it to God, and who knows who else is in there pulling the strings and pushing the buttons. But you’re just writing it out. And it seems to me superficial, and it’s been done over and over and over again before.

There are multitudes of people in the evangelical and mainstream churches who are living off of this stuff, and they don’t even know what the Bible says concerning these issues. Their churches don’t tell them or give them practical guidance. They don’t teach them about spiritual formation and how to do it. Many people get what they need from church attendance because the Word is preached, and the rituals are carried on, and God works, but it’s drift more than anything else. And that’s why the churches keep reaching for some programmatic formula that will make people come and give money. It’s just really very sad.

I don’t want to get off the point here. The thing that drove me to write Renovation was addressing the issue of spiritual formation and the need to do this in the contemporary context.

P: Can you talk a little bit about the biblical teaching on the soul?

D: Well, yes, I can talk a little bit about that. The Bible, of course, is not a theology book. It is certainly not a philosophy book. So we have to derive the meaning of terms from the context in use.

And that is what we see in the Scripture. It’s a wonderful thing to do an inductive study with our concordance. We see that the soul is the deepest and the most vital part of the person as a whole. It is often treated as the person, and we actually do this when we talk about “saving our soul.” Well, you know, we don’t save our soul and leave our emotions and our feelings and our body and all the rest of it out. That’s just a way of talking that emphasizes the soul is so fundamental that we can, in some cases, treat it as the whole person because it actually is the thing that integrates all of these aspects of the self and makes them work together. Now, I don’t think we can find a passage in the Bible that says that. We have to read and study how it addresses the soul, and we then see that it is the deepest, most vital part of the human self.

It’s important to distinguish the soul from the spirit, or will, because the will or the heart or the spirit is the executive center of the self. In other words, the spirit is the part that is supposed to consciously direct everything in the person, including the soul.

Generally speaking we don’t want to hear from the soul. We want it to just do its job. Unfortunately, in a broken world, it also is broken, and we’re going to hear from it because many of the ordinary miseries and extraordinary glories of human life are expressions of the state of the soul.

There is talk in the Scripture like, “The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul.” See, the “law of the Lord” draws the soul into the ways of God at a deep level that heals it. The soul’s order is re-established in God through the law. Or the

23rd Psalm, “He restoreth my soul.” These are extremely crucial passages.

I do emphasize that we cannot just get out of the Bible a definition of the soul. The Bible defines almost nothing because it isn’t a book for scholars and philosophers or free thinkers. It’s a book for people who want help. It’s primarily a book for pastors. They’re the ones that can use it in a way so that it actually achieves its purpose.

P: Going back to the example you gave of the spirit being the executive center, if you use the analogy of an automobile, might the spirit be the steering wheel and the soul be the engine?

D: Well, I would say the soul would be more than the engine. The soul would be like the computer system that coordinates everything, from the smog device to the fuel injection system to the brakes. Now, of course, you have guidance devices and all sorts of things. The soul would be more like the way this is all hooked together, a system of coordination.

The engine might be more like the body. In ourselves that is the source of our strength. As we reach out to God, we get another source of strength. But no matter how lost a person is, they still draw on their body. So the body would be more like the motor. Suppose we have a motor and our transmission doesn’t work or our clutch or whatever. Then our body, our motor, just takes us down the road. Or our brakes don’t work! We must have a coordination system.

The different parts of the automobile like the ignition switch, the various buttons, the steering wheel–the interfaces between the driver and the machine–is our spirit or heart. The different controls are the spirit.

Then we have the issue of what’s in control of the driver. And the driver had better be under some control! Hopefully, that will be God. And so the relation of redemption and sanctification would be the ongoing relationship between the driver and God who is directing her. Now, if God isn’t directing him, he may go wild and do all sorts of things criminal and crazy.

Think of the soul as the computer system that runs the whole thing. And then the spirit is the executive center. It’s the faculty of choice. And then you want that faculty governed by the truth of God and the Spirit of God. We really do need analogies for all of this, because the only alternative is to write a long book of philosophy that no one would understand.

P: What does a church committed to the spiritual formation of its members look like? What is its priorities? What does it emphasize? How does it spend its time?

D: The crucial thing would be that it would have as its aim the formation of all the people in the congregation internally in such a way that the deeds and words of Christ would just naturally flow from them wherever they are. That is really the