Human beings as Spiritual Beings
What Mike Tyson's infamous bout with Evander Holyfield taught Dallas Willard about the human condition
Toward the end of the first day in his Spirituality and Ministry course at Fuller Seminary, Dallas Willard moved from the abstract structure of a person to how it actually applies to pastoring. He started by challenging his students to look at people as truly spiritual beings. This isn’t about the “spirituality” you hear about in business or sports. It’s about ontology, or what kind of beings we actually are. Willard argued that pastoral theology has to start with the fact that humans are conscious, never-ceasing spiritual beings meant to live forever in God’s great universe.
You can watch the full lecture and read the transcript here: Human beings as spiritual beings.
Beyond behavior modification
Willard believed that our actions come from the deep structure of our selves, not just willpower. To prove his point, he used a famously messy example involving Mike Tyson. When Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear, he tried to claim it was just a “moment” of bad judgment. Willard disagreed. He said, “That wasn’t just a moment. That was Mike Tyson”.
This was more than Dallas being witty, he was showing that what we do reveals who we have become. If we believe that, then pastoring isn’t about behavior modification. Behavior modification creates the kind of “external righteousness” Jesus critiqued in the righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees. Instead, true apprenticeship to Jesus it is about inviting people into a total inner transformation that starts with surrendering their will to God.
Training for reigning
Secular culture likes to reduce our behavior to environmental causes, which basically destroys the idea of any personal agency. It’s easy to start feeling like a victim of your impulses when everyone tells you that’s all you are. Willard pushed back hard on this “intellectual drift”. Drawing on Genesis 1, Psalm 8, and Romans 5, he reminded his students that humans were created by God to reign.
Therefore, He saw the pastor’s job as “training for reigning.” This training equips people to exercise dominion over their actual lives including their jobs, their families, and their social contexts. To "reign" in this sense is not about holding a political throne. It is about being free and powerful in the creation and governance of what is good within your own entrusted domain. As Revelation 22 suggests, as believers we are training to govern the universe with God. This training can only happen through an interactive relationship with God. As Willard put it, “Eternal life is eternal living.” This means living right now in a way that your life is caught up in His.
The guide to reality
This lecture gives us a very grounded vision for pastoring. A pastor isn’t just a manager of religious activity. They are a spiritual guide, a shepherd. I think we spend too much time trying to fix people’s habits without helping them understand their identity as eternal beings. When we help people live under God’s governance in the places they already are, we are doing the real work of ministry.
Pastoring people as spiritual beings requires us to deal with their spiritual failings. Spiritual formation begins with repentance, which Willard defines as the surrender of the will to God: “God help me. I may not be able to do it, but I want to do what you want me to do”. In practice, this kind of repentance is a shift in how we help people handle their failures. We aren’t looking for a momentary emotional response or a list of resolutions. We are helping the individual recognize that they cannot change their character through direct effort alone. True repentance is the person admitting their powerlessness and then choosing to place their “kingdom”—the range of their own effective will—under God’s reign. As a pastor, you guide them to stop “trying” to be better and start by surrendering their inmost thoughts and intentions to Christ’s present reality. We move them from the guilt of “I did something bad” to the spiritual honesty of “I am the kind of person who does this, and I need God to change who I am.”
For reflection:
How would your approach to “difficult” people change if you saw their actions as a map of their spiritual formation rather than just a list of bad choices?
Where has the “secular drift” made you feel like you have no control over who you are becoming?
What would your week look like if you viewed ordinary tasks as “eternal living”?
Next week, we’ll dive into Lecture 5: What Ministry Is and How It Is Spiritual. We’ll look at why Willard thought ministry was actually impossible to do on our own