In , co-authored with his wife and psychology colleague, Todd Hall and Liz Hall, lay out a new way of looking at spirituality that takes into account insights not only from the Bible, but also from psychology and the neurosciences. Join Scott and Sean for this insightful look at spiritual formation.

Todd Hall is professor of psychology at Rosemead School of Psychology, Å·²©ÍøÖ·. He is the author of numerous journal articles, specializing in the spiritual formation of Christian college students.



Episode Transcript

Scott Rae: Welcome to Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture. It's a podcast from Talbot School of Theology here at Å·²©ÍøÖ·. I'm your host, Scott Rae, Dean of Faculty and Professor of Christian Ethics.

Sean McDowell: And I'm your co-host, Sean McDowell, Professor of Apologetics.

Scott Rae: We have the opportunity to have a dear trusted faculty colleague with us, who's done some groundbreaking research on the whole notion of spirituality and how best to pursue spirituality in a way that's actually transformative and not just sort of repeating what we've been doing in the past.

Scott Rae: Professor Todd Hall is with us. He's Professor of Psychology at Å·²©ÍøÖ·'s Rosemead School of Psychology. He and his wife, Liz, have written this really terrific book that we want to recommend to you called Relational Spirituality, where he blends psychology, neuroscience, theology, biblical studies, all together, really nicely into, I think, a new and different view of spirituality that we desperately need to hear about today.

Scott Rae: So, Todd, so grateful to have you with us and tell Liz too, we're grateful for her contribution to this as well. So, thanks for being with us. And tell us, first of all, what do you mean by the term relational spirituality? Is that really something new? Because I thought spirituality was all about a relationship to Jesus. But you're saying it's a whole lot more than that.

Todd Hall: Yes. Yes. Well, first of all, thanks God, it's so great to be with you and Sean, really appreciate this opportunity. Yeah, I think in some ways relational spirituality is new. In some ways it's building on a lot of research that has been growing over the past really 40, 50 years, which is what I try to piece together and sort of integrate.

Todd Hall: But yes, I think, certainly spirituality is about relationship with Jesus, relationship with God. But there is more to it and psychology and neuroscience, as you mentioned, helps us to understand how we grow and develop in relationships. So, the term relational spirituality really refers to a broad model or paradigm that suggests that human beings are fundamentally relational. That's a primary aspect of what it means to be created in the image of God. And that the goal of sanctification is a relational goal. And so I refer or that in the book as loving presence. And that the process of how we get there is a relational process. And that we grow in love for God and others primarily through relationships.

Sean McDowell: Part of what you're reacting to in your book, relational spirituality is what might be called a rationalistic spirituality. What do we mean by that? Where did it come from? And how does this overly reductionistic rational view affect the way we relate to God?

Todd Hall: Yeah, Sean, there's a longstanding assumption or rationalistic approach to spirituality that basically holds if we just learn enough about God and enough about scripture in our head, so head knowledge, that spiritual growth and maturity will automatically happen as a result of that. And I think there's a growing recognition in the church that that model is outdated and truncated, that it doesn't tell the whole story.

Todd Hall: In terms of where it comes from, there's a longstanding history of that. And I trace that in chapter one, but briefly the Reader's Digest version is that, in the early church, the pursuit of conceptual or head knowledge, whatever you want to call that, was generally speaking pursuit as an integral part of a deeper knowing of God, a deeper relational knowledge of God. And then over time that became split apart.

Todd Hall: So, there's a lot of historical forces that led to that. But a couple of the key ones are the development of scholastic theology in the middle ages with a heavy focus on logic. And then the enlightenment with a heavy focus on the new science that was developing. And that was imported into our approach to scripture. Then, the split between the liberal-conservative split in the late 1800s, early 1900s led to the conservative group understandably focusing on doctrine and sort of the boundaries of doctrine. So, that led to a focus on explicit or head knowledge, which was important, but left some gaps in our understanding of the relational dimensions of spiritual growth.

Scott Rae: So, Todd, a lot of your background in psychology has been, I think, really helpful in understanding the spiritual journey and you've done a lot of research on the spiritual journeys of college students, particularly in Christian colleges. But I think what's new, as I'm reading your book, is the emphasis on what the neurosciences have helped us, how they helped us understand spirituality. How has that contribution been significant in your own research on spirituality?

