Public
When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Luhrmann 2012; chapter 1 excerpts:
"The music is also an invocation. More responsively human and more supernaturally present than the God most of us grew up with, this God is asked to walk into church on Sunday morning with the music, and people speak as if they come because he is there. On Sunday mornings the band would pause after a few songs and the leader would pray softly into the silence. "God, we love you so much. Help us to hear you clearly today. Come into our midst … Come, Holy Spirit, come … Come …" And people waited (even the coffee drinkers) to let God come. People talk about this as if they mean it literally. They say things like "God really showed up today," and they distinguish between times when they felt that God was present and times when they did not feel his presence, although then they add quickly that he is always there.
The reason people have their notebooks out during sermons isn't because the sermon is about God, the way a college lecture is about the American Revolution or the poems of Emily Dickinson. Rather, the pastor's sermon teaches the congregation to use the Bible to relate to God, both as a God of power and as a best friend. Church is a class in which you learn how to hear what God has to say. The pastor teaches that when you are intimate and personal with a supernatural being, God speaks to you. Not all the time and usually not audibly, but in as real and as practical a way as if you were sitting down to coffee with a puzzle you had to solve.
In his Confessions, Augustine reports as an example of his sin that he stole some pears from a neighbor's garden with the wanton thoughtlessness of a teenage boy. A modern reader familiar with the addiction narrative feels that Augustine was not exactly hitting bottom
Arnold was in a secular university in southern California when he heard God call him to the ministry. The moment took place at a Vineyard Christian Fellowship meeting in an empty warehouse that the church rented each Sunday morning. Arnold wasn't even sure if he liked the church at the time. People were dancing in their seats to the music and raising their hands to praise God, and Arnold felt a little awkward and out of place. Then "all of a sudden, it was like a whole sentence spoken into my heart. I felt that God said, 'Arnold, I've called you into ministry.' I'd been doubting. I was always kind of insecure about whether I should go into ministry. I walked out of that service and never doubted it again."
One day, in passing, he heard the pastor mention that the Vineyard wanted to plant a church down in one of the city neighborhoods. The name of the neighborhood intrigued him and stuck in his memory, though he had never seen the area. He prayed that God would give him a supernatural sign to see whether he should explore it. A couple of weeks passed, and nothing happened. Then he sat at the information table one Sunday-it was the only Sunday he ever sat there-and again he prayed to God about whether he should explore the neighborhood. That morning some college students walked up to him and said that they wanted to talk to someone about having a pastor move to that very neighborhood and start a Vineyard there. That caught Arnold's attention. "But was it a sign from God? I was unsure. So I said, 'God, give me another sign.' "
At the time, he had a man living with him who'd recently been released from prison. Arnold did this kind of thing routinely. He would say that he had "a heart" for the poor. Even when he was in college, he did ministry work in inner city neighborhoods, and he would invite homeless men to sleep in his apartment. He told himself that it was safe because he didn't have anything worth stealing. Now, looking back, he is startled by his temerity. It so happened that the mother of the man released from prison lived in the neighborhood the college kids had mentioned. When the man came back after visiting her, Arnold asked him what the place was like without mentioning his interest in it. "The first thing he says after throwing himself dramatically on the couch was, 'That area, man, you would love that neighborhood.' He said, 'Actually you were made for that neighborhood.' " Arnold paused and looked at me. "Well, that was pretty stunning."
People tell stories like this in the church with the rhythm of dawning discovery-and then, and then, and then, as if God had to work so hard to get them to see. They love these stories, because they are the enactment of a relationship between a creature and his creator, between a dull, cautious, skeptical human and a loving, patient, persistent God. By this point Arnold was intrigued but not persuaded. It is risky to start a church, because the judgment people make in coming to a church is always in part about the person of the pastor. To fail is painful.
Some people come to the service specifically for the prayer. At the close of the service, six or so members of what is called the prayer team line up against one wall of the gym. (You have to be trained to be on the prayer team, and you can be dismissed if the pastor thinks you shouldn't participate.) They wear little tags to identify themselves as on the prayer team. While other congregants shrug on their coats and chat, the prayer team members lay hands on the shoulders of those who want prayer and then pray aloud over them, their faces focused with intense concentration, the supplicants often choking back sobs. Above the muffled voices, the pastor calls out softly to those who are leaving, "Go with God, you guys."
