More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
therefore, became a matter of...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
our will to God. To harmonize with older theology, what people thought and chose were attributed to a faculty called the “will.” The will emerged as a central feature in American theology. Packaged with the Second Gre...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The Christian context raised other questions about faculties. Which faculties are sinful? Which faculties can be saved? The body, emotions, feelings, desires, and will are all fallen and incapable of saving the soul. But something must respond to God and be saved. Logically, this must be whatever part makes a choice. Many people concluded that the will could be saved but the rest of the human being would only take us to hell. (Not everyone agreed, of course.) Fallen faculties would not produce godliness, the argument went, so God must work through the will. Since Scripture says that God saves
...more
Western theology usually has the will doing all the heavy lifting. In Life without Lack, Dallas concludes that Jesus’ victory over temptation in the garden of Gethsemane proves that “Jesus’ will was invincible.”[7] Yet Jesus is saying here, “Not My will, but Yours be done.”[8] Jesus was in the process of resisting His own will. Typically this complexity has been addressed by suggesting that Jesus was submitting His will to the Father. Given what we now know about the human brain, we must consider a different explanation. Jesus was using a human brain, and the strongest force in the
human brain is attachment. Attachment love will carry parents into burning buildings. It may have been the strength of Jesus’ attachment love for His Father, not His will, that was invincible.
Hebrews 12:2, where we discover
that what drew Jesus to victory was joy.
Joy is relational. Relational joy builds attachments.
Correcting character in the brain is a bit like what happens when my wife eats her favorite shepherd’s pie from the big warehouse store. Kitty will not eat mushrooms.
The results of making love into a choice have been dismal in actual church life. Splits, divisions, unresolved conflicts, and divorces all underline what Dallas says about the will—it has very little power. Commanding agape by acts of the will has done poorly in
marriages, churches, families, denominations, pornography addicts, and traumatized people.
Love as a choice (but without attachment) has preceded many divorces. Yet the very parents who could not stay married by choice fight like tigers to k...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
either! Joy is the energy that builds strong attachment love. Joy means “I am glad to be with you!”
The difference in a soteriology of attachment is that we move love to the center.”
Learning to love enemies is learned from a people who love enemies. Here are the requirements: (1) Someone who feels like my enemy right now. (2) A teacher who is attached by love to my enemy. This teacher (a) sees these “enemies” as “my people” and (b) knows that “my people” love our enemies. (3) A love attachment with my teacher.
(4) A mutual-mind moment with my teacher while I am in enemy mode, where I can experience attachment that lets enemies become “our people.” (5) Repeated practice attaching to enemies in the company of “my people” because that is the kind of people we are. With practice, it becomes harder and harder to fall into enemy mode. Fewer and fewer people feel like my enemies. A spontaneous attachment produces the desire for enemies to know what God and God’s people know about hesed love. I develop both emotional and spiritual maturity.
had loving attachments to their victims. Attachment is central to restoring our social selves.
I have observed Christians loving their enemies. I
Learning to attach to people who would kill us requires both a strong attachment to the God who loves enemies and attachment to the people of God who also love enemies. Where Christians know themselves as people who love our enemies, we find Christian character growing.
The soul integrates our identities and directs the energy of everything it means to be human. The brain can create this integration using the cingulate cortex. The process of integration produces a state of mutual mind with significant others. But the brain reserves the mutual-mind states that create our identity and character for people who share attachment love. These are “my people.”
We are transformed by who we love more than what we believe. We should neglect neither but make attachment love our priority.
Spiritual formation is a process—not an outcome. There is an outcome, but formation itself is a process, that of taking on a certain character for your whole life. As such, spiritual formation doesn’t have to be Christian.
Most people don’t have a consistent character because their models for character were inconsistent: They take a part of their character from this person, another part from that person. There are periods, for example, when young people reject what had been modeled for them earlier and begin to take on the characteristics of some influential new person in their life—maybe a peer or a teacher, maybe a person in the public arts, music—all the media that are constantly pounding them.
For Jesus, to disciple someone was to teach that person how to live their life in the Kingdom of God. Remember, the Kingdom of God is God in action. So to say “Seek first the Kingdom of God” is to invite someone to be caught up in the action of God and the kind of righteousness that comes with that. That’s a major point that we have to hold on to: The basic idea of being a disciple, in the New Testament, is being with Jesus, learning to be like Him.
Spiritual formation, in the Christian sense, is the process of transformation that occurs to the disciple. Such transformation involves emotional and spiritual maturity. And if we are not disciples, we won’t move forward in that process. You cannot experience spiritual
formation—transformation into the likeness of Christ—without being a disciple of Christ.
