![[assets/covers/jesus.jpg]] Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of the Christian tradition and the subject of Willard's entire project. What distinguishes Willard's treatment is the insistence that Jesus must be understood as a person of genuine authority, genuine presence, and genuine availability now: not a historical teacher, not a doctrinal abstraction, but someone currently active in the world, hearing, responding, and forming people who turn to him. ## Authority that does not cite The scribes and experts of Jesus's day taught by citing others: by appealing to tradition, precedent, and recognised authority. Jesus did not. He spoke with an authority that was not inherited but intrinsic: 'Just watch me and see that what I say is true.' He was himself the evidence for the truth of what he announced. This is a remarkable epistemological claim: the teacher's life is the argument. Not 'here is what the tradition says' but 'here is what reality is like; watch.'[^dc-p19] This directness forced a binary response. When the harlot who had overheard Jesus's teaching showed up at Simon's dinner (overwhelmed, grateful, weeping at his feet); Simon tried to explain the scene in a way that preserved Jesus's respectability. It did not work. 'When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him. That must be kept in mind for any authentic understanding of the power of Christian faith.' Niceness is not one of the available positions.[^dc-p20] ## Present and available Jesus's current availability is not a metaphor or a pious way of speaking about memory. Willard means it literally. Jesus is throughout the world, 'currently hearing those who cry out for him even more effectively than he did in "the days of his flesh."' This greater effectiveness is not explained away; it is insisted upon. The presence of Jesus after his death and resurrection is more (not less) available than his physical presence in first-century Palestine.[^dc-p32] The reach of this availability is deliberately scandalous: 'Do Jesus and his Father hear Buddhists when they call upon them? They hear anyone who calls upon them.' The accessibility of the [[Kingdom of God]] through Jesus is not gated by doctrinal affiliation or religious identity. What is required is genuine orientation: calling from the centre of one's being.[^dc-p32] ## The teacher who was displaced ==The issue Willard presses in Chapter 2 is not simply that discipleship has been abandoned; it is that Jesus has been displaced specifically as a teacher of how to live.== ==Both conservative and liberal Christianity, each in its own way, treat his teaching as either impossible (conservatives, who have made behaviour irrelevant to salvation) or derived from better secular sources (liberals, who read back Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx onto him).== ==What neither tradition will do is simply learn from him.==[^dc-p56] =='Nothing more forcibly demonstrates the extent to which we automatically assume the irrelevance of Jesus as teacher for our "real" lives.'== ==He has been replaced, in practice, by pop psychologists, financial advisers, political commentators: whoever happens to be producing the content people actually consume.== ==His teachings on money, enemies, anxiety, and ambition are stored in a devotional compartment rather than treated as the practical intelligence about human life that they are.==[^dc-p55] ==The gospel issue is the person, not the arrangement.== =='The gospel in the Gospels is concerned with whether we are alive to God or dead to him.'== ==Trusting Christ means trusting 'the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves'; not trusting some arrangement for sin-remission that he set up and that can be relied on without any ongoing relationship with him.==[^dc-p48] ## Selected passages > 'When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him. That must be kept in mind for any authentic understanding of the power of Christian faith.' > > *The Divine Conspiracy*, p. 19 > 'Jesus is now throughout the world, and he currently hears those who cry out for him even more effectively than he did in "the days of his flesh." He even reaches those who have very little knowledge about him.' > > *The Divine Conspiracy*, p. 32 > 'Do Jesus and his Father hear Buddhists when they call upon them? They hear anyone who calls upon them.' > > *The Divine Conspiracy*, p. 32 ## Appearances - *The Divine Conspiracy*, [[Dallas Willard]] (1997), Ch. 1 'Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now', pp. 19–20, 32 - *The Divine Conspiracy*, [[Dallas Willard]] (1997), Ch. 2 'Gospels of Sin Management', pp. 48, 55–56 ## Related [[Kingdom of God]] · [[Discipleship]] · [[Gospel of Sin Management]] · [[Grace]] · [[Dallas Willard]] [^dc-p19]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 19 · *'When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 38.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p20]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 20 · *'Scribes, expert scholars, teach by citing others.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 39.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p32]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 32 · *'Jesus is now throughout the world, and he currently hears those who cry out for him even more effectively than he did in "the days of his flesh." He even reaches those who have very little knowledge about him.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 51.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p48]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 48 · *'The issue, so far as the gospel in the Gospels is concerned, is whether we are alive to God or dead to him.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 67.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p55]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 55 · *'nothing more forcibly demonstrates the extent to which we automatically assume the irrelevance of Jesus as teacher for our "real" lives.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 74.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p56]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 56 · *'the ethic they ascribed to him turns out upon examination to be derived from the reflections of philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx — or even, in more recent years, thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Michel Foucault.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 75.jpg|↗]]