How do you tell the difference between the Holy Spirit giving you guidance and a stomach ache? This is a profound spiritual question that I have wrestled with on and off throughout my Christian life.
There have been times where I have sensed God’s leading and direction: A mysterious realization of Christ’s presence. There have been other times when I have sensed God to be silent. Awfully silent. Philosophers describe this as the problem of “divine hiddenness.”
Tanya Luhrmann explores “How God Becomes Real,” a fascinating look at how believers experience God, from the perspective of a secular anthropologist.
How Has God “Spoken” To You (or Not)?
I had a male friend in college who was friends with a young lady connected to our Christian fellowship group. One day, this young lady announced that God had told her that she was supposed to marry my friend. She admitted that God did not speak to her in an audible voice. Nevertheless, she was convinced that the Holy Spirit had led her to that conclusion. The problem was that my male friend did NOT get the same communication from God. The more my male friend expressed his doubts, the more this young lady persisted and doubled-down on her belief. Differences in how both perceived God speaking put such a strain on that friendship that they ultimately parted ways.
In my experience, there are just some things in the Christian life which remain mysteries. If a believer does sense a “leading of the Holy Spirit,” and that sense is confirmed by a fellow believer, then this is indeed a source of joy, relief, and confidence to move forward. Also, if a believer senses a kind of spiritual nudge that leaves them unsure, and then a respected friend suggests a better path to take, that can be received graciously with gladness as well.
On the other hand, I have known of Christians who have sensed a “leading of the Holy Spirit,” only to get knocked down when another Christian friend expresses skepticism about such a supposed “leading of the Holy Spirit.”
Perhaps their spiritual intuitions were only a product of a stomach ache. If that is the case, it only bolsters the philosophical case for divine hiddenness, for if we only imagine God to be revealing something to us, when God is doing no such thing, then in a worse case scenario it may cause someone to doubt God’s existence.
No matter what the cause, the internal conflict one experiences from a supposedly sure “hearing from God” that gets met by fierce or otherwise stubborn resistance can be disorienting. It can be particularly disturbing when someone else responds with “But the Bible does not teach what you think or experience is true,” or “You have no good evidence to indicate that the Holy Spirit is really leading you in the direction you think you should go.” Cognitive dissonance can easily settle in and really mess up your day. In certain severe cases, it can lead to the deconstruction of faith or even a full deconversion.
This type of cognitive dissonance raises the question of How God Becomes Real, the title of a book by anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. Many Christians will inevitably bristle at the title, for they would instinctively say that God is already real, thus rendering the idea of God “becoming” real as nonsensical. But the point raised by the title of How God Becomes Real addresses a very real phenomenon whereby a believer has intellectual assent to various Christian doctrines, at the head level, but at an experiential, heart level, that believer is not actively sensing God’s real presence in their life. As a pastor once told me, the greatest distance is the 18 inches between the head and the heart. A life is transformed when head-knowledge becomes heart-knowledge.
Nevertheless, cognitive dissonance in the spiritual life is the most grievous concern. For me, it can be quite unsettling when I see otherwise very intelligent Christians embrace a particular viewpoint, or take a course of action, where the basis of such a perspective is not supported very well in Scripture, or else seems entirely subjective and emotionally driven. I call it the “wishful thinking” complex, whereby a Christian can convince themselves of the truthfulness of an assertion, when the actual evidence in favor of the assertion is slim to none, or counterfactual.
Some of these personal revelations are relatively benign, or even extraordinarily good (!!!), while others are quite dramatic, perplexing, or even harmful:
- Did God supernaturally provide for you that new job,…. or was it a complex set of factors that while indicative of God’s providential care, were not-so-supernatural?
- Did God really miraculously heal someone you know, or did that person recover from their illness or injury in a purely natural way, albeit still under God’s providential care, without any evidence of supernatural intervention?
- Did God really give you that parking space in that crowded parking lot supernaturally so you would not be late for your appointment, or was it simply a result of statistical probabilities working in your favor this time?
- Did you really speak in tongues, or did you just fake it somehow in order to fit in with the rest of your group?
- Is God really leading you to leave your wife to go run off with another woman?
- Is God really leading you to leave your wife to go run off with another man?
I could go on with countless other examples. There have been times when I have personally sensed the leading of the Holy Spirit quite powerfully. There have been other times I have not been so sure, but I received encouragement from dear believing friends who helped me make good decisions. There have been other times when I completely deceived myself into thinking something was a “God thing” when it turned out to be my own failure in judgment.
