We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Greg’s Review of Changing Your Mind by Victor Copan
Several months ago Victor Copan introduced himself to me at the end of a Woodland Hills Church service. He told me about his recently published book, Changing Your Mind. “I know you’re into spiritual disciplines and neuroscience,” he said, “so I suspect you might enjoy my book. It’s about the interface of these two topics.” Well, he suspected correctly, to say the least!
In this book, Victor shows how recent neuroscience confirms everything the New Testament teaches about how we are to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. In the first section of Changing Your Mind, Victor lays out everything the New Testament says about the need for spiritual transformation and about how we are called to cooperate with the Spirit to bring this transformation about. While this may sound like standard fare, Victor draws out profound (and profoundly convicting) insights from this material, some of which I had never seen before.
But Changing Your Mind begins to get really exciting in the second section in which he covers cutting edge insights from neuroscience about the nature and power of the human brain. Among other things, he gives a number of fascinating accounts from scientific journals that illustrate the power of our beliefs to heal, kill or transform us. For example, he discusses a man in Latin America who believed he’d been cursed by a Witch Doctor with a lethal “lizard curse” and began to slowly die. Six weeks later this man was on the verge of death, though doctors could find absolutely nothing wrong with him.
Fortunately, a medical doctor who had treated a number of victims of curses like this heard about this man’s affliction. He told the family he knew how to break “the lizard curse” and then performed a made up exorcism. This ritual culminated when this doctor made it look like he pulled a lizard (which he had brought with him) out of this man’s stomach, shouting “we’ve defeated the lizard curse!”). The man immediately began to recover and was restored to full health within three weeks. This illustrates the power of our beliefs to kill or to heal us. When Jesus said; “According to your faith be it unto you,” he wasn’t kidding! Copan reviews a number of such episodes.
In the third and final section of this informative and insightful book, Copan integrates the Bible and neuroscience while offering very practical advice on how to apply this integrated model to our lives. All I can say about this third section is that I felt like it was something I felt I could have written (thought probably not as succinctly). Among many other things, Copan understands the supremely important role that imagination plays in exercising faith, and the exercises he suggests on how to exercise imagination to bring about spiritual transformation and liberation is spot on!
So, as you by now could probably have guessed, I couldn’t recommend a book more strongly than this one! If I had my way, I’d make it required reading for all followers of Jesus.
Category: General
Tags: Book Reviews, Discipleship, Imagination
Related Reading

Part 9 (of 15): Peterson on White Privilege
Assessing Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life by Greg Boyd “The degree to which the terrible part of the world manifests itself in your life is proportionate to how insufficient you are….If you got your act together completely, maybe all the suffering would disappear from your life, or at least all the unbearable suffering.” Jordan…

Following Jesus Doesn’t Work
I met a middle aged woman one day who told me she had given up on Christianity. “It just didn’t work for me,” she said. My response was: “What on earth made you think Jesus was supposed to work for you? The truth is that you were supposed to work for him.” The sentiment is…

Part 1 (of 15): Introduction — What’s Up With Jordan Peterson?
Assessing Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” by Greg Boyd Over the last two years I have, with increasing frequency, been asked what I thought of the views of this maverick Canadian thinker named Jordan Peterson. Sometimes the question was asked by admirers, if not devotees, of his writings and (more commonly) of his online…

The Future of Open Theism: From Antecedents to Opportunities (book review)
a book review by Greg Boyd While there were many precursors to the movement, Open Theism first exploded on the scene as a controversial issue among Evangelicals in the wake of the 1994 publication of The Openness of God (ed. Clark Pinnock). The years immediately following the publication of this landmark book were marked by…

Why Can’t God Stop Evil? The Thomas J. Oord Interview (podcast)
Greg and Thomas talk about Open Theism and how Greg’s views differ from Thomas’s. Theology nerds, get your compass and your flashlight and prepare to go DEEEEEP in the weeds! Thomas’s book: God Can’t Episode 487 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0487.mp3

Giant Jesus
Yesterday’s post featured a video of Greg sharing about the role of the church in manifesting God’s character to the world. Here are some follow-up thoughts on that topic. The NT often uses the metaphor of “the body of Christ” to describe the church. When Jesus walked the earth, he did so in an ordinary…