Book Review: The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard
Richard Foster places this book in importance with the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Wesley, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Teresa of Avila, Hildegard von Bingen, "and perhaps even Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo." WOW! But truly this is a rich book, deep in meaning and an instrument for instilling growth in the Christian life. Here is my review of the book.
October 1,
2006
Book being reviewed:
The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God
by Dallas Willard , Professor at University of Southern California's School of Philosophy
A HEAVY BOOK FULL OF TREASURES
This is my second attempt to read a Dallas Willard book. This is my first successful completion of a Dallas Willard book! He has a dense, dry reading style that is difficult to plow through. But I could see as I was reading this book that there were spiritual gems to be found throughout, so I plugged away through it. It took me about six months to finish this 400-page book, but I'm glad I made the effort. (Six months because I had to find times where I was in the right alert, diligent state of mind to read it.)
What got me into starting reading it was that it was one of three books our church, a Vineyard congregation, did as part of a Lenten book study with an Episcopalian church in town. Our pastor introduced the books to our congregation in this way: "The Divine Conspiracy goes right to the heart of our beliefs at this Vineyard church; The Heart Of Christianity is something that those our friends at the Episcopal church would feel at home with, and A Generous Orthodoxy is somewhere inbetween the two." Others in the book study had similar views as mine toward this book: it was difficult reading, but valuable. Of the three books, I got the most out of this book by far.
Willard takes two well-known New Testament writings, the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer, and dissects them at length. But these two pieces are not what the book is about; they are merely his prime theological starting points for developing his thoughts. The author's goal is to stir his readers into pursuing Christian growth, discipleship of Jesus, rather than just "living a Christian life," and approaching such a life as "sin management." It is a book of instruction on how to quit trying to do the right things, and instead become an apprentice of Jesus--become like him from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.
All three books we read in the book study had a focus on The Kingdom Of God. Reading these books helped me get a new understanding on the whole essence of Jesus' frequent descriptions of The Kingdom Of God. Willard scorns the view that being born again is about nothing more than getting a ticket to heaven, and points out the fruitless and empty lives of those who take such a view. If God's kingdom is among us, and we are to strengthen his kingdom, doing so is not merely a matter of getting other people to accept their tickets to heaven; it is fully living as Christ did when he was among us in the flesh.
Willard confronts our attitudes about Jesus, attitudes that we are generally not aware we have until he carefully exposes them and their implications. This can be painful to read at times. At other times, seeing God in a new way, a much better way than previously understanding him, is where the treasure comes in this book. This is not "new" theology, not catchy new illustrations of God's nature, or anything trendy like that. It is merely exposing where Christianity has gone wrong, where it has let cultural and traditional ideas infect Christians' views of what Jesus was saying, and thus what he expects of us.
Throughout this book, Willard tears down traditional understandings of the Bible and what Christianity is about that don't ring true, and views in the American culture that Christians have bought into that distort our understanding of God. Then he reconstructs the theology, followed by a very specific "how-to" section on what you need to do to become an apprentice or disciple of Jesus. Thus, the book covers both the understanding of the Kingdom, and also the guidance on how to respond to that understanding.
As I stated at the beginning, this is not a quick, easy read. However, I consider it to be important material, and worthwhile for wading through. You have to dig for the hidden gems, but they are gems indeed. And it's not like you could just get the gems by themselves, as in a Reader's Digest version or featured quotes -- digging for them (reading the entire book) is what makes you even realize what it is you have found.
I have reviewed this book at Amazon.com. Please visit the web page by clicking here , and vote yes on my review if you find it helpful. Thanks!
===============================================================================================================
For the remainder of this posting, I would like to include quotes from the book. The quotes are far more meaningful if you have read his explanations leading up to them, but to get that depth of meaning, you'd have to read the book.
Page 48-49: "What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him--trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything."
Page 242: "Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about 'good things' that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God's love."
(This reminds me of a part in the movie Bruce Almighty where God is telling Bruce to pray, and Bruce prays for world peace. God replies, "That's a nice prayer...if you're Miss America. Come on, what's really on your heart?")
Page 243: "Accordingly, I believe the most adequate description of prayer is simply, 'Talking to God about what we are doing together.' That immediately focuses the activity where we are but at the same time drives the egotism out of it. Requests will naturally be made in the course of this conversational walk. Prayer is a matter of explicitly sharing with God my concerns about what he too is concerned about in my life. And of course he is concerned about my concerns and, in particular, that my concerns should coincide with his. This is our walk together. Out of it I pray."
The following is the most important quote in the whole book to me, the one that shook me more than anything else in the book:
Page 244: "And God's 'response' to our prayers is not a charade. He does not pretend that he is answering our prayer when he is only doing what he was going to do anyway. Our requests really do make a difference in what God does or does not do. The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best. And of course God does not respond to this. You wouldn't either."
