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The Transformative Power of Relational Spirituality
In an age where loneliness has become a public health epidemic and digital connection often substitutes for genuine human interaction, Todd W. Hall's "Relational Spirituality" arrives as a timely antidote. This groundbreaking work has been hailed by renowned psychologist Curt Thompson as a "masterpiece" and has gained popularity among spiritual leaders seeking to address the growing "connection crisis" in contemporary Christianity. The book's approach resonates particularly with millennials and Gen Z believers who find traditional rationalistic approaches to faith insufficient for their spiritual development. By integrating cutting-edge neuroscience with trinitarian theology, Hall offers a revolutionary framework that transforms how we understand spiritual growth-not as mere knowledge acquisition but as a profound relational journey toward loving presence.
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The Split Between Theology and Spirituality: A Historical Wound
For the early church, theology wasn't an abstract intellectual exercise but a deeply experiential way of knowing God. Theologia represented a unified approach where intellectual exploration remained inseparable from personal relationship with God. Until the thirteenth century, practical knowledge was viewed as foundational for theology and Christian life-intellectual reflection wasn't pursued for its own sake but to grow in experiential knowledge of God and capacity to love.
This unity began fracturing during the Middle Ages. Boethius (480-525) applied Aristotelian logic to theological issues with a novel emphasis on pure reason, planting seeds for a rationalistic theology that would eventually reduce divine mysteries to what could be comprehended by the rational mind alone. By the mid-12th century, Aristotle's "new logic" had revolutionized teaching methods, establishing question-and-disputation as the fundamental approach to theological education. The spiritual emphasis of monastic culture gradually yielded to a scientific approach to theology.
The Enlightenment project further cemented this split by seeking to free human knowing from reliance on God and subjectivity. Anything beyond reason was relegated to the inferior domain of faith. In America, Enlightenment ideals created a unique synthesis between empirical science and evangelical Christianity. Charles Hodge defined theology as the scientific collection of biblical truths, treating the Bible as a "store-house of facts" to be approached like natural philosophy.
This historical split has produced what Richard Lovelace called "the sanctification gap"-a disconnect between Christians' explicit theological knowledge and their actual spiritual growth. The fundamentalist-modernist controversy exacerbated this problem, as fundamentalists focused narrowly on correct doctrine while de-emphasizing social justice. This created an ethos where spiritual growth became about believing correct doctrine rather than developing deep implicit beliefs embodied in love.
To heal this wound, we need to recapture the notion that explicit theology is inseparable from our implicit spirituality-our experiential knowing of God. What holds them together is the relational goal of loving God and neighbor.
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The Image of God: A Relational Foundation
Christian theologians throughout history have sought answers to theological anthropology in the biblical concept of the imago Dei-the profound notion that every person is created in God's image. While the imago Dei has been central to Christian anthropology, theologians have not agreed on its meaning. Two broad views have emerged: the structural-rational view and the dynamic relational view.
The structural-rational view, dominant until the Reformation, interprets the imago Dei as characteristics built into the soul, emphasizing rationality. The dynamic relational view, initiated by Luther and Calvin, understands the divine image as a fundamental relationship between humans and God-an activity rather than static capacities.
With the revival of trinitarian theology in the twentieth century, the dynamic relational view took on a trinitarian flavor. Karl Barth's "rediscovery" of the Trinity sparked this shift. Barth saw the imago Dei as continuing after the fall in human existence itself. His exegesis of Genesis led him to conclude that just as the Trinity exists in relationship, humans image God by being created male and female-an "I" and "Thou" confronting each other as a parable of divine nature.
Contemporary trinitarian theology has fostered a renewed understanding of God's intrinsic relationality, informing a more nuanced view of the imago Dei. Key themes include: sharing in the mutual love of the Trinity through koinonia (communion) and perichoresis (interpenetration); the concept of theosis as participation in divine life; and understanding the image as expressed in the social-ecclesial self.
This trinitarian-relational view of the image of God has profound implications for spiritual transformation. If God is a relational, loving being, then we truly need each other-in individual relationships and community-to reflect God and become who He intended us to be.
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Created to Connect: The Neurobiology of Relationship
We are profoundly relational beings, with close relationships being more important to mortality rates than smoking, obesity, or physical activity. God created us prewired to connect, which aligns with the biblical concept of the image of God. Contemporary research across numerous fields confirms this relational paradigm of human development.
Developmental science has revolutionized our understanding of infants, revealing them to be amazingly relational from birth. As psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott noted, "there is no such thing as an infant" apart from the baby-mother relational matrix. Research shows infants are born with three key relational capacities: they can "catch" others' emotions, they both influence and are influenced by relational interactions, and they innately anticipate and develop complex implicit models of how interactions will unfold.