I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. I believe in the Virgin Birth. I believe in the Ascension of Jesus. So I believe in miracles, and I believe God still does them. I do sense reminders of God’s presence from time to time. God is invisible to me but I somehow know that God is there. However, I also discover times where I feel spiritually alone in the Wilderness, like the people of Israel wandering around Sinai, waiting to hear from God, and wondering why God seems so silent in those moments.
Some liken these times of spiritual wandering to St. John of the Cross’ “dark nights of the soul.” I think about how God becomes real to people, and why such experiences happen … and why sometimes they do not.
Tanya Lurhmann, anthropologist and author.
Can Evangelical Christians Learn Something From a Secular Anthropologist? … Why, Yes
Tanya Luhrmann has spent years studying different spiritually-based communities, particularly Protestant evangelicals, to research how such people experience God. She tells the story of her research in How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. As an anthropologist at Stanford University, Dr. Luhrmann has spent years being with and studying various spiritual communities, including that of Orthodox Jews; a Cuban syncretic movement known as Santeria, which combines certain Christian beliefs with traditional West African polytheistic spiritualism; a black Roman Catholic Church in San Diego; and even witches. She notably spent a lot of time associating with certain conservative evangelical churches, particularly of the charismatic variety, to find out how the adherents of such movements experience their understanding of the divine.
Dr. Luhrmann confesses to be an atheist, having grown up in a tradition not associated with evangelical Christian faith. So she is not approaching her subject matter as a believer, but purely as an anthropologist, wanting to know how Christians experience their friendship with Jesus. So the title of her book “How God Becomes Real,” can be a bit confusing, in that she tries not to make any evaluation of Christian truth claims, or any other truth claims about the divine. Instead, she wants to understand how a person’s abstract conceptualization of their beliefs are felt to be “real” in their concrete experience. Luhrmann writes in her preface:
This is not a claim that gods are not real or that people who are religious feel doubt. Many people of faith never express doubt; they talk as if it were obvious that their gods are real. Yet they go to great lengths in their worship. They build grand cathedrals at vast cost in labor, time, and money. They spend days, even weeks, preparing for rituals, assembling food, building ritual sites, and gathering participants. They create theatrical effects in sacred spaces—the dim lighting in temples, the elaborate staging in evangelical megachurches—that enhance a sense of otherness but are not commanded in the sacred texts. They fast. They wear special clothes. They chant for hours. They set out to pray without ceasing.
Of course, one might say: they believe, and so they build the cathedrals. I am asking what we might learn if we shift our focus: if, rather than presuming that people worship because they believe, we ask instead whether people believe because they worship.
I suggest that prayer and ritual and worship help people to shift from knowing in the abstract that the invisible other is real to feeling that gods and spirits are present in the moment, aware and willing to respond. I will call this “real-making,” and I think that the satisfactions of its process explain—in part—why faiths endure.
By “real-making,” I mean that the task for a person of faith is to believe not just that gods and spirits are there in some abstract way, like dark energy, but that these gods and spirits matter in the here and now. I mean not just that you know that they are real, the way you know that the floor is real (or would, if you paused to think about it), but that they feel real the way your mother’s love feels real. I mean that people of faith come to feel inwardly and intimately that gods or spirits are involved with them. For humans to sustain their involvement with entities who are invisible and matter in a good way to their lives, I suggest that a god must be made real again and again against the evident features of an obdurate world. Humans must somehow be brought to a point from which the altar becomes more than gilded wood, so that the icon’s eyes look back at them, ablaze.
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This “real-making,” as Luhrmann puts it, is essential to understanding how Christians, like me, experience God. First, Dr. Lurhmann says that believers have a “faith frame,” that is, a way to integrate one’s theological beliefs into daily life, thus helping the person to navigate cognitive dissonances. The sacraments of the church provide excellents examples of this. Christians can experience the presence of Jesus by partaking of the Lord’s Supper, and experience the forgiveness of sin through the water of baptism. One can also experience this “real-making” through less formal sacramental expressions. Certain kinds of music can enhance a worshipful mood during a church service, whereas other forms of music can take away from that experience. Listening to a male’s voice in teaching someone a theological message might hit someone differently than if the same message were spoken with a female voice. Such mystical elements in spiritual practices can have a definite impact in how one senses the reality of the divine. It might be as simple as learning something new about God when reading the Bible.
