Thoughts from The
Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard October
30, 2018
While the title refers to a ‘conspiracy’ by God to subtly
overcome evil with good, the message that came through most to me had to do
with addressing the question of why the church has been so ineffective in
making disciples. The book opens stating the basic problem and his conclusion
that both the theological left and right in the church preach a partial gospel
that is disconnected from personal integrity and personal character, which are
foundational for personal holiness and discipleship. They are fundamentally
disconnected from leading people to Christ-likeness. He proposes that the
theological left promotes a gospel of commitment to fixing societal/structural
sin without really dealing with personal guilt and sin, while the theological
right promotes a gospel that is primarily forensic and deals with personal
guilt without addressing society. Both of them focus on a salvation that lies
somewhere in the future (at death for the forensic gospel, when social justice
is achieved for the social gospel) and are what Willard calls ‘gospels of sin
management’ rather than of new life.
Neither one really requires a personal, daily walk with Christ; while
things like prayer may ‘work’ for some, it isn’t really necessary if you are
saved from your guilt on the one hand or aligned with the current politically
correct social causes on the other. He comments on this matter that “prayer is
not needed either to go to heaven when you die or to be committed to the cause
of liberation.” The result in our time
is a Christianity that has little to do with the kind of person you are. He issues a challenge: would the gospel that
I preach cause people to want to become full time students of Jesus? I think he
makes good points about this and I have also been concerned about the failure
of disciple making in the institutional church. If discipleship happens it is
not a result of the programs and culture of the institutional church.
One of my life-long disappointments in the local church has
been the near total absence of anything that looks like a serious effort to
make disciples. Having been very involved in CRU while in college with their
small groups approach to building disciples, I was hoping to find some sort of
discipleship in the church that is more aimed at families rather than students.
Students have very flexible time schedules so I knew it would be much different
after marriage and entering the workforce, but it was very disappointing to
find that no such thing exists in local churches. I have lived in Wisconsin,
Chicago, Dayton, Memphis, Atlanta, and western Massachusetts and have never
found any organized plan to make disciples anywhere.
The CRU approach can be summarized in the 3 words Win,
Build, and Send. The CRU approach to evangelism incorporates it as part of discipleship
as small groups train their members to do ongoing witnessing. It seems to me
that local churches focus on Win (evangelism) but more as events with preaching
than by personal witness. Churches tend to have a patchwork of various programs
on the other 2 matters. Willard’s book doesn’t really say very much about the
Win part or the Send (multiplication of disciplers) part, focusing the Build disciples
part. His focus is on being an apprentice to Jesus such that we actually live the new life in Christ and develop habits that overcome our natural, fleshly reactions to life. In that regard he focuses less on what we do and more on the kind of person we are. Most other discipleship definitions seem to be mostly aimed at what we do.
He also goes on to outline some obstacles to making
disciples that are inherent in our current ‘gospels’ in addition to the
incompleteness of these 2 that confine the impact of the kingdom of God to some
undetermined time in the future. One of these obstacles is our view of God as
either far away from us as a result of our view of the cosmos being vast with
God out there somewhere beyond space and time, or else an opposite view of God
being inside us but not really active in the world around us. Both of these
cause us to think of God and His kingdom as being in a location that is not
very important in our physical life here and now. He spends time addressing the
nature of the cosmos as being within God’s kingdom and God being available everywhere,
along with how our limited view of the reality of both matter and spirit limits
our openness and willingness to living in the kingdom now.
Another obstacle is our view of Jesus; we often view Him as
holy but not actually smart or having great ability; we think of Him as wise
but never think of Him as having humor or laughing; we think of Him as having
eliminated obedience as important by providing the solution to our sin and
guilt but do not see Him as demonstrating what it looks like for obedience to
the Law to be our natural and automatic response when we have life in the
kingdom. The result is we don’t seek to grow in obedience and holiness; as
Willard points out, though, “Trust in Christ is inseparable from the fulfilling
the Law” and “Law is not the source of righteousness but it is the course of
righteousness”. In misunderstanding Jesus we also misunderstand His teaching,
and he uses the Sermon on the Mount to walk through that.
The partial gospels do not require prayer and our
misunderstandings inhibit prayer. He encourages praying for what we are
concerned about since “prayer simply dies from efforts to pray for ‘good
things’ that honestly do not matter to us.” This actual connection with God
then leads to a discussion of what building disciples might look like.
Like Piper, he points out that delighting in God is the real
goal of discipleship. He finds that getting to that requires some discipline,
however, with ‘disciple’ and ‘discipline’ sharing the same root. Delighting in
God, desiring God, loving that which is lovely and virtuous; these are all part
of the goal and should involve both body and spirit since we are made as
unified body/spirit creations. The gospel taught to disciples must be the
gospel that reveals the God who can be loved with all our heart, soul, mind and
strength, which is to say with both our spirit and our body. This includes delighting in God’s creation,
both of the cosmos and of ourselves. Loving father and mother as in the 10
Commandments requires being thankful that God created us as part of His
creation, for example. He sees discipleship as a course of apprenticeship to Jesus
that is intended to create habits of body and spirit that break our bondage to
natural, fleshly responses to life. This
disciplines us so that our body becomes a spiritual asset. He recommends 4 basic disciplines in this
course: 2 of Abstinence (Solitude and Silence) and 2 of Activity (Study and
Worship/Service).
I agree with much of what he has to say, and I think his
concern about the need for discipleship is exactly on target. I think it would
be good to expand the core disciplines to a few more that go back to the Torah:
Sabbath, giving/tithe, and the Levitical constraints on sex. All of these
involve key areas where body and spirit connect in important ways. He mentions Sabbath briefly, and it may be
that Sabbath and giving can be included in the Worship aspect, but our current
age and the sexual revolution cries out for a specific response to the sexual
dysfunction that has also become an obstacle to discipleship in our time. The
regular practice of abstinence called for in Leviticus 15 is a stark contrast
to the current culture and teaches very directly that regular abstinence and
self-control are required disciplines for the body if the body is to be a power
for good. Sexuality has become a defining issue of our time and it will need to
be better addressed in the church as a result; I think the church has failed in
regard to adequate teaching on marriage and sexuality just as we have failed in
discipleship (of which marriage and family is an important part). But you can’t cover everything in one book so
overall I appreciated this book a great deal!
