---

Aaron Preston: Fans of Willard’s popular writings often wonder whether there is any important relationship between his scholarly work in Philosophy and his popular Christian works.  Your book answers with a resounding “yes.” Can you summarize the main ways in which Willard’s philosophical work is foundational for his theology? 

 

Michael Stewart Robb: A summary is very difficult because the relationship is so interwoven. Dallas was a brand of philosopher that is rarely found today because he thought philosophy had its own work to do, whereas many Christian intellectuals think that philosophy should be more like a small child working in his father’s workshop (i.e. theology) with his tools and never far from his father’s shadow. St. Bonaventure is a good classical example of that latter view of philosophy, which is now prevalent again. Maybe he was wrong on this point but Dallas cut a different path. When he did philosophy, he did philosophy, which is no doubt how he could thrive at USC for so long.  

 So philosophy is foundational for theology in much the same way that geography is foundational for theology. Just because we live in a world in which God reveals himself through the Bible doesn’t mean we should be making up rival geographies derived from the Bible or the creeds. Geography is going to have its own contribution to make and there might be conflicts but we need to sit down and examine them and, if possible, offer a solution or, if necessary, hold things in tension for a while.   

 

AP:  I take your point about the difficulty of summarizing the relationship, so perhaps it will help to narrow the focus a bit.  In the book, you do a really nice job of explaining Dallas’ phenomenologically-grounded, “ontological” approach to the Bible.  Can you say a little about this approach to Biblical hermeneutics, and how it reveals the deeply interwoven nature of Dallas’ philosophical and theological thought?   

 

MSR: There is a view of the Bible, prevalent in Biblical Studies today, that regards the texts as philosophy-free. And at the same time, there is an accepted approach to the texts (a hermeneutic), also prevalent in Biblical Studies, that is just as philosophy-free. These two will often go together for a Biblical scholar but sometimes don’t. One of the badges of honor that these Biblical scholars will pin on themselves is “Historian.” It is a generalization but a majority of these “Historians” are relatively ignorant when it comes to philosophy. At least it is a fact of our day that you can get a Ph.D in New Testament or Old Testament from the very best schools and not have any knowledge of metaphysics or ethics or epistemology or even of theology. 

For Dallas, the more he studies philosophy as a young man, the more relevant that way of thinking about the world appears for his reading of the Bible. So for example the philosophy of perception. People look at things. People look at things in the Bible. These people tell us what they saw. That is what the word “testimony” or “witness” means and the Bible, everyone agrees, is full of it. 

So here are some of the philosophy of perception’s questions. How do people look at things? Do people only perceive material things? Or do people also perceive non-material, spiritual things? And when people look at things, do they look at them through a filter of some sort? Do they look with a cultural filter? With a language filter? With a personal experience filter? With a gender or race filter? And does a perceiver ever see the real cup out there or do our minds have a little image of a cup which they see and which they lay over the real cup?  

See even if a scholar getting his/her Ph.D has never worked through those issues in philosophy, he/she likely has assumed some answers to them which are influencing their so-called “historical” research. When Dallas models and sometimes explains his approach to the Bible, he models an approach in which questions like those aren’t dangling about with unanswered or, worse, assumed answers. 

 

AP: Yeah, Dallas was not a fan of letting assumptions go unexamined. I remember him teaching on Husserl’s concept of a “rigorous science,” and part of that is the ideal of having no unexamined presuppositions or assumptions. Dallas wasn’t sure that humans could actually achieve that ideal, but he certainly thought we should try, and that we could do a lot better than people usually do in that department.      

 

AP: In your introductory chapter, you make the striking statement that, if you had to choose between preserving Willard’s philosophical writings or his churchly writings, you would save the philosophical writings. Why is that?  

 

MSR: If you only know C.S. Lewis as a writer of Mere Christianity or maybe some children’s fiction and have never read any of his literary criticism, which was his day job, then you don’t know how good he can be. That’s the level of appreciation I have for Dallas as a philosopher. I did it for years too but now I sometimes want to pull my hair out when I see people trying to make sense of Dallas deeply without getting into his philosophy.  

Philosophy can be a little hard to spot in everyday life but we are steeped in it. I like to say that metaphysics (or philosophy) is the music theory of Dallas’s symphonies. And the importance of Dallas’s philosophy is that, if we master it, we’ll be in a better position to write our own symphonies, probably better ones than Dallas could, which is what Dallas would really want for his legacy. If you ask yourself ever, why aren’t current writers on spiritual life quite able to produce the quality of books Dallas could, the answer is not that they don’t practice spiritual disciplines as Dallas did. It is, in part at least, that they haven’t done any of the hard work in music theory as Dallas did. 

 

AP: Beautifully put! Thank you.   

 

AP: You note that Willard once described his theology as, at bottom, “pretty Calvinistic.” When I first read that interview, I found this self-description surprising, largely because Calvin is usually understood to be a theological determinist and Willard is anything but. In fact, as I understand Willard, he embraces a “libertarian” view of free will, and he assigns human freedom a very important role in all aspects of the Christian life, from regeneration through sanctification.  Can you comment on Willard’s understanding of free will, and how it might complicate categorizing his thought as “Calvinistic”? 