The evangelical interest in the direct personal experience of God exploded in the 1960s. Americans have always been religious, but every so often our religious enthusiasm seems to crest. Historians have called these periods of religious excitement "great awakenings." They appear (more or less) from 1730 to 1760, 1800 to 1840, 1890 to 1930, and 1965 to the present.9 During these decades, Americans were more likely to have had unusual spiritual experiences in which they fainted, spoke in tongues, saw visions, and so forth, and they were more likely to seek out and publicly celebrate these changes in consciousness as proof of God's living presence in their lives. These are not, of course, the only times when God has inflamed the American senses. Throughout the twentieth century, there were American churches that encouraged and even relied on unusual spiritual phenomena. Pentecostalism was born in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century and continued to grow over the decades. Southern Baptist churches encouraged richly spiritual experience well before the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, America does seem to have periods when great spiritual passion enters many humble homes. We are, scholars suggest, in such a period now.10
The demographic shift in American religion since the 1960s is remarkable. Two-thirds of the generation we call the baby boomers stopped going to churches and temples as adults. Half of them have now returned to religious practice, but not to the mainstream, hour-long services of their childhood. They have joined churches, temples, and odd little groups that put intense and personal spiritual experience at the center of what it is to believe in the divine.11 Wade Clark Roof famously called them "a generation of seekers."12 By 1996, a whopping 39 percent of Americans said that they were born again, and for most of them evangelical piety meant having a direct, personal, and vividly felt relationship with their Creator.13 Many different kinds of data converge to suggest that at least a quarter of all Americans follow a faith in which the Christian god is understood to be intimately and personally present.14
Another friend recalled, "I took my LSD and lay down on the floor for a few hours, and when I got up I was a Christian. It was really that simple."
Teens finding Jesus while high on acid, while the Beatles were discovering Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, did not think that the supernatural was safely in the past. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that "the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact, will do greater works than these." The hippies took that work to include the supernatural miracles. They seem to have modeled themselves on the disciples early in the Book of Acts. As Acts opens, the disciples are still in Jerusalem, waiting in their upper room, constantly in prayer. They have already seen Jesus alive after his death, and he has told them that they must wait in Jerusalem to receive power through something he calls the "Holy Spirit." Then the text describes what happened when that power descended: "Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind."27 Acts is the story of the supernatural miracles-"signs and wonders"-that the disciples do with this power as they wait for Christ to return and claim his kingdom. This seems to have been the way the hippies imagined themselves: a small, close, communal band of followers, with Jesus giving them instructions and the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit at their command.
The most visible expression of this Holy Spirit supernaturalism was speaking in tongues. "Tongues" are a flow of speechlike utterances that sound more or less as if someone is speaking in a language you do not understand. It is a skill-people talk about learning to speak in tongues and teaching others to speak in tongues-but it also has an uncontrolled, dissociative quality. Indeed, contemporary brain-imaging studies find that those who speak in tongues have less conscious control than when they sing.28 Tongues are usually interpreted by those who use them as spiritual speech that can be understood only by God (or, depending on the church, by someone with the spiritual gift of interpreting tongues), but they are sometimes understood as the actual sudden acquisition of a language the speaker has never spoken before. The interpretive ambiguity comes straight out of Acts. The text moves from the violent rush of fire from heaven, when "divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them," to the crowd (which gathered to hear them) commenting with amazement that "we hear, each of us, in our own native language … in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power."29
In the late nineteenth century, a Kansas minister, Charles Parham, became fascinated by Acts and convinced that if the disciples had spoken in tongues, all who followed Christ should also speak in tongues. Parham recalls his awe when he entered the room where twelve of his followers sat one evening, bathed as he thought in the "sheen of white light" and speaking in at least six different languages. "Right then there came a slight twist in my throat, a glory fell over me, and I began to worship God in the Sweedish [sic] tongue, which later changed to other languages and continued so until the morning."30
• • •
When Parham's followers began to speak in tongues, they assumed that they were speaking in new human languages. They were not. The linguistic anthropologist William Samarin, in a wonderful book, describes tongue-speaking as human utterance that is phonologically structured-that is, the sounds are not random noise but are drawn from the speaker's language-but without systematic resemblance to any language, living or dead. They have neither grammar nor syntax. (One pastor told me with a wry laugh that you could pass as speaking in tongues if you say quickly and repeatedly "She bought a Honda.") But language or not, the person who speaks in tongues often feels great: refreshed, buoyant, and alive.
