Abstract
This paper provides a conceptual framework for explaining how someone can know of God’s love factually but fail to receive God’s love experientially. After developing a theological epistemology of knowledge of God’s love, I turn to the psychodynamic concept of internalization to further explain resistance and receptivity to God’s loving presence. The paper concludes with implications for Christian spiritual formation.
To Have the Mind of Christ
In the movie Being John Malkovich, people travel through some sort of psychic wormhole and find themselves inside the mind of the actor John Malkovich. For a few minutes, they can feel for themselves what it is like to view and experience the world from the embodied perspective of someone else. They get into his mind and say, “Wow, so this is what it is like to experience the world as John Malkovich.”
What would it be like to step into the mind of the incarnate Jesus? What would it be like to feel and experience the world as Jesus did from his embodied perspective? People know what it is like to wake up in the morning and be conscious of things given their particular embodied sense of self and frame-of-reference. So, what was it like for Jesus to wake up in the morning and be conscious of things given his particular embodied sense of self and frame of reference? What did it feel like to be Jesus? In particular, what did it feel like for Jesus to be in a harmonious, loving relationship with God the Father? How did he experience himself in the world as God’s beloved child?
Some have suggested that the voice that said, “You are my beloved son; with you I am well pleased” (Lk 3:22), was a continual, underlying refrain in Jesus’s mind. The idea is not that Jesus often recalled his memory of that voice. The idea is that he carried with him a steady awareness that he was beloved and in sync with God continuously. In John’s Gospel, we get a sense of Jesus’s experience of God: “I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me. And he who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone” (Jn 8:28–29).
In John 12, we have a further glimpse into Jesus’s mind. John records that Jesus knew his time had come to depart to his Father, he knew the Father had handed all things over to him, he knew he had come from God and was going back to God (Jn 12:1, 3). According to John’s testimony, Jesus had a clear sense of who he was, what he was about, where he had come from, and where he was going. Jesus did not need to “find himself.”
Luke records in Acts 10 how Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power, that he went about doing good “for God was with him” (Acts 10:38). And Paul says that in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Col 1:19). It seems safe to think that Jesus went through the days and nights of his incarnate existence with a rich, deep, and sturdy sense of the loving presence and perfect care of his heavenly Father. Jesus’s cry of forsakenness on the cross—“my God, my God”—was surely due to a felt absence that was painfully out of the ordinary.
If these biblical passages provide a glimpse into what it was like for Jesus to have his mind set on his Father and the Spirit, how might we come to have more of that same mindset? Paul argues that through the Spirit who teaches spiritual things to spiritual persons, we have the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16). I take it that by the Spirit we have access to the mind of Christ and that we are to gradually take on his kind of mindset. 1 Paul writes, “Have this attitude [or mind, phroneite] in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5). To grow up into the fullness of Christ, to be conformed to his image, to walk as he did, involves developing a mindset like that of Jesus (Eph 4:13; Rom 8:29; 1 John 2:6).
Indeed, in John’s Gospel Jesus presents the Spirit as the one who takes what he had and declares it to his disciples (Jn 16:12–15). Interestingly, from a Pauline perspective, the repeated declaration of the Holy Spirit is his cry that God is “Abba, Father” (Gal 4:6) and the Spirit’s testimony that we are children of God by which we cry “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15, 16). The same Father who called Jesus his beloved child calls us his beloved children. Given this, it makes sense that the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace (Rom 8:6). As we walk by the Spirit, setting our minds on things above, where Christ is, we take on a similar sort of mindset or frame of mind as Jesus. While I am not suggesting that we will ever wake up and know exactly what it was like to have the mind of Christ, it does appear that our minds—our thoughts, inclinations, desires, imaginations, affect, attitudes, frame of reference, and so on—can become more and more like Jesus’s thoughts, inclinations, desires, imaginations, and so on. We begin to respond to things more like Jesus because our minds are more like the mind of Christ. Dallas Willard put it this way: The literal truth is that Christ through his word removes the old routines in the heart and mind—the old routines of thought, feeling, action, imagination, conceptualization, belief, inference—and in their place he puts something else: his thoughts, his attitudes, his beliefs, his ways of seeing and interpreting things, his words. He washes out our minds, and in the place of confusion and falsehood—or hatred, suspicion and fear, to speak of emotions—he brings clarity, truth, love, confidence and hopefulness.