Secondly, Dr. Lurhman says that “detailed stories help to make gods and spirits feel real.” Christians can be moved at Christmas time when hearing about the incarnation of God as in the baby Jesus. I can personally recall when the reading of the passion narrative of Christ’s death on the cross, at a Good Friday service, moved me as a teenager to feel that God cared for me in my own loneliness and awkwardness as a high school kid. In a less spiritual yet still powerful sense, the telling of stories which enrich us helps to explain why books like J. K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, etc. can grip our imagination so well.
Thirdly, “talent and training matter.” When people become absorbed into what they imagine to be true, they are more likely to have powerful experiences of an invisible other. This takes self-discipline. It takes regular attendance at a Christian worship service and/or small group meeting. For example, extended times of meditation, prayer and/or bible study, where Christians practice certain spiritual habits and rituals, can lead believers to have an intimate sense of God’s presence. Engaging in support groups where people share their spiritual stories, both struggles and victories, help to train the believer to experience God more deeply.
Fourthly, “the way people think about their minds also matters.” Certain spiritual practices that help us to blur the distinction between our own inner thought world and the world that exists around us can help believers to sense the Holy Spirit at work. Christians often talk about this as their “walk with Jesus.”
The challenge then for believers is to try to stay within their “faith frame” as much as possible, in order to experience God’s presence. For our encounter with God, who is invisible, is unlike our encounter with other human beings, like our neighbor or family member. Consequently, maintaining that “faith frame” requires that demands be placed on us by our spiritual community. In other words, in our efforts to try to clear the way as much as possible for a non-believer to encounter Jesus, sometimes these efforts will achieve the opposite result. If a worship service comes across as being too weird, it can be too off-putting.
On the other hand, attending a megachurch meeting filled with feel-good music, like you hear on the radio or Spotify, and upbeat preaching can easily feel like attending a combination of a rock concert and TED talk, leaving the person more spiritually empty than when they first entered the meeting. The more a Christian community places expectations on their people to enter into a radically different kind of story, as opposed to the kind of stories they regularly experience throughout the week, the more likely such congregants will enter into a richer, deeper experience of God. As Rod Dreher remarked in his review of How God Becomes Real, “You can’t really be “seeker-friendly” in the sense of making minimal demands on people, and expect the members of the community to develop a strong sense of God’s reality.”
There is a lesson for churches here: On the one hand, if Christian communities adopt practices which puts them unnecessarily at odds with the surrounding culture, it will reduce the outsider’s ability to connect with what is going on in those Christian gatherings. On the other hand, there needs to be some type of demand placed on the outsider who wishes to participate in such communities, otherwise their experience of God’s presence will lack tenacity and depth. For example, I know of formerly avid Protestant evangelical Christians who gave up on their megachurch traditions to embrace more demanding movements within either Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, because in those traditions their experience with God felt more real.
The richness of Luhrmann’s insights suggests that practical steps can be taken to increase one’s awareness of the divine. However, there is a drawback to How God Becomes Real in that despite Luhrmann’s efforts to avoid making a judgment as to the truth claims of Christianity, or any other revelatory truth claim, for that matter, her secular biases do seep through in her book from time to time.
For example, relatively few Christians spend much time reading the Book of Judges, but Dr. Luhrmann is quite frank and unflattering in calling it “an obscure and tedious book” (p. 32). She does not seem impressed by the typical Christian claim that the New Testament is the inspired Word of God, “A complicated Jesus raises many questions. In the Gospels, Jesus says, ‘Follow me.’ But he does not say how. The Gospels are a patchwork of anecdotes and sayings, retold in different ways by authors who seem to have been writing to different audiences….. He protects a prostitute from being stoned but then curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit, even though it’s not the season for figs, and the poor tree withers and dies” (p. 177-178). The anthropologist seems unaware of much of good Christian scholarship, which can help Bible readers make better sense of difficult passages.
Dr. Luhrman’s skepticism about the overall social benefits of evangelical Christianity are apparent: “…Individuals may benefit from developing a relationship with their god, but it does not follow that the way they imagine that god is a benefit for the social whole” (p. 180). Oooo… that felt like, “Ouch!” Sometimes, when we hear certain other Christians talk about their experience with God, and it comes across as less-than-edifying, we can get a sense of how off-putting such “Christianese” sounds at least to some outsiders.