Astonishingly, Charles Parham and his followers appear to have been among the first to speak in tongues since the early Christians.31
This combination of Jesus's intensely human nature and his tangible supernaturalism creates a mystery, and that mystery and the burden of discipleship that it demands are the heartbeat of the Gospel's narrative. In 1901 the great German scholar William Wrede argued that the Gospel writer imported these characteristics into the text to explain why Jesus seems so unlike a messiah in his historical life. In the other Gospels, Jesus brings the "mystery of the kingdom" or the "mystery of the word." In Mark, Jesus brings simply "the mystery," and as Luke Timothy Johnson points out, the mystery is Jesus himself: not so much what he says or even what he does but simply who he is. In Mark, only the demons-and at the end, his human executioner-know that this man is the son of God.60 Humans, on the other hand, are constantly amazed by him. He attracts. He says "Follow me," and people do. But he also repels. His parables are confusing. He says directly that he wants them to confound. His call to discipleship is hard: "Sell all you have, and follow me." And his disciples do not get it. "Who is this," they ask, "that even the wind and the sea obey him?" They do not understand what he says, and they are afraid to ask. Jesus says something straightforward; the disciples think it is a metaphor. He gives them a metaphor; they take it literally. He tells them, literally and metaphorically, "Keep awake!" Yet three times during his despairing watch in the garden, they fall asleep.61
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is a mystery, and when he dies, the story ends. We, the readers of the gospel, know that the story continues, but we are in the presence of a great unknown, although as humans we realize we share the weakness and the wrongheadedness of the disciples who fled.
That old, old mystery-how little we understand, how much it confuses us, how drawn we are to the promise, and how repelled we are by its irrationality-is at the heart of this new imagining of God. God is always a mystery, of course. But the Jesus that the Gospel writer presents in Mark is remarkable in being both utterly straightforward and quite unexplained."
"The music is also an invocation. More responsively human and more supernaturally present than the God most of us grew up with, this God is asked to walk into church on Sunday morning with the music, and people speak as if they come because he is there. On Sunday mornings the band would pause after a few songs and the leader would pray softly into the silence. "God, we love you so much. Help us to hear you clearly today. Come into our midst … Come, Holy Spirit, come … Come …" And people waited (even the coffee drinkers) to let God come. People talk about this as if they mean it literally. They say things like "God really showed up today," and they distinguish between times when they felt that God was present and times when they did not feel his presence, although then they add quickly that he is always there.
The reason people have their notebooks out during sermons isn't because the sermon is about God, the way a college lecture is about the American Revolution or the poems of Emily Dickinson. Rather, the pastor's sermon teaches the congregation to use the Bible to relate to God, both as a God of power and as a best friend. Church is a class in which you learn how to hear what God has to say. The pastor teaches that when you are intimate and personal with a supernatural being, God speaks to you. Not all the time and usually not audibly, but in as real and as practical a way as if you were sitting down to coffee with a puzzle you had to solve.
In his Confessions, Augustine reports as an example of his sin that he stole some pears from a neighbor's garden with the wanton thoughtlessness of a teenage boy. A modern reader familiar with the addiction narrative feels that Augustine was not exactly hitting bottom
Arnold was in a secular university in southern California when he heard God call him to the ministry. The moment took place at a Vineyard Christian Fellowship meeting in an empty warehouse that the church rented each Sunday morning. Arnold wasn't even sure if he liked the church at the time. People were dancing in their seats to the music and raising their hands to praise God, and Arnold felt a little awkward and out of place. Then "all of a sudden, it was like a whole sentence spoken into my heart. I felt that God said, 'Arnold, I've called you into ministry.' I'd been doubting. I was always kind of insecure about whether I should go into ministry. I walked out of that service and never doubted it again."
