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Michael Di Fuccia: For Willard, the gospel is Jesus himself, it is not a message, a doctrine, a club membership, etc. You make mention of this throughout the book and reiterate it in your conclusion. Why do you think the idea that the gospel is Jesus himself is so important for grasping Willard? 

 

Michael Stewart Robb: I say a lot of things about Dallas’s view of the gospel in the book and that the gospel is Jesus himself is one of them. It is an important take because Dallas’s soteriology, or doctrine of salvation, is centered around being awakened from deadness to the spiritual order in which Jesus reigns and so many of us are awakened, if you wish, by Jesus himself. He is, in other words, the first thing we know and relate to in the spiritual order. If you’ve made that conscious personal connection, Dallas thinks other things, “things which accompany salvation” as the author of Hebrews says, will follow naturally in its wake because our faith in Jesus will lead us along.

Dallas is making a pretty typical Protestant move here. He’s saying that the entry point to salvation or the eternal life with God is through a gospel, i.e. a specific, fairly brief teaching or set of ideas. This may seem obvious to Protestants now but it wasn’t that way in the history of theology. In an older view, more associated with patristic and medieval theology, salvation is like a meadow that people can enter into from multiple different points on the compass. Augustine, for example, has this idea that “lower case” everyday truths can or will lead one to the existence of “capital T” Truth, namely God. There isn’t an ideal or best way to enter the meadow of salvation so long as you ultimately get there.

The picture, of which Luther and then the Reformers become champions, is more like a walled orchard. There is a gate, a gospel, a specific set of ideas, which is the appropriate or best way to enter and also which we on the inside should be pointing outsiders to. Dallas is clear inheritor of this gospel-ed tradition of soteriology. But then in Protestantism the debates have been about what exactly this “gospel gate” is and whether anyone can scale the walls and get into the orchard in an unusual way and whether people can be born in the orchard. Dallas’s contribution to those debates is his attempt to put a person, a multiple-faceted person, there at the gate and to say, “Start with his main message and unravel it together with him.”

 

MVD: Thanks Mike, I love your imagery of the “meadow” and the “walled orchard” of salvation.

In introductory theology courses, we often learn about the sources of theology, which together come to form the basis of our beliefs. There is the well-known Wesleyan quadrilateral of Scripture, Reason, Experience, and Tradition. These are not exhaustive, but one gets the point; it is from these and other sources that we construct our theology, or what we take to be the heart of the gospel. We all stress or prioritize one source over another.

I bring this up, because your response about Willard’s want to remain within a “gospel-ed” tradition reminded me of something about Willard that I’ve found perplexing. That is, what theological sources did he prioritize? He sometimes reads as if he takes the “experience” of the encounter with the person of Jesus as his primary theological source. And yet, his paradigm for one’s encounter or interaction with Jesus is based on the scriptural account of Jesus’ interaction with his audience. So, one could argue that “scripture” is his primary source. Then, to further confound the source question, knowledge (or “reason”) at times seems to take a very high priority. As you say, for Willard, it is crucial that one have right knowledge about Jesus. Not to mention he was a philosophical realist! Finally, and as my colleague Gary Moon suggests in his interview with you, Willard also appears to be bathed in the rich “tradition” of the church.

So, I wonder, do you have any thoughts on whether Willard prioritizes certain theological sources over others to construct what you’ve called “the gospel according to Dallas Willard”?

 

MSR: Somebody needs to work on this question formally, say for a book. But here’s my rough and ready answer. While he admits that theology has multiple sources, he doesn’t seem to admit norms, which is the technical term for prioritizing sources. Maybe that’s a sign that he wasn’t a robust theologian in the same way that he was a robust philosopher. You’re right that this is something we do in introductory courses.

I think there might be some subversive, conspiratorial things going on here as well. Dallas knew that philosophy and natural theology (let’s just group those under Wesley’s “reason” category) were often not given a seat at the table in many seminaries. I know the schools I went to felt justified in graduating theologians and Bible scholars and psychologists without requiring of them even one philosophy course. If Dallas had become the founder of a seminary, we couldn’t imagine him doing that.

And then experience too is pushed out of the seminary for various reasons, sometimes with justification. Gary Moon, my friend, is always promoting experience but I like to remind him that Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of liberal theology, was also a great fan of experience, taking it in some dangerous directions. And so now you have justified reactions to him which seek to play down experience in seminary. Well, with Dallas the phenomenologist, experience is a non-negotiable element of knowledge. But the word “experience” is slippery and simply doesn’t cover what everyone who spoke of it are after.

