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When God Talks Back

Evangelicals and Suffering (When God Talks Back)

When God Talks Back book cover
When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann

Last week, in my discussion of what evangelicals can learn about themselves from T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back, I mentioned our approach to suffering. Originally, I wasn’t going to write another post on the book, but I wanted to come back to this important topic. Luhrmann discusses suffering in a chapter titled, “Darkness,” along with the related issue of feeling distant from God. Early in the chapter, Luhrmann describes the Vineyard’s approach in this way:

Churches like the Vineyard handle the problem of suffering [in a different way than traditional theodicy]: they ignore it. Then they turn the pain into a learning opportunity. When it hurts, you are supposed to draw closer to God. In fact, the church even seems to push its congregants to experience prayers that fail [due to their boldness]. (268, emphasis added)

Luhrmann observes that Vineyard churches and other evangelicals face two challenges that aren’t faced by certain other branches of Christianity or Judaism:

  • Evangelicals expect an intimate relationship with God. Unlike traditions that few God more distantly, evangelicals want daily closeness with him.
  • Evangelicals, particular of the Vineyard variety, expect God to answer big prayers. Luhrmann goes so far as to say that the Vineyard practically sets up its members for disappointment through its encouragement to prayer for healing and success (e.g. being accepted into certain college).

Times of suffering and spiritual dryness are inevitable. How, then, does Luhrmann see evangelicals addressing them? [Read more…] about Evangelicals and Suffering (When God Talks Back)

Talking Amongst Ourselves (When God Talks Back)

When God Talks Back book cover
When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann

Last week, I shared a few lessons on talking with non-evangelicals that I had taken away from T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back. This week, I’m going in the opposite direction. What are some things that evangelicals need to do better?

Accept our creatureliness. When describing Luhrmann’s work to evangelical friends, one of the main questions is, “Doesn’t this explain God away?” That is, if our ability to pray and to hear from God in prayer is related to certain psychological traits, then doesn’t that mean that God is just a psychological phenomenon?

Luhrmann herself rejects that line of reasoning. She is very clear throughout the book that she’s not investigating the existence of God or making any claims about his existence based on her research. Further, I’m not sure that discovering a psychological structure connected to the act of prayer says anything more about the existence of God than discovery of the optic nerve says about the existence of the Mona Lisa.

Historically, evangelicals have been very nervous about the physical aspects of the mind. We’re getting much better — I’ve seen incredible progress on the topic of mental health just in the years I’ve been a believer. This nervousness, though, is connected (I think) to the modern tendency to see ourselves as superior to and separate from our own bodies. This, in turn, is a rejection of our limits and, ultimately, our mortality. We are not only our bodies, but, as bodily creatures made by God, our bodies are an integral part of who we are. As Christians, after all, we profess believe in a physical resurrection, which suggests that there’s something important about this hunk of flesh. [Read more…] about Talking Amongst Ourselves (When God Talks Back)

Talking with Non-Evangelicals (When God Talks Back)

When God Talks Back book cover
When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. As I mentioned then, please read Mark Noll’s review, which is much better than what I could have written. This week, I’d like to share a few things that I learned from Luhrmann about engaging and talking with non-evangelicals. Next week, I’ll have a few thoughts about how we evangelicals can talk amongst ourselves.

1. Encourage good scholars and thinkers, whatever their beliefs. Maybe this just applies to me (though I suspect it isn’t). After I became a Christian, as a junior English major at the University of Louisville, I started checking up on the religious beliefs of poets and novelists before I had a word they had written. I went through a period where I had a very difficult time appreciating any writers whose religious beliefs didn’t square with my own.

Perhaps this is an appropriate stage for a new Christian — taking time to learn more about the faith from those in the faith — but it shouldn’t be the end stage for Christians. “All truth is God’s truth,” as the late Arthur Holmes said, and we should be willing to learn that truth from anyone. At the end of When God Talks Back, Luhrmann writes that she doesn’t consider herself a Christian, yet I was able to learn a great deal from her about how Christians think and how prayer works from a psychological perspective.  [Read more…] about Talking with Non-Evangelicals (When God Talks Back)

When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann

When God Talks Back book cover
When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann

For the past several weeks, I’ve been reading T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. The book addresses a simple, but profound, question from the perspective of a nonbeliever: how can seemingly rational, otherwise normal people claim to discern God’s will, to hear God’s voice, and, sometimes, to even see or feel spiritual beings? Luhrmann asks this with genuine curiosity, both personal and professional. A psychological anthropologist who has written previous books about modern witches, Zoroastrian Parsis, and American psychiatry, Luhrmann spent four years attending Vineyard churches and participating in Bible studies, prayer groups, and church seminars in preparation for the book. In addition to her own observations, Luhrmann ran the Spiritual Disciplines Project, an experiment at Stanford to explore how spiritual practices like prayer and Bible study affected individuals’ perception of spiritual things. When God Talks Back is the result of these observations, experiments, and Luhrmann’s synthesis of the literature on Christianity and other religions.

Much of the book focuses on sensory perceptions of “unnatural” phenomena — voices, visions, physical sensations of people who are not there. Augustine’s conversion story in his Confessions is a great example of this. While alone under a fig tree wrestling with whether to follow Christ, he hears a child’s voice singing “Tolle, lege, tolle, lege — ”take and read“ in Latin — but he knows somehow that isn’t just a child’s voice. He picks up a Bible, reads the first verses that he finds (Rom. 13:13–15), and ”all the shadows of doubt were dispelled” (Confessions, Book VIII).

Luhrmann chooses to examine Vineyard churches because she notices that experiences like these, as well as the more common process of discerning God’s will through prayer, study, and community, are much more common and accepted as authentic spiritual encounters in evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecotal churches than in the mainline Protestant church in which she was raised. In her research, Luhrmann finds that sensory experiences like these are much more common than some might think. Between 10% and 15% of the population volunteer when asked that they have heard voices or seen people who they knew “weren’t there.” The number rises to nearly 50% when the question is accompanied by a prompting example.   [Read more…] about When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann

What Do Academics Think of Evangelicals?

When God Talks Back book cover
When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann

During the past few weeks, one of the darlings of the book review circuit has been T. M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford, spent several years attending Vineyard Churches around the country — not out of spiritual interest, but as an anthropological study. Here she is on NPR, describing a key part of her thesis: that evangelicals train themselves to perceive God:

They learn to experience some of their thoughts as not being thoughts from them, but thoughts from God that they hear inside their mind,” she says. “They’re also invited to pretend that God is present. I take that verb from C.S. Lewis — he has a chapter of Mere Christianity entitled ‘Let’s Pretend.’ … These folks were invited to put out a second cup of coffee for God, they prayed to go for a walk with God, to go on a date with God, to snuggle with God, to imagine that they are sitting on a bench in the park with God’s arms around their shoulders and they’re talking about their respective days.

[Read more…] about What Do Academics Think of Evangelicals?