This page has three parts: Independent Biblical Identification, Cross-Entry Synthesis, and Observation Notes.
08-1907-06-23 Biblical Resonance Analysis
Volume 8 — June 23, 1907 “The most beautiful act is the abandonment in the Will of God.”
STAGE ONE — Independent Biblical Identification
The Question Posed: Sorrow, Resignation, and the Most Beautiful Act
“I was thinking to myself about which would be the most beautiful act, and most pleasing to our Lord, which might more easily induce Him to come: sorrow for one’s own sins or resignation? In the meantime, He came for just a little, and told me: ‘Daughter, the most beautiful act, and most pleasing to Me, is the abandonment in my Will.‘”
Luisa’s interior question places two well-established ascetical categories — contrition and resignation — against each other, and Christ’s answer transcends both by naming abandonment in the Divine Will as the supreme act. This is not a rejection of sorrow or resignation but a disclosure of the hierarchy: each is good, but abandonment reaches where neither can.
Psalm 51:17 — “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. O God, you will not despise a broken and contrite heart.” The goodness of sorrow for sins is scripturally unassailable; Christ’s acknowledgment that it is “good and praiseworthy” is anchored here. But Psalm 51 itself points beyond exterior penitential act toward interior disposition — the very movement toward which abandonment in the Divine Will is the culmination. The ranking does not negate the lower; it completes it. Direct doctrinal parallel
Matthew 16:24–25 — “Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, and whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it.” The logic of abandonment is structurally present in the dominical teaching: the soul who abandons herself completely in the Divine Will loses her being in order to reacquire the Divine — a precise instantiation of losing-to-find. The movement from sorrow (which addresses what the soul has done) to abandonment (which addresses what the soul is) parallels the movement from following outwardly to self-denial inwardly. Direct doctrinal parallel
John 12:24–25 — “Most certainly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life will lose it. He who hates his life in this world will keep it to eternal life.” The grain-of-wheat image illuminates the mechanism Christ is teaching: sorrow for sins mourns the past without dying to the self; abandonment in the Divine Will is the death that alone produces the fruit of divine reacquisition. Direct doctrinal parallel
The Destruction of One’s Own Being
“Even though sorrow for one’s own sins is good and praiseworthy, yet, it does not destroy one’s own being; while abandoning oneself completely in my Will destroys one’s own being, and makes one reacquire the Divine Being.”
Christ draws a sharp distinction between sorrow (which is good but leaves the self intact) and abandonment (which destroys one’s own being, opening the space the Divine Being then fills). “Destroys one’s own being” does not mean ontological annihilation but the dissolution of the self-will as the organizing center of the person’s existence.
Galatians 2:20 — “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. That life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.” The Pauline “no longer I” is the most exact scriptural rendering of the destruction of one’s own being: the ego that once constituted the center is crucified, and what remains and lives is Christ. This is the mechanism Luisa’s entry names: the soul “would remember no more that her being exists.” Direct doctrinal parallel
Colossians 3:3 — “For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” The death of self and concealment within God parallels precisely the double movement: destruction of one’s own being (death) and reacquisition of the Divine (life hidden in God). The hiddenness in God corresponds to the soul’s forgetting that her being exists — it is swallowed up in the Divine. Direct doctrinal parallel
Romans 6:6–7 — “knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be in bondage to sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin.” The “brought to nothing” of the old self, accomplished through co-crucifixion with Christ, is the theological ground for the destruction of one’s own being. Sorrow addresses acts of sin; crucifixion with Christ addresses the agent — which is why abandonment goes where sorrow cannot. Direct doctrinal parallel
2 Corinthians 5:17 — “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.” The destruction of one’s own being is the passing-away of the old; the reacquisition of the Divine Being is the arrival of the new. The new creation is not a repaired version of the old but its replacement — the same logic that governs the distinction between sorrow (which repairs) and abandonment (which transforms). Direct doctrinal parallel
Reacquiring the Divine Being — Return to Origin
“the soul gives Me more honor, because she gives Me everything I can demand of the creature, reacquiring, in Me, that which had come out of Me. And the soul comes to reacquire that which alone she should reacquire – that is, she reacquires God, with all the goods that God possesses.”
