Public
When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Luhrmann 2012; ch3 excerpts:
"To be sure, evangelicals rarely use words like pretend and make-believe. At the Chicago Vineyard, our pastor, Arnold, explicitly encouraged us to experience God as a friend, without uttering the word imaginary. But he invited us to behave with God the way children behave with imaginary friends. He encouraged us to set out a second cup of coffee for God in the morning-to pour God an actual cup of steaming coffee, to place it on an actual table, and to sit down at that table with our own mug to talk to God about the things on our minds. He held Sunday-morning sessions in which he asked people to talk out loud about their human best friends, and then told us to think of God as like that, but better. He explained that many of us thought of God as distant and magnificent, but that God wanted to be intimate with each of us, as if he were a buddy. He explained that we should be familiar with God: that we should hang out with God, tease God, ask God's advice about small things ("God, which of these muffin recipes should I choose?"), and rake God down when we thought he was out of line. If we truly allowed God to break into our lives in that way, Arnold said, we'd really relax with him, and we could trust him in a way most of us, he said, did not. In my field notes from Sunday-morning gatherings, as I listened to his teachings, I scrawled GOD IS YOUR BEST FRIEND in capital letters.
I knew people who talked about setting an extra dinner plate for God or pulling out a chair for him to sit on while they poured out their troubles. When they said those things, they often remarked that they didn't go as far as other people did. They were a little embarrassed by what they'd done. "There was a time," Stacy, the social worker, recalled, "when I was like, I'm gonna have dinner with Jesus because I was really stressed out about my life. I'm gonna have dinner with Jesus, just him and me. But it wasn't like there was an actual chair for God. I had a friend who like actually set out a chair and told God everything." Still, many people spoke casually about chatting easily, comfortably, and openly with God about whatever came into their head. (They often used "God" and "Jesus" interchangeably in this context.) They talked about giggling with God as they walked down the street. They talked about catching themselves speaking out loud, or suddenly laughing out loud because of something God had said or done.
Children do not confuse these imaginary companions with real people. It is true that children sometimes refuse to allow their mothers to "suffocate" the objectively filthy plush bunny in the washing machine. They can insist that an extra place be laid at the table for their invisible friend. Mothers do sometimes worry that their child does not know the difference between the fantastic and the real. But the children do not treat imaginary companions as real all the time. On Monday they may talk to the plush bunny and squeeze him tight, but then ignore him until Friday. They may insist that a place be set at the table, but not insist that real food be placed on the plate. They continue to treat their invisible friends as alive even after a clueless adult sits down on top of them. Imaginary companions are in a special epistemological category.
For members of the church, the informal God experiences in which God was the best of friends also seemed to be in a different epistemological category than an encounter with an actual human or, for that matter, than whatever the Bible said about God. People clearly took the encounters seriously. They delighted in the time they spent chatting with God, the time singing with God in the shower. But they seemed to treat those moments in a different way than they treated, say, a plan to have coffee with a human person or the decision to repair the brakes on the car.
That was particularly striking in the way people spoke about "date night" with God. Date night was a term only women used. (Men would talk about evenings for "quiet time" with God.) The women would set aside the night, and they imagined it romantically: it was a "date." They might pick up dinner or set out a plate at the table, and they imagined their way through the evening talking to God, cuddling with God, and basking in God's attention. They never confused date night with dates with their human husbands, and they were never bothered by God's failure to munch down on a taco. They behaved as if they believed that their experience of God took place only in their minds. But they also spoke as if it were more real, in some ways, than their everyday reality.
There is an entire stream of thought in evangelical Christianity that encourages this light, fanciful, not-real-but-more-real-than-real quality to the experience of God. Another one of the popular books about the experience of God begins by inviting readers not to be reliable, responsible adults: "Our inner story is most audible in the morning, or sometimes in the middle of the night when the inner editor that tells us how we 'should' respond to the world has gone off duty." That inner story, they explain, is our yearning for God. The authors tell us that it is our "life's enchantment"-it is a romance. Indeed, Brent Curtis and John Eldredge entitled their book The Sacred Romance. The point of calling something a romance, of course, is that it is not quite true because it is better than true...That state of mind is a lot like being engrossed in good magical fiction of the Harry Potter kind. The Sacred Romance compares the scriptures, approvingly, to Tolkien's Middle-earth and to C. S. Lewis's Narnia. The authors refer to the Gospels as a "fairy tale," and they say that this is their "wonderful strength"-and the only difference from fairy tales is that the Gospel happens to be true. They explain that our refusal to believe in the miraculous because it is childlike and irrational is the true danger that besets the average Christian. "The crisis of hope that afflicts the church today is a crisis of imagination."17
Winnicott thought that an adult's capacity to believe in a good world was not so different from a toddler's capacity to believe that a mother who was absent could return, and he thought that the concept of God served much the same function as the straw-stuffed bear and became emotionally real in more or less the same way. He believed that because God is invisible to the senses, each individual must make him anew out of their own private emotional experience of the good; but that God could not be God unless God was experienced as standing apart from the self. Winnicott thought that a God who was emotionally real for someone was like a teddy bear: more real than a daydream because anchored in the external world of plush and buttons, but meaningless-inert plush-without that inner world.
