On cheering when there's no game going on

I wish I had a buck for every time I heard an "evangelical" Christian tell me that God "told him" (or her) something.

It's amazing the number of out-and-out delusions which arise from the believe that God speaks to us directly and reliably through subjective impressions, apart from the Word. This is especially true for people with OCD.

A simple reading of history, of course, will impress anyone with an eye open for the phenomenon with how many amazing- and often gruesome- things God has allegedly "told" people down through the ages. A great many people are dead because God allegedly told others to kill them. In most cases, I think it's a reasonable conclusion that the message was either garbled, or- more likely- not authentic to begin with.

In the case of OCD, "God" usually tells people the very things they want least to hear. Sometimes it's to perform some sort of essentially meaningless ritual. Sometimes it's to make a particular decision in a particular way they have no reason- Scriptural or otherwise- to believe would be God-pleasing or particularly beneficial. With people who do not suffer from OCD, it's amazing how often  what "God" tells us is exactly what we want Him to tell us, even if they are not conscious of that fact.

What these experiences have in common with the "messages from God" is their origin: the psychology of the hearer. Whether the "messages" are wish-fulfillment or obsessions arising from faulty cerebral wiring, they are our own voices, not God's. And they are voices that usually lead us either to indulgence of the baser parts of ourselves, or to confusion.  Neither are characteristic of God.

It says a great deal about the validity of the widespread claim that God converses with Christians that an unbeliever claims that she has the same experience. Tanya Luhrman- who isn't even sure what the word "God" truly signifies- is fascinated by the fact that she has had the same "revelatory" experiences the charistmatic Christians she has been studying put so much stock in.

Not surprising; skeptical journalists and zealous Christians alike have personal psychologies. Sometimes they express themselves by claiming divine sanction for their own desires and wishes. Sometimes they represent random and utterly meaningless thoughts which miswired brains interpret as having significance they in fact lack. And sometimes- just often enough to help even the less credulous among us to believe on occasion- they represent insights of and conclusions which are the result of reasoning at a level of which we are not consciously aware. In the latter case, they sometimes are verified- and therefore qualified as significant and presumably external in origin- by subsequent events.

No Christian will deny that one often has truths or verses from Scripture suddenly come to mind while praying about the subject in question. The Holy Spirit speaks to us in the Word- to be sure, in the Law that is written (though obscured by sin) on the human heart, but more specifically in the Law and the Gospel which addresses us in Scripture, speaking of our sin and God's love. Every serious Christian prays for guidance when facing a significant decision, and believes that he or she finds it when the truths one learns about God in Scripture are correlated with the circumstances of life by the Holy Spirit Who comes to us in the Word.

But God, as St. Paul assures us, is not the Author of confusion. No, the "fuzzy radio station, 95.2, 94.9, which needs more tuning" is emphatically not the voice of God. Count on it: if God wants you to know something, you will have no trouble understanding it- unless, of course, you want to. Luhrman is closer to the truth when she sums up the experience this way:
What I saw was that they were learning to pay attention to their inner world in a different way. The church taught that words from God should feel as if they “pop” into the mind, a spontaneous break from the flow of thought.
Let us put to one side the question of whether God is really speaking, and examine the practice anthropologically. The first thing to notice is that the practice takes advantage of what we might call the “texture” of mental experience. We have thoughts that are more startling and surprising than others; thoughts that seem a piece of the psychic river of awareness and thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere. These Christians treat these contours as significant.
But- as secularists and theological liberals seem to have so much trouble realizing- one cannot put such questions aside quite so easily. In fact, Luhrman answers that question- correctly, I believe, in the negative- when she chooses not to take it at face value. Like an historical-critical scholar who thinks that he can "objectively" study Scripture while disregarding its claim to a supernatural origin, the moment Luhrman chooses to examine the claim of charismatics that God "speaks to them" anthropologically, she has thereby dismissed it. The conclusion Luhrman comes to is, I think, the simple truth: what the charismatics are listening to when they pray is not the voice of God, but "a piece of the psychic river of awareness and thoughts." The voice they are hearing is not God's, but their own. Luhrman continues:
But they do more than attend to thought differently. The church teaches congregants to pay attention only to certain of these striking thoughts—to good thoughts, thoughts that are the kinds of things God should say. That is, those thoughts should be relevant, wise, and loving. (“God does not tell you to hurt yourself,” people said.) You should feel calm when you have them. When you hear God correctly, you should feel peace, and if you didn’t feel peaceful, it wasn’t God.
The logic seems to be that since God is wise and loving, if unexpected thoughts come to one in prayer that are relevant to the subject at hand, they must come from God. In other words, since all cats have four legs, and all dogs have four legs, all cats are dogs. Can kind, loving and even wise thoughts not come from ourselves? Do not even nice people who are not believers, like Tanya Luhrman, have kind, loving and wise thoughts?  Yes, the unscriptural and presumptuous teachings of their churches, which confuse the extremely rare biblical precident of direct revelation from God with the normal, every day experience of the average believer (and do so totally without biblical support) do indeed form a filter through which charismatics interpret merely psychological phenomena common to all human beings, with or without the Holy Spirit. And who says that a feeling of peace is in any sense an indication of a thought's divine origin? If the teaching of Christ tells us anything, it is that the Holy Spirit's ministry will provoke violent opposition from the Old Self that continues to exist within us and war against the New. If the Old Self is cool with something, how is that proof that it comes from God?