The phrase “that which had come out of Me” is architecturally significant: the soul’s reacquisition of the Divine Being is simultaneously a return — the creature recovering what was originally given in the act of creation and lost in the Fall. The soul goes back to her source.
Genesis 1:26–27 — “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.‘” The human creature came out of God bearing the divine image; the soul in abandonment reacquires “that which had come out of Me” — she returns to the image-and-likeness condition, the original ontological configuration before sin disfigured it. This connects the entry’s teaching directly to IDR-1’s image-restoration arc. Typological
2 Peter 1:4 — “by which he has granted to us his precious and exceedingly great promises; that through these you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world by lust.” The promise of participation in the divine nature is the scriptural ground for “she reacquires God with all the goods that God possesses.” The theotic trajectory — partaking of what God is — is precisely the reacquisition named here. Direct doctrinal parallel
John 17:21–23 — “that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that you sent me. The glory which you have given me, I have given to them, that they may be one, even as we are one, I in them, and you in me, that they may be perfected into one, that the world may know that you sent me and loved them, even as you loved me.” Christ’s high-priestly prayer names the goal as the soul’s being drawn into the Trinitarian communion — which is the fullest form of reacquiring the Divine Being with all its goods. Christological/Trinitarian
Ephesians 3:17–19 — “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, to the end that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strengthened to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and height and depth, and to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” The filling with all the fullness of God is the exact trajectory of the reacquisition: not a portion of the Divine but the fullness — “all the goods that God possesses.” Direct doctrinal parallel
1 John 4:16 — “We know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.” The mutual indwelling is the operative form of the reacquisition: the soul who abides in God (through abandonment in His Will) abides in God and God in her — the reciprocal possession that constitutes reacquiring God. Direct doctrinal parallel
The Honor of Total Self-Gift
“by abandoning herself in my Will, the soul gives Me more honor, because she gives Me everything I can demand of the creature”
The abandonment in the Divine Will is not merely the most beneficial act for the soul; it is the act of supreme worship — giving God the only thing that is entirely the soul’s own to give: her will.
Matthew 22:37–39 — “Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. A second likewise is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” The total self-gift of abandonment in the Divine Will is the operative fulfillment of the Great Commandment — “everything God can demand of the creature” maps onto the totality of “all your heart, soul, and mind.” Sorrow addresses offenses against the law; abandonment fulfills the law’s innermost intent. Direct doctrinal parallel
Romans 12:1 — “Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service.” The “living sacrifice” — not the sacrifice of a life lost but of a life fully surrendered in ongoing self-offering — is the scriptural form of the abandonment that gives God everything He can demand. The honor given is precisely the honor of worship in its fullest sense. Direct doctrinal parallel
Micah 6:6–8 — “How shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the exalted God? Shall I … He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does the LORD require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” The ascending series of what can be offered culminates in walking humbly with God — which, read through Luisa’s framework, is the abandonment in the Divine Will: not sacrifices and offerings but the alignment of the soul’s entire movement with God’s. Affective/meditative
The Binary Condition: Divine Will or Corrupted Nature
“However, as long as the soul remains completely in the Will of God, she reacquires God; but as she goes out of my Will, she reacquires her own being, with all the evils of the corrupted nature.”
The entry closes with a sharp binary: remaining in the Divine Will and going out of it produce diametrically opposite acquisitions. There is no neutral ground. This is DWE-1’s governing structural logic stated in its most explicit form yet.