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Knowing God’s Love
While there is much more to say about the transformational renewing of our minds, I focus in this article on what was at the heart of Jesus’s mental experience and what must, therefore, be at the heart of our mental experience if we are to become like him. 3 At the heart of Jesus’s mental life was a consistent, deep knowing of God’s love. To become more like Jesus, our knowing of God’s love must become increasingly accurate, constant, confident, and meaningful. It is not just that we think about God more frequently throughout our day, it is what we think about God throughout our day that is or is not transformational. It is the qualitative nature of our thoughts about God that is the most important thing about us. 4
John 15:9 highlights the intensity of Jesus’s love: “Just as the Father has loved me, I have also loved you; remain in my love” (NET). In the same way and to the same degree that the Father loves the Son so too does the Son love his followers. How can human persons even imagine what it would be like to be loved by Jesus in the kind of way Jesus himself was loved by the Father? How do we abide in a love that is difficult to believe is true factually, let alone imagine experientially? To get at this question, we need to sort through what it involves to know God and his love. What does knowing God consist of and how do we grow in interpersonal knowledge of God? 5
In what follows, I first develop a brief theological epistemology of knowing God. What do we have to learn from the biblical authors about the kinds of knowledge involved in knowing God? Second, I turn to a brief discussion of the notion of “internalization” as a potentially helpful conceptualization of the psychological dynamics involved in developing a deeper grasp of God’s love. And, finally, given this treatment, I conclude with four implications for the process of spiritual growth.
A Theological Epistemology of Knowing God’s Love
A careful look at the New Testament provides several important distinctions when it comes to knowledge of God.
First, purported knowledge of God can be more or less accurate and more or less comprehensive in scope. While I do not have space to give an extended treatment of the biblical material on this, we might start with the claim that Jesus knew only what was true of God and he knew everything true of God that could be known by a finite human mind. If human persons are to have the mind of Christ, that would no doubt include having accurate and comprehensive knowledge of God. Much of the New Testament is announcing and correcting knowledge of God’s grace, love, and purposes in Christ that were previously unknown and which, if heeded, help listeners come to an increasingly accurate and increasingly comprehensive knowledge of God.
Second, the biblical authors seem to distinguish propositional/factual knowledge from experiential/personal knowledge. Perhaps the classic proof text is Job’s “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5). One commentary notes, “This statement does not imply there was a vision. [Job] is simply saying that this experience of God was real and personal. In the past his knowledge of God was what he had heard—hearsay. This was real.” 6
In his classic study of Pauline epistemology, Ian Scott distinguishes conceptual knowledge from experiential and personal knowledge.
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A helpful example of this distinction can be located in Paul’s prayer for the Ephesian Christians. For this reason I bow my knees before the Father . . . [that he] may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Eph 3:14–19 ESV).
Paul’s prayer is clearly for the Ephesian Christians to experience God’s love more thoroughly. The Ephesians already knew the fact of God’s love. The propositional truth that God loved them is clearly stated in the early chapters of the book of Ephesians. In Ephesians 1:4-5, Paul writes, “In love (agape), God predestined us for adoption” and then again in Ephesians 2:4, Paul writes of “the great love (agape) with which he loved us” (cf. Eph 5:25). The Ephesians know the fact of God’s love. It must be that Paul’s prayer is for that fact to be received in the Ephesians’ experience more fully. 8
We can see this in the language of Paul’s prayer. First, Paul prays that the Christians in Ephesus would be rooted in God’s agape love like a plant is rooted in soil and that they would be grounded in God’s agape love like a house established on a foundation. To be rooted and grounded in love is experiential language. It is to come to feel in our bones that God’s love is nourishing and dependable. Paul then prays that the Ephesians would get in touch with the width, length, height, and depth of Christ’s love. Again, Paul is not just appealing to the idea or concept that Christ’s love has vast dimensions. He is praying that the Ephesians would experience the vast dimensions of Christ’s love. Finally, Paul prays that the Ephesians would come to know that the agape love of Christ surpasses their knowledge; that they would be filled with as much of God and his love as possible. In short, Paul’s prayer is that the Ephesians would be experientially rooted, grounded, and filled with God’s unlimited loving presence. In his commentary on this passage, Peter O’Brien writes that grasping God’s love “cannot be simply a mental exercise. Clearly, it is personal knowledge . . . it cannot be reduced simply to intellectual reflection. Paul wants them to be empowered so as to grasp the dimensions of that love in their own experience.” 9
Given these first two distinctions in our theological epistemology of God’s love, to grow in the knowledge of God’s love would include growing in more accurate and more comprehensive factual and experiential knowledge of God’s love. Third, we get a sense in Scripture that knowing God can be deeper, richer, or fuller in a sense that goes beyond merely more accurate and more comprehensive factual and even experiential knowledge. There is a depth of meaningfulness, appreciation, and receptivity to God’s love that can also develop.
