Hello and welcome to Restoring the Soul with Michael John Kusick. I'm your producer, Brian Beatty. We're almost at the conclusion of our Soul Care Summer. And today we're airing one of the most intellectually rich conversations in the 10 years of this show. Dr. Jim Wilder has spent decades at the intersection of brain science, scripture, and spiritual formation, and he has a name for that. It's neurotheology. This conversation originally aired in October of 2020, and it still asks questions most of us haven't sat with long enough. What does the brain actually need in order to grow? And what does that tell us about what God is doing when he forms us? And now without any more further delay, here's Michael John Kusick with Dr. Jim Wilder.
Michael John CusickDr. Jim Wilder, thank you for coming down from Evergreen, Colorado to our offices here
and being on the podcast. It's great to be with you, Michael. Let's just jump right in. We've had a fair amount of chit-chat, and I'm familiar with your books. You're a prolific author. What is a neuro-theologian, as you call yourself?
Jim WilderMm-hmm. Well, it's this combination of trying to figure out from God's creation, how did he design the brain, and then from uh scripture and uh Christian thought, what is the best way to operate? Uh so the, you know, now we know what the brain is, how it works. The software or whatever you're supposed to run into, the values that you're supposed to use to make it work, they're going to come from theology. So whenever we find an intersection, the brain seems to be designed for something, and then theology says, this is what you're supposed to do with it. It's very interesting from a neurotheological perspective.
Michael John CusickHow did you first get exposed to the neurological approach in your clinical training, or was it after that?
Jim WilderWell, I had originally wanted to be a medical doctor, so biology was my my fascination from probably about age ten on. So I was very interested in in anything physical. I remember I think probably age twelve, I was drawing diagrams of the twelve cranial nerves and how connected. Just for fun. Just for fun. This is kind of stuff that fascinated me. And very much interested in uh scientists that had cured diseases like anthrax and sheep and stuff like that. How did you go about solving those problems? Um and then I happened uh to uh have this experience where I had
asked God, uh, you know, had encountered somebody uh who is actually in psychological trauma, I didn't know it, and I said, God help, and and I saw their eyes open and their make a change. So uh right about the time of starting college, I switched over to psychology to figure out what was going on there. Then when I got to graduate school, my professor was one of the ones who had invented the EEG rib machine for brainwaves, discovered the existence of brainwaves. Wow. And he was the first neurotheologian I met. He was like, okay, here's the brain, here's how it operates. Now, where does God engage with the brain was the question he would ask in class. What year would have this been? This would have been 1967. Wow. Yeah. What what can I ask the name of the. Sorry.
Michael John CusickThat's right, because you said you were uh your doctorate at Fuller in the 80s, the early 80s. What professor was that? Uh Dr.
Jim WilderLee Edward Travis. Wow. And the building at Fuller at the seminary is named after him, the Travis Auditorium.
Michael John CusickSo I've been in that auditorium. Yeah. But he was making the connection back then. Yes.
Jim WilderAnd at that point, uh, you know, technical point, he was uh saying, well, it must be the reticular activating system is where God engages, because that's what makes you conscious of various things. Um but where we've gone since then is that you know there's things that happen in the brain before you're even conscious. And I'm of the school that thinks that God's involved in helping bring things to consciousness uh even before the conscious part of the brain engages.
Michael John CusickSo Christians are famous for, at least in the mental health field, either being on kind of two sides of the extreme. One is just prescribe Bible verses, and then there's this, let's just kind of copy what the secular world is doing and then baptize it and call it Christian. And my experience in the Egyptians they call it. Yes. My experience is that there's there's not been a lot of people that are doing the kind of deep thinking that you have done where you're truly integrating, not just using that word, but asking uh the question like what are the questions the Bible is asking and and looking at science and neurology and psychology. Talk to me about how that um integration emerged and how it led to your life model.
Yeah. Well, going back again to the uh early uh 70s, one of the progressive churches in California had formed a counseling center where they're trying to help the kids who are out on the street and people with drugs and stuff like that. And I got a chance to intern there where Jane Willard, who is married to Dallas Willard, was one of my early trainers. And so from that perspective, we're trying to fit Christian thought with the practical questions of life. Well, as soon as you had somebody with a problem, all of a sudden it seems everybody's solution digressed. So uh from a psychological perspective, the school was sort of uh you pick whatever works from whatever uh field. And so we had people with trauma. Now, with trauma, you were supposed to handle them delicately and uh affirm them and all that sort of stuff. And the people with trauma also had sex addic and drug addictions, and the Minnesota model then says you get in their face and you confront them in time, you're gonna die. And so, one hand you don't confront this person at all, on the other hand, you confront them consistently, and then another school was saying, well, it's all demonics, you have to cast all of these uh demons out, and another point of school was saying, Well, it's dissociative, so it's not all demons, you've got different parts of their mind. And uh and then we had the people they had children, and so now we're trying to raise children, and that's a completely different model, and then they're in their marriages, and the marriage model is complete these none of these things work together. Uh and so when we stopped and had a look, we said, you know what we're trying to do is get everyone to grow up to be mature and look like Jesus at every age in their life. So there should be a unified model for what life should look like. It should be the same model you use for finding the brain tumor or figuring out what you need for uh medication, should be the same thing you do for planting a church.
