And he told me that I’m right about everything.
Joking aside, this seems to be an ongoing problem in today’s (Western) church. We seem to be deeply uncomfortable with this notion that God can speak to people; that he might speak to me or someone I know. I was pondering why this might be and came up with a few ideas:
- We’re functional deists; believing that God doesn’t normally interact with his people directly.
- Â It messes up our predictable lives and shatters the illusion that we’re fully independent beings.
- Our postmodern context has made us deeply distrustful of authority because we perceive its abuse in so many facets of life. “God spoke to me” = “You must listen to me” in the minds of many. Sadly, many do abuse it in just such a way.
- We don’t feel like we can be absolutely certain of how to know if God really spoke to us.
My own belief is that removing direct, personal communion with God from Christianity produces something that is no longer Christianity. And yet there are very real reasons, such as I have listed, why this is a deeply disturbing idea to many.
My question is, how to we retain belief in a God who speaks to us today, while not ignoring the very real problems that people have with this?