A great book, and a good read. I can't think of any other book which i can recommend equally to any religious or non-religious person who is curious to understand just what really happens in a Vineyard church.
Quotes:
This book begins with a few simple questions. How does God become real for people? How are sensible people able to believe in an invisible being who has a demonstrable effect on their lives? And how can they sustain that belief in the face of what skeptical observers think must be inevitable disconfirmation? This book answers these questions by taking an outsider’s perspective into the heart of faith through an anthropological exploration of American evangelical Christianity.
Faith is hard because it is a decision to live as if a set of claims are real, even when one doubts: in the Christian case, that the world is good; that love endures; that you should live your life as if the promise of joy were at least a possibility.
Over the last few decades, this generation of Americans has sought out an intensely personal God, a God who not only cares about your welfare but worries with you about whether to paint the kitchen table.
We know that God is experienced in the brain as a social relationship. (Put someone in the scanner and ask them about God, and the same region of the brain lights up as when you ask them about a friend.)
At its heart, this is the dilemma of all human knowledge. We reach out to grasp a world we know to be more complex than our capacity to understand it, and we choose and act despite our awareness that what we take to be true may be an illusion, a wispy misperception.
I will argue that people learn specific ways of attending to their minds and their emotions to find evidence of God, and that both what they attend to and how they attend changes their experience of their minds, and that as a result, they begin to experience a real, external, interacting living presence.
to become a committed Christian one must learn to override three basic features of human psychology: that minds are private, that persons are visible, and that love is conditional and contingent upon right behavior.
Their Jesus is deeply human and playfully, magically supernatural.
What we have seen in the last four or five decades is the democratization of God—I and thou into you and me—and the democratization of intense spiritual experience, arguably more deeply than ever before in our country’s history.
That is the invitation: to experience God as if he were real in the flesh and standing by your side, with love. The challenge is to learn how to do that.
To an observer, what is striking is how hard people work to feel confident that the God who speaks to them in their mind is also the real external God who led the Jews out from slavery and died upon the cross.
At the beginning is the yearning.
And so already, in this first step, the congregant who seeks to experience God directly and immediately begins to tolerate uncertainty.
IF THE FIRST TASK in becoming able to experience God as an intimate friend is learning to recognize God in the privacy of one’s mind, the second task is learning to relate to God as a person.
In The God Delusion, the scientist Richard Dawkins states bluntly that we cannot choose to believe. C. S. Lewis thought that this was exactly what pretending enabled us to do.
In short, the congregants set out, at the church’s invitation, to treat God like an imaginary friend. When I asked people whether they experienced God as an imaginary friend, they usually rejected the word imaginary—and then accepted the comparison.
This is play, but it is a serious play: a play that cultivates the imagination for a serious end, precisely because congregants presume the basic claim of Christianity to be unbelievable, even foolish, in a modern, secular society.
The God of the renewalist evangelical church is not this cruel judge. The Vineyard took the basic Christian narrative about the distance between a limited human and a boundless mighty God and shifted the plotline from our inadequacy to God’s extraordinary capacity.
“crying in the presence of God.”
evangelicals support an ever more thriving community of Christian therapists who described their primary task as working with someone’s inner God-concept.
(it is an odd but obdurate fact that in my years as an anthropologist, I have heard several people describe intense spiritual experiences that took place on buses)
The difference between the joy of The Velveteen Rabbit and the joy of Christ is the enormous amount of work that these Christians do to allow the individual to experience the story not as a tale for children, which is never really true, but as a story that really is true, just not in an ordinary way, not yet.
It is one of the great paradoxes of Christianity that these moments, which secular outsiders can interpret as a capitulation to peer pressure and the taking on of prescribed rules and beliefs, are experienced, by someone like Sam, as sacred moments of exquisite freedom.
Nearly a quarter of the people I interviewed systematically at the church—six out of twenty-eight—told me, sometimes with discouraged voices, that they just didn’t hear God the way other people did.
There is what you might call a technology of prayer that centers on attention.2 That is, if you put to one side the theological purpose and supernatural efficacy of prayer, prayer changes the way the person praying uses his or her mind by changing the way that person pays attention. People learn to attend in specific, structured ways when they pray, and some people—the experts—become skilled at doing so.
There are two named styles of spiritual discipline within the Christian tradition: apophatic and kataphatic prayer.