 

MSR: To answer this question, one must start with Calvinism and what it might mean to fall into a particular tradition like Calvinism. Augustine believed that all unbaptized infants are in hell. But people call themselves and others “Augustinians” all the time (Westmont has an “Augustinian Scholars Program”) and nobody has that particular teaching in mind. I’ve never met a Calvinist or somebody who calls themselves “pretty Calvinistic” who agrees with Calvin 100% down the line. These people don’t exist. It is a caricature of the movement, for every real Calvinist disagrees with Calvin somewhere. Because, frankly, John Calvin’s system isn’t consistent and that’s obvious to us now. The question is where are you going disagree with Calvin and, second, how much of it can you disagree with before you fall out of the tradition. 

Calvin is, let’s say, “pretty deterministic.” But he’s not even consistent on that, which is typical of the theological tradition leading up to Calvin. I would argue that determinism is something which is not essential to Calvin’s theological world and you will find few in the Calvinist tradition today who are willing to defend determinism to the death. Some do; most don’t. Calvinism is a 500-year tradition after all; it is allowed to have some variations. 

What if Dallas is one of those variations? I’d encourage people to try out thinking about him in that way and, above all, to get to know some other teachings of Calvin besides determinism – which Calvin is shaky on anyway. 

 As for human freedom, Willard did argue against the determinist position in his USC lectures, having mainly the determinism of contemporary materialism in mind. But he also argued in his church lectures against models which keep God at such a distance that he can’t be a causal force in an individual’s life or salvation. That’s the birdfeeder view of God’s grace, as if God hung up some seeds on a tree for us to peck at because he didn’t want to disturb our free will. It’s still a metaphor but what if Willard’s “pretty Calvinistic” view is more like spoon-feeding a baby – which is not easy. Willard was so helpful in calling the church to its responsibility to swallow that we might overlook how he talked about Who is holding the spoon. 

And, Calvin himself wrote way more on swallowing than we’ve been led to believe! 

 

AP:  That “big tent” approach to “Calvinism” as a tradition seems right to me. But I want to press you a bit on the place of human freedom in Dallas’ theology. The metaphor of spoon-feeding a baby is interesting in this regard. It connotes a less heavy-handed approach than stereotypical Calvinistic determinism. But it’s still pretty heavy-handed, and I wonder if it does justice to what we might call the “personalistic” dimensions of Dallas’ thought. By this I mean Dallas’ tendency to present God as actively appealing to us via the capacities that make us persons, especially the mind or intellect, in ways that non-coercively encourage us to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). Between the birdfeeder and the baby, there’s the approach that Dallas sometimes referred to as God “wooing” us to Himself (I don’t recall whether that term shows up in his writings or recorded lectures, but I personally heard him discuss God’s overtures to us in terms of “wooing” on several occasions). On this model, God appeals to us primarily through His word, which consists in intelligible “messages” addressed primarily to the human mind. To receive God’s word is to have a new idea arise in the mind, a new way of thinking or conceptualizing reality and our place in it. And this naturally generates a range of emotional responses which either attract us to, or repel us from, what is represented by the mind.  In turn, this sense of attraction or repulsion exercises a non-coercive “pressure” on the will – the sort of pressure that can be resisted, and which, if we choose in accordance with it, we’d call an “influence” or an “inclination” rather than a determining cause. It seems to me that this captures the sense in which, for Dallas, God is “a causal force in an individual’s life or salvation” without overriding human free will. It’s far more direct than hiding a birdfeeder up in a tree – more like dressing up the birdseed with an enticing garnish and waving it under our beaks – but it’s not coercive or deterministic. I guess my question in all this is:  metaphors aside, do you think this a fairly complete and accurate picture of how Dallas understands the relationship between Divine and human agency? Or are there important additions or corrections that should be made?   

 

MSR: I think wooing is an accurate description of Dallas’ picture of divine and human agency. He does use that description. And there is no doubt that it preserves for Dallas the place for human agency, human free will. Remember, there’s a lot of wooing that goes on in feeding a baby. And even as your babies get bigger and hold their own spoon, wooing is still part of the interaction! 

 I like your description of Dallas as “personalistic.” What that brings into the divine-human relationship is the idea of conscious exchange. God appeals to our minds (thoughts, feelings) and we respond with our minds. That’s missing in a lot of theologies such that the exchange is more formulaic, more like getting your daily methadone pill from the clinic. You mention the centrality of the Word in that process and I think that’s exactly right for Dallas and it is another place where he’s a textbook Protestant (see my forthcoming theological exchange with Michael Di Fuccia). If you wish, the centrality of the Word is one of his attractions to “Calvin the Protestant” over against the non-Protestant options. 

 I’ve got one more metaphor and that’s making the French delicacy foie gras, which is delicious but involves force-feeding a goose. I think that’s what people think of as the Calvinistic alternative to their own “free will view.” That’s not fair to Calvin or many Calvinists. But it is fair to some people. Dallas grew up in Southern Baptist churches and with being told that “you can do nothing for your salvation.” And I think a “foie gras view” was what many Southern Baptist preachers had in mind. As everyone knows, Dallas doesn’t stay there, if he ever was there. Supposedly he argued with his Sunday school teachers about this – on both sides! 

