![[assets/covers/dallas-willard.jpg]] Dallas Willard (1935–2013) was an American philosopher and Christian writer, professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, and one of the most influential voices in the modern spiritual formation movement. He is best known for *The Divine Conspiracy* (1997) and *The Spirit of the Disciplines* (1988). ## Who he writes for Willard’s pastoral reach is unusually wide. He writes explicitly for the broken and excluded: ‘The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorced. The HIV positive and the herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged and the incurably ill.’ This is not sentimentality. It follows from a theology in which Jesus’s teaching is genuinely available to anyone willing to learn, not only to those who already have their lives in order.[^dc-pxi] Richard J. Foster places *The Divine Conspiracy* in the company of Bonhoeffer, Wesley, Calvin, Luther, Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, Aquinas, and Augustine. That is high company. It is not unwarranted.[^dc-px] ## The philosopher’s angle Willard was a professional philosopher before he was a popular author, and it shows. He takes Jesus seriously as an ‘intelligent, fully competent Teacher’, a framing that sounds obvious but runs against a long tradition of treating Jesus’s ethical teaching as either impossibly demanding or ethically secondary to his salvific role. For Willard, the two cannot be separated. The [[Sermon on the Mount]] is not a test; it is a curriculum taught by someone who knew what he was talking about. ## Jesus’s words as real information The central diagnostic in the Introduction is that the church has failed to treat Jesus’s words as what they are: ‘reality and vital information about life.’ Willard means this precisely. Jesus knew things, specifically how to live, and communicated them. The institutional failure is not doctrinal but formative: churches teach people to profess allegiance to Jesus and to attract others to him, but do not teach them how to do what he said was best. The gap between profession and practice is, at root, an epistemological failure: we no longer take his words seriously as information.[^dc-pxiv] The approach to scripture that follows from this is intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading: not governed by academic theories, not reduced to mindless orthodoxy, but oriented toward the practical question of how to live in God’s kingdom. Both failure modes (the scholar’s and the traditionalist’s) share a common result: they ensure that Jesus’s words bear no direct weight on how life is actually conducted.[^dc-pxvi] ## Selected passages > ‘It is the failure to understand Jesus and his words as reality and vital information about life that explains why, today, we do not routinely teach those who profess allegiance to him how to do what he said was best.’ > > *The Divine Conspiracy*, p. xiv > ‘An intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading — that is, one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy — is what it requires to direct us into life in God’s kingdom.’ > > *The Divine Conspiracy*, p. xvi ## Appearances - *The Divine Conspiracy*, Dallas Willard (1997), Foreword (R.J. Foster), pp. x–xi - *The Divine Conspiracy*, Dallas Willard (1997), Introduction, pp. xiv–xvii [^dc-px]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. x · *‘Most writers turn these penetrating words of Jesus into a new set of soul-crushing laws.’* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 9.jpg|↗]] [^dc-pxi]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. xi · *‘I would place The Divine Conspiracy in rare company indeed: alongside the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Wesley, John Calvin and Martin Luther, Teresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen, and perhaps even Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo.’* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 10.jpg|↗]] [^dc-pxiv]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. xiv · *‘The people initially impacted by that message generally concluded that they would be fools to disregard it. That was the basis of their conversion.’* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 13.jpg|↗]] [^dc-pxvi]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. xvi · *‘An intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading—that is, one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy’* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 15.jpg|↗]]