Todd Hall: Yeah, yeah. Both psychology broadly, as well as neuroscience have helped us to understand that early relationships with caregivers, with emotionally significant people in our life, that those experiences are imprinted in our brain and remembered in a form of gut level or implicit memory. And those memories then guide and shape the way we experience relationships, the way we relate to others. And it does this all outside of our conscious awareness. So, it's very powerful and we have to sort of tune into that. And it's something that gets missed a lot, I think, in the church. And that comes from neuroscience and psychology.

Sean McDowell: You maintain that we were "created to connect." What's the evidence for that? And what bearing does that have on our view of spirituality?

Todd Hall: Yeah, Sean. So, there's a lot of evidence that I take a look at in chapter three in the book, that we're created to connect. Some of that comes from infant research. Prior to the 1970s, infant researchers thought that infants were born sort of non-relational and that they grow into being relational. And we've since learned that infants are incredibly relational from day one, even in utero, there's evidence that infants remember implicitly, again, their mother's voice, for example.

Todd Hall: So, there's a lot of research in the area of infant research, probably the biggest area would be attachment research, which I think I just mentioned, there's a whole body of research on attachment that shows that, again, the types of experiences that we have with early caregivers gets imprinted. We remember that. And that predicts all kinds of outcomes in every area of life.

Todd Hall: So, people who experience secure attachment and internalize that, again, through this implicit memory, have better outcomes in terms of educational outcomes, social outcomes, relationships, marital outcomes, physical health, and mental health. So, back to spirituality, Sean, if we're defining and thinking about spirituality within this relational framework or relational endeavor of growing and love for God and other people, then this whole idea that we're created to connect has a huge impact. It suggests that God designed us for relationships and that we really need to focus on and pay attention to this research and understanding how we grow and develop. Because it's not just, I mean, it is psychology, but it also is intrinsically part of our spirituality, how we love others.

Scott Rae: Todd, I know it's been sort of a longstanding tradition that our notion of spiritual formation primarily is for our relationship to God. And that scripture is really all we need for that. Have you gotten some resistance to your work on integrating psychology and the neurosciences into this sort of predominant view of spirituality?

Todd Hall: Yeah, I think there's some resistance, Scott. I do think it has lessened over the past 20 or 30 years, which has been encouraging to see. But there is some resistance still in some sectors of the church. And I think part of that comes from this typical view of spirituality that you mentioned, Scott, this more rationalistic view, it allows us to have a sense of control. It presents a very linear model of how we grow and there's a sense of control.

Todd Hall: So, when you bring in this new view that growing in our love for God and love for others is kind of a messy relational process and it's not linear, that really can kind of shatter our sense of control. So, I think there's some understandable reasons why there's resistance there, but the hope is that we can push through that and develop this in the church.

Scott Rae: Although this does make a little more sense why Jesus paired the two great commandments together like He did, and that loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and strength. And the second commandment is like it. I think what He meant by that is it's equally integral. So, loving your neighbor as yourself. So, those two are connected.

Todd Hall: They're all intertwined. Exactly.

Scott Rae: Yeah. Now, one other thing that I think we've been skeptical about in the past is the place of emotions. And we've often viewed emotions as disruptive or as unreliable things, you can't trust your emotions in favor of rationality. But you have really a different take on that. I mean, you describe it as the emotion revolution in your book. So, what do you mean by that and how do emotions fit into our understanding of spirituality?

Todd Hall: Yeah. Yeah. So, I think, first of all, we have to understand what emotion really is. We tend to, in the church, oftentimes, think of it as just mood or something like that. And that emotions as mood can just sort of take us astray. But really emotion from a deeper perspective is the way we evaluate the meaning of events for our wellbeing. And it happens automatically. It's processed primarily in the right brain, very rapidly, outside of our conscious awareness.

Todd Hall: So, when you look at emotion that way, what I'm trying to say in the book is that emotion reflects an underlying meaning system. So I'm not saying that you always just go with your emotions or mood. What I am saying is that emotion is the starting place for transformation, that you can't bypass that. It reveals this underlying meaning system, it reveals how we view ourselves at this deep implicit level and how we view God as well. So, that's the starting point for transformation.

Todd Hall: And it's an integral part of the growth process. Also, emotions are very helpful. They have what we call action tendencies built in. They motivate us to take action. Sometimes they can be off and they need to be rewired, but generally they reveal our meaning system.

Sean McDowell: So, what would that look like? Because if we're doing systematic, rational theology, it's pretty much easy to say, "Well, you got a faulty view of the Trinity. You don't understand the end times. Here's the role of the Holy Spirit." There's cognitive ways we can control and kind of fix the process, but emotions get a little bit more messy and seem to be outside of our control. So practically speaking, what would it look like to try to rewire those to develop spiritual health?

