Link to Beginning of Explanation.
Part I: Does God really speak?
God speaks? To be a Christian is to believe this underlying notion: God speaks. In fact, if everyone believed that God actually speaks, and if everyone actually heard God speak, there wouldn't be many agnostics in the world, right? So, starting with the third question first, and the most crucial of the three, Does God talk as 'direct communication'?
To follow William Abraham's treatment of the subject, we need a little bit of common, in-this-world sense. When you and I speak, as long as our hearing is good and we're not deaf, we can hear the words directly from you to me. That's direct communication. I can ask questions of you, and you have the opportunity to respond with answers. I can hear those answers.
Now, of course, we know that communication is more than words: body language, intensity and "feel" of the words, speed of the words, the interpretation of slang used, etc. I may need to ask some clarifying questions back to understand what you are saying and meaning. But you are present for me to ask and to hear. The bottom line: you communicate with me and I hear you. I hear you through physically hearing the words; I hear you through 'reading' your body; I hear you in a very physical way. Over the internet, I "hear" you. I read your words. I can (usually) ask questions and will (usually) get/want a response from you. There's some sort of physical back and forth taking place. You reveal yourself to me. I reveal myself to you.
So, let's get onto hearing from God! Oh, you mean it's different? God is not a physical form (usually)?
Hence, the "problem." Even if we use our ears, even if we use our lips, there seems to be a God-side problem. If God is really there, wouldn't we hear and speak just like we do with a person? (That's question number one: "the modality" - later for that.)
We are not used to thinking of the fact that the activity we're involved in (talking together) goes deeper than "communication" and enters the territory of "revealing." If I could make a simple delineation. Communication is more about the "physicality of the process." Revealing is more about the "sharing of personhood in the process." God's primary objective is the revealing side; the physicality side comes as a result of the primary objective.
This may be to oversimplify it, but to put it into descriptions of personality we may be accustomed to: God is a people relating first "guy/gal" (sharing, revealing, creating community) who then becomes "task-oriented" (physicality, stuff that can be physically touched and heard, tasks to be done together, the context). Isn't that amusing to put God into our personality categories?
That does not mean that we have God without the physicality/context side of sharing/revealing. (more on that in Part 2). God does not have a "body" as you and I. So, it makes no sense to expect God's communication to be limited to our "bodily" expectations. God doesn't wear shoes, drink coffee with us or stuff letters into our post office boxes. However, that doesn't mean God can't speak - doesn't communicate - doesn't reveal.
For the initial question, "Can we hear God speak?", we want to keep focus on the fact that the point of communicating (real communicating) is to say something that tells us something about you or I. For God, it's the same. And, theologically, what we are then discussing about God's communication is the ideas of revelation. There is an experience at stake here that is more than subject-object talking activity, but is also about purpose, direction, communion together, looking to the future, and transforming who we are, to name a few experiences that happen in revelation.
To quote Abraham, "It is only because God has spoken His word that we can have any assurance about what He has done in creation and history and about His intentions and purposes in acting in creation and history. Without His word, the alternative is not just a tentative, carefully qualified guessing at what God is doing, but a radical agnosticism." (p. 21 in Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism by William J. Abraham)
Within the Bible, we have accounts of people claiming to hear God's voice. Jeremiah hears God call and telling him to pass on messages. Paul is struck dumb and hears Jesus Christ speak to him directly on the Damascus Road (Acts 9). The Disciples hear Jesus Christ speak and "experience" it as God-with-them speaking. Here is what Jesus is quoted as saying: "My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me." (John 10:27)
To be more specific, we are making the claim that hearing God speak is more than "pious human speaking." To quote Abraham again, "Divine revelation is not a pious way of doing justice to the genius of human discovery." (p. 19)
This is not human imagination or genius, but God speaking. It is the testimony of people who wrote the Bible, quoted God's speech to others, and saw events change before their eyes. It is the testimony of people today. The testimony is to say that people have told what they saw and heard from a first-person standpoint. Others have passed on what was heard and seen.
To be clear, people throughout history have said they heard God speak, not themselves.
But, I am also not saying that the Bible is a word-for-word account of God's dialogue with us! The Bible has been used in that way - "God said it right here" as people choose and select what is appropriate for their "cause." "It conjures up the image of a flat Bible dictated by a literalist God who gives inside information on the workings of nature and the details of history (science)." (Abraham, p. 22)
To deal with God's speaking and people's testimonies, we need this understanding of revelation: God has, is ready, and will continue to reveal Himself. God's purpose is to be known, like two people getting to know one another. We will have to allow for the "intellectual possibility" that God speaks - rather than begin with any proposition creating the impossiblity for God to exist or speak. In simpler terms, if we don't look for God speaking, we won't hear God speak, the same as if you decided this blog didn't exist and didn't look, you would not have found it either.
First, taking seriously what people say they've heard is investigating the evidence that God speaks.
