If you make an appointment with Westmont College’s Voskuyl Library’s Special Collections staff and find your way to the Dallas Willard Reading Room, you might stumble upon all sorts of surprises. Tucked away in books and file folders are notes that Dallas wrote on the back of napkins, church bulletins, and dozens and dozens of yellow legal pads. There are hundreds of books and article clippings with sentences underlined, words circled, and exclamation marks in the margins, often with two or three different colors of ink that indicates Dallas interacted with these items more than once. And here and there you might stumble upon one of Dallas’s personally designed business cards.
In Keas Keasler’s recent book, Kingdom Apprenticeship: Dallas Willard’s Formational Theology and Missional Vision, Keas recounts discovering Dallas’s business card on one of his visits to the Willard Special Collection: “Among the many items I came across in Willard’s unpublished papers was his business card. . . . On the left side of the card is an image of the haloed Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), carrying a cross, with blood pouring forth from its chest into a chalice. Beneath the image appears the Latin phrase nudi nudum Christum sequi (‘nakedly following the naked Christ’).”Keas Keasler, Kingdom Apprenticeship (IVP), 280.
In a recent update from Dallas Willard Ministries, Becky Heatley (Dallas’s daughter) reflects on the history of these cards. Becky writes, “When I began working for my father in 1999, his advisors recommended printing new business cards that included my contact information. With a gleam in his eye, he said he already had a logo in mind.”You can sign up for the Dallas Willard Ministries Legacy Updates here: https://dwillard.org/school-of-kingdom-living/contact
Keas notes that the Agnus Dei with the blood pouring into a chalice appears most famously in the Ghent Altarpiece (15th century).
Precursors to the Latin phrase nudi nudum Christum sequi date back to St. Jerome in the 4th century. For instance, in Jerome’s Letter 125, he writes to Rusticus, “Naked, follow the naked cross of Christ.”The Latin in this case is “nudus nudam Christi crucem sequere,” which is typically translated “Destitute yourself, follow a destitute Christ” but is more literally, “Naked, follow the naked cross of Christ.” See https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001125.htm The sense is clearly a response to Jesus’ call to the rich young ruler: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me” (Mt 19:21). Jesus calls his students to strip off all that holds us back from total abandon to the fully abandoned Jesus.
Although the image and Latin phrase have a long history, it appears that the pairing is Willard’s own design. The bleeding lamb with the cross over its shoulder and the call to let go of all attachments to follow the destitute Christ reminds me of Dallas’s note on Jesus’ call to “take up your cross daily, and follow me” (Lk 9:23; cf. Lk 14:27; Mt 16:24; Mk 8:34). Dallas would often comment that if you saw someone in the first century Roman world carrying a wooden cross down the street, that only meant one thing: their life was over. To take up our cross and follow Jesus is to lay aside our way for his way. For instance, Dallas states:
“Now, the cross was one of the most common sights in that landscape. It was the common instrument by which people were executed by the Romans. It was common for the person who was condemned to have to carry their own cross to the place where they were strung up. The picture that Jesus is giving us is of a person for whom everything in their life has been put in kind of brackets, has been made to stand to one side. If you had been given your cross to carry, there wasn’t anything else to take care of. You stopped worrying about where your lost goat was. You stopped worrying about whether or not your lawn was going to be mowed. You stopped worrying about the person who owed you money. Business was over. Only one thing lay before you and that was death. You see, the image of the cross is the image of that which cuts us off from our normal human existence. If we live on the plane of normal human existence, we cannot be disciples of Christ. There will be something we want more than to be like Him.”Dallas Willard, “‘Adding to Your Faith’ by Sowing to the Spirit and Exercising unto Godliness,” 12:40–14:32.
Dallas often made the point that images influence as much if not more than the ideas behind them. Images carry meanings that often outstrip words alone and an image will linger in our minds far after words are forgotten. I find it interesting that Dallas wanted a business card prominently featuring a relatively rare image coupled with a Latin phrase that few would be able to translate. Business cards are functional and typically self-referential—they are handed out to help others remember our name, our title, where we work, and how best to contact us. From Dallas’s business card we see that he wasn’t living on that “normal plane of human existence.” His business card invited us to remember that he was first and foremost called, as we all are, to bracket everything else to one side and nakedly follow the naked Christ.
I can imagine Dallas handing out one of his business cards and someone mentioning the odd image and phrase. With that gleam in his eye, perhaps Dallas would say, “Did you not know I would be about my Father’s business?” (Lk 2:49). Life on Dallas’s terms and, with it, self-promotion was over.
*Another resource on this topic is Dallas’s talk “Discipleship and Your Cross” (for Dallas’s comments on the cross, begin at minute 22:40). To hear Keas Keasler’s reflections on Willard’s business card, see his recent talk at Westmont’s Martin Institute “The Great Remarriage: Spiritual Formation and Missional Living.”