Changing your Mind: The Bible, the Brain, and Spiritual Growth

[Music] [Music] you [Music] yeah my name is dick copán and i am i lived for sixteen years and beyond austria and i was working with the austrian protestant church there and worked a lot with theology students at the university of vienna and in the course of that i was doing some doctoral work and the topic that i chose was looking at the apostle paul as a spiritual director looking primarily at his imitation passages where he encouraged people to imitate him and that was that got me to the heart of spiritual formation without me even realizing it but fruitful time and after 16 years I received a call to be a professor at the at Palm Beach Atlantic University associate professor and I've been teaching there for the last 13 years primarily in the area of biblical studies and ministry studies and for the last four each semester since I started I've been teaching on spiritual formation and because of all the things that I was learning in teaching on spiritual formation and writing in that area I thought I would gather a lot of the ideas that I'd been working on into a book and just recently published with with cascade publishers and it's the title is called changing your mind the Bible the brain and spiritual growth there's a lot of fuzziness about spirituality and spiritual formation that's out there and you can get all different kinds of spirituality now you look on the you look at Amazon and the the offerings of books go into the thousands of what of all different kinds of spirituality but as a result of my doctoral work focusing in on Paul I began asking what's what's Christian spirituality what's the heart of it and for me in my research on looking at the Apostle Paul as a spiritual director and looking at what his aims were in as he directed the various congregations the churches that he started it became crystal clear to me that he has a razor-sharp focus on Christ himself and it's such a crystal centric vision that he had that is embedded in the creation story that I think Paul is is a thinks in in cosmic terms if you will and his his way of thinking in his reasoning is asking the question what is God doing in the world and so it starts with creation and the focus there on humanity is being created in the image of God and Paul then takes that idea and through the fall he says that needs to be restored Paul picks up the creation theme of the image of God in Romans 8 and he says he wants he desires all people to be conformed to the image of his son and that to me is is the absolute heart of spirituality of spiritual formation as under to buy a Christian by Christian by Christians so spiritual formation is not about ecstatic experiences it's not about getting into deeper and deeper levels of Prayer they're important but that's not the main focus the main focus is I'm having the entire life become conformed to the image of Christ on a and an ever-increasing level again going back to my research for my doctoral studies thinking about Paul's vision pulse aim for his congregations my own research fell into when I began reading Dallas Willard's books particularly is book renovation of the heart where dows willed was going was where I was going in my own thinking and I I loved his definition of spiritual formation I've tweaked it a little bit try to recreate it here it's a Christian spiritual formation is the redemptive process of intentionally shaping and forming our interior and exterior life so that more and more takes on the character and the inner being of Christ himself that to me is a fantastic summary of what I think Paul is doing in his writings and I think it's the vision of the New Testament there which means it needs to incorporate all of who we are we need to think about how are how are we who Jesus is for one and how do we become more like him in all those dimensions you hear about the the new findings in neuroscience about the how the brain works and how the brain and body function together and began hearing about the plasticity of the brain the ability of the brain to reshape itself through the things that we do and I began thinking about how that whole area that whole area of research began would interface with them what in the Christian world we talk about spiritual formation how do they interface with one another do they connect do they not are they separate things or are they not and so in writing this book I want it to immerse myself into this question of how do these two things interface and my my studies have led me to the conclusion that it's an artificial distinction to say on the one hand there's personal growth human growth psychological growth and on the other hand on the other side separated from that is spiritual growth I think God made us as a as an entire being unified so you can't separate spiritual growth or personal growth on one hand and spiritual growth another they blend together into one and I think my goal is to discover what neuroscience has uncovered about how we function as human beings how we grow and develop and to say how can we use what we're learning here in service of growing spiritually with our aim of becoming more and more like Christ and it was just a wonderful fascinating area of research in all the facets of who we are and how we change in all of our dimensions I began seeing that spiritual formation is is less Gnostic you could call it and more earthy that it incorporates all of who we are our body our mind our thoughts our emotions and our relationships primarily through a more careful study of the creation story Genesis 1 and 2 and how its described how we are created and the image imagery that is used in the creation story is that God is pictured as someone who is like a Potter creating something that the Hebrew terminology there is of a craftsman who's taking physical material dirt in this case and fascinating fashioning it in in a way that creates something both beautiful and purposeful and when you look at the elements that we are created out of the dirt the physicality of that you can study those elements you can analyze those things that are make us up that and we can begin discovering what things there are that leads to human flourishing and what things are that cause damage to us as our entire being and another thing that I discovered is the use of the language of the soul particularly in the Genesis account it says God created us as a living nephesh a living soul and so the language itself indicates we are not we don't have a soul we are a soul and that when God comes in to dwell in us he dwells in every aspect in every cell of who we are and so we can when we think about spiritual formation we have to ask how does God embody in dwell our thoughts our emotions the things that we do with our bodies and the things that we do in our in our relationships with other bodies with other souls and so it was just a careful study of the and taking seriously the language of the creation account that moved me away from or more simply Gnostic understandings of just simply thinking different things to a full embodiment of what it means to be in the image of God how do people change what's the process I think those are really important topics to think carefully through and as a result of teaching this my classes for the last 13 years in spiritual formation my aim has always been not to pass on theory it's always been thinking about how can I help these students change in those areas that they sense they need to change it and so it's always been a very practical focus and practical aim how to do that and what I've tried to do in a book is lay out a all the factors that I think are important on spiritual growth spiritual formation spiritual development there are various components that when you analyze them when as people have grown spiritually you can analyze all those elements together and what you need is you need to put these together synthesize them into a workable plan and so I've tried to lay that out in the book but in my class is what I've done is I've given them a task in the semester early in the semester for them to I for each student to identify one area that they sense they need to grow in and then I have them think through what are the things that they can what are the practices that they can engage in on a consistent regular basis that they think might lead them in that direction and I embed that into a whole process I make sure that each one is has an accountability partner that they're meeting with regularly they're embedded in the in a in a small group that talks about that but this intentional focus I've in reading the reflections the weekly reflections of of what they were practicing and how they are going about it in reading the reflections I've noticed there's this incremental change that takes place in the students that they themselves because they're reflecting on it and engaging in it they can see incremental change on a regular basis so that by the end of the semester when they look back and look at this whole project they they themselves are surprised at how much has happened in the meantime and I think particularly you can see that for a lot of people it's it's it's one area that where they can they've seen a lot of growth but I also have had a number of students where it's been dramatic where they have struggled with with an area say fear of others that has that has yet that goes way back to the childhood that they've never confronted before and through this process they have moved in a way moved in a direction of real health and healing as a result of taking this embodiment this practice seriously and it's just been a thrill to see these students grow in those areas you

Channel: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Views: 13,469

Rating: 4.8775511 out of 5

Keywords: victor copan

Id: Emqd_iL-hZg

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2017