Transformational Theology

Philip Yancey

In Conversation with Gary W. Moon

Philip Yancey is a popular author and speaker known for careful research, keen insight and raw honesty. Not long ago he was driving on a deserted road in New Mexico one Sunday morning when his Ford Explorer hit a patch of black ice. Yancey wrestled with the steering wheel, but his SUV went over an embankment, shattering glass, plastic, metal and bones.

He was rushed to a hospital where, after being strapped to a gurney for seven hours, a doctor broke the bad news: “Your neck is broken and a bone fragment may have nicked a major artery.” Then the doctor said, “This is a life-threatening situation. Here’s a phone. You may want to contact your loved ones and tell them goodbye.”

On the darkening, rainy night of April 29, 2011, as people huddled in basements and closets, a powerful, churning EF-4 tornado, with 175-mile-per-hour winds bore down on the small northwestern Georgia town of Ringgold. At about 8:30 p.m., it angrily smashed the McDonald’s and BP service center, flattened a three-story Super 8 motel, and turned a Ruby Tuesday restaurant into kindling. It engulfed Christopher Black’s home, instantly killing him and his wife, Pamela, and their two children, Kelsea and Cody. The tornado, one of 13 to strike Georgia that April night, left eight dead in Ringgold and scores of others missing.

Scholars are supposed to avoid nostalgia. Getting attached to old notions, conventional wisdom tells us, breeds a reluctance to test them and discover something new. Nevertheless, I’ve become nostalgic for an idea that held sway for centuries: the belief that nature cannot be truly understood apart from the category of creation. In fact, the progressive decoupling of “nature” from creation has caused us to think different thoughts when we hear the word nature, and I fear that those thoughts create significant problems in our quest to be spiritually attuned with God.

David G. Benner has been very productive in his semiretirement. His latest book, Soulful Spirituality: Becoming Fully Alive and Deeply Human, addresses many important topics, including the neglect of the body in many approaches to spirituality. How could we resist inviting David to the table for another frank conversation?

David G. Benner needs no introduction to the readers of Conversations. As a founding editor, David has poured much of himself into creating a space for honest dialogue about transformation. Now living on Vancouver Island and semiretired from all things not fun, David has been sailing in exotic places around the world and working on some new writing projects, such as his just-released book, Opening to God: Lectio Divina and Life as Prayer. His recent thinking about that book and the theme of this issue—contemplation and action—serves as the backdrop for this conversation. So pull up a deck chair and listen in.

Gary W. Moon: David, you begin your book with a provocative reflection: “Just imagine how different your life would be if moment by moment by moment you were constantly open to God.” How is your life different when you are able to live with that kind of openness to God?

David G. Benner: My experience of that openness is far from constant…

GWM: So why are you writing in this area, David? Just kidding; please continue.

DGB: Hmm. As I was saying, the moments when I have known this openness are rarer than I’d like, but they leave a taste I can never forget. It’s a sense of being at one with myself and, in the same moment, with all that is. It’s a feeling of alignment, wholeness, and everything belonging. Like any taste of God, it leaves me hungering for more. And this is the way it most impacts life. Once you taste this oneness and experience even for a moment the sense of being sufficiently open to God to allow God to flow through you, desire, not willpower, becomes all that is necessary to lead you forward. And that desire comes from the lingering taste—the residual memory—that remains within you. How does that make my life different when this is my experience? I am spoiled for any lesser goods, any lesser gods.

“I die by brightness and the Holy Spirit”

—Thomas Merton

I dare to call action birthed from contemplation the greatest art form because I believe it is. It underlies all those other, more visible art forms we see in great sculpture, music, writing, painting, and most especially in the art form called human character. When these two (action and contemplation) are one, the result is always beauty, symmetry, and transformative form—lives and actions that inherently sparkle and heal.

With most people the process of uniting contemplation and action begins on the “action” side. It is surely this way for the first half of life for almost all of us, even introverts. We learn, experiment, try, do, stumble, fall, break, and find. It is largely done in the outer world of activity, starting with crawling, walking, playing, and speaking. The stage gradually gets larger for these “enactments,” but we are still constructing our own good stage on which to perform. (We just don’t know it yet!)