Todd Hall: Yeah. So, that involves, in a nutshell, new relational experiences. So, when a person for example has... Let's say they grow up with a father who's abusive or neglectful and they have certain kind of experiences that wires attachment system to expect those same experiences with other important people in their life, as well as with God.

Todd Hall: So, those experiences have to be rewired through new relational experiences. So, that's the code, if you will, in which it operates. So, explicit knowledge or head knowledge helps to guide us, it helps to interpret these experiences, but the direct transformation happens through new relational experiences that sort of challenge those old painful experiences in a positive way.

Sean McDowell: That's so interesting and helpful, because one of our mutual friends, Mark Matlock, some time ago just gave an example with me that he was talking about difference between implicit and explicit knowledge. And you talk about this in the book, but the example that he gave was related to relativism, how it's believed so much by young people. And we tend to say, "Well, it's faulty views that they have." And he says, "Actually, there's a connection between having broken relationships and lacking community and embracing certain things like relativism."

Sean McDowell: So, if we want to help someone to understand truth, there's a cognitive fix and kind of a relational fix. Now, talk about this distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge, because I'm an apologist and we tend to focus on explicit knowledge. But oftentimes, like you say, implicit knowledge can be equally, if not more powerful in the way we relate to God and other people.

Todd Hall: Right. Right. Yeah. So, there's an author, Michael Rousell who has a phrase that he says, "Emotion is the rule, rationality is the tool." So, emotion, again, when we think of it as the way we evaluate meaning automatically operates outside our conscious awareness, four times faster than conscious thinking. So, by the time we have conscious thoughts and beliefs, they're already thoroughly informed by this deep emotion system. So you have to get to that, to your point, to really have a deeper transformation.

Scott Rae: So, why is it that we spend so much of our time and energy in tempting spiritual transformation by just teaching people about it? Why don't we recognize this implicit knowledge as being so important in the process of spiritual transformation?

Todd Hall: Yeah, it's a great question, Scott. I think part of it, again, goes back to the history that we talked about of, there was a need to kind of defend doctrine, understandably, and a focus on explicit knowledge there. But I think then that led to, again, this gap in understanding the messy relational processes. So, that's part of what I started to learn as I got into psychology, became a clinical psychologist, started doing therapy.

Todd Hall: And I started to see that, to a person, my clients who have experienced painful, early emotional experiences, abuse, trauma, those things always played out in their experience of God. And I think part of the answer to that question, Scott, is that we have a thin model and understanding of this deep process within the church. So, many leaders in the church have not really experienced it and been trained in it, and have difficulty seeing it.

Scott Rae: It's part of that too, just because we're uncomfortable with messy relational things. And maybe to add to that, we just don't have the patience to realize that we're in a long game here when it comes to spiritual transformation. And especially if those early traumatic unattached experiences need to be rewired in the brain, that's not a short-term fix.

Todd Hall: Right. Yes. That's a great point. It is. I think that's some of the psychological reasons why this is difficult in the church. Yeah. That it is messy. It takes a lot of patience and a lot of grace and we, understandably, naturally, we want quick fixes. I mean, and that's part of our culture, I mean, this focus on quick fixes and information transfer and that's been kind of imported into the church.

Todd Hall: So, oftentimes you see in the church, people who are really struggling, they might go to a church leader or pastor, and pretty quickly they get to a point of, "I'm not sure what to do with this person." And then they get maybe referred out or the person leaves. So, it does take a lot of patience. I think the starting point for that is just understanding this process that it's a marathon, it's a long process to rewire someone's connection, especially if there's been trauma or abuse or those kinds of things

Sean McDowell: Are some of those experiences that somebody has trauma when they're younger, sometimes in terms of implicitly, before they even recognize that there was a kind of abuse, you said it's a marathon, but in some ways, does the data show that certain people, their ceiling will just be limited a little bit in their ability to connect with people and connect with God because of those experiences? Does the data show that? How do we incorporate that into the way we disciple people?

Todd Hall: Yeah, I think, overall, so one of the transformations we've seen in neuroscience is understanding what's called the plasticity of the brain. The brain continues to develop throughout life. 50 years ago, the view was the brain develops until maybe 25 and then it stops. But now we know the brain can continue to develop and regenerate. And of course, that's just sort of the mechanism for the change in the soul.

Todd Hall: So, change is always possible, but this view does suggest, again, the idea that it's a long haul and that early experiences that are damaging, especially when they occur during periods where the parts of the brain that process social and emotional information are going thr