Studies with lab rats, rhesus monkeys, and human infants demonstrate our prewired ability to respond to others' suffering. Rats will rescue distressed companions, and monkeys will even starve themselves to prevent harm to others. Human infants cry when hearing other babies cry and attempt to comfort them by 14 months.
Attachment is a special kind of relationship-a deep connection between caregiver and child that forms an invisible bond supported by a literal brain-to-brain linkup. When children are hurt, they don't seek comfort from random adults-they run to their specific attachment figures. To be securely attached means someone has signed up to look out for you, to always be for you. These attachment relationships remain significant throughout life, serving the same functions of secure base and safe haven.
The traditional nature-versus-nurture debate has imploded as scientists now recognize that development results from the interaction between experience and unfolding genetic potential. Genes serve two functions: filtering information passed to the next generation and determining when genes are expressed through protein synthesis. Crucially, this transcription function is influenced by relational experiences, which directly impact how neurons connect to form neural networks.
Neuroscience reveals that our brains are designed to connect directly with others through emotional contagion. When we see someone's facial expression, it travels through our thalamus directly to our amygdala via the "low road," mimicking their emotions in our own body before reaching higher cortical processing systems. This allows us to "catch" others' feelings by creating similar feelings within ourselves.
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Relational Knowledge: Beyond Rationalism
We are created for loving connections with God and others, and designed to grow through these relationships. Two fundamentally distinct ways of knowing shape our spiritual lives: implicit (gut-level, intuitive) knowledge and explicit (analytic, propositional) knowledge.
Just as the Enlightenment led to a rationalistic approach to knowledge and spirituality, it similarly produced a view in neuroscience that disparaged emotions. The cognitive revolution that emerged mid-twentieth century intentionally excluded emotion, viewing it as an illogical disrupting force inferior to cognitive processes.
In recent decades, an "emotion revolution" has emerged from converging theories in psychology and neuroscience. Contrary to earlier views, emotion is now understood as a broad organizing force in human functioning that provides context of meaning for all information processing.
Emotion functions as a sensory modality providing information about our internal state as it interprets external events. Unlike other senses, emotion is internally directed-only you can directly experience your emotions. What your emotion systems perceive is subjective, based partly on implicit bodily memories of past experiences.
Emotion functions as the foundation of implicit knowledge, which differs from explicit knowledge in being less directly accessible to conscious awareness. Wilma Bucci's multiple code theory identifies three levels of emotional information processing: subsymbolic emotional processing and nonverbal symbolic processing (both implicit), and verbal symbolic processing (explicit).
In relationships, emotional experiences associated with specific people cluster into relational schemas. Infants process constantly changing presentations of caregivers first subsymbolically, then chunk this information into "functionally equivalent classes" that enable recognition, behavior prediction, and emotional communication. These implicit relational schemas form through repeated relational experiences sharing a common affective core.
These schemas operate outside conscious awareness, shaping our cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to others. When implicit memory is retrieved, we don't experience it as remembering-it simply tells us how to be with someone.
A.W. Tozer noted that our actual beliefs about God often lie buried under conventional religious notions, requiring painful self-examination to unearth. We know God in two ways: through explicit knowledge (what we say we believe) and implicit knowledge (what we actually believe at a gut level). Our implicit knowledge of God develops in our earliest relationships with attachment figures. Studies confirm that parent images strongly predict God images, with idealized parents having particular influence.
While Scripture doesn't systematically address implicit relational knowledge, it demonstrates it throughout. The Bible primarily communicates through stories rather than propositions, showing the importance of feeling truth rather than merely understanding it intellectually. Hebrew concepts of truth and belief are holistic, not separating propositional beliefs from personal knowledge.
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Attachment Filters: How Relationships Shape Our Capacity to Love
Our most formative relationships shape us profoundly. These attachment relationships with caregivers form our very sense of self before we can even speak. We remember these early relational experiences not in words but through emotions, bodily sensations, and images-through our implicit, relational knowing.
Attachment filters are implicit relational schemas or "expectancy models" we develop by the end of our first year. As our brain constantly seeks patterns in experiences, it processes new relational information through these established filters. This happens automatically and unconsciously, biasing how we experience all relationships.
Research confirms that Christians experience God as an attachment figure, but findings present seemingly inconsistent patterns of both correspondence (where God relationships mirror human attachment patterns) and compensation (where God substitutes for insecure human attachments). Studies reveal that human attachment predicts implicit aspects of spirituality but not explicit ones.
While everyone's attachment filter is unique and may vary between relationships, most people have a dominant pattern. Research identifies four main categories: secure, preoccupied, dismissing, and fearful. People with secure filters believe at a gut level that others will be available when needed, creating a secure base that frees them to love God and others. They acknowledge emotional distress, seek support effectively, access painful memories without being overwhelmed, and disclose appropriately.