More to the point, the via negativa can lead to spiritual transformation.
for many evangelicals, prayer rich in the images and stories of Christ, the via imaginativa, seems like a more appropriate form of prayer.
the medieval historian Mary Carruthers argues that in medieval monastic culture, contemplative prayer was primarily understood as a process of crafting thought. In this culture, she says, memory was understood not as a mirror of the past, or as a record of what has happened, but as a tool to make real what God desired.
To follow the exercises as Loyola gave them in the sixteenth century (more or less as they are now done), a participant must commit a full thirty days. One must move into a retreat house for a month and spend each day in silence, except for daily meetings with a “spiritual director.” The participant is expected to spend perhaps five hours a day in prayer, following specific, structured assignments.
Loyola, however, understood that there would be times when participants would enjoy the prayer process, and feel as if they could talk to God, and times when it would make them very unhappy and they couldn’t really believe that God was there to listen.
The point of religious conviction is that the everyday world is not all there is to reality; to see beyond, one must change the way one pays attention.
In fact, the kataphatic practice seemed to give people more of what the scriptures promise those who turn to Christ: peace and the presence of God.
Even in the United States, as many as 80 percent of those who have been bereaved will hear, see, or feel the person they have lost, and often that contact gives them comfort.
There is no single experience that is in itself intrinsically religious.
The anthropologist Richard Shweder says that when you take culture seriously, you must accept that we live in plural worlds, worlds made so distinctly in the interaction of peoples with one another that the most basic elements of human lives—to whom we respond emotionally, to what we recoil in moral disgust—will shift, so that it no longer makes sense to think about a shared world seen from different vantage points but of multiple worlds.
It’s not just about the brain—god spots, peak moments, and universal insights. Knowing God involves training, and it involves interpretation. Each faith—to some extent, each church—forms its own culture, its own way of seeing the world, and as people acquire the knowledge and the practices through which they come to know that God, the most intimate aspects of the way they experience their everyday world change. Those who learn to take God seriously do not simply interpret the world differently from those who have not done so. They have different evidence
It’s not just about the brain—god spots, peak moments, and universal insights. Knowing God involves training, and it involves interpretation. Each faith—to some extent, each church—forms its own culture, its own way of seeing the world, and as people acquire the knowledge and the practices through which they come to know that God, the most intimate aspects of the way they experience their everyday world change. Those who learn to take God seriously do not simply interpret the world differently from those who have not done so. They have different evidence for what is true. In some deep and fundamental way, as a result of their practices, they live in different worlds.
To the extent that prayer techniques can help make more real a loving God, they can also make more real a leering demon.
What we carry in our minds really can become our world if we encourage it and allow it to be present. That is the promise of faith and also its curse.
But the practices of faith within this kind of evangelical church make it possible for someone in trouble to learn to experience God as an internal source of comfort, whether or not the idea of God makes coherent logical sense.
The community is crucial, snarky as its members can be.
it takes a great deal of work for the community to teach people to develop these apparently private and personal relationships with God.
At the Vineyard, the community stood in for God when God seemed distant and particularly when he seemed unreal.
religion is not about explaining reality but about transforming it: making it possible to trust that the world is good, despite ample evidence to the contrary, and to hope, despite loneliness and despair.
The evangelical Christianity that emerged out of the 1960s is fundamentally psychotherapeutic. God is about relationship, not explanation, and the goal of the relationship is to convince congregants that their lives have a purpose and that they are loved.
How are Christians able to hold on to their faith despite the frank skepticism that they encounter again and again? The answer is that they understand their God in a way that adapts to the skepticism.
These stories of doubt and the fear of being foolish are an integral part of what it means to be an evangelical Christian.
“I don’t believe it but I’m sticking with it. That’s my definition of faith.”
And there is another factor that shapes the way the individual experiences God. That is the real presence of the divine. I have said that I do not presume to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of this journey, in my own way I have come to know God. I do not know what to make of this knowing. I would not call myself a Christian, but I find myself defending Christianity. I do not think of myself as believing in a God who sits out there, as real as a doorpost, but I have experienced what I believe the Gospels mean by joy.
In the end, this is the story of the uncertainty of our senses, and the complexity of our minds and world. There is so little we know, so much we take on trust. In a way more fundamental than we dare to appreciate, we each must make our own judgments about what is truly real, and there are no guarantees, for what is, is always cloaked in mystery.