Whether or not you have to be a disciple to be a Christian is at the heart of our problem with
spiritual and emotional maturity—in the churches generally, and in Christian leadership particularly. Generally, people do not believe that discipleship is required for salvation. The picture of salvation that now emerges does not involve spiritual formation that yields maturity. It’s wonderful if it happens, and of course the New Testament is full of spiritual formation. But it’s not thought of as essential to the Christian life. That’s what we’re up against.
If a disciple of Jesus is defined as one who is “learning from Jesus how to lead my life as He would lead my life if He were I,” we have to ask ourselves, Is that me? Then we have to answer honestly in terms of what is happening in our life. And then we have to ask, Have I chosen that? And if I have chosen it, what am I doing to carry through with it?
Most of the folks in our congregations have never been invited to become a disciple. We don’t do discipleship evangelism. We do Christian evangelism, but perhaps we should have some occasions when in an appropriate way, we invite people to decide to be disciples of Jesus.
There’s a wonderful preacher up in Canada that I heard some time ago who said when he got saved, he thought he got three things: He got (1) a certificate that said he’s in, (2) a ticket that said we’ll take you there when the time is right, and (3) a catalog, in which he could place orders by praying. I thought how striking that was and how similar to what the vision is for many people. It’s a negative one—I’m going to the place that doesn’t require air conditioning.
Eternal living is a matter of living a life so intertwined with the life of God Himself that your life is a part of God’s life. Consider John 17:3: Eternal Life is knowing God, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. The knowing Jesus describes here is not cognitive (knowing what the answers are). Knowledge, biblically and in life generally, is a matter of interactive relationship.
If discipleship is for the world, then the primary place of discipleship is at work, because that’s where we spend most of our time, and that is where the need is the greatest. When you look at all the difficulties we face in our world and ask yourself, What would it be like if those places were inhabited by disciples of Jesus who are doing their work to the glory of God in the power of His name?,
One has to do only with forgiveness of sins. Your sins will be forgiven, and you will be in heaven in the afterlife if you believe that Jesus suffered for your sins. Now,
If forgiveness of sins is the whole gospel, what connection does it have to emotional maturity? I’m afraid we have to say none.
Watch how it actually works in real life—and there’s little connection to character transformation.
The second gospel commonly preached is that Jesus died to liberate the oppressed, and you can stand with Him in that battle. I see a large segment of self-identifying Christians believe that liberation from oppression is the sum total of the gospel message.
Finally, the third gospel message commonly preached is “Take care of your church, and it will take care of you.”
represents. It is absolutely essential, and the main part of preaching the gospel, to present the goodness of Christ and the world that God has intended and that is held out in front of us as this Resurrection life.
In the counseling office, we observed
that the human will was rarely in charge of much and could be quite ineffective. Spiritual disciplines worked better for some people than others.
This redemptive element comes from an interactive life of loving attachment with God. The three elements needed for full (spiritual) maturity are multigenerational community; interactive (Immanuel) life with God; and relational-brain skills needed to be fully human.
that the Christian life is simply securing a ticket to heaven. His corrected vision becomes one of life with Jesus that begins now at salvation, not when we reach heaven.
Dallas is convinced that the “with-God-life” must and does begin at salvation, not in heaven. He knows that Christians have lots of beliefs and show little change of character. We can now ask, “Could part of why we have Christians who aren’t experiencing life with God be caused by emphasizing beliefs as the means of transformation?”
process of taking on the character of Christ. That means a person
begins to think with—to have beliefs and images and ways of interpreting things that were characteristic of—Christ.” He states that we “think . . . have beliefs and images and ways of interpreting things” like the person we have as a model.
Christlike character begins with attachment love, develops through mutual-mind states, and ultimately, creates a people with a shared sense of identity—in real time. These relational-brain skills in the fast track direct our lives. Life with others allows the brain to become human and regulate feelings, desires, impulses, and emotions. Mutual mind with God replaces the predatory reactions that emerge toward anyone who is not “my people” with gentle, protective responses.
If God Works through Attachment Love, What Should We Expect?
God would expect us to return the same hesed, attachment love.
I propose that we apply a series of tests to Scripture that will show us whether God is talking about attachment love. First, God should say directly that we should attach to God. Second, God should use the processes that form healthy attachments in the brain rather than avoid them. Third, the words in Scripture that describe the nature of God’s relationship with His people should make sense if we substitute the word attachment. Fourth, human-attachment systems should affect our relationship to God. Fifth, God’s expectations about the character and identity changes in disciples should match
...more