Michael John CusickWow. That's gonna that's gonna push some people out of their chair and go, what does that mean?
Jim WilderYeah. Well, a church is a multi-generational community of people who are trying to look like Jesus, and then there's all these things that go wrong, which can go down to the level of, you know, are you depressed and you need a medication? Uh, because all these people are coming from churches.
Michael John CusickAaron Powell And how each of those people are functioning from the leadership on down, they're all neurological beings, and as you and I well know, that uh leaders are not immune to all of those issues.
Jim WilderAaron Powell No, as a matter of fact, the pressure and the position they're in actually makes the issues more likely to show up in their lives. So keep going with uh with the life model. So what we decided
uh then was we're going to gather people, and we gathered about thirty people from different uh fields and different points of view and said, you know, tell us what's working, because if we look at an overlap of all the things that work, uh and I might say, Michael, there's a big difference between things that work and how we explain the way they work. Indeed. So the explanations are all completely different. Um but the you know what's working is always in people's lives and the fruit that we're looking at is very comparable. So sort of like let's discard all of the existing explanations for a while and try to see what are the things that all these have in common what's working, and when it came down to it, it turns out it's human brains that have to be taught how they how to do all these different things. And so uh now the question that we had was a lot of the things that were being taught are very culturally dependent. So if you're in this particular culture, and you might let me say that uh one Christian group from another varies a lot by culture and language. And you know that firsthand from growing up in South America. Yeah. And from uh yeah, whenever we came back to the United States, we'd go from one church to another, so we're in all these different kinds of churches, uh, and the cultures inside were very, very different. But they're all saying, you know, we're serving the same God and the same principle, and uh, you know, but they're very different. So if you try to take some of that cultural language off the top, and what is it you have to learn and when do you learn it and how does that work? That's what we were trying to figure out together so that it would actually have the best uh brain science, but you wouldn't need to have to have a Western culture to understand the way it works.
Michael John CusickAaron Ross Powell, which is fascinating because the scriptures didn't come out of a Western culture and the Hebrew uh worldview, if you will, is far more holistic, which I want to ask you about than the Greek or rational idea. Aaron Ross Powell Yeah.
Jim WilderAnd so what this allowed us to do is avoid the reductionism while still having the science.
Michael John CusickHow rare to get 30-ish people together and to even be able to say, let's let go of all of our explanations. If we just did that in the U.S. today with race and politics and stepped back and said, let's look at what the problems are and kind of begin again thinking about this. That sounds like a really hopeful but rare thing.
Jim WilderAaron Ross Powell I think it it is. And it was actually uh one of the funny things that would happen to us is we would get calls from
people and uh we'd people we'd never heard from before, we had no idea who they are, and they said, uh, I feel that God's telling me I should call you folks. Um, and I'm not sure why. Uh and I'm not even sure who you are. And um I would say, Well, well, why are you calling? Well, they said, I feel like I have a part of something, and I'm supposed to bring this. It's part of what it means to be Christian and and whole, but I I I don't know how it fits. Does that mean anything to you? And we would say, uh, yes, actually, we've been praying that the parts of this would come together, and you must have one of them. So come on down and let's
find out what you got.
Michael John CusickAnd one of the things that's different about the life model and what you write about in your new book, Renovated, is that rather than uh I I do not like the word eclectic because it's like this doctor kit and you reach into that bag at any given time and you pull out this uh instrument or that instrument. And so eclectic is I kind of do whatever works, and then a person will say, and I integrate all those together. But the life model truly is where you've taken what works and what is true, and by that I don't mean propositionally true, and you've put it together into a really cohesive faction. So can you talk about the elements of that that emerged after this uh kind of initiation with these thinkers and practitioners?
Jim WilderYes, uh, I'd have to agree with you about the eclectic part. I've always pictured it as as a prospector with a mule who hangs one more thing on his mule and it it all work walks together and you use it for some purpose. But there's nothing inherently that makes that a whole or a coherent something. So the um yeah, back to your question. Clarify that.
