The Divine Conspiracy Read online

  The Divine Conspiracy

  Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

  Dallas Willard

  R. R. Brown

  Joe Henry Hankins

  John R. Rice

  Lee Roberson

  J. I. Willard

  “In those days there were giants in the land.”

  The kingdom of the heavens is similar to a bit of yeast which a woman took and hid in half a bushel of dough. After a while all the dough was pervaded by it.

  JESUS OF NAZARETH

  You must have often wondered why the enemy [God] does not make more use of his power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree he chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the irresistible and the indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of his scheme forbids him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as his felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For his ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve…. Sooner or later he withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish…. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away his hand…. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

  UNCLE SCREWTAPE

  C. S. LEWIS, THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now

  Chapter 2

  Gospels of Sin Management

  Chapter 3

  What Jesus Knew: Our God-Bathed World

  Chapter 4

  Who is Really Well Off?—The Beatitudes

  Chapter 5

  The Rightness of the Kingdom Heart: Beyond the Goodness of Scribes and Pharisees

  Chapter 6

  Investing in the Heavens: Escaping the Deceptions of Reputation and Wealth

  Chapter 7

  The Community of Prayerful Love

  Chapter 8

  On Being a Disciple, or Student, of Jesus

  Chapter 9

  A Curriculum for Christlikeness

  Chapter 10

  The Restoration of all Things

  Notes

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Dallas Willard

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  The Divine Conspiracy is the book I have been searching for all my life. Like Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, it is a masterpiece and a wonder. And like those famous frescoes, it presents God as real and present and ever reaching out to all humanity. I am struck by many things in The Divine Conspiracy. Let me mention a few.

  First, I am struck by the comprehensive nature of this book. It gives me a Weltanschauung, a worldview. It provides me with the conceptual philosophy for understanding the meaning and purpose of human existence. It shows me how to make sense out of the whole of the biblical record. It helps me see that the teachings of Jesus are intelligent and vital and intently practical.

  The breadth of the issues covered is astonishing: from the soul’s redemption and justification to discipleship and our growth in grace to death and the state of our existence in heaven. The middle chapters rightly give concentrated attention to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, but Willard does even this in such a way that he actually teaches us the whole Bible—indeed, the whole of our life before God.

  Then, too, his analysis of the contemporary scene is quite remarkable and comprehensive. Incisively, he uncovers the pretense of the various theories, facts, and techniques of contemporary secular materialism, showing that “they have not the least logical bearing upon the ultimate issues of existence and life.” Nor does the contemporary religious scene escape his incisive eye. In perhaps the most telling phrase of the book, he reveals the various “theologies of sin management” that plague churches today, both conservative and liberal. This is a book that opens me to the big picture.

  Second, I am struck by the accessibility of this book. I’m fully aware that the issues discussed here are of immense importance, yet it is all so understandable, so readable, so applicable. Perhaps I feared that a world-class philosopher would be unable to speak to my condition, but in this I was wrong. Again and again I found myself mirrored in Dr. Willard’s insights into human nature.

  In addition, everything Willard deals with is so intently practical. Never allowing issues to stay theoretical, he constantly weaves them into the warp and woof of daily experience. His stories charm. His examples teach. Most of all, he deals with such huge human issues in such wise and sane ways.

  This is never more true than in chapter 9: “A Curriculum for Christlikeness.” It contains a wealth of practical guidance into precisely how we come to love, honor, and consistently obey “God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”

  Third, I am struck by the depth of this book. Willard is a master at capturing the central insight of Jesus’ teachings. Perhaps this is because he takes Jesus seriously as an intelligent, fully competent Teacher. He writes, “Jesus is not just nice, he is brilliant.”

  Here I must comment on the depth of teaching on what we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount. Most writers turn these penetrating words of Jesus into a new set of soul-crushing laws. Others, feeling the teaching is impossible to obey, try to relegate it to another time, another place, another dispensation. Those who reject these two options usually think of it simply as a loose collection of nice sayings thrown together by unknown editors—interesting to read in a poetic sort of way, but having nothing essential to do with how we live today. What, I wondered, would Willard bring to the table?