But here’s where I want to make an addition to the description you give and which I generally agree with. There is a notion of independence which accompanies some defenses of human agency. Perhaps it has been imported in from humanist philosophies, of which secularism is one and from which many of us are converts. And the idea is that the more effective God is as our savior the more we stand on our own two feet and gain our independence. That’s the limitation of the spoon-feeding-a-baby metaphor. As a parent, I don’t want to keep doing that. And as a parent of teenagers, I even have hope I won’t have to keep buying the food!  

Dallas, however, has an idea that the more we grow, the more dependent we become on God and God’s grace. “A saint consumes grace like a 747 consumes fuel on take-off,” he would say. So human freedom in the spiritual grown-up takes the form of extreme dependence on God. For Dallas, it is still personalistic, as you say; a conscious exchange, as I say. That’s Calvin’s picture of sanctification too. And it has a reverse side. As Dallas says, “God’s aim is that each one of us becomes the kind of person he can empower [that’s grace! that’s divine agency!] to do what we want.”  

I’m not enough of a Calvin scholar to know if Calvin recognized the reverse side too. Perhaps it’s tucked into Calvin’s notion of vocation. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t see that side of it. Calvin was still very indebted to the patristic and medieval ideas of our future (that is, of “heaven” and eschatology and such) in which we look forward to inactivity (rest) in contemplation or worship of God (see, ideas of theosis or the beatific vision). Dallas, I think, is among those who want to move the theological tradition forward by talking biblically about an active, creative future for us. And that’s why character formation is so important. 

 

AP:  That’s super helpful.  The foie gras analogy is brilliant and hilarious – the image of the human as force-fed goose will live rent-free in my mind forever. And your point about dependence on God in the spiritually mature, in the context of cooperative, creative activity, is really important — we may be free to choose, but we’re made for cooperative activity with God, in endeavors so great that we must rely on Him to act with and through us. It’s a glorious vision.      

 

AP: Arguably, Willard’s view of free will has implications for his understanding of God’s relationship to time and his views about God’s foreknowledge of creaturely free choices.  For instance, some have thought that his views about free will and its role in the Christian life suggest a version of “open theism.” I’d take this further and say that not only his understanding of free will, but also his views about finite substances – e.g., that they don’t have temporal parts – fit most naturally with a “presentist” view of time,  which in turn fits most naturally with an “open theist” perspective.  But Willard resisted that label, and his occasional references to “eternity” might be taken to indicate that that he accepted an “atemporal” view of God.  Such a view is one part of the conceptual scaffolding required for a view of foreknowledge like that of Augustine, Boethius, or Thomas Aquinas, which says that God is “outside of time,” and that this gives him a unique vantage point from which He can perceive the whole of time – including the free choices of creatures – as if it were an “eternal present.” Aquinas in one place compares it to watching a caravan enter a medieval city from a watchtower, versus street-side by the city gate: street-side, you can only see one bit of the caravan at a time pass through the gate, but from the watchtower you can see the whole caravan, from beginning to end. However, if presentism is correct, there is no “whole of time” (no whole caravan) for an atemporal God to perceive – or rather, the perceivable “whole of time” is just the present moment, which is constantly in flux.  How do you interpret Willard on these issues?  Did he have a clear view of God’s relationship to time? If so, what are the implications for God’s foreknowledge of creaturely free choices?   

 

MSR: Ask me again in a few months! Seriously though, I am going to start working on this for some writing I’m doing and I don’t know where I’ll land.  

 There are not many sources, to be honest, in which Dallas is reflecting on the nature of time. So we may not get a complete theory out of him. What I know is he did want to protect a straightforward account of our relationship with God as set out in the Bible in which God decides – sovereignly, graciously, etc. – to make space for us his creatures to count for good. For example, our prayers really do matter. God has set up the world in a way that we can contribute in small ways to its final outcome. But that means that God has chosen, somehow, to respond or react to what his creatures do in time.  

What must Dallas the theologian or philosopher say about God and time to honor that biblical and very pastoral theme? For one thing, Dallas is going to hold process theology at arm’s length. But he’s also going to hold Heideggerian and the so-called “phenomenological” ideas of being and time at arm’s length. And finally, he’s going to hold Christian-Neoplatonic ideas of God as beyond being or beyond thought at arm’s length – the latter being what Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas are fascinated by. One of his words for holding all of these as arm’s length is substance, God as substance. So if you want to get to the bottom of this in Dallas, substance is the idea that needs to be tracked down and made sense of.  

And if you know anything about 20th century theology, you’ll know I just set off some bombs.   

 

AP:  Indeed!  Thanks, Mike – it’s reassuring to learn that you’re just as puzzled as I am about this dimension of Dallas’ thought. Your focus on God as substance strikes me as a move in the right direction. I look forward to seeing where you land as you continue to work on this.