John 15:4–5 — “Remain in me, and I in you. As the branch can’t bear fruit by itself unless it remains in the vine, so neither can you, unless you remain in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. He who remains in me and I in him bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” The abiding/non-abiding binary is the Johannine form of the in-Will/out-of-Will binary. Abiding yields fruitfulness (reacquiring God); separation yields nothing (reacquiring only the corrupted self). Direct doctrinal parallel
Romans 8:6–7 — “For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the Spirit is life and peace; because the mind of the flesh is hostile toward God, for it is not subject to God’s law, neither indeed can it be.” The two orientations — Spirit-mind and flesh-mind — correspond to the two acquisitions: Spirit-mind reacquires God; flesh-mind reacquires the self with all the evils of corrupted nature. The binary is not merely behavioral but ontological, exactly as in Luisa’s entry. Direct doctrinal parallel
Genesis 3:6–7, 17–19 (paraphrase) — The Fall narrative: Adam and Eve acting outside God’s will and immediately “reacquiring their own being” in the most literal sense — knowing themselves in shame, subject to labor and death. The going-out-of-God’s-will described here is the Fall’s structural repetition at the level of the individual soul; the remaining-in-God’s-will is its reversal. Typological
Jeremiah 2:13 — “For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the spring of living waters, and cut out cisterns for themselves: broken cisterns that can’t hold water.” Forsaking God corresponds to going out of His Will; the broken cisterns that hold no water correspond to “reacquiring one’s own being with all the evils of corrupted nature.” The two evils of Jeremiah map onto the single act of going out — and the result is emptiness, not plenitude. Affective/meditative
STAGE TWO — Comparison with Hogan’s Commentary
CORRESPONDENCES
Both identify Romans 8:28 as the primary anchor for abandonment in the Divine Will — the foundational scriptural expression of the surrender-to-God tradition Luisa is now extending to its furthest register.
Both identify Galatians 2:20 as the governing passage for the destruction of one’s own being: “I no longer live, Christ lives in me.” Hogan cites it explicitly; Stage One treats it as the most exact scriptural rendering of the mechanism.
Both connect the reacquisition of the Divine Being to the state of Adam before the Fall, identifying the entry’s teaching as a restoration to the original pre-lapsarian condition.
DEVIATIONS
Stage One identifies John 12:24–25 (the grain of wheat) as the operative image for the losing-to-find mechanism, while Hogan does not move toward this passage. The grain image illuminates the mechanism differently from Romans 8:28: where Romans 8:28 addresses the trustful disposition of abandonment, John 12 addresses the death-structure that makes reacquisition possible.
Stage One anchors the binary (in-Will/out-of-Will) in John 15:4–5 and Romans 8:6–7; Hogan does not cite these specifically, though the abiding logic is implicit in her commentary.
ADDITIONS — MINE
- Psalm 51:17 — affirmation of the goodness of sorrow (the category Christ acknowledges before transcending)
- Matthew 16:24–25 — the dominical lose-to-find logic as the structural ground for abandonment over resignation
- John 12:24–25 — grain-of-wheat image; death as the precondition of fruitful reacquisition
- Colossians 3:3 — “you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” as the double-movement parallel
- Romans 6:6–7 — “old self brought to nothing”; why abandonment reaches where sorrow cannot
- 2 Corinthians 5:17 — new creation language; destruction of old and arrival of new
- Genesis 1:26–27 — original image as what “came out of God” and is now reacquired
- 2 Peter 1:4 — partaking of divine nature as the scriptural ground for reacquiring God with all His goods
- John 17:21–23 — Trinitarian communion as the fullest form of reacquisition
- Ephesians 3:17–19 — filled with all the fullness of God
- 1 John 4:16 — mutual indwelling as the operative form of reacquisition
- Matthew 22:37–39 — total self-gift as fulfillment of the Great Commandment
- Romans 12:1 — living sacrifice as the form of abandonment that gives God everything He can demand
- Micah 6:6–8 — ascending series of what can be offered; walking humbly with God as the culmination
- John 15:4–5 — abiding/non-abiding binary as the Johannine structural parallel
- Romans 8:6–7 — Spirit-mind vs. flesh-mind binary as the Pauline structural parallel
- Genesis 3:6–7, 17–19 — the Fall as the prototype of going-out-of-God’s-will
- Jeremiah 2:13 — broken cisterns; forsaking God = reacquiring the hollow self
ADDITIONS — HERS
Hogan provides an important pastoral hermeneutical note on the phrase “destroys one’s own being”: she flags that a reader unfamiliar with these writings could reach a dangerously wrong conclusion, interpreting destruction of being as ontological annihilation. She clarifies: it means putting aside the ego and letting the Divine Will reign. The implicit scriptural background for this clarification is Romans 8:13 (“if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live”) — the language of mortification that is death not of the person but of the self-will’s sovereignty.
