God at hand

Why is it that when we talk to God we’re said to be praying,” Lily Tomlin once quipped, “but when God talks to us we’re schizophrenic?” That line undoubtedly played well in Cambridge, Madison and Berkeley. But that was before Tanya Luhrmann’s book exploded like a Roman candle in the review pages of the New Yorker, the New York Times and the New Republic. National Public Radio’s Fresh Air also featured the author. Little wonder. Luhrmann has won three prizes for a previous book, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She now holds an endowed chair in anthropology at Stanford University.

In When God Talks Back, Luhrmann seeks to answer two straightforward questions. First: How are sensible people—people who get along perfectly well in the day-to-day world—able to believe in “an invisible being who has a demonstrable effect on their lives”? After all, they “cannot shake God’s hand, look God in the eye, or hear what God says with [their] ears.” The second question is: Why does belief in a loving personal God persist in the face of objective disconfirmation? Christians, like everyone else, suffer “the body blows of life: loved ones die before they grow old; good marriages end in divorce; dreams shatter on the rocks of circumstance.” So what would it take to make them reconsider? These are questions a social scientist can ask without passing judgment on the ontological reality of the God they claim to be thinking about.

Luhrmann’s primary data came from two congregations of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship. She worshiped with the two groups for two years each. She sang their songs, attended their weekly Bible studies, kept a prayer journal and even retained a spiritual director. She spent hundreds of hours talking with members and reading their favorite authors, such as Rick Warren, Dallas Willard and Richard Foster.