Theories of Divine Transformation: Understanding How God Changes Lives
The fundamental premise of the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture is that knowledge of how to be conformed to Christ’s likeness is vitally important for our being conformed to Christlikeness. In other words, the Jesus way is a learning way (Matt 11:29). In light of this premise, the Martin Institute’s primary goal is to assist Christian individuals and organizations to understand, communicate, and implement biblically grounded and psychologically realistic pathways of becoming more like Jesus for the good of the church and the world to whom we witness.
In May of 2025 we convened the 2nd annual Martin Institute Christian Formation Workshop at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. The primary goal of the Christian Formation workshops is to help establish knowledge of Christian spiritual and moral formation to further spiritual maturity among Christian individuals and groups. To accomplish this goal the workshops are designed to gather, integrate, and refine multidisciplinary scholarship related to formation in Christ and bring this emerging scholarship into dialogue with pastors, ministry leaders, and practitioners from various churches and parachurch organizations.
The theme of the 2025 workshop was “Theories of Divine Transformation: Understanding How God Changes Lives.” Over three days, theorists and practitioners examined the nature of Divinely caused human moral transformation addressing two fundamental questions:
For more information on the workshop itself, see here.
The format of the workshop involves opening comments by Steve Porter, Martin Institute Senior Fellow and Executive Director, and closing comments by the workshop co-organizer, Rebecca De Young (Professor of Philosophy, Calvin University and Martin Institute Senior Fellow). In between there were nine sessions. Each session consists of a ten-minute overview of a longer presentation paper that was read by the workshop participants prior to the workshop and a twenty-minute response by the session’s commentator.