There aren't many false teachings which have caused more spiritual misery and have led people to such profound and even ridiculous spiritual dead ends than the notion that God whispers in their ears- or that He can be expected to. Yes, we pray about our decisions and our circumstances. Yes, the Spirit brings the truth of His Word to our awareness, and helps us to apply it in the context of our lives. But in the last analysis, we are capable of being deceived, usually with the active complicity of our own fallen natures. Calling the products of our own psychology the voice of God doesn't protect us from being wrong. And while they are very good at rationalizing the experience away, those who rely on "God" to whisper advice directly into their ears while circumventing their own psychology very often are wrong.

The late Professor Kurt Marquart of Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne used to tell the story of a "message" that came to a man at a Pentecostal church service that said that if the pastor would ride all over the county on a black horse preaching the Gospel, a great revival would take place. The congregation searched far and wide, but nowhere in the county were they able to find a black horse. So "God" sent them another message: Not to worry. A brown one would do.

Think about it.

I once heard a pastor describe the phenomenon known to theologians as "Enthusiasm" by inviting us to imagine the local high school football stadium filled to capacity some Friday night, and the fans enthusiastically cheering the efforts of the local eleven down on the field.  Now imagine the same stadium, he said, on a Tuesday night. The same crowd is there, and they're cheering and hollering just as enthusiastically. Except when you look down on the field, there's no game going on.

Cheering and hollering are indeed real phenomena. But they do not necessarily mean that there's a football game going on, except in the imaginations of the crowd. And the only place God speaks to us clearly and unambiguously is in the Word.

Where there is confusion, doubt, and a lack of clarity- all symptoms of OCD, by the way- there is one thing we can be absolutely certain of- it is not the voice of God.

HT: Real Clear Religion

Comments

  1. I think the author has missed the mark on this article. Agreed there are a lot of crazies out there but that doesn’t mean everyone is. Most certainly all of us believer or not has an inner voice that can be guiding or confusing. Where we part ways is that God does not speak to us. God is no respecter of man and what HE does for one HE will do for another, it is recorded that God spoke to man on many occasions Job, Abraham, Moses...OT. John didn’t imagine Christ and I certainly hope you are not saying that Paul who wrote 2rds of the New Testament was also just imagining Christ appearing to him. God has received the blame for many ridiculous things people have done. Less often does God get credit when people have received a word past it on and thus changed someone’s life for the better or they themselves where changed for the better. People can be strange at best but having said that I sincerely believe that God still speaks to HIS children from time to time. MY sheep hear MY VOICE...

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  2. Tom, of course God speaks to us.

    In His Word. He has not promised to speak to us anywhere else.

