alan Noble's book is exactly what we need. It shows the severe weaknesses of the supposedly liberated modern approach to identity and lifts up the biblical and Christian confessional resources (the sixteenth-century Heidelberg Catechism) that can heal us. As you can see from Alan's copious notes, he has read deeply in the many great critiques of the modern self written over the past two generations. But while powerful and penetrating, these volumes are inaccessible to the average person and therefore they have not gotten the traction in our culture that they should. Alan is, I hope, the beginning of a new generation of scholar-writers who can bring the insights of these thinkers down to earth and apply them in the most practical, compelling, and helpful form. May Alan's tribe increase!"
Timothy Keller, Redeemer City to City