Michael John CusickAre you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
Jim WilderI was I was raised in a uh a common purse uh Christian community. So if you're close.
Michael John CusickWell again, we're we're of the generation where people are going, what's he talking about? Vladimir Putin or something? Uh no, the just how what are the different elements of the life model that are central to it? Yeah. Well, it's probably three then.
Jim WilderOne is that uh human beings exist in a multi-generational community, and it takes at least four generations to make a functioning community. So that's part of this multi-generational life. There's something we hand on from one generation to the another to another when we're in a properly attached relationship to each other that just doesn't come any other way. Um that's I think why God doesn't just pull everyone who believes out of the world and as soon as they do go, okay, we gotcha. You made the right statement, the right confession, you know, we're we got you out of that mess. Uh the second part is uh that
the brain has to learn how to be human. So there's some relational brain skill abilities that uh are absolutely inherent to how your brain works, and if you try to even uh think with God or uh relate with other people and you're missing these abilities, something isn't gonna work for you. You're gonna have a chronic failure because you you don't know how to do one of the and and we've counted from the brain science side nineteen of them that are absolutely essential. And then the third element is that this is a life of mutual mind with God, and unless we're thinking with God as we're going along, uh we don't raise above the level of normal human uh the best that you can be by normal human. Uh you have to add something that's actually an active ingredient coming from God. And of the three, that's the most contested.
Michael John CusickYour first chapter in Renovated is Salvation as Attachment. So that that brings back this idea of the something from God. Speak a little bit about how salvation is attachment or a new attachment.
Jim WilderYeah. Well, as Dallas and I were talking about um maturity, the interest uh part of his idea is that uh salvation shouldn't be what uh just gets you out of a bad end to life. You know, it's salvation isn't just uh like a ticket to heaven instead of someplace. Fire insurance. Yeah. But it should actually be saving you as you go along by self that that active sense of salvation. It's like this is what's keeping me from being a lousy human being. Um and so uh as we were we were talking about that,
the problem is that most of the Christian solutions come down to ideas we put into our conscious mind. But from a brain perspective, you have the a very fast system in your brain that's most predominantly on the right side that determines your identity and your character and it always runs faster than your conscious mind. So we're always consciously catching up with a reaction we've already had inside, and we're going, oh crap. You know, I didn't shouldn't have that reaction. And then we try to think, well, here's what I'll think differently, so that won't happen. But thinking differently always runs too slow, so the other reaction is always coming out.
Michael John CusickSo you're you're you're describing the process of trying to use the left brain to impact the right brain, and it fundamentally can't work. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah.
Jim WilderIt's just not engineered that way. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Jim, can you take a look at the same thing? Attachment is what gets you into that fast circuit.
Michael John CusickTrevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah, because attachment develops the right brain develops earliest, and that therefore it's more core to who we are in our personhood. Can you take a minute and just kind of walk through the left brain-right brain distinction? Because a lot of people think of that in term terms of you know, left brain is accounting and right brain is painting. But it's so much more than that, including the right brain as a spiritual mediator.
Jim WilderYeah, that that that's a stereotype that got stuck into culture about 30, 40 years ago, uh maybe a little more. And it's kind of fun, but it's not how it actually works. Uh so the the right brain dominant, and so first thing we want to s notice is that
word. Because the brain is dominant on the right side doesn't mean everything gets done on the right side. It's just that's who's running the operation. So on the right side of the brain, things run at about six cycles per second. Um so six times per second your brain figures out who am I right now in this circumstance. That's what it's looking at. What is who am I right now and what is it like me to do? Uh on the left side, the conscious mind uh runs at five cycles per second, and five times per second it figures out uh what's going on uh in terms
of my explanation, how do I explain what's happening? So if you do the math, it's the six times per second is always running too fast for the conscious mind to catch up with. Not by a whole lot, but enough that we can't really watch it. And so uh words and explanations and sequences all run at conscious speed and they're all over focused. That is you always have to pick out a detail at the expense of the big picture. The fast side of the brain is always looking at the big picture and it'll tell you which attention detail you should think about more. But it doesn't really stop to look at that, it sends that out to the the detail-oriented left side. So um when we start thinking that Christianity's all about believing the right things, we've now reduced it to detail. And you know, we get a mystery like uh the Trinity or the nature of God. If you reduce that all to explanations that make sense to you, you have lost most of what it means to be God because it's you know, it's bigger, much bigger than that. So our character, on the other hand, is running on this fast track, and it lets only the people it's sort of like a firewall in your brain. The only people can tamper with my identity are the people that care about me and love me and have a enduring attachment to me. So when Jesus says to the disciples in the upper room, um from now on the Father and I will not reveal ourselves to anybody, just only to those who love us or attached to us, and uh so Judah's not as scary it is like uh why what it's what's that all about? It's it's you know, Jesus is saying, No, attachment is gonna be our way of communicating from this day on. Wow. And if you're not attached, you won't be hearing from us. And uh you know that tells me that from now on God's gonna communicate to this fast track, to this identity system which is formed by who you love.