Secondly, listening for God's speech is a primary activity every Christian - or seeker - needs to do. You can hear God speak. Run your own experiment. Sit down and ask God to speak in a way that you can hear. Then, take notice (observe) and write down what you see and hear. Gather the data later. Focus on observing and notekeeping first.
(For more help on hearing, see Part 2 on how God reveals)
Later ... Part 2.
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3 comments:
It is an interesting question. I think I had God speak to me loudly once (so I wasn't confusing him with intuition or anything). Maybe these days he is harder to hear since we are distracted by more and more technology everyday.
1) It seems pretty clear that if God is in fact omnicient and omnipotent [I note the bible does not actually claim omnicience for God] then the current situation is how *e wanted it - it would have been entirely possible for God to email you, or to appear as a physical being, or whatever *e wanted. [Actually, I suspect that direct physical communication would be extrordinarilly difficult for God, and that's why *e generally doesn't do it. Either that or *e has forgotten about the human race entirely.]
2) Another problem is, if the communication is so subtle, how exactly am I to know that it's God talking to me? At times I have a hallucinatory voice in my head that claims to be Satan. (It also claims that Satan IS God - which I find somewhat beleivable since God did claim to be the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega..).
How, exactly, am I to discern what is mental illness and what is actual communication from dieties?
I think that if the Christian God exists [which I find highly dubious], then *e is probably a mostly evil being.
This is trivially easy to prove. Christianity claims to be the One True Religion, and anyone who doesn't adhere to it is going to a place of eternal suffering when they die. If you don't accept that Jesus died for you on the cross, you're totally screwed, the Christians tell us.
However, God clearly doesn't speak to all, or at least, not in ways that are clear to the listener that they're being spoken to by God! So all the adherents to other religions are going to Hell by the random chance of having parents that believed in the wrong thing, or being exposed to the wrong information, or whatever path led them to reject Christ.
A God that behaves in this way - that requires people to believe in one particular thing, but doesn't clearly communicate to all, in a easily authenticated way, that this thing is the one true path - is evil. This is evil behavior.
Personally, I think that the Christians limit God and put h* into a convenient box that fits their limited understanding of the universe. [I'm not claiming, by the way, that my understanding of the universe is very much less limited than theirs is]. Here are some basic things that really annoy me:
1) God probably doesn't speak in human ways. *e has access to unlimited CPU, ram, and mass storage. You have access to very limited resources compared with God. God may 'speak' by influencing nature, by affecting the time path, by bending reality so you are not in the same world as the person next to you, by arranging to have books written - for all I know, me typing this article is a Act Of God. *
2) God can probably think of more than one way to save souls. If *e is a just and moral entity, then having created this universe and dragged us into it, *e is going to try and 'save' (i.e. not send to a place of torture) as many of us as *e can. Therefore, Jesus and the Cross are probably not the only path to heaven.
3) God probably is not as offended by our very human behaviors as the Christians would have you believe. For example, given that *e created us in such a way as to have some of us be, *in hardware* as far as I can tell, gay, I find it hard to believe that *e would be inclined to torture us eternally for being gay, or that *e would have any problem with letting gay people marry. Basically, the Christians take their prejudices - which are transmitted as part of Christianity, which resembles nothing quite so much as a computer virus - and apply them to other people. As far as I can tell:
4) God, by means of staying almost completely quiet in the vast sea of humanity and complexity, is basically making a statement, which is, *e doesn't endorse or approve of *any* religion. It is not God that expects moral behavior of us (although *e may) but us who expect moral behavior of ourselves. Unfortunately, we can't quite agree on what 'moral' is.
One of the reasons I hate the Bible is becuase it attempts to limit God, and put him in a human-shaped God-box. It also attributes much behavior to him that I very strongly doubt a ethical deity would participate in, such as repeated genocide.
* = Actually, there are two views you can take of God. In one, *e is a seperate entity. In another, *e is the sum total of all intelligent/sentient life, or possibly all life, period. If the latter, then we *are* God.
Hey Jonathan . . . GREAT to meet you! You've got a lot here and it will take some time and a lot of words to unpack what's really important to you. I'd like to start with the direct physical communication. It's not rocket science. If we can see that God does talk to us - specifically each of us - in very direct ways - then we start from a new place.
I didn't grow up in church. And I didn't grow up with parents that believed - or believed that God talked to anybody. So, what I'm sharing is going to be very personal. Because I found out, through personal experience first, and then investigating later, God does talk. And so I wondered why?
So, keep up with the column, ok? And keep posting what you're thinking. I really like dialogue much better than "writing articles." My goal is not to provide totally useless thoughts, but to get us into a conversation (all of us - not just you and I, I mean). So, pick away - fire away.
(By the way, I don't think "religion" and God or Jesus Christ are the same - nor do I think that "Christianity" and Jesus Christ are the same. I think you'll know what I'm getting at.)
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