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We Californians live in a culture of religious sensory override.

We are only content with our faith when the senses that we do have (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell) are overridden by an otherworldly experience. We want to feel something. I have seen college students who were at their most passionate when the Lord was speaking to them in dreams, visions, and prophetic words, only to crash and burn during the seasons when God was not present to bless in that way. They seem to judge this disappearing act solely on whether he “reveals” himself to them, not in the usual manner, such as Scripture, community, or common prayer, but in out-of-the-ordinary manifestations that override their five senses. These types of divine encounters are wonderful when they happen, and I believe they do. But we are addicted to them.

Anthropologist, Tanya Luhrman, spent years researching this spiritual trend. In a fascinating project, entitled, When God Talks Back, she points out that “the God of this evangelical church illustrates the dominant shift in American spirituality of the last forty years, towards a more intimate, personal, and supernaturally present divine” (Random House, 12). Millennials are all over this type of relational spirituality, as seen in the darkened atmospheres of gathered worship (such as the college ministry I pastor), individualized forms of communion, Jeffrey Bethke’s famous call to trade “religion” for a person, the way we always gauge “worship” by what we experienced, and countless other forms of expression that flow from our generation’s explosive passion and love for interconnected relationships, including the divine. I think these are mostly good things, until they come at the cost of necessity.

The Bible is a necessity, the essential precondition of the Christian life.

Worshippers that feast on supernatural affections may consider the Bible too archaic. It follows that those who favor supernatural encounters in prayer and worship, will sometimes do so to the neglect of reading Scripture, finding it too dry and unromantic. This gets exacerbated by any moment of felt need; prophetic visions can offer a specific answer in real-time, which seems much more suited to our fast paced, twitter-pated generation than tediously searching a dusty Bible hoping to find something relevant.

My guess, is that the times we do open the Bible, we open it without much of a plan. This simply reflects our faithless approach to those sensory overrides we cherish so much—e.g., we don’t need to plan or think when God is speaking to us directly through a prophetic word! And we don’t plan when we open up the Bible either, because we don’t view the Scriptures with the same intensity as God. Or the Hebrew believers for that matter.

Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg bring us into the world of the ancient rabbis, who “thought that study, and not prayer, was the highest form of worship…they pointed out that when we pray, we speak to God, but that when we study the Scriptures, God speaks to us” (Zondervan, L.417, emphasis mine). Read the rest of this entry →