Nevertheless, it is quite thought-provoking to see how a secular anthropologist like Tanya Luhrmann views how evangelical Christians encounter God in their “real-making,” and she pretty well hits it on the mark. Many evangelical believers seem more concerned about directly figuring out how the Bible can make sense of their own life situation, as opposed to first deeply wrestling with the original meaning of the sacred text as intended by the sacred author, before making the step towards application. As a result, such believers often miss the gravity of the text they are discussing in their small group Bible studies, as they seek to relate a passage of the Bible to their own lives: “People read a passage about the Israelites fighting the Midianites and talked about it as if it were something that had happened to them that afternoon at work with a colleague” (p. 32).
As Wheaton College’s Timothy Larsen noted in his review of How God Becomes Real, Luhrmann’s chapter on “Why Prayer Works” demonstrates that we have anthropological evidence that while not all prayers are answered, the very act of prayer can bring about a sense of inner harmony and health, which a person who never prays may not experience. “The central act of praying is paying attention to inner experience—to thoughts, images, and the awareness of one’s body—and treating those sensations as important in themselves rather than as distractions from the real business of living” (.p 139). She also compares such prayer to the more secularized practice of “mindfulness,” which has its roots both in Buddhist meditation, as well as medieval Christian mysticism, as exemplified in texts like the 14th century The Cloud of Unknowing, and contemporary Christian efforts of “Centering Prayer” or Lectio Divina.
Different Christians champion different ways of praying, some reveling in certain “mystical” practices, while others shun them. There is a saying attributed to the 20th century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, that I recall: “The problem with ‘mysticism’ is that it often begins with ‘mist’ and ends in ‘schism.’” Barth’s caution resonates with many Christians, but any Christian knows that experiencing God comes down to more than simply reading your Bible. As Christians yearn to “make God real,” they gravitate towards those practices which enable that kind of experience and awareness of God’s presence and loving acceptance, whether they be “mystical” or not.
The work of Christian prayer is more about changing the persons doing the praying, as opposed to simply trying to change some external circumstances. For example, “In expressing gratitude, they alter what they remember of the day: not the irritating comment but the warm smile, not the cold morning but the lovely afternoon, not the office quarrel but the smooth, dappled sunlight on the trees” (p. 140). Prayer changes people for the better.
That is a very positive evaluation of the benefits of prayer, coming from a secular anthropologist!
Some of her observations can be quite sobering. While many outsiders to the Christian faith decry the supposed evangelical obsession with the doctrine of hell, Luhrmann correctly notes that very few evangelical churches in 21st century America place much emphasis on the doctrine of hell in their typical Sunday morning preaching. Instead, Luhrmann observes that in the evangelical churches she has studied that Christians are mainly concerned about whether or not God accepts them for who they are, as opposed to focusing on the fear of divine punishment. In other words, many evangelical Christians in the 21st century are primarily driven to know if God really loves them or not. It is a stark contrast to the fire and brimstone sermons we have from the days of the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards.
Dr. Luhrmann also points out that the spiritual practices that can lead a person to good health, and a sense of experiencing the love of God, can sometimes lead to disappointment and frustration for other believers. She makes a particularly jarring observation:
“The practices that can help to create intimacy between god and human can also build a god who makes someone miserable. When the inner other disapproves of you intensely, it can feel awful, worse than your own self blame. It can feel as if you are jailed from within. Those who reach puberty as young evangelicals and discover that they cannot maintain chastity, or are drawn to the wrong gender, or cannot bear the politics that people around them hold can struggle for years to remake God in a way that feels safe” (p. 180).
This unsettling observation serves as a reminder for me, and should serve as a wake-up call for Christian readers of Tanya Luhrmann’s work. The spiritual journey can not be walked alone. It takes being involved in some type of supportive community which can walk that journey with you, whether that be a small group Bible study, a spiritual director, and/or simply a caring friend who can listen and ask good questions related to your spiritual journey. When Christian communities are not able to create environments where struggling believers can voice their doubts and questions, and still feel safe, then isolation can easily settle in and choke off the spiritual life.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to making God “real” for the evangelical believer in a way which achieves total peace and harmony. But the Christian reader of Luhrmann’s work will be better equipped to walk alongside fellow believers who wrestle with downtimes in their relationship with Jesus. The cognitive dissonance one may encounter in trying to follow a particular spiritual formula for experiencing God that does not work as expected can find some resolution, when met with an empathetic listener who can share their struggles with one another. Tanya Luhrmann’s empathetic treatment of spiritual practices, coming from a secular anthropologist, makes How God Becomes Real an excellent helpful resource in understanding the value, mechanics, and struggles associated with such practices.
Veracity 
What do you think?