This paragraph was an arrow shot to the center of my heart. I've always had so much struggle maintaining an active prayer life. This paragraph painfully exposed why: Unbeknownst to me before reading this paragraph, I had the view that God is going to do what he's going to do anyway, but he just wants me to submit it before him. With this underlying belief, yes, prayer is a dead ritual, and his "answer" is a charade. It's a fatalistic view of life and of God; no wonder prayer time doesn't stick.
Page 250: "Prayer as kingdom praying is an arrangement explicitly instituted by God in order that we as individuals may count, and count for much, as we learn step by step how to govern, to reign with him in his kingdom. To enter and to learn this reign is what gives the individual life its intended significance."
Page 273: "Anyone who is not a continual student of Jesus, and who nevertheless reads the great promises of the Bible as if they were for him or her, is like someone trying to cash a check on another person's account. At best, it only succeeds sporadically."
Page 296: "And what does 'dwelling' or 'continuing' in his word mean? It means to center your life upon the very things we have been studying in this book: his good news about The Kingdom Among Us, about who is really well off and who is not, and about true goodness of heart and how it expresses itself in action. We will fill our souls with the written Gospels. We will devote our attention to these teachings, in private study and inquiry as well as public instruction. And, negatively, we will refuse to devote our mental space and energy to the fruitless, even stupefying and degrading, stuff that constantly clamors for our attention. We will attend to it only enough to avoid it."
Page 298: This is a direct quote from William Law in his book A Serious Call To A Devout And Holy Life: "You see such a mixture of sin and folly in the lives even of the better sort of people.... It was this general intention that made the primitive Christians such eminent instances of piety, that made the goodly fellowship of the Saints and all the glorious army of martyrs and confessors. And if you will here stop and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it."
Page 302: "There is a widespread notion that just passing through death transforms human character. Discipleship is not needed. Just believe enough to 'make it.' But I have never been able to find any basis in scriptural tradition or psychological reality to think this might be so. What if death only forever fixes us as the kind of person we are at death? What would one do in heaven with a debauched character or a hate-filled heart?"
Page 307: "We often speak of people not living up to their faith. But the cases in which we say this are not really cases of people behaving otherwise than they believe. They are cases in which genuine beliefs are made obvious by what people do. We always live up to our beliefs--or down to them, as the case may be. Nothing else is possible. It is the nature of belief."
Page 324: "Now we need to understand that what simply occupies our mind very largely governs what we do. It sets the emotional tone out of which our actions flow, and it projects the possible courses of action available to us. Also the mind, though of little power on its own, is the place of our widest and most basic freedom. This is true in both a direct and an indirect sense. Of all the things we do, we have more freedom with respect to what we will think of, where we will place our mind, than anything else. And the freedom of thinking is a direct freedom wherever it is present. We need not do something else in order to exercise it. We simply turn our mind to whatever it is we choose to think of. The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought, what constantly occupies our mind--as well as what we can or cannot even think of."
Page 334: "The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him."
Page 337-338: "We will never have the easy, unhesitating love of God that makes obedience to Jesus our natural response unless we are absolutely sure that it is good for us to be, and to be who we are. This means that we must have no doubt that the path appointed for us by when and where and to whom we were born is good, and that nothing irredeemable has happened to us or can happen to us on our way to our destiny in God's full world. Any doubt on this point gives force to the soul-numbing idea that God's commandments are, after all, only for his benefit and enjoyment, and that in the final analysis we must look out for ourselves. When the 'moral failures' of well-known Christians (and unknown Christians, for that matter) are examined, they always turn out to be based on the idea that God has required them to serve in such a way that they themselves must 'take care of their own needs,' rather than being richly provided for by God. Resentment toward God, not love, is the outcome, and from such a condition it is impossible to consistently do the deeds of love."
Page 356: In describing a time in college when he first discovered what I am about to quote, where he spent a whole day reading and meditating upon the Gospel of John: "In particular, I had learned that intensity is crucial for any progress in spiritual perception and understanding. To dribble a few verses or chapters of Scripture on oneself throughout the week, in church or out, will not reorder one's mind and spirit--just as one drop of water every five minutes will not get you a shower, no matter how long you keep it up. You need a lot of water at once and for a sufficiently long time. Similarly for the written Word."
Page 378: (regarding the afterlife) "We will not sit around looking at one another or at God for eternity but will join the eternal Logos, 'reign with him,' in the endlessly ongoing creative work of God. It is for this that we were each individually intended, as both kings and priests."
Page 379: "The intention of God is that we should each become the kind of person whom he can set free in the universe, empowered to do what we want to do. Just as we desire and intend this, so far as possible, for our children and others we love, so God desires and intends it for his children. But character, the inner directedness of the self, must develop to the point where that is possible."