The surprising thing is that a large portion of the evangelical church seems to have come to the same conclusion about how to make God come alive for congregants. Books like The Sacred Romance assert that the church on its own terms will fail, at least in this pluralistic, scientific world. So they encourage the reader to imagine God as present-theological precision be damned. "We must be careful," The Sacred Romance says at one point, "or these will be only religious words."24
A two-year-old can take Teddy out of the shoebox and announce that "Teddy's all wet" because Teddy has been in a pretend bathtub full of pretend water. The child can add new stipulations and draw out more causal chains. That two-year-old can take a paper towel and "dry Teddy off" even though the paper towel is not a cloth towel and even though the stuffed bear is not actually wet; and after the stuffed bear's "bath," the child may announce that it is time for Teddy's story if-in the child's experience-baths lead to stories that lead to bed. Play is a human activity that allows a child (or adult) to attribute these personlike qualities to nonpersonlike objects.29
Playing together helps. People said that when they read the Bible together and talked about what God was thinking, it made the external reality of a living, interacting God just that much more real. Hearing about the way other people have experienced God's voice makes it easier to feel that there really is a voice to hear. Imagining other people's conversations makes it easier to infer what God must be saying to you. In house group, we sat around one evening talking about how the group was helpful in what people called their "walk" with God. One man explained how much his experience of God had changed since coming to the Vineyard. "God's voice is like a fuzzy radio station, 95.2, 94.9, that needs more tuning. You're picking up the song, and it's not so clear sometimes. It's clearer to me now." Reading the Bible with your imagination could have the same effect
Elaine told me that she was trying to hear God speak in the little things, so that she could hear his voice when it really counted. She began to ask him what she should wear every morning. The Sunday we spoke, God told her-as she experienced it-to wear the blue shirt. But when she put it on, her bra showed, so she took off the blue shirt and put on a black one. When she arrived at church, she was standing around with the worship team. The pastor walked by, smiled, and said (she reported), "I see you are all wearing blue today." Elaine told me this story to illustrate how mortified she was at having not taken God seriously. The real point, of course, was that Elaine-a deeply committed Christian who had repeatedly explained to me that every word of the Bible was accurate-did not, as she stared at her closet, treat her inference about what God was thinking ("wear the blue shirt") as an actual insight into divine intention. She thought she had just imagined it."
"To be sure, evangelicals rarely use words like pretend and make-believe. At the Chicago Vineyard, our pastor, Arnold, explicitly encouraged us to experience God as a friend, without uttering the word imaginary. But he invited us to behave with God the way children behave with imaginary friends. He encouraged us to set out a second cup of coffee for God in the morning-to pour God an actual cup of steaming coffee, to place it on an actual table, and to sit down at that table with our own mug to talk to God about the things on our minds. He held Sunday-morning sessions in which he asked people to talk out loud about their human best friends, and then told us to think of God as like that, but better. He explained that many of us thought of God as distant and magnificent, but that God wanted to be intimate with each of us, as if he were a buddy. He explained that we should be familiar with God: that we should hang out with God, tease God, ask God's advice about small things ("God, which of these muffin recipes should I choose?"), and rake God down when we thought he was out of line. If we truly allowed God to break into our lives in that way, Arnold said, we'd really relax with him, and we could trust him in a way most of us, he said, did not. In my field notes from Sunday-morning gatherings, as I listened to his teachings, I scrawled GOD IS YOUR BEST FRIEND in capital letters.
I knew people who talked about setting an extra dinner plate for God or pulling out a chair for him to sit on while they poured out their troubles. When they said those things, they often remarked that they didn't go as far as other people did. They were a little embarrassed by what they'd done. "There was a time," Stacy, the social worker, recalled, "when I was like, I'm gonna have dinner with Jesus because I was really stressed out about my life. I'm gonna have dinner with Jesus, just him and me. But it wasn't like there was an actual chair for God. I had a friend who like actually set out a chair and told God everything." Still, many people spoke casually about chatting easily, comfortably, and openly with God about whatever came into their head. (They often used "God" and "Jesus" interchangeably in this context.) They talked about giggling with God as they walked down the street. They talked about catching themselves speaking out loud, or suddenly laughing out loud because of something God had said or done.
Children do not confuse these imaginary companions with real people. It is true that children sometimes refuse to allow their mothers to "suffocate" the objectively filthy plush bunny in the washing machine. They can insist that an extra place be laid at the table for their invisible friend. Mothers do sometimes worry that their child does not know the difference between the fantastic and the real. But the children do not treat imaginary companions as real all the time. On Monday they may talk to the plush bunny and squeeze him tight, but then ignore him until Friday. They may insist that a place be set at the table, but not insist that real food be placed on the plate. They continue to treat their invisible friends as alive even after a clueless adult sits down on top of them. Imaginary companions are in a special epistemological category.