Secure attachment filters develop from consistent experiences with emotionally available caregivers. These individuals learn healthy emotional regulation strategies, recognizing their emotions won't overwhelm them and that expressing feelings leads to positive connection. In relationships with God, secure individuals expect Him to be available, responsive and welcoming of all emotions, including negative ones.
People with preoccupied attachment filters develop from inconsistently responsive caregivers, creating a pattern of hyperactivating attachment needs when distressed. They desperately seek connection while fearing rejection, becoming emotionally flooded and totally focused on gaining comfort from others. With God, they feel abandoned and unstable, experiencing less spiritual community connection, more anxiety, and viewing God as less loving than secure individuals do.
People with dismissing attachment filters employ both "front end" and "back end" defensive strategies to manage emotions. The front-end strategy involves keeping all emotions at bay, resulting in emotionally barren memories. In their spiritual life, dismissing individuals acknowledge needing God intellectually but rarely rely on Him emotionally.
The fearful attachment filter combines elements of both preoccupied and dismissing styles. In their relationship with God, fearful individuals experience high anxiety similar to preoccupied individuals but remain on the periphery of spiritual communities like dismissing individuals.
Attachment filters resist change because they provide a form of "secondary felt security." Even painful connections feel better than no connection at all, as our primary motivation is human contact. These filters become self-reinforcing through two mechanisms: First, they affect what we perceive in relationships, and second, they influence how others relate to us.
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The Nature of Loving Presence: The Goal of Spiritual Transformation
Love stands at the very center of Christian life and spiritual growth. Jesus identified loving God and loving neighbor as the greatest commandments, yet defining and embodying love proves remarkably complex.
The love between the Father and Son provides the foundation for Christian love in three ways: as reason, model, and source. First, we love because Christ loved us first-his love is our motivation. Second, Christ's love provides the model for how we should love-with humble service and willingness to sacrifice, promoting others' highest good (relationship with God). Third, Jesus' love is the very source of our love-we extend the same love we receive from Christ through the Spirit, mediating God's presence to others just as Jesus did.
Rather than distinguishing between different types of love (philia, agape, eros, storge) as fundamentally different concepts, Scripture uses these terms somewhat interchangeably. The word agape appears in contexts ranging from divine love to romantic attraction, suggesting it refers to love itself rather than a specific kind of love.
While some theologians argue that agape cannot be an emotion since we cannot control our feelings yet are commanded to love, Scripture clearly includes emotional elements in love, calling believers to "love one another deeply, from the heart." Emotion cannot be separated from love-it's the physiological and psychological motive behind behavioral expression, carrying loving-action tendencies.
Love is central to Christianity because it represents the foundational dynamic within the triune God, in whose image we're created. God exists as a community of love and invites us to participate in this love by receiving and sharing it-we are loved into loving.
Though there is only one love rather than distinct types, it takes many expressions as it responds to others' needs and relationships. Our love may incorporate friendship (philia), appreciation (eros), attachment (storge), and sacrifice (agape), with familial-attachment love serving as the prototype of God's love.
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The Art of Loving Presence: Wisdom in Action
Love requires responsiveness to be effective. While love is a unitary concept, it takes many forms depending on the relationship type and characteristics of the loved one. Stephen Post notes that love might manifest as celebration of accomplishments, active compassion during suffering, forgiveness for reconciliation, care during illness, companionship in loneliness, or correction when someone promotes ill-being.
Two major factors impact how we love others: the "office of love" (relationship type) and the characteristics/needs of the other person. Love requires finely tuned responsiveness and wisdom to balance competing demands, what scholars historically called the "order of love."
Different relationship types require different expressions of love. Each relationship type-parent-child, therapist-client, friendship, marriage-has parameters that shape appropriate love. Parents shouldn't burden children with their personal struggles, as children need parents who can manage their own emotions to help develop secure attachment.
Love requires balancing what Sorokin called "extensivity"-the range from loving only oneself to loving all humanity and creation. This tension between loving those closest to us and extending love to the broader world, particularly the marginalized, is called the "order of love" (ordo amoris).
As embodied, relational beings located in specific times and places, we must start with our "little corner of the world" as a foundation. We have profound responsibilities to those who rely on us daily-children, spouses, employees, friends-especially since some relationships like parent-child bonds are irreplaceable.
The Oliners' study of Holocaust rescuers revealed that those who risked their lives to save Jews had experienced strong family bonds in childhood, developing a capacity for "extensive relationships" that included those outside their immediate circles. Their early attachment experiences equipped them to extend profound love to strangers in crisis.