  A soul-satisfying banquet, that is what. No one I have read so effectively penetrates to the heart of Jesus’ teaching. Willard’s discussion of the “Beatitudes,” for instance, is simply stunning, upsetting many of our common notions of this famous passage. The entire book is well worth that discussion alone. But he gives us more, much more—a feast for the mind and the heart.

  Which leads me to my fourth, and final, observation. I am struck by the warmth of this book. Rarely have I found an author with so penetrating an intellect combined with so generous a spirit. Clearly he has descended with the mind into the heart and from this place he touches us, both mind and heart.

  Dallas Willard speaks words of grace and mercy to us all, and especially to those who have been crushed by the world in which we live: “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. The barren and the pregnant too many times or at the wrong time. The overemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, the shoved-aside, the replaced. The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid.” In this, and so many other ways, I find this book speaks with compassion to where we all live and move and have our being.

  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. If the parousia tarries, thi
s is a book for the next millennium.

  —RICHARD J. FOSTER

  INTRODUCTION

  My hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. In his case, quite frankly, presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance.

  Very few people today find Jesus interesting as a person or of vital relevance to the course of their actual lives. He is not generally regarded as a real-life personality who deals with real-life issues but is thought to be concerned with some feathery realm other than the one we must deal with, and must deal with now. And frankly, he is not taken to be a person of much ability.

  He is automatically seen as a more or less magical figure—a pawn, or possibly a knight or a bishop, in some religious game—who fits only within the categories of dogma and of law. Dogma is what you have to believe, whether you believe it or not. And law is what you must do, whether it is good for you or not. What we have to believe or do now, by contrast, is real life, bursting with interesting, frightening and relevant things and people.

  Now, in fact, Jesus and his words have never belonged to the categories of dogma or law, and to read them as if they did is simply to miss them. They are essentially subversive of established arrangements and ways of thinking. That is clear from the way they first entered the world, their initial effects, and how they are preserved in the New Testament writings and live on in his people. He himself described his words as “spirit and life” (John 6:63). They invade our “real” world with a reality even more real than it is, which explains why human beings then and now have to protect themselves against them.

  Dogma and law—wrongly, perhaps, but understandably—have come to have about them an air of arbitrariness. Because of how our minds have come down to us through history, dogma and law for most people today simply mean what God has willed. This view makes them important, and also dangerous, and that is appropriately acknowledged. But it breaks any connection with our sense of how things really are: with truth and reality. And our “real life” is our truth and reality. It is where things actually happen, not a realm of supposed-to-bes that only threaten to make life harder, or possibly unbearable.

  The life and words that Jesus brought into the world came in the form of information and reality. He and his early associates overwhelmed the ancient world because they brought into it a stream of life at its deepest, along with the best information possible on the most important matters. These were matters with which the human mind had already been seriously struggling for a millennium or more without much success. The early message was, accordingly, not experienced as something its hearers had to believe or do because otherwise something bad—something with no essential connection with real life—would happen to them. The people initially impacted by that message generally concluded that they would be fools to disregard it. That was the basis of their conversion.

  Jesus himself was thought of as someone to admire and respect, someone you thought highly of and considered to be a person of great ability. Worship of him included this—not, as today, ruled it out. This attitude was naturally conveyed in such New Testament names and phrases as “the Prince of life,” “the Lord of glory,” “abundant life,” “the inexhaustible riches of Christ,” and so on. Today these phrases are emptied of most intellectual and practical content.

  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. We lead them to profess allegiance to him, or we expect them to, and leave them there, devoting our remaining efforts to “attracting” them to this or that.

  True, you will find few scholars or leaders in Christian circles who deny that we are supposed to make disciples or apprentices to Jesus and teach them to do all things that Jesus said. There are a few here and there, but they are, at least, not widely influential. Jesus’ instructions on this matter are, after all, starkly clear. We just don’t do what he said. We don’t seriously attempt it. And apparently we don’t know how to do it. You have only to look honestly at our official activities to see this. It saddens me to say such things, and I do not mean to condemn anyone. But it is a matter of extreme importance, and unless it is openly acknowledged, nothing can be done about it.