Hogan notes the progressive character of Christ’s teaching across the volumes: “she’s been told in six volumes it’s resignation” — and this entry now advances beyond resignation to abandonment. No new scripture citation accompanies this observation, but it functions as a cross-volume doctrinal calibration.
Hogan does not mark this entry as VIP.
STAGE TWO SYNTHESIS
The combined analysis reveals a tightly integrated doctrinal unit with three interlocking scriptural traditions as its load-bearing structure. The Pauline crucifixion-with-Christ stream (Galatians 2:20; Romans 6:6–7; Colossians 3:3) supplies the mechanism of self-destruction; the theotic tradition (2 Peter 1:4; Ephesians 3:17–19; John 17:21–23) supplies the positive content of reacquisition; and the dominical lose-to-find logic (Matthew 16:24–25; John 12:24–25; John 15:4–5) supplies the structural logic by which destruction and reacquisition form a single movement. Romans 8:28 anchors the foundational tradition of abandonment while Galatians 2:20 names its interior mechanism. The entry’s binary conclusion (in-Will/out-of-Will) draws on both the Johannine abiding tradition and the Pauline Spirit/flesh antithesis, revealing that what Luisa frames as a moment-by-moment condition is grounded in one of Scripture’s most pervasive doctrinal antinomies.
Cross-Entry Synthesis
Volume 8 — June 23, 1907 “The most beautiful act is the abandonment in the Will of God.”
The Question Posed: Sorrow, Resignation, and the Most Beautiful Act
Luisa’s interior question — sorrow or resignation? — opens a space that Christ immediately reorganizes. Both categories are acknowledged as real goods; neither is dismissed. But the entry’s opening move is already instructive: that Luisa frames her question around which act might “more easily induce Him to come” reveals the functional frame operative in earlier stages of the formation arc — the soul calibrating her acts in relation to their efficacy in drawing Christ’s visitation. Christ’s answer does not address the functional question directly; He bypasses it entirely, naming the act that exceeds both by a different logic altogether.
This entry’s position as the first of Volume 8 is worth noting. The graduation from sorrow and resignation to abandonment recapitulates, in a single teaching unit, the doctrinal arc traversed across Volumes 1 through 7: the formation of the victim-soul through sorrow and contrition (Volumes 1–4), the deepening into resignation (Volumes 5–6), and now the disclosure of the summit — abandonment so total that the soul “would remember no more that her being exists.” The opening entry of a new volume is functioning as a doctrinal hinge.
Stage One identified the dominical lose-to-find logic (Matthew 16:24–25; John 12:24–25) as the structural ground for Christ’s comparative ranking. Hogan anchors the same movement in Romans 8:28. These two citation streams are complementary rather than competing: Romans 8:28 addresses the trustful disposition that enables abandonment (the soul who loves God and is called according to His purpose), while the dominical texts address the death-structure that abandonment enacts (the soul who loses her life finds it). Together they supply both the motivation and the mechanism.
The Destruction of One’s Own Being
The entry’s most structurally significant claim is also its most hermeneutically demanding: abandonment in the Divine Will “destroys one’s own being.” Hogan’s pastoral intervention — flagging the risk of misreading this as ontological annihilation and clarifying that it means the putting aside of the ego — is itself theologically significant. The clarification does not soften the teaching but grounds it: what is destroyed is not the person but the self-will’s sovereignty as the organizing center of the person’s existence. The soul does not cease to exist; she ceases to exist as her own center.