    I think you miss the mark in your examples- and also the point. In all the thousands of years covered by the Bible, God only spoke directly to a handful of people. Of course God can do anything He wants. But He hasn't promised to speak to us apart from His Word, and to look for His voice there is to invite self-deception- and, if you have OCD, psychological disaster.

    Again, if God were really to speak to us directly, there would be no question about it. He is not the Author of confusion. Our fallen natures and our egos- and our broken brains, in the case of OCDers- on the other hand cause a great deal of it that would be avoided if we looked to encounter Him in His Word and let Him worry about speaking to us directly in the statistically unlikely event that He should choose to do so.

    And then again, there's the bottom line: apart from the Word about Jesus, what would He have to say? It would merely be more rules, more laws, and more burdens.

    We have the Gospel. If we prized it more highly, we would not go searching in our imagnations for further messages.

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    1. Robert I am truly saddened by your reply. God the Father sent His son because He loved us so much He saw that the law was impossible for us, why on earth would He want to give us more rules??? Jesus’ mission is the same as the Fathers mission is the same as the Holy Spirits mission. You write/post such beautiful helpful articles here on this webs site yet this article has more to do with attacking the charismatic movement than it does with helping OCD suffers. I can give scriptural reference on God communicating with man from the Bible and I know what is coming next “ you have misinterpreted the scriptures or the scriptures do not apply to us” but misinterpreted or not if you take just a moment to read the article you posted you will notice that there is not ONE scriptural reference to back up the author’s opinions which leaves them as mere opinions. It is difficult to create tone with a keyboard so please do not misinterpret the spirit in which I am writing, I am not fighting with you just simple debating that if God the Father gave us HIS SON and even asked us to call Him ABBA Father(Daddy) what more He not do for us. The Bible Holy and true as it stands today was not always in its current format…people that heard from God wrote the bible so it should be understood that if and when God drops something into your heart I HAS TO line up with His word that is how we must measure it.

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  3. Precisely my point, my friend. There is no reason why He would give us more rules. After Calvary, there is nothing left for Him to say- and when people go looking for something more to say, the result is more rules- and purely human rules at that. Hence the legalism of the charismatic and Pentecostal movements, which cause so much suffering by directing people with OCD to the very subjective feelings and emotions which are disordered by their broken brains.

    Yes, God did speak directly to a handful of people during the thousands of years over which the Bible was written. But even then, it wasn't a routine event. And nowhere does He ever promise to speak to us directly today, except through the Word.

    By the Word I mean the biblical Law and Gospel, not simply the words of the Bible. As Luther pointed out, the Word's natural genre is the sermon, not a book. God speaks to us above all in the Good News about Jesus- and no, the mission of the three Persons of the Trinity are not the same. The Father creates and rules creation. The Son redeems it. And the Spirit's only concern is to point us to the Son. Miss that, and you've missed the whole point of Christianity. years or so

    The question is whether God DOES "drop things into our hearts" apart from the external Word. Once again, there is no promise anywhere in the Bible that He will do so- a point which you, and charismatics generally, seem to either miss or ignore. And if I heard a voice saying to me, "Bob, this is the Lord," my first response would be to have myself examined by a psychiatrist for schizophrenia. Prudence would dictate that I do so, because even in biblical times schizophrenia was more common than God speaking to people directly.

    If you are right, the Bible finally has no authority greater than a momentary impression coming from my own desires. It's not a question of a "revelation" lining up with the Word. It's the basic fact that apart from the Word, we have no way of knowing whether some internal emotion is from the Lord or not. The charismatic movement makes God the Author of confusion- a confusion that brings untold anguish to people with OCD who are encounterd by it.

    Best to stick tot he place where God promises to be found: the Word about His Son. If He wants to communicate with us some other way, He is more than able to do so in terms which leave no doubt that it is He Who is "speaking-" and not our own egos or broken caudate nucleii.

    And then, there's the biblcal test for discerning false prophets. I do not suggest that every time a "prophesy" by a charismatic "prophet" fails to come true, he be stoned to death. It would be enough if the spirit of the command were carred out, and he were never again taken seriously as a prophet.

    Were that to happen, the charisatic and pentecostal movements would die out very quickly.

    There are few things more damaging to people with OCD than the charismatic and

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