One day, in passing, he heard the pastor mention that the Vineyard wanted to plant a church down in one of the city neighborhoods. The name of the neighborhood intrigued him and stuck in his memory, though he had never seen the area. He prayed that God would give him a supernatural sign to see whether he should explore it. A couple of weeks passed, and nothing happened. Then he sat at the information table one Sunday-it was the only Sunday he ever sat there-and again he prayed to God about whether he should explore the neighborhood. That morning some college students walked up to him and said that they wanted to talk to someone about having a pastor move to that very neighborhood and start a Vineyard there. That caught Arnold's attention. "But was it a sign from God? I was unsure. So I said, 'God, give me another sign.' "
At the time, he had a man living with him who'd recently been released from prison. Arnold did this kind of thing routinely. He would say that he had "a heart" for the poor. Even when he was in college, he did ministry work in inner city neighborhoods, and he would invite homeless men to sleep in his apartment. He told himself that it was safe because he didn't have anything worth stealing. Now, looking back, he is startled by his temerity. It so happened that the mother of the man released from prison lived in the neighborhood the college kids had mentioned. When the man came back after visiting her, Arnold asked him what the place was like without mentioning his interest in it. "The first thing he says after throwing himself dramatically on the couch was, 'That area, man, you would love that neighborhood.' He said, 'Actually you were made for that neighborhood.' " Arnold paused and looked at me. "Well, that was pretty stunning."
People tell stories like this in the church with the rhythm of dawning discovery-and then, and then, and then, as if God had to work so hard to get them to see. They love these stories, because they are the enactment of a relationship between a creature and his creator, between a dull, cautious, skeptical human and a loving, patient, persistent God. By this point Arnold was intrigued but not persuaded. It is risky to start a church, because the judgment people make in coming to a church is always in part about the person of the pastor. To fail is painful.
Some people come to the service specifically for the prayer. At the close of the service, six or so members of what is called the prayer team line up against one wall of the gym. (You have to be trained to be on the prayer team, and you can be dismissed if the pastor thinks you shouldn't participate.) They wear little tags to identify themselves as on the prayer team. While other congregants shrug on their coats and chat, the prayer team members lay hands on the shoulders of those who want prayer and then pray aloud over them, their faces focused with intense concentration, the supplicants often choking back sobs. Above the muffled voices, the pastor calls out softly to those who are leaving, "Go with God, you guys."
The evangelical interest in the direct personal experience of God exploded in the 1960s. Americans have always been religious, but every so often our religious enthusiasm seems to crest. Historians have called these periods of religious excitement "great awakenings." They appear (more or less) from 1730 to 1760, 1800 to 1840, 1890 to 1930, and 1965 to the present.9 During these decades, Americans were more likely to have had unusual spiritual experiences in which they fainted, spoke in tongues, saw visions, and so forth, and they were more likely to seek out and publicly celebrate these changes in consciousness as proof of God's living presence in their lives. These are not, of course, the only times when God has inflamed the American senses. Throughout the twentieth century, there were American churches that encouraged and even relied on unusual spiritual phenomena. Pentecostalism was born in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century and continued to grow over the decades. Southern Baptist churches encouraged richly spiritual experience well before the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, America does seem to have periods when great spiritual passion enters many humble homes. We are, scholars suggest, in such a period now.10
The demographic shift in American religion since the 1960s is remarkable. Two-thirds of the generation we call the baby boomers stopped going to churches and temples as adults. Half of them have now returned to religious practice, but not to the mainstream, hour-long services of their childhood. They have joined churches, temples, and odd little groups that put intense and personal spiritual experience at the center of what it is to believe in the divine.11 Wade Clark Roof famously called them "a generation of seekers."12 By 1996, a whopping 39 percent of Americans said that they were born again, and for most of them evangelical piety meant having a direct, personal, and vividly felt relationship with their Creator.13 Many different kinds of data converge to suggest that at least a quarter of all Americans follow a faith in which the Christian god is understood to be intimately and personally present.14
Another friend recalled, "I took my LSD and lay down on the floor for a few hours, and when I got up I was a Christian. It was really that simple."
