Hearing God in Conversation: How to Recognize His Voice Everywhere: Samuel C. Williamson

I am reviewing this book having had a free e-copy for the purposes of review but my review is not obliged to be favourable because of that.

So what do I make of this book? I was drawn to it because I think that for many people I deal with, hearing and listening to God is important, So I was looking for a potential resource to recommend on to them. Personally, as well, I'm interested in how we discern and know God speaking to us. I have to say that this book is fit for those purposes. It comes from what I think of as a classic evangelical background (classic is not code here for militantly conservative but rather rooted in the kind of piety which has a generosity to it and an affectionate approach to God). So, I recognised the classic quie time disciplines of attention-giving to God in and with scripture and the in-life expectation of reflection, and ongoing conversation with God. So in many ways this is a clear and gently encouraging restatement of what used to be considered normal evangelical spiritual practice. What is interesting, of course, is that the author writes this because he perceives that so many in supposedly evangelical churches do not know this stuff and have even been warned off it by a particular kind of biblicism which is scared of iner spiritual experience. This book does a great job of normalising in a low key way the expectation that God does address us personally.

Thire are stories of hearing God to illustrate the points being made. Many of them are the author's own experience and are helpful for  their honesty and power to enable the reader to grasp how it might look in their own experience.

Hearing God is anchored, for this writer, in the discipline of reading scripure ruminatively with the expectation of finding in it things that inwardly resonate and which may then be reflected on and kept company with to disclose to us something of God's communication with us. He also shows how this process can be followed in everyday life, with the biblically-based and learnt basis forming a kind of training ground and filter.

I'd commend this book to people wanting to connect or reconnect with classic evaneglical discisplines of quiet time and converse with God. In this book we get to see how scripture memorisation might make sense as part of a living relationship with God rather than a way of arguing with people. In this book we see the Bible as a devotional tool rather than a textbook or apologetic tool. I think it would also, potentially, be enjoyed by Christians with a Catholic background as it is, in more catholic terms, an exposition of Lectio Divina.

One thing that I think deserves more consideration, though, is the way that Scripture is conceived of to be functioning in the devotional life of a believer. The writer is clearly keen that people are not misled by mistaking inner voices for the voice of God (there is no sure-fire method except learning by experinec and reflection to distinguish the various voices, some are obvious, others are not). A big part of the remedy for this is seen to be testing the voices/feelings by scripture. So far, so evangelical and clearly a reassurance to the traditional evangelical presumptive readership. However, there is a lacuna, a missing piece in relation to this in the book. The author, discussing hearing God through Scripture, points out that it is possible to mistake things. In other words, just because it is in Scritpture dosen't mean that whatever you 'pick up' is of God; we need to triangulate (my phrase, not his) with the rest of Scritpture, but also our reason and to take advice from the wider Christian communtiy through space and time (again my expression). So, the point here is that the same difficulty also applies to listening for God in Scripture as in oher areas of life.This may not satisfy some hard-line biblicists but it is true to human experience and the nature of creation and Christian Scripture. Implicitly we are invited to enter into a life-long learning to discern the Spirit's leading. An anchor point for this is Scripture, but it is not something that can be read text-book-wise or oracularly but a place to learn to hear but with its own potential pitfalls.
This is a good book to think about psycho-spirituality and to recover a wise and gentle Evangelicalism rooted in a warm God-centred piety rather than finger-pointing alledeged doctrinal rectitude.

Hearing God in Conversation: How to Recognize His Voice Everywhere: Samuel C. Williamson: 9780825444241: Amazon.com: Books