HEARING a voice in response to prayer can be very reassuring. A pastor in Northern Ireland, in intensive care with Covid-19, prayed “Lord, help me!” and heard an audible voice saying, “Son, you are more than a conqueror” (reported on Premier Christian News, 31 March 2020). Richard Gamble, visiting a church in California, met a woman who said “I’ve got a word from God for you,” and this word became a part of the story of God’s guidance in the plan to build a 169-foot eternal wall of prayer on the outskirts of Birmingham.
How do we know what God is telling us? Scripture, tradition, and reason provide standard Anglican resources for answers to this question, but experience matters, too. The experience of hearing a voice can be spiritually very significant for individuals, churches, and wider communities.
In 2018 and 2019, 58 people, most of whom were Church Times readers, and almost all Christians, responded to a survey on spiritually significant voices undertaken by our research group at Durham University (findings recently published by BMJ Medical Humanities; research funded by the Wellcome Trust). These voices included words of comfort in distressing circumstances, e.g. “Do not be afraid”; calling to Christian ministry, e.g. “Teach scripture”; and confirmation/clarification in the midst of uncertain circumstances, e.g. “You’re going to marry him, you know.” For slightly more than half the respondents, the voice was audible (“out loud”); for a quarter, it was more thought-like; for others, somewhere in between.
Spiritually significant voices may be heard rarely — perhaps only once in a lifetime — and may occur at conversion, or calling to a particular vocation, or in time of crisis. Such voices variously guide, affirm, and confirm. They follow a pattern familiar in scripture: for example, the voice at Jesus’s baptism, “You are my Son, the Beloved — with you I am well pleased”; Isaiah hearing God say “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”; or Peter hearing “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
For a small minority in our survey, spiritually significant voices are a frequent occurrence. One of our respondents told us that “I chat to God every day, and that conversation often feels like dialogue.” It is difficult to think of explicit scriptural precedents for such daily experiences (the closest is, perhaps, Moses?), but there are many in Christian tradition. The 14th-century English mystic Margery Kempe reported conversations with God and the saints on almost every page of her Book. Tanya Luhrman, in When God Talks Back, reports similar experiences in her research in the Vineyard churches in California and Chicago.
Spiritually significant voices, for about one third of our respondents, gave commands. These were often very specific: for example, instructions to visit a friend in hospital, to buy a house, or to go into a church.
Almost 90 per cent of people in our survey identified the voice as God’s voice. Some — a minority — were very specific that it was the voice of Jesus, or of the Holy Spirit. Almost all described their voices as very positive experiences: “life-enhancing”, “precious”, and “beautiful”. Voices provided reconnection with faith, spiritual growth, and strength to persevere in difficult circumstances.
Only two people reported the meaning of their experiences in primarily negative terms, as “damaging” and “destructive”. Two people reported hearing demonic voices.
WE NOW know a lot about the science of voice-hearing. Spiritually significant voices share many of the same characteristics as other voice-hearing experiences, but they are also different in some important ways. For example, about one third of our respondents heard their voices in the context of prayer. Some were very self-critical and discerning. One reported that “From initial suspicion and reluctance, I have decided that it is God speaking.” Another person reported, however, that they “never doubt” what they receive in this way. One person, not reported in the survey, told me that what the voice had said was false, and so could not possibly have been from God.
If voices are miracles, they become so only through a process of discernment and reflection. This includes not only reflection on the words themselves, but also on the impact that they have on people’s lives.
Voices that people hear arise in a variety of different ways, but so-called “top-down” processes seem to be important. The top-down influence of higher cognitive processes is such that we are more likely to hear what we expect to hear, whether a voice is heard in the context of silence or as a misperception of another sound/voice.
Top-down theories also emphasise the importance of what we give attention to. The more we focus our attention (for example, in prayer), the more confident we may be about what we perceive, but also the more likely we may be to misperceive. God may, indeed, speak to us in our prayers, and we do well to listen, but we still need to exercise discernment about what we hear.
Our confidence — or conviction — about what we have heard has wider relevance in Christian life. We may well have rational reasons for believing what we do, based on scripture, tradition, reason, or experience. Unconscious processes also play a part, however, and the true sources of our convictions will always be a mystery to us. We easily get things wrong — perhaps especially when we are convinced that we are right. This is evident in various controversies within Churches and wider society, and not just in relation to experiences of voices. Paradoxically, the more certain we are, the more we may need to be willing to entertain uncertainty.
Faith does not avoid difficult questions about what God is saying, or about our human capacity to be deceived. It listens well. It takes what it has heard to heart. Most importantly, it exercises discernment.
The Revd Professor Chris Cook is Professor in Spirituality, Theology and Health at Durham University.