Michael John CusickI just want to interject. There might be listeners at this point that go, okay, what translation or paraphrase of the Bible is Dr. Jim Wilder reading from? But it really is there. If you look at the Old Testament, the New Testament, and especially so many of Jesus' conversations and teaching, it really is all about that. So you mentioned uh Judas in the upper room and Jesus saying, This is how it's gonna be. After that's all over, he gives his last sermon and it's vine and branch. Boom. It's attachment. It's it's all about a connection that's organic. It has to be cultivated, but it's there. So I just think it's beautiful how you're, you know, this is just kind of rolling off your tongue and out of your left and right brain, but it really is there in the scriptures that this is not just science that you took and threw some scripture on it.
Jim WilderUh I've really worked hard to avoid doing that sort of proof texting,
you know, there's a bit of science that proves what I believe, or the other way around here's a scripture that, you know, if you take this verse, then you gotta believe my science. The really the question is do they harmonize together? When you look at it from both perspectives, does it make complete sense? And where that happens, uh another example of that one you might say is um I was up on the top of Mount Langley, which is the second highest mountain in the 48 states, and I'd taken a youth group up there and were looking around. Now, when I was two, I had a stroke, and I was not supposed to get out of a wheelchair, and I was supposed to be uh mentally deficient. And so I'm up on the top of Mount Langley, and I obviously got there without a wheelchair, and I had a PhD, so I'm thinking I'm probably, you know, neither of those things happened, which I attribute to prayer among a primary reason why this has happened. And so up there I said to God, I want an explanation for the people that it seems no one can help. And, you know, there's people that just were not responding to either what Dallas was teaching for spiritual formation or what we were doing for therapy. And very soon after that we came across the brain science of joy. Uh and uh dick it was Dr. Alan Shore from UCLA who was saying, you know, what stimulates the brain to grow is joy, and joy is relational. It's who is glad to be with you, who smiles at you, uh, who connects with you, and that this is the most powerful influence in your brain is this response to joy. Uh so you know, I started doing the math. Yeah, you know, every pastor I've had it to work with who fell into sexual sin had let their joy get low. And it's the person who came along that had some joy, was glad to be with them. It's like, boom, I'm find that irresistible. That makes sense. Addictions, they made sense in terms of here's a if people aren't joyful, uh, here's the substances and experiences that make me feel good. Um and in terms of looking at babies and mothers together, yeah, the ones that do really well are the high joy babies, then high joy mothers, this is all making sense. Then I asked myself the question, is joy anywhere in the Bible? Just a little bit. Yeah, but actually, you know, I'm an by that point I'm an ordained minister. I've got a you know degree in theology. I've spent thirty five years in the church. I never heard of it being particularly important. It's sort of like a maraschino cherry on the end of your you know dessert. If everything goes well, you get a little joy with it. But um in fact, most people said uh, you know, joy is sort of this mysterious spiritual something or another that you can't really get as a human being, but God might give you some.
Michael John CusickSo this idea it's relational is completely and a central part of God's very being. And I and I don't want to cheapen it by saying it's an aspect of his nature, because his whole nature is all woven together, you know, joy and but keep going.
Jim WilderYeah. So I really had to stop and I said, I'm gonna have to look back in the Bible and see if it's in there. And then I'm going along this last uh discourse of Jesus there just before the crucifixion, and he said, uh, you know, the disciples say to him, Oh, for the first time he's actually speaking clearly to us instead of parables. He's telling us what's really going on. And then he says, These things I've spoken to you that my joy might be in you, and that your joy might be the fullest or the largest joy possible. Now I put that back in the context of the brain. That's what I just heard of the brain was designed for. And that is what made a brain function really well was to have this relational joy and the strongest joy possible. I said, wow, if that's why he's teaching, why did it take me, you know, forty years of spiritual life to actually discover that joy was central,
not just some rare uh dessert you got later on.
Michael John CusickI think that goes back to the idea that um you can't manufacture or create joy with the left brain. Uh it has to emerge out of the right brain. So I want to come back to this because uh it it's really the thread through all of what you do. You said earlier, and I thought this was fascinating, uh that the brain needs to be taught how to be human. Unpack what you meant by that, and then um just continue on with the the left and right. And I won't throw more questions at you because I'm famous for giving like five questions at once. All right, because I'll forget the other questions if you do anyway.
