Prof. Dion Forster on Hearing God's Voice in a Noisy World: My Sheep Listen to My Voice

In this episode, Anton chats with Professor Dion Forster from the Free University of Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Stellenbosch about living in a noisy world and hearing the voice of God. Anton opens by describing how, from the moment we wake up, voices compete for our attention — the news, social media, people we love and trust, uninvited voices, and the voice inside our own heads. Prof. Forster reflects on Herbert Simon's concept of the "attention economy" — we live in a "poverty of attention," with so many stimuli that our lives can become shallower than those of people in close relationships thirty or forty years ago. He shares about hosting the Global Network for Public Theology conference in Amsterdam, reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, and delivering his professorial inaugural lecture for his new chair in public theology and ethics, where he spoke about recognition and what it means to be recognized by God as our primary source of identity. Drawing on his first doctoral research in cognitive neuroscience, he explains how our relationships with others form our identity — who we become, how we speak, and how we react to good and bad. For Christians, there should be one voice that dominates all others: the voice of God in Christ — the first voice in the morning, the last at night, and the first we listen for in trouble. He shares his long-standing habit of reading seven chapters of the Bible every day for more than thirty years (roughly thirty minutes a day, reading through the Bible twice a year), which has built a "bedrock" and "underlying hum" of what the voice of God sounds like — through Isaiah, the Psalms, the wisdom literature, and Jesus in the Gospels. He encourages listeners not only to pay attention to the voice of Jesus but to cultivate a love for it, illustrated by his little dogs who recognize his voice and come running, but ignore a stranger calling them the same way. He warns that many Christians are being misled by populist leaders, sometimes even leaders who claim to speak on behalf of God, and he can almost hear Jesus saying, "If only you knew my voice." He closes with John 10:27: "My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me." His encouragement: no matter what you face today, God wants to speak to you, share His love with you, lead you, and comfort you.