Christians are called to redefine family itself, extending attachment-type love to the "new family of God" that crosses socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic lines. This "contrast-society" demonstrates a new social order of love where believers become true family.
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Transformational Change: The Journey of Spiritual Growth
Our spiritual journeys are winding roads with limited visibility ahead, much like driving through mountain passes where each turn reveals new vistas. While some transformations happen in dramatic moments of insight or revelation, growing into Christlikeness typically requires extended time, patient persistence, and challenging internal work. Both incremental shifts and sudden breakthroughs work together synergistically in an overall dynamic process of growth, similar to how a plant grows steadily but also experiences growth spurts.
Spiritual growth often seems invisible despite our consistent efforts, like watching a child grow day by day. These incremental changes quietly build upon each other until they coalesce into something qualitatively new-a transformation in the internal landscape of our soul. Our attachment filters, shaped by early experiences and relationships, gradually reorganize, leading to new experiences of self and new ways of relating to others and God. This transformational change represents a "tipping point" where small inputs create large, unpredictable effects, much like how water slowly fills a container until suddenly overflowing.
A key process in transformational change is bringing together explicit knowledge (what we consciously know and can articulate) and implicit relational knowledge (our unconscious patterns and emotional wisdom) through "referential activity" or the knowledge spiral. This integration happens through story in two powerful ways: interpreting our experience by telling our story, which helps us make sense of events and emotions, and feeling an idea as we hear stories that work explicit knowledge into our hearts. For example, hearing parables doesn't just teach us concepts but shapes our emotional understanding of truth.
Suffering, while unwanted and often painful, holds unique potential for spiritual growth by disrupting our implicit views of ourselves, God, and others. The amount of growth one experiences directly relates to intentional engagement with trials rather than mere passive endurance. Meaning making during suffering weaves together our two ways of knowing, like a tapestry combining different threads. As conscious and unconscious beliefs are challenged through difficult experiences, our knowledge becomes more integrated and aligned with reality, similar to how metal is refined through fire.
The middle prefrontal cortex, activated during mindfulness practice, provides an integrative function by connecting distant brain areas into a functional unity, much like a conductor coordinating an orchestra. This neural integration mirrors the trinitarian concept of perichoresis-the sharing of divine love among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect unity and distinction. Mindfulness helps regulate emotions by approaching them with curiosity and acceptance rather than judgment or avoidance, facilitating the integration of our two ways of knowing. This practice allows us to observe our thoughts and feelings while maintaining a broader perspective, much like watching waves from the shore rather than being tossed about in them.
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Spiritual Community: The Context for Transformation
The communal nature of spiritual transformation requires taking seriously our relational identity as image-bearers, the goal of sanctification as loving presence, and relationships as the means of transformation. This leads to intentional engagement with other Christians, forming attachment relationships that demonstrate God's love.
Unlike the New Testament understanding of church as ekklesia (a people or community), Western culture's radical individualism has led us to view church as a place to meet personal needs rather than as the family created by God to collectively demonstrate divine love.
Paul used two primary metaphors to describe spiritual community: the church as family and the church as body. The family metaphor emphasizes bonds between God's children. In the Mediterranean world of the New Testament, family ties were stronger than marital bonds, making this metaphor particularly powerful. Jesus established this new family identity where believers became siblings through their common relationship with God.
A spiritual community has four essential characteristics. First, it is spiritual by nature, with the goal of glorifying God by stimulating transformation into Christ's image. This happens through "means of grace"-channels the Holy Spirit uses to impart God's transforming grace.
Creating authentic spiritual community requires deliberate effort-it doesn't happen accidentally. Community size matters significantly. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar's research establishes 150 as the upper limit of meaningful social connections humans can maintain-the maximum number of people with whom we can share defined personal relationships based on shared history and values.
Spiritual communities function best when structured in units of 150 or fewer. Within these communities, relationships naturally organize in tiers of decreasing intimacy: First-tier (about 5 people) providing safe haven and secure base; Second-tier (about 15 people) offering costly emotional, social and economic support; Third-tier (15-150 people) forming functional community units; and Fourth-tier (150-1,500 people) connected more by leadership and vision than relationships.
We all possess an innate need to belong to community-particularly one with deeper purpose and higher good. While we objectively belong to God's family as Christians, we also desire to subjectively experience this belonging. Building a sense of ultimate belonging requires working together through inevitable conflicts and disappointments.
The glue that holds spiritual community together is commitment and mutuality. When disillusioned, we tend to focus on what we're not getting rather than how we can contribute. While it's easier to leave at the first sign of difficulty (reflecting our individualistic culture), transformational change happens through long-term relationships that allow us to face pain together and develop secure attachment.
