well as apparent accidents of fortune like car crashes and the weather. Though retaining personal characteristics such as love or anger, God operates less like an individual human person with limited reach and partial interests, and more like light, air or gravity do—quite pervasively and constantly.
Usually one side or the other comes to the fore in the way Christians feel connected to God: for some Christians the personal side of God is central; for others, the more impersonal. Thus, some Christians expect God to be very much like a human friend, offering companionship and good advice.“ As Tanya Luhrmann explores in her essay, their religious lives often revolve around the internal sensory or imaginative experiences that make a God of that sort seem real to them--the sense that God is in the room with them, that God speaks to them, and so on. They work to cultivate a prayer life that heightens the vividness of those experiences and thereby allays doubts about the actual existence of this invisible, otherwise seemingly unreal, divine friend. In short, good practitioners of prayer gain a stronger and more reliable sense that God is present as a friend directing the course of their lives.
Other Christians have expectations of a more overarching and impersonal sort about the way God is a force in their lives; these expectations, I suggest below, are the consequence of their holding certain beliefs about God as the creator, sustainer, and savior of the world. In this case a strong sense of God’s presence in one’s life does not depend on having experiences of a literally personal sort or on developing the spiritual practices that help cultivate such experiences. The sense that God is present as an influence on one’s life is
121
Page
rather something one feels all the time simply in virtue of the beliefs one holds about God and the world. Given a particular construal of those beliefs—a relatively impersonal one, I argue— simply having those beliefs in mind, with some awareness of their quite obvious presuppositions and implications, makes clear one is never alone, never a self-sufficient operator. In contrast to the understanding of God as friend, here God’s invisibility does not threaten to interrupt a sense of God’s presence and influence. God’s invisibility to the contrary enables the sense of God’s presence and influence to be the routine backdrop of all one’s experience, to constitute a general outlook on the world, no matter what the circumstances.
Belief in Creation as a Backdrop to the Whole of Life
For example, a common Christian construal of the belief that God is the creator of the world makes it possible for the sense that God is with one—one’s supporter and sustainer—to be a constant feature of one’s life as a whole. Contrary to first impressions, God’s creation of the world need not refer to the origin of the universe, or to the beginning of its more specific features or components. Were either to be its meaning, belief in God as the creator of the world could not be a very central component of a generally applicable Christian outlook, of much relevance, that is, for more than the occasional speculation about origins: e.g., why am I here at all? The belief concerns instead a causal dependence upon God of a more continuous sort, spanning, in short, the whole time of the universe’s existence and therefore the whole time of one’s individual life. To be created by God is to exist in a relation
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021367