Invite Gregory of Nyssa, an Aristotelian like Aquinas, an “Enthusiast” (as so labeled by the Reformers), John Locke the empiricist, a Pietist like Philip Spener, the old liberal Schleiermacher, William James the pragmatist, Edmund Husserl the phenomenologist, a new liberal like Gustavo Gutiérrez and a modern Pentecostal to speak at a conference on Christian experience and it’s a mess because they are all speaking about different things. That’s a picture of the modern seminary! And then you have all those who are, in reaction, genuinely worried about what experience is as a source of theology. That’s the real situation Willard stepped into as a Christian teacher. So we can’t imagine experience not being a part of his seminary but at the same time he’s going to expect some serious work be done to filter experience. Because not all of it is going to get in!

That’s a beginning to thinking about this but I better stop because my answer is getting too long. I’ll finish with this. Dallas was once asked how we should “reconcile Athens and Jerusalem,” that is, handle the integration of faith and reason, which is a question about prioritizing sources. He said it’s not difficult, “It’s simply, follow the argument, wherever it shows up.” I don’t know if it’s simple but that’s what he said.

 

MVD: Thanks Mike! I agree that this is opening a can of worms. Even though it would take another book to get try to make sense of Willard as a theologian, your comments are really helpful. You’ve pinpointed something important here: in the theological context of liberal Protestantism, Willard seems to place a high priority on reason as a way of “filtering” this overemphasis of experience which lies at the origins of theological liberalism.

 

MVD: Speaking of reason or knowledge of God, the idea that God slowly reveals himself through successive historical phases was very popular in Willard’s time. This view is popularly known as “progressive revelation” and is the logic behind various forms of “dispensationalism.” But you point out that for Willard, God has always been very present, active, and available to us. Therefore, according to Willard, what is progressive is not God’s revelation of Himself, but our apprehension of his Kingdom in our midst. Can you speak to why this notion of progressive apprehension is so important to understanding Willard?

 

MSR: It seems to get him out of a number of sticky issues in reading the Bible; I’m sure that’s a big part of the appeal. The Bible is a big diverse set of books. Progressive revelation is also an attempt to make sense of that diversity but it makes God himself responsible for the diversity. That sounds great but when you get deeper into it, it isn’t clear why God would intentionally save “the good stuff” while his dear people down below suffer from ignorance.

Progressive apprehension also fits into a larger context of how Willard is making sense of salvation as spiritual formation. It actually isn’t new, it’s an idea that’s been around for a long time.  Ellen Charry has this book By the Renewing of Your Minds in which she shows how theologians from Athanasius to Calvin thought of salvation in pedagogical, formational terms. In other words, God is the teacher and we, humanity, are the very obstinate, very dim-witted, very distracted students. It explains why Christianity in the earliest centuries referred to itself as a philosophy, not a religion. Many great theological texts, she argues, are not academic treatises but rather sincere pastoral attempts to participate with God in his work as humanity’s teacher.

From time to time, we hear Dallas tossing out to an audience the question which seems to have been one of his own early questions. He asks, if Christ’s coming to die on the cross and rise again to new life was the first fundamental step to God’s plan of salvation, why didn’t that happen right after the fall in the garden? Why not have Jesus be born to Eve instead of Cain? Why, in other words, did God allow for a human history and a covenant history? The answer he comes up with is basically the same as what Ellen Charry discovered, namely that there is a millennia-old divine project to educate (to form) humanity spiritually, that is in terms of its knowledge, character and power. But we’re very obstinate, very dim-witted, very distracted students and so covenant history is a history of progressive apprehension.

 

MVD: Mike, your clarifying of not just the theological significance of progressive apprehension but also the formative implications are insightful.

It seems to me that in Willard one finds a constant interplay or a symbiotic relationship between one’s knowledge of God and one’s spiritual formation. I think this is what you’re saying. Can you expand upon what you take to be the relationship between one’s spiritual formation and one’s progressive apprehension of God? Or put another way, what are the formative implications of one’s growing apprehension of God?

 

MSR: I think this is a weakness of the spiritual formation movement as it exists today. It imagines that it can do spiritual formation without doing theology. Look at the books that are published under spiritual formation. Look at the conferences. Are these theological in the way that Dallas’s books are? Are the spiritual directors we’re training getting a theological education as well? Are the rules of life that we’re promoting going to produce laymen who can teach others about God?

I know I’m lobbing some grenades but these are matters we need to be thinking about as we go forward. I think the simplest way to put the relationship between spiritual formation and progressive apprehension of God is to say that spiritual formation aims to produce mature people in character, in power and in knowledge. I use those three qualities a lot for my own orientation and when I explain maturity or holiness to others. There’s a lot to say about the other two but maturity in knowledge is obviously going to be centered around knowledge of God.

And so if you’re a pastor or have a voice in your church, this is time to think about the teaching ministry of your church. Is there even one? What does it need to look like in a culture addicted to their phones and “short-form content” and entertainment? I’ve been learning more about continent-wide movements in Europe like Benedict’s monasteries or Calvin’s churches. Both self-identify as “schools,” which is in itself interesting and forgotten. But both also encouraged education in a broader sense. In Scotland, the prevalence of Calvinist churches led to the first system of public education for the simple reason that if Calvinist churches were going to be governed by lay elders who were to be chosen for their knowledge of the Bible and the confessions, then the elders needed to be able to read. And in order to have a pool of knowledgeable laymen to choose from, there would have to have schools to teach them, hence Europe’s first public education system coming out of Europe’s Middle Ages when even kings and queens couldn’t read.