  So one is bound to look for an explanation of this state of affairs. How could the obligation be so clear and at the same time there be no attempt to meet it? The problem, we may be sure, lies very deep within the ideas that automatically govern our thinking about who we are, as Christians and as human beings, and about the relevance of Jesus to our cosmos and our lives.

  In fact, it lies much deeper than anything we might appropriately feel guilty about. For it is not, truly, a matter of anything we do or don’t do. It is a matter of how we cannot but think and act, given the context of our mental and spiritual formation. So any significant change can come only by breaking the stranglehold of the ideas and concepts that automatically shunt aside Jesus, “the Prince of Life,” when questions of concrete mastery of our life arise.

  Whatever the ultimate explanation of it, the most telling thing about the contemporary Christian is that he or she simply has no compelling sense that understanding of and conformity with the clear teachings of Christ is of any vital importance to his or her life, and certainly not that it is in any way essential. We—including multitudes who have distanced themselves from any formal association with him—still manage to feel guilty with reference to those teachings, with a nervous laugh and a knowing look. But more often than not, I think, such obedience is regarded as just out of the question or impossible. This is largely because obedience is thought of solely in terms of law—which we shall have much to say about in what follows.

  More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.

  It is my hope with this book to provide an understanding of the gospel that will open the way for the people of Christ actually to do—do once again, for they have done it in the past—what their acknowledged Maestro said to do. Perhaps the day will come when the “Great Commission” of Matthew 28:18–20 would be fully and routinely implemented as the objective, the “mission statement,” of the Christian churches, one-by-one and collectively.

  Individual Christians still hear Jesus say, “Whoever hears these words of mine and does them is like those intelligent people who build their houses upon rock,” standing firm against every pressure of life (Matt. 7:24–25). How life-giving it would be if their understanding of the gospel allowed them simply to reply, “I will do them! I will find out how. I will devote my life to it! This is the best life strategy I ever heard of!” and then go off to their fellowship and its teachers, and into their daily life, to learn how to live in his kingdom as Jesus indicated was best.

  MY ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE BIBLE

  It is tempting in such a project to enter the conflict—long-standing and currently at the boiling point—about the accessibility of the “real” Jesus and his words to us now. Because I do not do so, I will simply state my assumptions about the Bible: On its human side, I assume that it was produced and preserved by competent human beings who were at least as intelligent and devout as we are today. I assume that they were quite capable of accurately interpreting their own experience and of objectively presenting what they heard and experienced in the language of their historical community, which we today can understand with due diligence.

  On the divine side, I assume that God has been willing and competent to arrange for the Bible, including its record of Jesus, to emerge and be preserved
in ways that will secure his purposes for it among human beings worldwide. Those who actually believe in God will be untroubled by this. I assume that he did not and would not leave his message to humankind in a form that can only be understood by a handful of late-twentieth-century professional scholars, who cannot even agree among themselves on the theories that they assume to determine what the message is.

  The Bible is, after all, God’s gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic. 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. Any other approach to the Bible, I believe, conflicts with the picture of the God that, all agree, emerges from Jesus and his tradition. To what extent this belief of mine is or is not harmfully circular, I leave the philosophically minded reader to ponder.

  I have freely translated and paraphrased scriptural passages to achieve emphases that seem to me important. When I quote versions other than the King James, that will be indicated.

  COMPLETING A SERIES

  With this book I complete a trilogy on the spiritual life of those who have become convinced that Jesus is the One. In the first, In Search of Guidance, I attempted to make real and clear the intimate quality of life with him as “a conversational relationship with God.”

  But that relationship is not something that automatically happens, and we do not receive it by passive infusion. So the second book, The Spirit of the Disciplines, explains how disciples or students of Jesus can effectively interact with the grace and spirit of God to access fully the provisions and character intended for us in the gift of eternal life.