Why Does God Talk So Loud?

There’s nothing subtle about a come-to-Jesus moment. Arriving unbidden and with no warning, they are inflection points in life that irrevocably alter what came before and what comes next. When God arrives on the scene, he is rarely delicate and even rarely unnoticed.

Traveling from Jerusalem to Damascus, the life of one of the most intelligent and faithful servants of God took an abrupt and entirely unexpected turn. A bright light shone, a voice from heaven spoke, and Paul was knocked off his high horse and stricken blind. In the span of just three days, the man on a mission to imprison Christians for blasphemy became a blasphemer himself.

We have scant details about Paul’s backstory in the years before that blinding light on the outskirts of Damascus. He was raised by devout Jewish parents in the city of Tarsus, on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor. As a member of what is called Diaspora Judaism, Paul followed the law and went to synagogue weekly. He likely spoke Aramaic at home while learning the family trade of tentmaking. He went to grammar school, where he learned Greek, memorized the scriptures, and excelled in his studies — a trajectory that led him into prestigious circles of influence.

As dramatic as his conversion was, what led him to that point was equally unremarkable. If Paul was the supervillain of early Christianity, he is a decidedly underdeveloped character. His life was not marked with tragedy, nor was he irredeemably evil from an early age. He wasn’t a classic outsider plotting revenge or a former hero who fell from grace. His error was no impulsive misstep or simple miscalculation; it was a lifetime in the making. Paul’s intellectual giftedness, his wisdom accrued over a lifetime of learning, his promotions up the ladders, and even his belief in God and fidelity to the law all guided him step-by-step along a path that led to one necessary and obvious conclusion: the heretic Christians must be silenced by any means necessary.

If Paul had met the apostle Peter along the road to Damascus, Paul would have detained him and pushed forward. If he had met his former teacher in the law, who had advised caution and restraint when dealing with the Christians (Acts 5:34–39), Paul would have paused to offer a compelling rebuttal before continuing north. Were Paul to have twisted his ankle on the rocky path, he would have limped forward with a makeshift cane. He was thoroughly convinced of his righteousness and the necessity of his mission. Nothing short of divine theatrics would have rerouted Paul’s journey: a blinding spotlight and a loud voice from heaven.

The same is true of us, of course, though few would characterize themselves in such stark terms.

Instead of wholesale upheaval on the road to Damascus, we tend to believe the good life to be found on the other side of a few tweaks to the system. We need optimization, not renovation, and the booming market of self-help guides promises a pseudo-Aristotelian[1] path to flourishing.  Everyone, it seems, is talking about building good habits, and not just your doctor. Good actions, it is said, accrue over time to produce good habits, better productivity, and life success. “Fake it ‘til you make it” life hacks that promise that minor modifications can lead you to fulfillment and wholeness. These range from the banal “start your day with an ice bath to increase your norepinephrine levels” to the increasingly weird recommendations of wellness influencers. Now, it’s good to get exercise, not check your email all the time, or get your daily recommended dosage of vitamin D. These are certainly small steps to take to marginally improve your life. But are they all that revolutionary? Insofar as one can obtain good habits, can they really deliver productivity and fulfillment? The idea that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” might be true, but only trivially so. Walking is far easier than overcoming a lifetime’s worth of accumulated customs and beliefs.

On the other side of the same pseudo-Aristotelian coin, an entire field of behavioral psychology proclaimed the gospel of nudge theory, the idea that “soft interventions” could positively influence people’s behavior. By improving the “choice architecture” people will end up making better choices. Placing fruit at eye level in a cafeteria will nudge employees to eat more fruit. Making people sign an honesty pledge before they file their taxes will nudge them away from tax evasion.

For humans who are notoriously terrible at making good choices, tweaking the choice architecture with nudges seems like a no-brainer in the same way a parent might attempt to prompt a child to eat their vegetables by serving them first. But as commonsense as this might sound, much of the science behind nudge theory hasn’t exactly stood the test of closer scrutiny. For starters, translating laboratory observations of nudges into the real-world settings has been found to significantly diminish their impact. Other studies have found extreme publication bias in the field: accounting for data that wasn’t published reduces the overall effect of nudges to zero. And that study about honesty pledges when filing your taxes? The data was fabricated!

Christian approaches to personal change are only marginally better, though they remain substantively the same. Most Christian spirituality consists in the repetition of spiritual disciplines, whether they be journaling, quiet times, prayer, or meditation. Change happens incrementally through persistent, daily routine. When harnessed for the purposes of personal growth, the line between starting your day with Jesus and starting your day with an ice bath becomes a bit too blurry for comfort. Though one is crazy and the other sanctified, the common emphasis on utilitarian, practical benefits of both can border on the kind of magical thinking that characterizes so much of habit discourse.

Along similar lines, it is often said that God is to be found within the rhythms of routine, changing the choice architecture of daily life. The key is to cultivate an everyday awareness of God’s many nudges, to hear his nearly imperceptible “still, small voice” prompting you to make better choices that cumulatively trend toward holiness.

Whether it be spiritual disciplines or the mysteriously nudging God, I tend to find these emphases represent a forlorn, false humility that can’t fathom a God showing up in our lives in dramatic and revolutionary ways. This meager God of incremental change might help out a little when needed, but salvation seems like a bit too much of an ask. Such a god doesn’t have much of an answer to the problems of addiction or character flaws or that insurmountable problem that keeps you up at night. A God that only nudges our hearts can’t be the same God who knocked Paul off his horse. Nor can such a God be powerful enough to overcome all the cumulative steps Paul took before he set off for Damascus.

No, God isn’t quiet, but loud. And necessarily so! The fundamental problems of life aren’t the kind that can be magically fixed by better habits and a soft-spoken life coach. Whatever troubles we’ve gotten ourselves into have been countless generations in the making. The kind of change Christianity promises is anything but incremental. It is disruptive, marked by sudden and inexplicable change, as radical and miraculous as the blind seeing, the lame walking, and an enemy becoming a friend. It is nothing short of death and resurrection, whether you are learning the family trade, rising up the ladder of prestige, or mounting a horse on the way to Damascus.