{"id":16469,"date":"2018-02-15T10:10:52","date_gmt":"2018-02-15T18:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=16469"},"modified":"2018-02-15T10:10:52","modified_gmt":"2018-02-15T18:10:52","slug":"the-problem-of-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/the-problem-of-presence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem of Presence"},"content":{"rendered":"

You should not be surprised at my saying, \u201cYou must be born again.\u201d The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it come from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit\u201d <\/em>(John 3:7-8).<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/em>This is the problem of presence: that the evidence for divinity does not come directly from the senses. It usually comes indirectly, from other, more unreliable, sources.[1]<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Tanya Marie Luhrmann was not trying to prove or disprove God when she wrote her book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God. <\/em>She was trying to answer the question, \u201cHow can sensible, educated people believe in an invisible being who has a real effect on their lives?\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Luhrmann has pondered the question since her childhood, raised as a Unitarian by parents who both rebelled against their own conservative Baptist and Christian Science upbringings. At holiday time, their living room was uncomfortable during prayer. Some believed that prayer was to God who heard and answered. Others were just being polite. Tanya wondered who was right.<\/p>\n

By the time Tanya was an adult, trained as a psychological anthropologist, she had had opportunities to study the \u201cproblem of presence\u201d as well as other hard questions, including theodicy<\/em>, among evangelicals.<\/p>\n

Tanya relied on her secular training for most of the answers to these hard questions, but her quest was genuine. She attended two Vineyard churches over a period of many years while conducting her research. She participated in Bible studies, services, small groups and local, regional, and national events. The pastors and the people in the churches knew her motive for being there. Some members of the churches became her friends and confidants. While she said that she would \u201cnot presume to know ultimate reality\u201d she came to know God in her own way on this journey. (325) She understood that evangelicals like those in the Vineyard churches do experience God as a being in their individual lives. But what is this experience?<\/p>\n

Modern psychotherapists believe that independent beings (intelligences) who are claimed by religious people to inhabit an invisible realm are \u201cprojective descriptions of the functioning of the human psyche.\u201d[2]<\/a> Voices are only in your head and people who hear them are out of touch with reality. Tanya Luhrmann seemed to concur with many rational explanations for the voices that people hear. She said that evidence for divinity comes indirectly, from other, more unreliable, sources. <\/em>What are “reliable” sources? Her explanations included \u2013 evolutionary psychology, which suggests that we inherit a propensity for religious belief in our minds, improving mental imagery using magic or other rituals, and other psychiatric problems including delusions or hallucinations.<\/p>\n

Tanya really cares for and admires her Christian friends. She believes that they experience something good, and she demonstrates that the voice that the people in the Vineyard church hear is very different from schizophrenia or hallucinations.<\/p>\n

Preferring to call the phenomena of hearing voices by evangelicals as \u201csensory overrides\u201d she notes the differences between those with schizophrenia and the Vineyard churchgoer. Hallucinations are frequent, extended, and distressing, primarily auditory, and often accompanied by strange delusions not shared by other people. (241) Christians who experience \u201csensory overrides\u201d are usually in-tact people with good jobs and relationships. Tanya interviewed many people in the church and the result was that the voices they heard were infrequent, brief, and not distressing. The two experiences were very different.<\/p>\n

A further question \u2013 Why did Christians work so hard to maintain the personal relationship with God that included hearing from Him when they pray?<\/p>\n

She found that at the Vineyard church people were taught to recognize God\u2019s voice in the privacy of one\u2019s mind (72), learn to relate to God as a person by pretending (95), and, interpret their feelings as proof that God loves them (111). This kind of \u201cevangelical Christianity solves the problem of presence with specific faith practices.\u201d (132) In other words, since God is not material and cannot really be experienced with the senses, churches like the Vineyard church teach congregants to find God in their minds. I admit I was struggling here to understand what \u201creal\u201d is for Tanya.<\/p>\n

At the heart of Tanya Luhrmann\u2019s book is a study of prayer. She said that we cannot understand how God becomes real to someone without understanding that person\u2019s practice of prayer, and above all the way they pray. (156) \u201cThe person praying has to learn to use the imagination to experience God as present, and then to treat what has been imagined as more than \u2018mere\u2019 imagination. The twofold shift in attention \u2013 toward the internal, as the external \u2013 is the heart of the skill in prayer.\u201d (159, And note here the “privacy of the mind” and “pretending”.) Some people were more skilled at this than others. They were able to be \u201cabsorbed into internal imaginative worlds\u201d (201) and they practiced it daily, sometimes for hours. She admired the way that the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius helped many people.<\/p>\n

Tanya believed that she could train people in the skill of prayer so she did an experiment called the Spiritual Disciplines Project. (202) After the project, Tanya believed that she had demonstrated that those who used both kataphatic (guided imagination) and apophatic (centering prayer) conditions had more sensory overrides.<\/p>\n

Tanya\u2019s findings really convicted me about my own prayer life. Especially after reading Shelley Trebesch\u2019s book, I believe that a voluntary period of isolation and prayer would be worthwhile.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still not sure that Tanya is \u201cborn again\u201d but she did a great job of explaining prayer to those who truly want to understand what evangelical prayer is. It is Tanya\u2019s continual mixing of the material and immaterial worlds that is perplexing for me. She slides right over that as if there is no epistemological problem here.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tanya also gave a great historical analysis of the faith practices in the United States. Evangelicals have gone from an intellectual acknowledgement of God as proof of salvation (18th<\/sup> century) to a personal relationship with Jesus (especially since the 1960\u2019s). This intensely personal relationship with God is important to her thesis because in it she sees a new emphasis on absorption experiences. Believers long for a God who loves them and speaks to them.<\/p>\n

Through her years of study, Tanya discovered joy and the concept of redemption from sin. She learned that love changes you. \u201cIt changed me,\u201d she said. \u201cIn the end, this is a story of the uncertainty of our senses, and the complexity of our minds and world.\u201d (325) Each has to decide for herself what is real. There will be mystery, or doubts as we also learned earlier from Dominic Erdozain. Doubts don\u2019t disprove God.<\/p>\n

It is not clear to me that Tanya Luhrmann believes that the voices people hear come from the \u201cwholly other\u201d. Charles Taylor pointed out that we live in a society that has problems with the transcendent. Is Tanya only looking for answers in this closed universe?<\/p>\n

God does not dwell in our five (six?) dimensions. He is transcendent and immanent. God proved that He can break through into our world with the Incarnation. His voice is real, but what should we do about it?<\/p>\n

This book helps us to see how others view Christians who claim to hear God\u2019s voice. We need humility as we say that we can\u2019t prove God exists. We can pray that our skeptical friend will soon experience the joy of salvation and even experience the very real \u201cstill small voice\u201d of comfort and love that we have experienced.<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> T. M. Luhrmann. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God. <\/em>New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2012. xviii.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> T. Craig, Isaacs. Revelations and Possession: Distinguishing Spiritual From Psychological Experiences. <\/em>Kearney, Nebraska, 2009. 11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You should not be surprised at my saying, \u201cYou must be born again.\u201d The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it come from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit\u201d (John 3:7-8). \u00a0This is the problem of presence: that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1139,1140],"class_list":["post-16469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-t-m-luhrmann","tag-when-god-talks-back","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16469"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16478,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16469\/revisions\/16478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}