For instance, Paul’s statement “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16) implies that the word of Christ can remain on the surface of one’s life. Or Paul’s prayer that the eyes of the Ephesians’ hearts would be enlightened “that you may know . . . the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Eph 1:18–19). In addition, Paul refers to “the depth of the riches” of the wisdom and knowledge of God (Rom 10:33 NASB). When it comes to God’s love, we saw in Ephesians 3 that there are vast dimensions and that we can “know the love of God that surpasses knowledge.” This suggests that there is always more to God’s love than what one currently knows. 10 Just as I might say of my wife that there is more richness and meaningfulness to her love than I experientially receive, a fortiori, there is more richness and meaningfulness to God’s love than I experientially receive. We can know the proposition that God loves us, we can experience God’s loving care, and we deepen in our propositional and experiential knowledge of God’s loving care.
A fourth distinction in our theological epistemology is that knowledge of God’s love can be resisted. The unbeliever suppresses the truth of God in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18) and those habits of suppressing the truth do not immediately disappear at the moment of salvation. For instance, Paul speaks of an “old self” rooted in a “former manner of life” (Eph 4:22) that the Ephesian Christians lived before putting their trust in Jesus (cf. Col 3:9 and Rom 6:6). This “old self”—which bears a relation to Paul’s notion of “the flesh” (sarx)—involves habituated ways of finding life apart from God (Phil 3:3–11). The desires of the flesh are opposed to the desires of the Spirit (Gal 5:17). It is not merely that we still desire to sin. More deeply, it is that we still desire to be our own gods. The flesh, for Paul, is relational resistance to the life-giving and life-changing reality of God. When we act according to the desires of our autonomous resistance, we “quench the Spirit” (1 Thess 5:19), “grieve the Holy Spirit” (Eph 4:30; cf. Is 63:10), and choose to be filled with things in place of the fullness of the Spirit (Eph 5:18). Since we all come to new life with Jesus with an “old self” belonging to our “former manner of life,” we come with lingering resistance to knowing or entrusting ourselves to God in our attitudes, values, thoughts, feelings, desires, and behaviors. 11
Given this theological epistemology of knowing God, it seems that to grow in knowledge of God would be to develop a more accurate and comprehensive propositional and experiential knowledge of him as well as to more deeply receive the meaningfulness of God’s love as we put to death our resistance to him. But how might we conceptualize this process of receiving God’s love?
Internalization
Here I turn to a brief discussion of the concept of “internalization” as a potentially helpful conceptualization of the psychological dynamics involved in developing a more meaningful experiential grasp of God’s love.
The concept of “internalization” or “internalized knowledge,” as I am using it here, in the first place refers to a common human experience. It has also been developed theoretically within psychodynamic theories of human psychology. Before proceeding to the theoretical development of the concept, it might be helpful to make sure we are acquainted with common experience of the phenomenon.
If I asked you to bring to mind your spouse, a close friend, or one of your parents, you could no doubt do so. And bringing that person to mind would not just come with a mental image of what that person looks like. You would have a visceral experience of that person rooted in what that person means to you and how you experience being in relationship with that person. For instance, while I said goodbye to my spouse this morning and haven’t talked to her since, I can easily imagine who she is in my mind, my experience of what it is like to be in relationship with her as well as my sense of who she is. In fact, I carry a sense of her with me—my sense of her warmth, her care, her regard for me, her burdens and anxieties. I can call her to mind and feel, to some degree, like I am with her. She is not out of sight, out of mind in the way that, for instance, the guy who lives across the street from me is out of sight, out of mind. When I wonder how my spouse is doing right now, I am wondering how my internalized sense of her matches up with the reality of what is going on for her and how I would experience her if I were with her at this moment. That sense we carry of significant others is internalized knowledge; it is a mental re-presentation of that person that we utilize in our actual interactions with persons. When I speak with my spouse on the phone later today, I will come into that conversation with an expectation of what it will be like to experience her based on my internalized representation of her. If she sounds particularly distracted or distressed, I might say, “You seem off; you’re not your usual self; are you ok?” My current experience of my spouse would not match my internalized sense of her.
