Slides for chapter 9 from class and discussion about Dallas Willard's Renovation of the Heart.

1. Wednesday Night Class
Renovation of the Heart:
Putting on the Character of Christ
October 28, 2020
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2. Chapter 10:
Transforming Our Social
Dimension
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3. Circles of Sufficiency
• The natural condition for humans “is one of reciprocal
rootedness in others.”
• “When the required type of ‘for-ness’ is adequately
present, human ‘circles of sufficiency’ emerge. The
most fundamental form is that of a mother and child.”
• Though they are natural and essential, they are illusory
and fragile.
• The smaller circles of sufficiency depend on larger
circles.
• Only when rooted in the divine, can broken people in
broken circles recover from wounds and find
wholeness.
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4. The Reality of Rejection
• We have all experienced rejection,
being left out, not received, not
welcomed or being seen as not
acceptable.
• A child not received well by parents
can have a devastating impact on
them.
• Severe wounds are not limited to the
early years and can come later in life.
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5. The Two Basic Forms of Evil in Relation to
Others
• As we then look at spiritual formation in this next
dimension of self—the social dimension—we
have to start from woundedness.
• Two forms of the “poisons of sin in our social
dimension.”
– assault (or attack)
– withdrawal (or distancing)
• While assault and withdrawal will always be
present in the world, we as transformed
individuals can learn to live without them.
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6. Understanding Assault and Withdrawal
• Assault: acting against what is good for
someone, even with their consent (e.g.
seduction). Examples would be the last six of
the Ten Commandments.
• Withdrawal: regarding the well-being and
goodness of someone as matters of indifference
to us; perhaps even to the point of despising
them. Apathy.
• Assault and withdrawal primarily involve our
relations to those close to us. Those we see on
a regular basis (family, co-workers, community).
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7. Spiritual Formation Is Necessarily Social
• Spiritual formation in whatever direction, is always social. It’s
not “just between me and God.”
• “For all that is between me and God affects who I am; and
that, in turn, modifies my relationship to everyone around
me. My relationship to others also modifies me and deeply
affects my relationship to God. Hence those relationships
must be transformed if I am to be transformed.”
• A picture of Jesus’s vision for how we are to love one
another.
– 1 John 2:7-11
– 1 John 3:11-18
• Love is not a feeling but a divine way of relating to others
and oneself and structures our world for good.
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8. Love Deeply Rooted in Human Nature
• The life of a human being is one of
relating to others.
• Mother Teresa example
• This social dimension mixes with the
other dimensions.
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9. God Is Love
• This level of transformation is something that
can actually happen.
• The good news is not just that God loves us
but rather he is love and sustains his love for
us from his basic reality as love.
• Just like God, the nature of personality is
inherently communal.
• Humans are really only together in God. All
other attempts at this fall short,
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10. One Nation Under God?
• Pledge of allegiance includes phrase “one
nation under God.”
• Only through a biblical vision can someone
really understand or imagine this as a
possibility.
• Sin structures embedded in our souls and
bodies have rendered us unable to have
these relationships we long for and what
God meant them to be.
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11. One Nation Under God?
• Larry Crabb quote:
– When two people connect, when their beings
intersect as closely as two bodies during
intercourse, something is poured out of one
and into the other that has power to heal the
soul of its deepest wounds and restore it to
health. The one who receives experiences the
joy of being healed. The one who gives knows
the even greater joy of being used to heal.
Something good is in the heart of each of God’s
children that is more powerful than everything
bad. It’s there, waiting to be released, to work
its magic. 11

12. Spiritual Formation in Christ Would Make It So
• “The power of life in Christ is seldom realized, but spiritual
formation in him, carried to fulfillment, would mean that what
Crabb describes would routinely happen between Christ’s
people.”
• Members of the church nourishing other members of the
church with the transcendent power that raised Christ from
the dead is the meaning of the church being the body of
Christ.
• “This must happen within the imperfect communities and
congregations available to us now. But the new life can and
must eventually transform the entire social dimension of our
self toward the heavenly future in which we shall know as we
are now known by God—‘where every book shall lie open to
one another.’”
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13. Thoroughly Understanding the Wrongness
• The centrality of assault is the will to make another
suffer and suffer loss. Spiritual formation in Christ will
mean becoming a person who would not assault those
in whom they stand in relation.
• There are ways of assaulting that merge into the
withdrawal side of wrongness.
• We can verbally assault someone with a cutting remark
or harassment. This can be detrimental. But the tongue
can be used to wound by not speaking; withdrawal.
• Our social life is meant to be constant and mutual
blessing.
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14. Our Current Coldness Is Not Normal
• “Could the epidemic of addictions and dysfunctions
from which the masses suffer possibly be related to the
fact that we are constantly in the presence of people
who are withdrawn from us, who don’t want to
acknowledge we are there and frankly would feel more
at ease if we weren’t—people who in many cases
explicitly reject us and feel it only right to do so? Isn’t
the desperate need for approval that drives people so
relentlessly today—causing them to go to foolish and
self-destructive lengths to be ‘attractive’ or at least to
get attention—nothing but the echo of a lost world of
constant mutual welcome and blessing in family,
neighborhood, school, and work?”
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15. The Centrality of Families
• Willard says that it is especially in
families and those we are closest to
that we must break our assault and
withdrawal.
• Marriage
• The “Market” Approach to Marriage
• The Devastation of Children
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16. Minister to Marriage
• The visible churches, congregations of
apprentices to Jesus, must return to the
transcendent power of Christ for which
they stand. They must drain the assault
and withdrawal, the attack and
coldness, from the individual men and
women who form families under their
ministry of Jesus and his kingdom.
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17. Main Elements in Spiritual Formation of Our
Social Dimension
• Practical steps: four major elements of
transformation
• His ranking for where they need to be
seen:
– Family relationships of those who lead and
teach
– The context of the redemptive local
gathering
– Conjugal relationships and families arising
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18. Receiving God’s Vision of Our Wholeness in
Him
• First step: Individuals come to see
themselves as whole, as God himself
sees them.
• With this vision, people can move past
wounds they have received in past
relationships with others.
• While this vision of ourselves is
important, we must also see others as
God sees them.
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19. Defensiveness Gone
• Second step: abandonment of all
defensiveness
• This includes a willingness to be
known in our most intimate
relationships for who we really are.
• We do not follow strategies for
“looking good.”
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20. Genuine Love Predominates in Our Gatherings
• Third step: all pretense would vanish
from our lives
• Romans 12:3-21
• Fourth step: an opening up of our
broader social dimension to redemption
• This transformation is only possible with
the power of God.
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21. Next Week:
Chapter 11:
Transforming the Soul
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22. Matters for Thought and Discussion
• 2. How does rejection affect us? Why does it affect us as it
does? Can you recall an occasion, perhaps as a child or
youth, when you rejected someone and how they
responded?
• 3. Do assault and withdrawal cover the field of the evils
people do to others? Think about the role these play in
ordinary life. Is it possible to disagree with or correct others
without assault or withdrawal?
• 10. Do you agree that redemption of the marriage relation is
central to any hope for transforming our broader social
situation today? Or is that just “too much” to put on man–
woman relationships?
• 11. How can we come to “see ourselves whole in God’s life,”
and how would that help heal our social dimension?
• 12. Could Paul’s picture of the redemptive fellowship of
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