T. M. Luhrmann's fascinating new book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, is an attempt to understand how is it possible for a living God to become real to modern evangelicals. To be a 21st-century modern, she claims, is to live in a technologically-mediated world built on the fruits of reductionist scientific skepticism and devoted to the empirical evidence of the senses. Modernity thus poses unique challenges to American evangelicalism, whose democratic, existential, individualistic faith calls people to stand before God and hope for what their eyes do not see and their ears do not hear. Such faith, she says, "asks people to consider that the evidence of their senses is wrong." How can this tension be overcome?

The answer, according to Luhrmann, lies in sets of practices that allow "evangelicals" (we'll come back to that) to cultivate what she calls a "new theory of mind" by which God is experienced as an intimate, unconditionally loving, best friend who communicates personally with believers—a God who "talks back." Luhrmann argues that it is the inner experience of this personal communicative relationship in the imagination of her subjects that overcomes the disabling effects of skepticism about many other aspects of Christian faith. God's presence in the imagination is more powerful than God's apparent absence in the disenchanted sensorium, and, in fact, attention to God's presence in the imagination often leads subsequently to sensory manifestations. Doubt about God's presence does not disappear for Luhrmann's subjects because of this imaginative exercise—the difference is that they can meet doubt with a cognitive subjective relational response, as opposed to an empirical argument. Like Job, they can say in the face of radical alienation, "I know my Redeemer lives."

Luhrmann saw these practices in action over the course of several years by immersing herself as a participantobserver in the lives of two Vineyard ...

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Dan Bruce

July 31, 2012  5:17pm

Much of modern evangelicalism is built on a mindset that, "asks people to consider that the evidence of their senses is wrong." Unfortunately, that mindset has evolved into a doctrine of hostility to science among many evangelicals in recent years, but that is not the way the Bible says that we should approach life. God created eyes to see. God created ears to hear. He did not want us to ignore the senses. He also created us with a spirit, and, beyond the senses, that is how we are to "see" the things of faith, which are the things that are unseeable with the senses. A whole human being is able to understand the things perceived by the senses, and to understand the things perceived by the spirit, and to know the difference.--Dan Bruce, The Prophecy Society

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