By attending to our experience of internalized others, we can identify at least five aspects of internalized relational representations. First, internalized representations of others have a qualitative feel, significance, or meaning. For instance, when we consider spending time with a particular person, we are either drawn to the idea or not based on our sense of what it is like to be with them. We can imagine whether being with Bill as opposed to Ted will feel energizing or draining, easy or hard, fun or awkward, safe or unsafe. There is an affective valence or evaluative quality to our sense of internalized others. Although this affective valence or meaning can be conceptualized and described, it is often felt viscerally before it can be put into words. 12
Second, an internalized relational representation can be more or less accurate to the reality of the person. Our qualitative feel of someone can be a misinterpretation of that person. For instance, it is unsettling when we have internalized someone as trustworthy, only to find out that they are actually unfaithful. Our internalized representations can be accurate or inaccurate.
Third, internalized representations become fairly stable and constant over time even when the person is absent. For instance, a colleague whose husband died unexpectedly in mid-life, poignantly said about a year after his death, “The kids and I are doing alright, but it sure sucks to be married to a dead guy.” What she was saying was that her internal sense of her husband remained fairly constant in her life even though he was no longer physically present.
Fourth, internalized knowledge has a depth of ingression, meaning that it cannot be easily overturned. 13 To use a negative example, if one has internalized their parent’s criticisms as shaming and judgmental, it can be very hard not to experience shame and judgment from a negative comment, especially from the parent. Internalized representations have constancy, meaning that their content is fairly fixed and not easily overturned by protestations or even experiences to the contrary. I can insist to my daughter that I was not trying to control her and perhaps it is true, but my insistence will not change her felt-experience of being controlled by me.
Lastly, a fifth aspect of internalized relational representations is that they can be generalized to others. For example, if we have positive or negative internalized representations of professors, or coaches, or grandmothers, we will likely generalize from that positive or negative experience base when we meet another professor or coach or grandmother. The tendency to generalize our internalized relational representations to others is why we have to train our children to not talk to strangers. Children who have internalized that adults are to be trusted will have a tendency to generally trust adults regardless of whether adults are actually worthy of trust or not.
Although more could be derived from the phenomenology of internalized others and the process of internalization, perhaps enough has been said to briefly turn to how the concept of internalization has been developed in psychodynamic psychology. The core idea of psychodynamic psychological theory is that the repetition of interpersonal patterns (particularly in early childhood) gradually embeds an internal, mental representation of the felt quality and meaning of being in relationship with particular persons and, over time, persons in general. 14 These mental representations are sometimes called internalized objects (Melanie Klein), internal working models of self and other (Bowlby), or implicit relational representations (Hall). 15 They are relational, self-other schemas that enable us to interpret our relational experience, predict what might happen relationally, and help us determine who to trust and not trust.
In their treatment of internalization in psychotherapy, Jesse Geller and Barry Farber write, “There is a growing consensus among psychoanalytic and cognitive theorists that representations, or schemas, of the self and others have the capacity to organize and influence aspects of human behavior (e.g., attention, memory, and the felt appraisal of interpersonal experience), and that these representations may be as varied in their forms, complexity, emotional coloring, and functional significance as those relationships existing between actual persons.” 16 Once a way of experiencing persons becomes internalized as an implicit relational representation, these relational schemas act as interpretive filters of our future relational experiences. For instance, if our implicit relational representation is that persons tend to abandon us, or we are too bad to be loved, or that persons cannot be trusted to care for us well, then even in the presence of faithful, gracious, or trustworthy persons, we will find it difficult to experience the relational other in that positive way. We will regularly feel deep in our viscera that the person we are coming to know as faithful, gracious, or trustworthy will eventually abandon, reject, or fail us. And, of course, since persons are imperfect, any taste of abandonment, rejection, or failure will quickly activate and embolden our long-held implicit representation. In fact, we might actually look for evidence of abandonment, rejection, or failure where there is not any because our internalized expectation of how relationships tend to work is so dominant.
Internalizing the Love of God
This theoretical framework of internalized others and internalization can be constructively applied to our discussion of knowing God’s love in at least the following four ways.
