![\"\"](\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/evolution-chimp1.jpg\" "\\"evolution")
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In the late 1990s I discovered two Christian authors<\/strong> who were to have a big effect on my thinking.<\/p>\n In this post, I’ll discuss the first of these: Dr. Dallas Willard<\/a>\u00a0(1935-2013)<\/strong>, professor of Philosophy at\u00a0USC, and well-known writer on Christian spirituality. While at Biola in the early 90s I’d heard him talk at an SCP, and was vaguely aware that some of my professors\u00a0at Biola had studied under\u00a0him, such the man who introduced me to philosophy, Del Hanson. His philosophical work that I’ve read is well done and helpful. But his magnum opus is his Divine Conspiracy<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, clearly the product of many, many years of studying and reflecting on the Bible, and learning to live it out as a disciple of Jesus.<\/p>\n Back in the dead of the winter of 1999-2000, based on my study of this book, and taking its advice, I went on a spiritual retreat, alone at a Catholic retreat house in Massachusetts. I read through all four gospels, and rededicated my life to God, to discipleship to Jesus. It gave me a huge boost in faith, in trust in God, which saw me through the process of job hunting, a process that went from about September 1999 to April 2000. Most find this process terrifying, but I thought it was fun! I simply didn’t worry about it, I just trusted God and did my best, and I was given what I needed.<\/p>\n I’ve read The Divine Conspiracy<\/em> maybe half a dozen\u00a0times, and I’ve worked through it with about three groups of people. But I wouldn’t<\/em> say that I’ve fully\u00a0learned and lived its message<\/strong>. I’m still working on that. Other Christians I’ve read it with have usually either (1) pooped out before the end, or (2) thought it was really neat, but they seemed to go on understanding the message of Jesus and Christianity as they always had – like, in one ear and out the other. These responses, I could never understand. I’d be a happy man if I could be a part of a group of Christians who really got<\/em> the good news of the Kingdom, and who would throw aside all tradition, if that’s what it took, to get it.<\/p>\n The content of the book<\/strong> is hard to summarize. But he expounds on the good news of the Kingdom of God, which was Jesus’s central message<\/strong>. (Through a footnote of his, by the way, I discovered that the biblical unitarian Sir Anthony Buzzard<\/a> had long been emphasizing this biblical theme, such as in this short book<\/a>\u00a0and this one<\/a>.) Willard shows, I think, how this fits with Paul’s emphases, and with the Old Testament. He provides a reading of the Beatitudes<\/strong> on which they make sense<\/em>! (Here’s my version<\/a>.) He expounds at great length on the theme of discipleship<\/strong> to Jesus. He devastatingly critiques<\/strong> the theological Right as well as the theological Left in contemporary America as inadequate “gospels of sin management.” Although Willard writes as an evangelical to evangelicals, in many ways he’s profoundly out of step<\/strong> with them. I don’t think he always realizes to what extent this is so – or at least, he never draws attention to these issues.<\/p>\n One big theme Willard hits is the centrality of God to Jesus’s world view<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Now God’s own “kingdom,” or “rule,” is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his Kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or b y choice, is within his kingdom. …the kingdom of God is not essentially a social or political reality at all. Indeed, the social and political realm, along with the individual heart, is the only place in all of creation where the kingdom of God, or his effective will, is currently permitted to be absent. (p.25)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You can tell here that he’s no Calvinist<\/strong>. In my mind he’s a sort of\u00a0open theist<\/a><\/strong>, though he privately denied it<\/a>. He also, much of the time, sounds like<\/em> a unitarian – someone who thinks God just is a certain self, namely the Father. It’s important, he argues, that we think rightly about this magnificent self.