Four Books by Dr. Tallman

Loving God is the most important thing in life. When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he said “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.” Or as one person translated it: “Love God with all your passion, intellect, soul, and willpower.”

Jesus also said there is a second great commandment which is like the first one, that is, “Love others as you love yourself” (Matthew 22: 37-39). These two commandments sum up all of scripture, the Law and the Prophets. Everything else is commentary.

In 1983 I decided to make these great commandments the centre of my life. When I pondered, “How can I love God with all my heart?” it came to me that I needed an expert opinion. That is when I discovered Francis de Sales’ Treatise on the Love of God. It was very profound but seemed out of date since it was published in the seventeenth century. I thought “Someday someone should do a modern update of it.”

Now, God has given me the gift of writing. I have had two books published which were aimed at professional spiritual directors and counsellors. One of them, Finding Seekers, is a bestseller in its field. Plus, I have had hundreds of articles on spirituality published in the London Free Press, the main newspaper where I live. Various people have suggested I should write a book on spirituality aimed at the general public. Because I felt God was telling me through these people what I should do, I give God all the credit for this present book. I have just tried to obey orders.

For several years now, God has been laying on my heart that the world is falling apart and this is partly because the major religion of the western world, Christianity, has been overwhelmed by all the contemporary challenges to it: modern evolutionary science, scholarly criticism of the Bible and of the church’s historical record (both important and necessary, but faith-shaking), a materialist and consumerist culture, Christians rubbing shoulders with other major world religions thus relativizing Christianity, the rise of people who are spiritual but not religious, the new atheism, and so on.

If their faith survives, Christians today seem to be either anti-intellectual, anti-science fundamentalists with great passion, or broad-minded liberal intellectuals who lack passion. God has led me to believe that what the world needs now is a new type of Christian, that is, one who is both passionate and intellectual. De Sales’ Treatise is an intellectual and passionate approach to God and a masterpiece that fits this need.

In brief, I have written this book because God led me to write it. God has called me to do my little part to try to renew our civilization by renewing the Christian faith. I don’t see many Christians living Christ’s Great Commandments. And I believe they don’t love God with all their heart because no one taught them the importance of this, and just showing up at church for an hour once a week is not enough to transform anyone.

In my opinion and that of many scholars, the Treatise is on the level of other great classic Christian works such as The Cloud of Unknowing, The Imitation of Christ, and The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, but the Treatise is unknown by 99% of Christians. I wrote my book with the hope of remedying that. This is meant to be a devotional book, not an academic one, and so I hope the 260 quotes from the actual Treatise, hundreds of passages from scripture, and my 21st century commentary on all this will have a spiritual impact on my readers and change their hearts, minds, souls, and wills. I hope they will find their love of God growing as they read it.

I didn’t want the book however to be so heaven-bound that it was no earthly good. I believe that loving other human beings is integral to loving God, and so I wanted to show how God’s love and loving God in return relates to the everyday real-life issues of ordinary people. Throughout, I relate de Sales’ ideas to contemporary concerns about social justice, peace and care for our planet.

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi for the United Kingdom from 1993 to 2013, said that “Since we are living with such immense powers of destruction, God is setting us a really big challenge. God is giving us very little choice: we must love or die. That is where we are at the beginning of the 21st century.”

Hopefully God’s Ecstatic Love, a condensed version of the greatest spiritual masterpiece of a great spiritual master on the most important topic of all, that is, God’s love and loving God and other human beings, will help us all in fulfilling this great 21st century challenge.

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