First, internalization provides a framework to understand the theological epistemology developed earlier, particularly the notion of coming to personally experience and receive the love of God more deeply, meaningfully, and richly. It is one thing to read in the biblical text and intellectually assent to the claims that God is faithful, perfectly good, unconditionally loving, all-powerful, gracious, caring, forgiving, and so on, and it is another thing to internalize those divine qualities in a way that we carry such a sense of God with us throughout our day. It is crucially important that as we set our minds on things above, where Christ is, we do so with the psychological capacity to experience Christ as he actually is. Setting our mind on Christ in meditation, prayer, worship, and other practices will not be transformational if the god of our gut is not actually Christ but rather a dim and distorted representation of Christ. Just as it takes time and experience of other human persons to internalize them as they actually are, it will take time and experience of the divine persons to internalize them as they actually are. The process of being rooted and grounded in God’s love, knowing the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, and being filled with the fullness of God’s love can be helpfully understood as the process of internalizing an implicit relational representation of God that is emotionally meaningful, accurate, constant, and deeply ingressed. Of course, we are not just internalizing an implicit representation of God; we are receiving God himself. But God himself will always be experienced by the human mind according to the capacities and structures of that mind. The notion of internalization provides a way to understand the progressive nature of increasing communion with God that helps make sense of the gradual nature of Christian sanctification.
Second, the notion of internalized knowledge helps us understand that the internalization of God’s love competes, as it were, with other internalized representations of persons. Indeed, the earliest internalized relational representations stem from childhood and are online and entrenched in our neurobiology long before persons experience God in Christ. Since these early internal working models act as filters of future relational experience, it is difficult to overturn distorted representations of what it is to be loved, accepted, forgiven, guided, cared for, protected, and so on. In fact, at best, human relational experiences are a finite and imperfect analog for the reality of God’s relational qualities. At worst, human relational experiences are not only finite and imperfect but radically contradictory to the reality of God’s relational qualities. Many psychologists have argued that the plasticity of the human brain in the first years of life makes the relational patterns experienced in those early years dominant and recalcitrant to change. 17 Is this not our experience of many Christians who know correct theology about God, who can recite biblical passages that affirm their correct theology, and who have heard sermon after sermon and sang worship song after worship song that accord with the same theology, but who nevertheless struggle to receive in their experience a deep and constant sense of the God of whom they believe and sing rightly?
Third, given the above two points, it will be important for Christian life and practice to realize that many truths about God that are cognitively accepted remain experientially aspirational. We are often like the father who responded to Jesus, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” (Mk 9:24). Such a posture in prayer, worship, bible study, and so on is a posture of confession and repentance. “Lord, I believe you are faithful, good, loving, gracious, but I confess that my belief does not go all the way down. I turn towards you (repentance) in the very ways that I tend to distrust you.” This sort of approach to Christian practices helps us be honest as we draw near to God. We are not trying to will ourselves into experiencing what we know to be true of God. Rather, we are confessing that what we know to be true of God does not dwell in us richly. Like the Corinthians we are not yet able to receive the nourishment that we need (1 Cor 3:1–4).
Fourth, the theoretical framework of internalized others and internalization makes sense of the further psychodynamic principle of relational repair. If our internalized representations of self and others were fashioned in dysfunctional human relational experience, there is a sensible symmetry to the idea that our internalized representations can be repaired through healthier human relational experiences. While the process of internalization is more challenging in adulthood, there is good evidence that distorted representations of human others can be repaired and healed over time through corrective relational experiences. Indeed, given that the human heart was made for perfect love, to experience even a dim reflection of it can be life-giving and reparative.
One of the Holy Spirit’s primary and essential means of sanctifying grace is the body of Christ—brothers and sisters by adoption into God’s family who are able to offer encouragement, acceptance, forgiveness, love, comfort, understanding, attunement, challenge, and so on in a manner that can begin to help make those same sorts of experiences with God more believable in the core of our beings. Spiritual practices that involve opening our lives to trustworthy brothers and sisters in Christ can be used by God to bring tremendous healing from distorted internalized relational representations. Practices of spiritual friendship, mentoring, small groups, counseling, therapy, and spiritual direction are essential to healing our internalized sense of who God is and how he views us. We need one another to model God’s loving presence to us, even if imperfectly, in order to come to entrust ourselves fully to the perfect love of God. If we are to have the mind of Christ, we need to have minds that meaningfully, accurately, consistently, and deeply experience the never-ending, never-failing, limitless love of God. 18
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.