<\/p>\n You cannot call upon Jesus Christ or upon God and not be heard. You live in their house… We usually call it simply “the universe.” But they fully occupy it. …Only as we understand this, is the way open for a true ecology of human existence, for only then are we dealing with what the human habitation truly is. And the God who hears is also one who speaks. He has spoken and is still speaking. Humanity remains his project, not its own, and his initiatives are always at work among us. (pp. 32-3)<\/p>\n To [Jesus’s] eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world. …Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us. …We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. (pp. 61-2)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here, as through the book, “God” isn’t Jesus<\/strong> – rather, Jesus is someone else, someone other than God, a go-between relating humans to God. He’s quite far from the Jesus-is-God-himself strain of thinking that is so prominent in American evangelicalism. When you go to look at the New Testament, you see that this is how it is – Jesus and God are, as it were, two characters. And God is held up as fundamental and central, although Jesus is exalted to his right hand, to sit on his throne with him.<\/p>\n Just like in the New Testament, Willard often uses “God” to refer to the Father. But totally unlike the New Testament, eventually it becomes clear that Willard is a social trinitarian<\/strong>! For him, God is a group, a society which is a close-knit community of divine persons. (e.g. pp. 382-4)<\/p>\n What? How can God be both a group (so, not a self) and a “He” (a self)? Clearly, Willard thinks the one God is both. If he’s a self, though, he must be a thing, a concrete entity, an individual substance. But at times, Willard describes this “God” community as neither a thing nor a self. He seems to think that the fundamental reality is really a group of three realities, a group which isn’t itself a thing.<\/p>\n …the advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity were real… a self-sufficing community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings<\/strong>… In faith we rest ourselves upon the reality of the Trinity in action – and it graciously meets us. For it is there. And our lives are then enmeshed in the true world of God. (p. 318)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What gives with those last two “it”s? I don’t know! Is the one God an it, or a he? It matters!<\/strong> I see the unfortunate influence of late 20th c. “social trinitarian” theologians here, injecting incoherence into what is otherwise a magnificent scriptural picture. It’s pretty hard to read the New Testament and come away thinking that the Father is either a member or a proper part of<\/strong> the one God. The New Testament is firmly on the “he” side, and assumes that the God of Jesus (the Father) is one and the same as the God of Israel.<\/p>\n This is, it seems to me, based on his writings, how Willard often\u00a0thought about the one God. But I surmise that for him, as with many, it was unthinkable that a Christian should not be a trinitarian. So of course, he must be a trinitarian, and the Bible must be trinitarian. Isn’t a Christian by definition<\/em> a trinitarian<\/strong>, of one sort or another? I would answer, no. If by definition a Christian were a trinitarian, then there would have been no Christians in the first 350 years or so of Christianity, which is absurd. You can choose to label, say, Justin Martyr, Origen, or Tertullian as “trinitarian<\/strong>,” (because they were Christians<\/em>, were they not?) but in my view<\/a> that is an abuse of the term<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you’ve read my philosophy papers, it’ll probably come as a surprise that my favorite Christian book (outside the Bible) is by a social trinitarian. But I’ve found that subtracting the confused social Trinity theorizing from the book leaves it as valuable as it was; in other words, those theories are inessential to nearly all that Willard says.<\/p>\n![\"Dallas](\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/dallas-willard.gif\")
I found this book staggering<\/strong> for many reasons. It took me a long time to read it the first time; each chapter required a lot of thought to process. I would read one, then stop to think about it for several days or weeks. To call it a book on Christian spirituality is to shortchange it. It is that, but it’s also a practical and biblical theology of the Kingdom of God<\/strong>. It is full of\u00a0insights about the New Testament, about Jesus and God, about human psychology and relationships. Name a Christian classic<\/strong> – Augustine’s Confessions<\/em>. The Imitation of Christ<\/em>. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity<\/em>. I would argue\u00a0that Willard’s book is far superior, and affords far more insight.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/qui-gon-300x175.jpg\" "\\"qui")
Someone – I think it might have been J.P. Moreland – once described Dallas as a sort of Christian Jedi Master<\/strong>. That’s not far off the mark!<\/p>\n