For members of the church, the informal God experiences in which God was the best of friends also seemed to be in a different epistemological category than an encounter with an actual human or, for that matter, than whatever the Bible said about God. People clearly took the encounters seriously. They delighted in the time they spent chatting with God, the time singing with God in the shower. But they seemed to treat those moments in a different way than they treated, say, a plan to have coffee with a human person or the decision to repair the brakes on the car.
That was particularly striking in the way people spoke about "date night" with God. Date night was a term only women used. (Men would talk about evenings for "quiet time" with God.) The women would set aside the night, and they imagined it romantically: it was a "date." They might pick up dinner or set out a plate at the table, and they imagined their way through the evening talking to God, cuddling with God, and basking in God's attention. They never confused date night with dates with their human husbands, and they were never bothered by God's failure to munch down on a taco. They behaved as if they believed that their experience of God took place only in their minds. But they also spoke as if it were more real, in some ways, than their everyday reality.
There is an entire stream of thought in evangelical Christianity that encourages this light, fanciful, not-real-but-more-real-than-real quality to the experience of God. Another one of the popular books about the experience of God begins by inviting readers not to be reliable, responsible adults: "Our inner story is most audible in the morning, or sometimes in the middle of the night when the inner editor that tells us how we 'should' respond to the world has gone off duty." That inner story, they explain, is our yearning for God. The authors tell us that it is our "life's enchantment"-it is a romance. Indeed, Brent Curtis and John Eldredge entitled their book The Sacred Romance. The point of calling something a romance, of course, is that it is not quite true because it is better than true...That state of mind is a lot like being engrossed in good magical fiction of the Harry Potter kind. The Sacred Romance compares the scriptures, approvingly, to Tolkien's Middle-earth and to C. S. Lewis's Narnia. The authors refer to the Gospels as a "fairy tale," and they say that this is their "wonderful strength"-and the only difference from fairy tales is that the Gospel happens to be true. They explain that our refusal to believe in the miraculous because it is childlike and irrational is the true danger that besets the average Christian. "The crisis of hope that afflicts the church today is a crisis of imagination."17
Winnicott thought that an adult's capacity to believe in a good world was not so different from a toddler's capacity to believe that a mother who was absent could return, and he thought that the concept of God served much the same function as the straw-stuffed bear and became emotionally real in more or less the same way. He believed that because God is invisible to the senses, each individual must make him anew out of their own private emotional experience of the good; but that God could not be God unless God was experienced as standing apart from the self. Winnicott thought that a God who was emotionally real for someone was like a teddy bear: more real than a daydream because anchored in the external world of plush and buttons, but meaningless-inert plush-without that inner world.
The surprising thing is that a large portion of the evangelical church seems to have come to the same conclusion about how to make God come alive for congregants. Books like The Sacred Romance assert that the church on its own terms will fail, at least in this pluralistic, scientific world. So they encourage the reader to imagine God as present-theological precision be damned. "We must be careful," The Sacred Romance says at one point, "or these will be only religious words."24
A two-year-old can take Teddy out of the shoebox and announce that "Teddy's all wet" because Teddy has been in a pretend bathtub full of pretend water. The child can add new stipulations and draw out more causal chains. That two-year-old can take a paper towel and "dry Teddy off" even though the paper towel is not a cloth towel and even though the stuffed bear is not actually wet; and after the stuffed bear's "bath," the child may announce that it is time for Teddy's story if-in the child's experience-baths lead to stories that lead to bed. Play is a human activity that allows a child (or adult) to attribute these personlike qualities to nonpersonlike objects.29
Playing together helps. People said that when they read the Bible together and talked about what God was thinking, it made the external reality of a living, interacting God just that much more real. Hearing about the way other people have experienced God's voice makes it easier to feel that there really is a voice to hear. Imagining other people's conversations makes it easier to infer what God must be saying to you. In house group, we sat around one evening talking about how the group was helpful in what people called their "walk" with God. One man explained how much his experience of God had changed since coming to the Vineyard. "God's voice is like a fuzzy radio station, 95.2, 94.9, that needs more tuning. You're picking up the song, and it's not so clear sometimes. It's clearer to me now." Reading the Bible with your imagination could have the same effect
Elaine told me that she was trying to hear God speak in the little things, so that she could hear his voice when it really counted. She began to ask him what she should wear every morning. The Sunday we spoke, God told her-as she experienced it-to wear the blue shirt. But when she put it on, her bra showed, so she took off the blue shirt and put on a black one. When she arrived at church, she was standing around with the worship team. The pastor walked by, smiled, and said (she reported), "I see you are all wearing blue today." Elaine told me this story to illustrate how mortified she was at having not taken God seriously. The real point, of course, was that Elaine-a deeply committed Christian who had repeatedly explained to me that every word of the Bible was accurate-did not, as she stared at her closet, treat her inference about what God was thinking ("wear the blue shirt") as an actual insight into divine intention. She thought she had just imagined it."
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