Jim WilderWhen the brain is is born, it's already pre-wired to look for faces. If you can put any kind of target in front of a baby's eyes, and they will pick a face as the one they want to look at the most. And if they can look at any part of the face, they'll look at the eyes. And if they look at
any uh eyes, they will look at the left eye, and it turns out that the there are about 200 muscles around the left eye that convey joy. Your brain has two kinds of joy centers. One is in the center, which is a spontaneous relational joy. I'm glad to see you, and the other's on the outside of your brain and the cortex, and it's uh the smile for the camera kind of smile. So joy is actually a response to someone is looking at me and they're glad that I'm there. And
based around that simple experience, by the time the baby is five months old, it has discovered that there is a mind behind the face it's looking at, and that mind has thoughts and impressions, and if it follows what that other mind is doing, uh Hebb's principle, which is the brand things that fire together, wire together, it will actually learn to develop exactly the same brain circuits that that other brain is using, uh, that work together in the same ways and create the same chemistry. And basically what you have is all these spare parts in the brain running around, and the ones that get used are the ones that get strengthened, and baby spends half of its time asleep up until two and a half m years old, just rehearsing these things that it learned when it was awake, building those circuits stronger. Then at four years of age it goes through and it deletes all the things it didn't use. And that's how you end up with an accent if you learn a language later on, because the the brain cells that you needed for that language but didn't use, the brain deleted them. So now you've actually got a brain that's been shaped to run and think and operate and speak the according to the brains it duplicated. Uh my my wife and I were over in Hungary and all these little Hungarian children talking Hungarian, it's like, you know, look at how they talk Hungarian. And there's a joke uh which is more true than you'd hope, that you can only speak Hungarian if you were born there. You know, it's like you really have to shape your brain this way, or it you can't do it. Uh but they were doing it, you know, three and four years old, and yeah, we couldn't pull off a word of Hungarian hardly. You know, so it's that kind of very powerful shaping thing that develops not only language but also identity and character. We become like the ones we duplicate. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Michael John CusickSo take that uh developmental um theory and information and your analogy with language and now drop that into our relationship with God. That um rather than just Bible verses, which is left brain, and there that's important, obviously, to give us a context and a foundation, that if we have God who is looking upon us and has joy, that that's formative of something other than just our intellect.
Jim WilderYeah, it's formative for our for our character. Now the the language side is very good for error detection. So if you want to know uh how you're not operating the way that God told you to, uh language will really help you identify your errors. But if you shall not uh covet um so if I'm coveting, uh-oh, this isn't how God designed me. Okay. Right. Uh you shall not lie to
other one another. Okay, well I'm lying there. So you can pick figure those out. But now who do I become if I don't lie? Ah, now there is the attachment question. Who will I become like?
Michael John CusickAaron Ross Powell And just to clarify, you're using the word character several times um as right brain. And I think most people think of character as uh I do these things therefore I'm a good person, or I do bad things and I'm not a good person. So just uh we
could clarify that.
Jim WilderSo the uh one of the things that Dallas Willard used to talk about was loving our enemies. So he said uh instead of sin management, which is we try not to hate our enemies, uh is your first spontaneous reaction love to your enemies, or is it not? That's character, whatever your spontaneous first response is. Um character is not really quite the same as identity, because we can develop our character incorrectly.
Michael John CusickAnd so define the difference or contrast difference between character and identity.
Jim WilderSo the question of who are you going to be in 500 years is a good way to think of identity. Five hundred years from now, which takes us out past uh you know the our life expectancy. If we are with God, what will be our spontaneous thoughts and reactions and stuff like that? Because for eternity, you're going to be developing the true you. The problem is that your brain is made up of mirror neurons, and mirror neurons respond to how other people see you. So actually your brain can't perceive its own self directly in the identity system. It sees how other people see us. And so Yeah, well, here's for example. Um I was considered um one of the dumbest kids in school because I couldn't spell.