Teens finding Jesus while high on acid, while the Beatles were discovering Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, did not think that the supernatural was safely in the past. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that "the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact, will do greater works than these." The hippies took that work to include the supernatural miracles. They seem to have modeled themselves on the disciples early in the Book of Acts. As Acts opens, the disciples are still in Jerusalem, waiting in their upper room, constantly in prayer. They have already seen Jesus alive after his death, and he has told them that they must wait in Jerusalem to receive power through something he calls the "Holy Spirit." Then the text describes what happened when that power descended: "Suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind."27 Acts is the story of the supernatural miracles-"signs and wonders"-that the disciples do with this power as they wait for Christ to return and claim his kingdom. This seems to have been the way the hippies imagined themselves: a small, close, communal band of followers, with Jesus giving them instructions and the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit at their command.
The most visible expression of this Holy Spirit supernaturalism was speaking in tongues. "Tongues" are a flow of speechlike utterances that sound more or less as if someone is speaking in a language you do not understand. It is a skill-people talk about learning to speak in tongues and teaching others to speak in tongues-but it also has an uncontrolled, dissociative quality. Indeed, contemporary brain-imaging studies find that those who speak in tongues have less conscious control than when they sing.28 Tongues are usually interpreted by those who use them as spiritual speech that can be understood only by God (or, depending on the church, by someone with the spiritual gift of interpreting tongues), but they are sometimes understood as the actual sudden acquisition of a language the speaker has never spoken before. The interpretive ambiguity comes straight out of Acts. The text moves from the violent rush of fire from heaven, when "divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them," to the crowd (which gathered to hear them) commenting with amazement that "we hear, each of us, in our own native language … in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power."29
In the late nineteenth century, a Kansas minister, Charles Parham, became fascinated by Acts and convinced that if the disciples had spoken in tongues, all who followed Christ should also speak in tongues. Parham recalls his awe when he entered the room where twelve of his followers sat one evening, bathed as he thought in the "sheen of white light" and speaking in at least six different languages. "Right then there came a slight twist in my throat, a glory fell over me, and I began to worship God in the Sweedish [sic] tongue, which later changed to other languages and continued so until the morning."30
• • •
When Parham's followers began to speak in tongues, they assumed that they were speaking in new human languages. They were not. The linguistic anthropologist William Samarin, in a wonderful book, describes tongue-speaking as human utterance that is phonologically structured-that is, the sounds are not random noise but are drawn from the speaker's language-but without systematic resemblance to any language, living or dead. They have neither grammar nor syntax. (One pastor told me with a wry laugh that you could pass as speaking in tongues if you say quickly and repeatedly "She bought a Honda.") But language or not, the person who speaks in tongues often feels great: refreshed, buoyant, and alive.
Astonishingly, Charles Parham and his followers appear to have been among the first to speak in tongues since the early Christians.31
This combination of Jesus's intensely human nature and his tangible supernaturalism creates a mystery, and that mystery and the burden of discipleship that it demands are the heartbeat of the Gospel's narrative. In 1901 the great German scholar William Wrede argued that the Gospel writer imported these characteristics into the text to explain why Jesus seems so unlike a messiah in his historical life. In the other Gospels, Jesus brings the "mystery of the kingdom" or the "mystery of the word." In Mark, Jesus brings simply "the mystery," and as Luke Timothy Johnson points out, the mystery is Jesus himself: not so much what he says or even what he does but simply who he is. In Mark, only the demons-and at the end, his human executioner-know that this man is the son of God.60 Humans, on the other hand, are constantly amazed by him. He attracts. He says "Follow me," and people do. But he also repels. His parables are confusing. He says directly that he wants them to confound. His call to discipleship is hard: "Sell all you have, and follow me." And his disciples do not get it. "Who is this," they ask, "that even the wind and the sea obey him?" They do not understand what he says, and they are afraid to ask. Jesus says something straightforward; the disciples think it is a metaphor. He gives them a metaphor; they take it literally. He tells them, literally and metaphorically, "Keep awake!" Yet three times during his despairing watch in the garden, they fall asleep.61
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is a mystery, and when he dies, the story ends. We, the readers of the gospel, know that the story continues, but we are in the presence of a great unknown, although as humans we realize we share the weakness and the wrongheadedness of the disciples who fled.
That old, old mystery-how little we understand, how much it confuses us, how drawn we are to the promise, and how repelled we are by its irrationality-is at the heart of this new imagining of God. God is always a mystery, of course. But the Jesus that the Gospel writer presents in Mark is remarkable in being both utterly straightforward and quite unexplained."