Book being reviewed:
The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God
by Dallas Willard , Professor at University of Southern California's School of Philosophy
A HEAVY BOOK FULL OF TREASURES
This is my second attempt to read a Dallas Willard book. This is my first successful completion of a Dallas Willard book! He has a dense, dry reading style that is difficult to plow through. But I could see as I was reading this book that there were spiritual gems to be found throughout, so I plugged away through it. It took me about six months to finish this 400-page book, but I'm glad I made the effort. (Six months because I had to find times where I was in the right alert, diligent state of mind to read it.)
What got me into starting reading it was that it was one of three books our church, a Vineyard congregation, did as part of a Lenten book study with an Episcopalian church in town. Our pastor introduced the books to our congregation in this way: "The Divine Conspiracy goes right to the heart of our beliefs at this Vineyard church; The Heart Of Christianity is something that those our friends at the Episcopal church would feel at home with, and A Generous Orthodoxy is somewhere inbetween the two." Others in the book study had similar views as mine toward this book: it was difficult reading, but valuable. Of the three books, I got the most out of this book by far.
Willard takes two well-known New Testament writings, the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer, and dissects them at length. But these two pieces are not what the book is about; they are merely his prime theological starting points for developing his thoughts. The author's goal is to stir his readers into pursuing Christian growth, discipleship of Jesus, rather than just "living a Christian life," and approaching such a life as "sin management." It is a book of instruction on how to quit trying to do the right things, and instead become an apprentice of Jesus--become like him from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.
All three books we read in the book study had a focus on The Kingdom Of God. Reading these books helped me get a new understanding on the whole essence of Jesus' frequent descriptions of The Kingdom Of God. Willard scorns the view that being born again is about nothing more than getting a ticket to heaven, and points out the fruitless and empty lives of those who take such a view. If God's kingdom is among us, and we are to strengthen his kingdom, doing so is not merely a matter of getting other people to accept their tickets to heaven; it is fully living as Christ did when he was among us in the flesh.
Willard confronts our attitudes about Jesus, attitudes that we are generally not aware we have until he carefully exposes them and their implications. This can be painful to read at times. At other times, seeing God in a new way, a much better way than previously understanding him, is where the treasure comes in this book. This is not "new" theology, not catchy new illustrations of God's nature, or anything trendy like that. It is merely exposing where Christianity has gone wrong, where it has let cultural and traditional ideas infect Christians' views of what Jesus was saying, and thus what he expects of us.
Throughout this book, Willard tears down traditional understandings of the Bible and what Christianity is about that don't ring true, and views in the American culture that Christians have bought into that distort our understanding of God. Then he reconstructs the theology, followed by a very specific "how-to" section on what you need to do to become an apprentice or disciple of Jesus. Thus, the book covers both the understanding of the Kingdom, and also the guidance on how to respond to that understanding.
As I stated at the beginning, this is not a quick, easy read. However, I consider it to be important material, and worthwhile for wading through. You have to dig for the hidden gems, but they are gems indeed. And it's not like you could just get the gems by themselves, as in a Reader's Digest version or featured quotes -- digging for them (reading the entire book) is what makes you even realize what it is you have found.
I have reviewed this book at Amazon.com. Please visit the web page by clicking here , and vote yes on my review if you find it helpful. Thanks!
===============================================================================================================
For the remainder of this posting, I would like to include quotes from the book. The quotes are far more meaningful if you have read his explanations leading up to them, but to get that depth of meaning, you'd have to read the book.
Page 48-49: "What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him--trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything."
Page 242: "Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about 'good things' that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God's love."
(This reminds me of a part in the movie Bruce Almighty where God is telling Bruce to pray, and Bruce prays for world peace. God replies, "That's a nice prayer...if you're Miss America. Come on, what's really on your heart?")
Page 243: "Accordingly, I believe the most adequate description of prayer is simply, 'Talking to God about what we are doing together.' That immediately focuses the activity where we are but at the same time drives the egotism out of it. Requests will naturally be made in the course of this conversational walk. Prayer is a matter of explicitly sharing with God my concerns about what he too is concerned about in my life. And of course he is concerned about my concerns and, in particular, that my concerns should coincide with his. This is our walk together. Out of it I pray."
The following is the most important quote in the whole book to me, the one that shook me more than anything else in the book:
Page 244: "And God's 'response' to our prayers is not a charade. He does not pretend that he is answering our prayer when he is only doing what he was going to do anyway. Our requests really do make a difference in what God does or does not do. The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best. And of course God does not respond to this. You wouldn't either."