And so, in fact, uh, when I was young, it was atrocious. Uh and so uh all the other kids in school determined, and the teachers pretty much as well, that you know, this is not a very bright kid. Um and uh my family was sort of the same opinion. My uh my parents would say to me, Well, you're not really gonna make it into college, you're not as bright as the rest of the family. And so my identity then was I I'm the dumb, the dumb kid around. Uh so when I went to college, actually, somewhat by mistake, uh the one of my professors said to me, you know, looking at your stuff here, you you might want to consider being a writer. And I told him, No, I could never be a writer, I can't spell, and he looked at me like, uh I don't know what that's got to do with it, but uh you know someone saw a writer in me, and eighteen books later, it's you know, had that never been seen. And a PhD. Yeah, and a PhD and these other things. So uh now the question is when people come to si see me as a counselor, most of them were people that their parents didn't like too well. Right? But when I saw them as delightful people that you know were just developing these characteristics their family were not too fond of or weren't familiar with, they grew something crazy. You know, and so this ability to see in the other person what it is that should be growing there, if that's what God is all about, if that's what identity is about, we've got a lot of mistakes about our identity that we have going into life as adults. But the spiritual forces, the people who see us in us what God is growing, are able to actually through these mirror neurons wake up parts of our identity that we didn't even know were there, but they look much more like more like what God wanted to bring out. So my idea is that in a community, we're waking up in each other what God wants to grow, nurturing it, and we actually, you know, our character begins to be like this, you know, to match our true identity over time. Uh, because usually starting out it's a pretty bad match.
Michael John CusickI've been annoyed over the years, especially uh when I was in the thick of my addictions years ago, and people would just say, well, your identity is in Christ, and you just need to understand that. And it's very much a left-brain idea.
Jim WilderYeah.
Michael John CusickHow do we begin to internalize that with the with the life model and in your book Renovated? Um, it's all about uh this believing in Christianity versus a with God life, or the distinction that you make and Dallas Willard made between uh just being a believer and a disciple. So can you put some kind of big hooks on uh what it looks like to move from being unhealthy to healthy and and character-formed like Christ?
Jim WilderMm-hmm. Yeah. Well, uh I'd say that again we go back to the three characteristics of the of the life model at this point, and that is if you're missing
some of the basic uh relational skills the brain needs to to have, uh it's gonna be very hard to do that because you won't understand what a relational being is like. So uh one of the you know, two basic skills, for instance, are to be able to respond with joy. And um you probably have noticed yourself that the parts of the world where the troubles are the worst are very low joy environments. And so if you haven't learned a way of joy, uh the first thing your brain thinks of is that joy is a blessed miracle that might come across every once in a while like rain in the desert, as opposed to as a a normal way of life.
So we have to learn that that's the nor normal, that's a brain thing you have to learn. Uh but then the second thing you need to know is that learning how to be human has human models, so there's other people I can I can learn from. So being part of that human community, those are just those lower level things, but then your brain has to learn the third thing is to recognize a thought from God when it goes through your head. One of the things I've discovered over the years is God is constantly giving thoughts to everybody, but most people don't bother to notice them. It goes through their head, but it's like that wasn't important. They don't recognize the voice, they don't recognize the source. And when you have God talking to you, there's a very peculiar effect, and that is if you stop and notice it, it strikes you as deeply true in a way that just makes you quiet and peaceful inside. Like, oh that fit things together in a way, you know. Uh I remember talking to one person who had very, very uh racially prejudiced and so I was just teaching him to stop and um listen to God's thoughts. And after one of these times when he stopped and listened to God's thoughts, he came running up to me. He said, You know what? God just told me that I have been a fool. He said, Now if you had told me that, I would never have taken that from you. But he did it without hurting my feelings. It just when he said to me it felt really true. I understood it, I looked at it and go, Yeah, that that is foolish, that isn't what I should be doing. And it changed his entire perspective around, uh, even though it was a correction, uh, in a way, and and it I could see it within minutes he was treating other people differently. Wow. Yeah. So these are the kinds of things we want to have uh informing who we really are and allowing that to be corrected. Then your brain has can remember that and it helps you the next time.
Michael John CusickAaron Ross Powell You talked about that in Renovated as well, this idea of correction. You didn't write this phrase, but we live in this culture where everybody gets a trophy and you know everything is okay, and not everything is okay. You know, if you bang your head against the wall, you're you're gonna get brain damage. Um but the the correction um very consistent with Jesus as the revelation of God, it's with kindness and it's always speaking to something that's true as opposed to something that's not true, like you're never gonna go to college and your spelling problem, you know, it's impossible for you to be a writer. Yeah.
Jim WilderThe uh the the thing that com sort of complicates it is your brain actually has a correction circuit in it, uh, and it only corrects itself if it feels something is sort of unpleasant or painful, and the correction circuit is called shame. Uh now most of the time shame in our culture is so toxic
that it just only tells you what's wrong with you, and that'll that's just really debilitating. But um shame when it's used healthy way is said that's not you, this is you. And so it it it points you directly in the right direction. So when uh Paul is talking to Titus, he says, Now teach the older women not to be diabolos. Uh devils. Devils, yes. And accusers is the word. Accuser is somebody who says everything that you did wrong is the real you. Uh and you have to learn that your if your culture's used to doing that, you have to switch that around. So you can say, Well, that's not the real you, here's the real you. You know, Paul says in former times some of you were thieves, but now you have learned to work with your hands and have something good to give to other people. So instead of being someone that's taking from others, your same hands are using, you know, creating something to give to others. So that that's a good shame message. It says, that's not you, here's the real you. When those things happen together, now we've got some growth happening.