The Pauline tradition supplies the governing articulation. Galatians 2:20 — cited by both — is the load-bearing anchor: “no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Colossians 3:3 (“you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God”) and Romans 6:6–7 (“our old self was crucified with him… brought to nothing”) extend the same movement. What is notable across this stream is the consistency of its double structure: crucifixion/death is always paired with new life, “brought to nothing” always issues in freedom. The destruction of one’s own being is not terminal; it is the precondition of reacquisition.
2 Corinthians 5:17 opens the same double movement at the level of creation: “the old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” This passage illuminates a distinction the entry implies but does not spell out: sorrow for sins addresses acts, resignation addresses circumstances, but abandonment addresses the creature’s fundamental ontological orientation. Sorrow can be deep and genuine and leave the self-will entirely intact; abandonment, by definition, cannot.
Reacquiring the Divine Being — Return to Origin
The phrase “that which had come out of Me” is the entry’s most architecturally significant formulation. It transforms what could be read as a purely ascetical teaching into a creation-and-restoration theology: the soul who abandons herself in the Divine Will does not merely acquire something new but recovers something original. The reacquisition is a return.
Genesis 1:26–27 — the image-and-likeness — is the scriptural anchor for this origin. The human creature came out of God bearing the divine image; the soul in abandonment reacquires what her being originally was before sin reorganized it around the self-will. This connects the entry’s teaching to IDR-1 (Image Disfigurement and Restoration), which has been tracking precisely this arc across the corpus: restoration is not repair of a damaged original but recovery of the actual form of Christ rising within the soul whose will has been dissolved (January 20, Volume 7). The June 23 entry is IDR-1’s most foundational doctrinal statement — it supplies the mechanism (abandonment → destruction of own being → reacquisition of Divine Being) that the January 20 phenomenology presupposes.
Hogan makes the Adam connection explicit in commentary: “you come back to the state that Adam was in before he fell, where he was in the divine will and everything was fine.” The implicit scriptural background is Genesis 2 — the original condition before the Fall — and Romans 5:18–19 (HOG-1’s governing anchor: “as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous”). What abandonment in the Divine Will accomplishes in the individual soul is the undoing of the Fall’s fundamental movement — the substitution of self-will for Divine Will — and its reversal.
The theotic tradition — 2 Peter 1:4, Ephesians 3:17–19, John 17:21–23 — supplies the positive content of what is reacquired. “She reacquires God with all the goods that God possesses” is not metaphorical; these passages ground it in the scriptural promise of genuine participation in the divine nature, genuine filling with the divine fullness, genuine incorporation into the Trinitarian communion. The reacquisition is real.
The Honor of Total Self-Gift
Christ’s framing — “she gives Me more honor, because she gives Me everything I can demand of the creature” — establishes abandonment in the Divine Will as the supreme act of worship. The honor-language is precise: this is not merely the most beneficial act for the soul but the most worshipful act from God’s perspective. What God “can demand” of the creature is the creature’s will — the one thing the creature possesses that is genuinely her own to give. Abandonment gives it wholly.
Matthew 22:37–39 (the Great Commandment) and Romans 12:1 (living sacrifice as spiritual worship) together supply the scriptural ground. The Great Commandment names what God can demand — all heart, soul, mind, strength; Romans 12:1 names the operative form of offering it — the living sacrifice. Abandonment in the Divine Will is the living sacrifice in its fullest expression: not a single act of offering but an ongoing condition of total surrender. Micah 6:8’s ascending series (“walk humbly with your God”) reaches its culmination here — that walking is the abandonment Christ is naming.
This movement also carries forward DWE-1 (Divine Will Exclusivity). The entry does not merely assert that abandonment is the best act among several good acts; it names it as categorically superior because it alone gives God everything He can demand. Sorrow gives God acknowledgment of offense; resignation gives God acceptance of circumstances; abandonment gives God the self. DWE-1’s governing logic — that the Divine Will life supersedes all prior forms of holiness — is here stated in its most doctrinal form.
The Binary Condition: Divine Will or Corrupted Nature
The entry’s closing formulation is among the sharpest binary statements in the corpus to this point: there is no neutral position between remaining in the Divine Will and going out of it, and the two positions produce diametrically opposite acquisitions — God with all His goods, or one’s own being with all the evils of corrupted nature.
