The Role of the Body in Developing the Spiritual Life

The Role of Indirection - Dallas Willard, William Law, and the Body That Forms the Soul

Toward the start of his seventeenth lecture at Fuller, Dallas Willard pauses over the practices that fill the ordinary believer’s week. Bible reading, prayer, church attendance, songs, fellowship. And he asks:

“What does that do?”

Willard names “the open secret of Bible-believing churches”: how little of the Bible “is ingested and taken in and made a part of life.” The same diagnosis applies to much of our singing, praying, and gathering. We perform the practices. Few of us stop to ask how those practices form the soul.

Willard answers by returning to the bodily nature of formation, territory he has covered before. This time he reaches across two and a half centuries and brings in a partner: the eighteenth-century Anglican priest William Law. Law sharpens what every pastor and believer comes to know. You cannot order the heart to change.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/the-role-of-the-body-in-developing-the-spiritual-life/?collection=2409

Discipleship Names a Status; Formation Names a Process

Discipleship, Willard says, names a status. The disciple enrolls in the “class with Jesus” as a beginner “probably still pretty green, ignorant, and unformed.” Spiritual formation, in turn, names “the process you go through as a disciple,” the slow work where “all of the elements of personalities… increasingly become like Christ.”

Discipleship describes a status. Spiritual formation describes a process.

Churches collapse the two when discipleship signifies mere membership. An unformed disciple has not failed the gospel. Every disciple starts unformed. After enrollment, the disciple’s action begins formation.

Direct Command Cannot Reach the Soul

Willard delivers the diagnosis: “You cannot directly command the inward state of your souls to any significant degree.”

Willard concedes that thoughts allow some direction: “You can, in some measure, direct your thoughts. That is perhaps the first freedom that a normal human being has.” But emotions and desires escape the will. We cannot command love. We cannot manufacture desire. Orders alone do not bend the heart.

So how does the heart change? “You have to go indirectly at them, through how you use your body.”

Willard’s phrase “the way of indirection” names this whole approach. Paul says the same thing in Romans 12, by Willard’s reading: “If you want to renew your body, your mind, you do that by surrendering your body a living sacrifice.” The body provides the access point. Bodily surrender to God transforms the soul.

In Willard’s framing, every person rules a small kingdom: the area where individual will operates. Spiritual formation hands over that personal rule. The handover takes years. The body carries out that transfer. Bodily action accomplishes what direct command cannot.

Outward Actions Reach the Heart

Law had written that “certain motions and actions of the body have the same power of raising such and such thoughts and sentiments in the soul.” Singing, Law says, produces joy. It operates “as truly a natural cause of raising joy in the mind.”

For Law, outward actions produce inward states.

Willard agrees, and lets Law’s summary stand: “though therefore the seed of religion is in the heart, yet since our bodies have power over our heart, since our outward actions both proceed from and enter into the heart, it is plain that outward actions have a great power over that religion which is seated in the heart.”

Willard reverses the logic. As James says, “the tongue is a fire, set on fire of hell.” Anger produces angry words, and angry words increase anger. The body acts. The soul follows.

The practices a pastor sets before believers help cause formation. Singing, kneeling, praying aloud, eating at the Lord’s table, reading the Word with the body present: these practices accomplish more than ceremony. They open the door for grace to enter.

Thanksgiving Marks the Greatest Saintliness

Law treats thanksgiving as the chief case of bodily formation.

“There is no state of mind so holy, so excellent, and so perfect as that of thanksgiving,” Law writes. And then, in a sentence Willard lets sit:

“Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world? It is not he who prays most or fast most. It is not he who gives most alms or is most imminent for temperance, chastity, or justice. It is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything God wills, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness, and has a heart always ready to praise God for it.”

Law puts thanksgiving first. Prayer, fasting, and giving matter, but thanksgiving names the goal each practice serves. Such a heart takes shape through the body. Singing, saying thanks at the table, and the daily reception of everything as God’s gift complete that shaping.

Law presses further: “If anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to all happiness and all perfection, he must tell you must make it a rule to yourself to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you, for it is certain that whatever seeming calamity that happens to you, if you thank and praise God for it, you turn it into a blessing.”

Will alone does not form thanksgiving. Bodily practice opens the soul, and grace shapes a thankful heart.

Pastoral Work Reaches the Body

For Willard pastors teach the nations. These pastors proclaim, manifest, and teach God’s kingdom. Our work as pastors, this lecture insists, must reach the body. We do more than tell our people what Jesus taught. We guide them into the bodily practices that let grace accomplish what willpower cannot.

“Grace,” Willard reminds, “is God acting in our lives to accomplish what we can’t accomplish on our own.”

And: “God has set up human life so that it is capable of discipline so that we can have a part in determining what kind of persons we’ve become.”

The soul has not lost its capacity. Bodily action helps shape future identity. The teaching that hands our people the practices of song, prayer, Scripture, fasting, and thanksgiving accomplishes more than ritual maintenance. Such teaching delivers the bodily means that shape Christ-like character.

Willard adds a careful pastoral note. Not every believer stands ready to take up a discipline. Some, he says, “need ministry in different ways… before people can come to the place where they can actually direct their body in spiritual disciplines.” Teaching, fellowship, pastoral care, and deliverance carry that ministry. The shepherd discerns where each sheep stands, and offers the practice that helps rather than harms. You cannot order the heart to change. You can train the body. The body, practiced over years, forms the soul.

For Reflection

1. Willard asks pastors and believers to look at every practice and ask, “What does that do?” Take the practices shaping your week. Your reading, your singing, your serving, your gathering. Identify the kind of soul they form. Do they reach the inward state, or do you perform them at a level that leaves the heart untouched?

2. Willard reads Law’s question and lets it stand: “Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world?… It is he who is always thankful to God.” Does the shape of your bodily life, your speech, your singing, your daily reception of what God sends, form a thankful person? Or have you tried to feel grateful by sheer will when the rule Law recommends would have done the work?

3. After Law calls believers to thank God for everything that happens, Willard pauses on the practical question: “How can you do that?” Have you adopted the bodily practice the will alone cannot supply? Grace, by the way of indirection, can finish what willpower never starts.