Michael John CusickAaron Powell I'm so glad you brought up the topic of shame because uh and honestly I struggled with this in the book, but I'm chewing on it. I've taught uh kind of the classic definition of shame psychologically, distinction between guilt and shame, guilt as I've I've done bad shame as I am bad, and I've I've uh played with the language a lot. There's there's people that talk about legitimate shame and illegitimate shame, or toxic shame and healthy shame. Um but I I I think I'm gravitating back toward this idea that there's shame that actually reveals the and or the more, that uh by definition of saying this is what I feel, that's actually implicitly saying there's something to you beyond this. You're better than this, if you will. It feels dangerous, though, if we don't have the voice speaking what's true and if we if we're not seen.
Jim WilderOh yes.
Uh your brain will go into toxic shape uh if you go more than 90 seconds without the what's true to begin with. And to also just help with this particular discussion or make it worse, whichever the case is. The left hemisphere shame is different than the right hemisphere shame. Interesting. The right hemisphere shame is one that you get in response to someone's face sort of dropping like, oh my goodness. Uh it's that's not making me happy. Uh and that's a very common experience. You know, we if we bring somebody sorrow instead of joy, we should respond with feeling like, oh, that wasn't right, that wasn't what I was hoping for. The left hemisphere shame is always secondary to a thought. That's the difference a w an idea. So the idea that I'm no good, the feeling that follows that follows a thought. And every time you strengthen a left hemisphere emotion, you increase the error. Whereas the fur right hemisphere emotion, well that didn't bring you joy, raises the question, well, what would actually make our relationship better? So the left side is always dangerous, and when you're running conscious thought, that's yeah, it never helps. So you're absolutely right. But the other side, the right hemisphere side, is secured by an attachment. That is, well, that didn't make me very happy, but we're still together. I'm here with you, and I will help us have a good relationship in spite of it.
Michael John CusickThat is the side we're looking for to like the man who said, God said you're acting like a fool, and he could hear that because of the safety that he had known and experienced, and then it became something that you you use the word correction, but I think of it as life giving as opposed to uh That he withered or collapsed and fell in on himself. So when Romans I like to quote this because we all know the verse in Romans where it says, if you believe in your heart and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, you'll be saved, and then the next verse says, For anyone who trusts will never be put to shame. That would be the left brain shame. Yeah. Okay. That's really, really helpful. You talk about wholeness so much because this this maturity, this character is being a whole person. And you made the statement that I loved that wholeness doesn't happen quickly and that it takes a lot longer than we think to get there. So first,
what is wholeness and why does it take so long?
Jim WilderWell, I think it'd be safe to say there's two reasons it takes so long. One is always intended to be. So if you had a baby that was born and three days later they're fully 70 years old in every way, you'd go, oh man, this is completely wrong. Point well taken. Benjamin Button. Yeah. Or kind of. Whatever it is, right. We were meant to actually be eternal beings. And as far as uh I can tell, this growth potential is always there. It doesn't get freeze-dried at some point.
Michael John CusickSo we're going to grow into eternity.
Jim WilderYeah.
Michael John CusickSo a lot of times I hear people going, well, when I'm you know, when I'm in heaven, the minute I die and I'm with Jesus, they quote, when we see him, we will be like him. We're perfect, you know, and we but this unpacking and becoming will be eternal.