This paragraph was an arrow shot to the center of my heart. I've always had so much struggle maintaining an active prayer life. This paragraph painfully exposed why: Unbeknownst to me before reading this paragraph, I had the view that God is going to do what he's going to do anyway, but he just wants me to submit it before him. With this underlying belief, yes, prayer is a dead ritual, and his "answer" is a charade. It's a fatalistic view of life and of God; no wonder prayer time doesn't stick.
Page 250: "Prayer as kingdom praying is an arrangement explicitly instituted by God in order that we as individuals may count, and count for much, as we learn step by step how to govern, to reign with him in his kingdom. To enter and to learn this reign is what gives the individual life its intended significance."
Page 273: "Anyone who is not a continual student of Jesus, and who nevertheless reads the great promises of the Bible as if they were for him or her, is like someone trying to cash a check on another person's account. At best, it only succeeds sporadically."
Page 296: "And what does 'dwelling' or 'continuing' in his word mean? It means to center your life upon the very things we have been studying in this book: his good news about The Kingdom Among Us, about who is really well off and who is not, and about true goodness of heart and how it expresses itself in action. We will fill our souls with the written Gospels. We will devote our attention to these teachings, in private study and inquiry as well as public instruction. And, negatively, we will refuse to devote our mental space and energy to the fruitless, even stupefying and degrading, stuff that constantly clamors for our attention. We will attend to it only enough to avoid it."
Page 298: This is a direct quote from William Law in his book A Serious Call To A Devout And Holy Life: "You see such a mixture of sin and folly in the lives even of the better sort of people.... It was this general intention that made the primitive Christians such eminent instances of piety, that made the goodly fellowship of the Saints and all the glorious army of martyrs and confessors. And if you will here stop and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it."
Page 302: "There is a widespread notion that just passing through death transforms human character. Discipleship is not needed. Just believe enough to 'make it.' But I have never been able to find any basis in scriptural tradition or psychological reality to think this might be so. What if death only forever fixes us as the kind of person we are at death? What would one do in heaven with a debauched character or a hate-filled heart?"
Page 307: "We often speak of people not living up to their faith. But the cases in which we say this are not really cases of people behaving otherwise than they believe. They are cases in which genuine beliefs are made obvious by what people do. We always live up to our beliefs--or down to them, as the case may be. Nothing else is possible. It is the nature of belief."
Page 324: "Now we need to understand that what simply occupies our mind very largely governs what we do. It sets the emotional tone out of which our actions flow, and it projects the possible courses of action available to us. Also the mind, though of little power on its own, is the place of our widest and most basic freedom. This is true in both a direct and an indirect sense. Of all the things we do, we have more freedom with respect to what we will think of, where we will place our mind, than anything else. And the freedom of thinking is a direct freedom wherever it is present. We need not do something else in order to exercise it. We simply turn our mind to whatever it is we choose to think of. The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought, what constantly occupies our mind--as well as what we can or cannot even think of."
Page 334: "The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him."
Page 337-338: "We will never have the easy, unhesitating love of God that makes obedience to Jesus our natural response unless we are absolutely sure that it is good for us to be, and to be who we are. This means that we must have no doubt that the path appointed for us by when and where and to whom we were born is good, and that nothing irredeemable has happened to us or can happen to us on our way to our destiny in God's full world. Any doubt on this point gives force to the soul-numbing idea that God's commandments are, after all, only for his benefit and enjoyment, and that in the final analysis we must look out for ourselves. When the 'moral failures' of well-known Christians (and unknown Christians, for that matter) are examined, they always turn out to be based on the idea that God has required them to serve in such a way that they themselves must 'take care of their own needs,' rather than being richly provided for by God. Resentment toward God, not love, is the outcome, and from such a condition it is impossible to consistently do the deeds of love."
Page 356: In describing a time in college when he first discovered what I am about to quote, where he spent a whole day reading and meditating upon the Gospel of John: "In particular, I had learned that intensity is crucial for any progress in spiritual perception and understanding. To dribble a few verses or chapters of Scripture on oneself throughout the week, in church or out, will not reorder one's mind and spirit--just as one drop of water every five minutes will not get you a shower, no matter how long you keep it up. You need a lot of water at once and for a sufficiently long time. Similarly for the written Word."
Page 378: (regarding the afterlife) "We will not sit around looking at one another or at God for eternity but will join the eternal Logos, 'reign with him,' in the endlessly ongoing creative work of God. It is for this that we were each individually intended, as both kings and priests."
Page 379: "The intention of God is that we should each become the kind of person whom he can set free in the universe, empowered to do what we want to do. Just as we desire and intend this, so far as possible, for our children and others we love, so God desires and intends it for his children. But character, the inner directedness of the self, must develop to the point where that is possible."
Posted: Sun - October 1, 2006 at 06:11 PM
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