Yes, there are inner thoughts, feelings, and imaginings during this time, maybe even sustained study, prayer, or disciplined thought, but do not call them contemplation. These are necessarily and almost always self-referential, both for good and for ill. Do not be put off by this, but at this point in our lives, it is still largely about “me” and finding my own preferred and proper viewing platform. These first steps toward true contemplation have to be, and they are good. But they are not yet the great, much less the greatest, art form of the union between action and contemplation that we want to talk about here. We must go further.

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Dallas Willard needs no introduction to the readers of Conversations. After all, he is responsible for the fact that our five sections correspond to his components of the person—and that we try to hear from a representative of each of the six great traditions of Christian faith in each issue. He is also responsible for the fact that I, for one, have come to believe it is actually possible to become like Jesus. I believe it because I see the way Dallas lives his life.

Dallas is an ordained Southern Baptist pastor who left the traditional version of ministry to study philosophy in the early 1960s after God told him, “If you stay in the churches, the university will be closed to you, but if you stay in the university, the churches will be open to you.” After receiving his Ph.D. in 1965, he had two immediate job offers—one from the University of Southern California and one from the University of Georgia. While some (okay, just me) think he made a mistake in picking USC, he has had an amazing academic and ministry career. Some refer to him as America’s C. S. Lewis.

Dallas Willard needs no introduction to the readers of Conversations. After all, he is responsible for the fact that our five sections correspond to his components of the person—and that we try to hear from a representative of each of the six great traditions of Christian faith in each issue. He is also responsible for the fact that I, for one, have come to believe it is actually possible to become like Jesus. I believe it because I see the way Dallas lives his life.

Dallas is an ordained Southern Baptist pastor who left the traditional version of ministry to study philosophy in the early 1960s after God told him, “If you stay in the churches, the university will be closed to you, but if you stay in the university, the churches will be open to you.” After receiving his Ph.D. in 1965, he had two immediate job offers—one from the University of Southern California and one from the University of Georgia. While some (okay, just me) think he made a mistake in picking USC, he has had an amazing academic and ministry career. Some refer to him as America’s C. S. Lewis.

C. S. Lewis once compared world religions to soups—thick soups and clear soups. The “thick” soups bubbled with mystery, matter, and ritual (e.g., ancient mystery religions) while the “clear ” soups blended philosophy, thought, and ethics (e.g., Confucianism). The truest religion, Lewis believed, would be both thick and clear because neither alone could do justice to the fullness of reality. That’s why Lewis sought a religion of sacraments and dogma, body and soul, poetry and proposition.?

Lewis found all this in Christianity. What’s more, Lewis saw Christian transformation in “thick” and “clear” terms too. To “be saved” was something more than just an external pardon by God or an intellectual consent to an idea—what he might call a “clear” approach to this crucial reality. For Lewis, salvation was an inward process involving the transformation of the whole person by the Holy Spirit and leading to nothing less than mystical union with God. In other words, Lewis embraced the ancient Christian doctrine of deification (or theosis) much as it was taught by the likes of St. Basil the Great, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, and St. Maximus the Confessor, and which is still taught today in the Eastern Orthodox Church. This doctrine was neatly expressed by St. Basil in the fourth century when he said that man is nothing less than a creature who has received the order to become god (note the lowercase “g”). Similarly, Lewis asserts in Mere Christianity that the whole purpose of Christianity is to turn people into “new men,” “little Christs,” “sons of God”—even “gods and goddesses.”[1]

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Eugene Peterson lives a life of unlikely juxtapositions. He is an introvert’s introvert, yet he planted a church and served as its senior pastor for 29 years. He is a scholar of biblical languages who searches through dusty volumes for the precise meaning of a word and then, as a poet, paints meaning with colorful and imprecise strokes. He has rejected the formulaic patterns of success in the Christian publishing world, but has become an industry superstar. He eschews information technology—only his wife and children have his e-mail address (dang it!)—but he reaches out to hundreds of thousands each day through The Message and more than 30 other books he has written.

Retired from the pastorate of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, and from Regent College, where he served as professor of Spiritual Theology, Eugene lives with his wife, Jan (much more the extrovert) in the home where he grew up, on the shore s of Flathead Lake in Lakeside, Montana. It was there he wrote one of his latest books, The Jesus Way: Conversations on the Ways