Jim WilderThat's how I read the text. Uh and uh first of all, I think it might be rather boring if we just never learned the whole n a thing. Uh well how would we explore all of this? God's got to be enormously diverse, complex, and interesting, and so there must be some room there. But also if you just read the text and revelation of what's life on in heaven, there's this interaction, they're asking questions, they're looking at things, they're they're teaching things uh to each other, the elders come over and talk to John and explain things to him because that seems to be a normal function up there. Uh
what's perfect is that those things that have kept us from learning are out of the way. But not that the learning is over. So that's kind of the the long view of it. So that's it's meant to be long. The other part of it is that uh with with identity uh we're sort of, uh Paul says, sort of looking in a glass darkly. We're trying to figure out what's really going on inside in a way that is, you know, it's very hard to see who we really are inside. And so we're very prone to having lots of mistakes that need to be healed and removed. And so the this process of we take it it's like healing something physical. You take out the glass that's stuck into your hand, and it'll be a while healing back up after that, even though the healing is part of a normal process. And and to great degree I look at human beings as all having gone through the windshield of life and sin and having our faces full of glass and trying to figure out from that what should a face look like? You know, they're all pretty mangled uh and it's really hard to construct this idea of what would if we looked like God meant us to look like. Yeah, you know, this to me is one of those moments I was up in the high Sierras backpacking, look just enjoying those enormous and fantastic trees up there, and I heard uh uh God speaking to me rather clearly, more than usual. He said, Um, you've never seen a tree. And I'm looking around at these trees and what are you talking about? He said, These trees are nothing like the trees I created. And I knew he wasn't talking about trees. Uh and I thought about it, yeah. I when I look at other human beings, uh I see some that I admire a lot, but there's none of them that were just the way he was cre we were created. And so together we're looking into that mystery. We accompany each other on that, we resonate with, yeah, I can see in there what you just said God saw, and it helps our brain to grow. So the the mystery is that if we don't let God see us, we'll never become more than what human beings see. And the other side is if other human beings don't see what God sees, our brain can't really learn that and turn it into something solid. So we need both sides.
Michael John CusickSo wholeness is this place of becoming more and more Christ-like. Is it also an integration of our left and right brains?
Jim WilderYeah, as a matter of fact, uh we would go f I would go even farther than that. So not only do we integrate our left and right brains, but we have to spread out into our whole body because a lot of our nervous system isn't even in our brain. It's connected to our body systems. And then our brain is actually capable of mutual mind with other human beings, so we have a way in which our brain thinks as a group. So our integration is our left and our right brain and our whole body, and then moving out into the group of people that we're connected with and we're thinking with them as well. And that's getting considerably beyond the Western world view.
Michael John CusickRight. Good segue to where we started before this interview, and that is talking about the church
and community. What is the role of the church and community in this developmental maturation process where it seems like we're just scratching the surface to understand that you can't separate emotional health and spiritual health? What's the role of the church and community?
Jim WilderWell, the first thing would be that it actually is a community. It's not an entertainment center, it's not a uh shopping center for spiritual events. It's it's a community of people who actually are forming uh a people, a lifelong attachment uh here that is actually continued into eternity. So this idea that we're forming attachments with other people that are meant to endure for all eternity
is quite alien to the way we generally do church. And the the second thing is that we're actually nurturing that growth in other people. So one of the things I very often have a chance to do is talk with men who are frustrated with their wives. Um and I said, Well, you read the part about how Christ loved the church, right? They say, Yeah, I mean I have to put up with her all the time. No, I said, you know, the church most of the time doesn't know what who they're supposed to be. So are we people who look at other parts and go say, Well, I'm not too surprised that you can malfunction, but I'm here to help you become who you were meant to be. I remember one time my wife was uh thinking about leaving me. We had in particular rough go of it, and I thought to myself, you know, you never leave your encouragers. So I don't know who she's going to become, but I want to encourage her to become everything that God means her to be. And if I'm her greatest greatest encouragement rather than trying to control her, I'm gonna be a source of life. And it's kind of open ended because it you can't guarantee that's gonna turn out well. But are we looking at each other as a community and going, you know what? God has you here for a reason, and I'm gonna find out what that is, and I'm gonna be part of making that come alive. That's how I think of the church as a as a you know now it's actually a community, it's a multi-generational community of life intended to not leave the world in the same shape it found it.
Michael John CusickWell, as we wrap up, I just want to say thank you to you, Jim, for uh for your stewardship of uh despite early on spelling skills and being told you'd never go to school, to to take what you learned in your doctorate and your uh Do you have a divinity degree or theology degree? I thought so. Uh from Fuller as well. From Fuller. So all of that training and uh going a direction that has been a little bit well, a lot countercultural within Christianity. And um it seems as if you've been someone who has been for years laying down tracks that now others are kind of coming along and driving the train on that. Uh so thank you for that. Uh thanks for writing your most recent book, Renovated with Nav Press. Subtitle again is God Dallas Willard and Churches That Transform Renovated. Uh so thanks for being here, and I hope you can come back now that I know you're in Evergreen.
Jim WilderYes, well, I'd
be very delighted to do that. Thank you for this time, Michael.
Brian BeattySo we've wrapped up another episode of Restoring the Soul. We want you to know that Restoring the Soul is so much more than a podcast. In fact, the heart of what we have done for nearly 20 years is intensive counseling. When you can't wait months or years to get out of the rut you're in, our intensive counseling programs in Colorado allow you to experience deep change in half day blocks over two weeks. To learn more, visit restoring the soul.com. That's restoring the soul dot com.