John 15:4–5 (abiding/non-abiding in the vine) and Romans 8:6–7 (Spirit-mind/flesh-mind) together reveal that this binary has both Johannine and Pauline scriptural depth. The abiding tradition addresses the relational form of the binary — union with Christ as vine; separation as the branch cast off. The Spirit/flesh antithesis addresses the ontological form — the two orientations produce qualitatively different forms of existence. Together they confirm that what Luisa’s entry presents as a moment-by-moment condition is grounded in one of Scripture’s most structurally pervasive doctrinal antinomies.
The typological background — the Fall itself (Genesis 3) — makes the binary’s stakes unmistakable. “Going out of My Will” is the individual soul’s re-enactment of Adam’s movement; “remaining in My Will” is its reversal. Jeremiah 2:13 (forsaking the fountain of living waters for broken cisterns) provides the prophetic articulation of what is actually acquired by going out: not autonomous plenitude but the emptiness of a self that cannot hold what it has grasped.
Synthesis
The dominant biblical imagination of this entry is the Pauline crucifixion-with-Christ tradition, operating in concert with the Johannine abiding tradition and the creation-and-restoration typology of Genesis. The three traditions are not competing but stratified: Genesis provides the theological horizon (return to origin, reacquisition of the image), John provides the structural logic (abiding as the operative form of remaining in the Will), and Paul provides the mechanism (co-crucifixion as the mode of self-destruction that enables reacquisition).
The three findings carrying the most theological significance:
First, “that which had come out of Me” is the entry’s most architecturally consequential phrase. It grounds the entire teaching of abandonment in a creation-and-restoration ontology: the soul’s reacquisition of the Divine Being is not a novel achievement but a return to origin. This connects Volume 8’s opening entry to IDR-1’s restoration arc and to the Adamic-forward-bridge that has been accumulating since Volume 7. The mechanism is now disclosed: abandonment → destruction of own being → reacquisition of what came out of God. IDR-1’s phenomenology presupposes exactly this mechanism.
Second, the comparison with sorrow and resignation establishes a doctrinal hierarchy that retroactively organizes the entire formation arc across Volumes 1–7. Sorrow is the beginning; resignation is the middle; abandonment is the summit — and the distinctions are structural, not merely gradational. Sorrow does not destroy one’s own being; it addresses acts. Resignation does not destroy one’s own being; it accepts circumstances. Only abandonment reaches the ontological root.
Third, the binary closing formulation — in Will: reacquires God; out of Will: reacquires corrupted nature — is DWE-1’s most explicit structural statement. It is not an escalation of prior DWE-1 instances but their doctrinal ground: the reason Divine Will living supersedes all other forms of holiness is not arbitrary preference but ontological consequence. The two acquisitions are what determine the matter.
Observation Notes
See this note in volume context →
08-1907-06-23
DWE-1 — most explicit structural statement: The binary formulation closing this entry — “as long as the soul remains completely in the Will of God, she reacquires God; but as she goes out of my Will, she reacquires her own being, with all the evils of the corrupted nature” — is not an escalation of prior DWE-1 instances but their doctrinal ground. Prior instances assert the supremacy of Divine Will living; this entry explains why: the two acquisitions (God with all His goods vs. own being with all evils of corrupted nature) are ontologically determined by the in-Will/out-of-Will binary. DWE-1 updated with Volume 8 opening entry as doctrinal foundation.
IDR-1 — mechanism disclosed: “Reacquiring, in Me, that which had come out of Me” supplies the mechanism that IDR-1’s phenomenological arc (culminating in January 20, Volume 7) presupposes. The soul reacquires the Divine Being by abandoning self-will; what she reacquires is what originally came out of God — the image-and-likeness condition of Genesis 1:26–27. IDR-1 updated: this entry is its most foundational doctrinal statement, supplying the operative mechanism underlying all prior restoration phenomenology.