 

MVD: Mike, as a theologian I resonate with the need to integrate theology and teaching in our ministry/formation contexts. You’re right about both the need for and the challenges facing getting theology into the hands of Christian practitioners and theological education more broadly. Paradigms stressing growth, leadership, efficiency, productivity, and hyper spirituality often treat theology as a hindrance, whereas historically, as you say, theology was understood as “queen of the sciences.”

 

MVD: Moving on, I have another question about “progressive apprehension” that relates to how one comes to a saving knowledge of God. In Chapter 11 you mention that the book is structured around “a soteriological path of reasoning” (page 395) that you find in Willard. You imply that there is, in general, a “progressive apprehension” of the people of God that one finds in the Biblical narrative and in the particular lives of Jesus’ audience. According to this reading of Willard, Jesus’ audience undergoes a 3-stage process of progressive apprehension that ends in faith in the person of Jesus. Do you think Willard takes this process as normative for all believers or unique to Jesus’ first century audience? In other words, should we expect that converts today will experience something like progressive apprehension?

 

MSR: I have to be careful here. The specific “soteriological path of reasoning” I speak about on page 395 is not Dallas’s but my own. Books and chapters have to have beginnings, middles and ends and I couldn’t find a way to organize the material in Dallas’s own work.

But the idea of coming to know something (e.g. the gospel, the divinity of Christ) by means of progressive apprehension is deeply sympathetic to Dallas’s theology and philosophy. It is found in Edmund Husserl who thought it applied to material objects as well as, let’s say, mental objects. Consider a table in your vicinity. The aspects of the table that you can perceive from the position you are currently in are limited to just a few. You can probably see the top and a couple sides and some legs. But these aspects have a “horizon” which suggests further ways that the table could be known, such as from a different angle and in different light, and further aspects to be known, such as its underside or its inside. Second generation phenomenologists like Heidegger jump on that idea of understanding unfolding and run with it in (pragmatic) directions with which Husserl and Dallas would be uncomfortable because of their realism. But the idea is deeply phenomenological, you could say. And Dallas does it all the time as a theologian.

In my book, these paths of understanding, like the big three stages of coming to understand Jesus’s message or the smaller one I use in chapter 11, are at best my own tentative attempt to make sense of what the Bible seems to indicate was the actual historical path of the first listeners. Obviously a book like The Kingdom among Us shouldn’t be an argument for my own views but I do own up to it and try not to let it distort Dallas’s views.

So to answer your question, I don’t think it will be normative for all believers. I say something about that at the end of chapter 12. If I am right that this is the Bible’s depiction of the historical path, then there might be something there for us today to know about Jesus and the gospel. What I think is there are ontological relations – the person Jesus is related to the kingdom in some objective ways. But we aren’t 1^st century Jews, so their path likely won’t work for us in the same way. Theirs was the first way the mountain was scaled and it remains a good way to get up there. But from the top it’s likely that other approaches present themselves to us. You could say that’s what’s happening with the gospel of John. John the evangelist is depicted as an eagle in Christian art because he “soars over history.” It is a different approach, a different progression of apprehension.

This ties us back into an earlier question but Dallas still wants to be a Protestant, a gospel-ed theologian and so he is going to promote Jesus and his message as much as possible as the entry point of salvation. But it seems that for him there isn’t just one way to meet Jesus and his message, so long as you keep going and get the whole person. That’s the Husserlian idea of horizons but it is also, if you notice, a form of that older meadow view.

 

MVD: These comments are super helpful. Your book goes a long way to articulate what you see as a fundamental phenomenological insight guiding Willard, “progressive apprehension.” This is part of what strikes me about your last line. Therein, you seem to imply that your reading of Willard holds in tension two views of salvation that are nowadays opposed: the Jesus centered “walled” or “gated” “orchard” and the “open field.” In your response to the first question, you say that Willard seemed to prioritize something like the “walled orchard” approach, yet here you state that his phenomenology of progressive apprehension represents something akin to the “open field” approach.

If I am understanding you correctly, does this also make Willard something of an “odd duck of 20^th century theology,” to use your own description, or am I reading too much into your last sentence?

 

MSR: This is so good, Mike, because it gets us right into it. I think we are encountering here the typical Protestant distinction between salvation as once and for all and as an ongoing process that culminates in glorification, as Paul says (2 Cor 2:15), we are being saved. So I don’t think it is so much a holding in tension as it is a making of an objective distinction.

Aside from their genuine interest in exegeting the Scriptures fairly, looking for a way to rest in their divinely-accomplished salvation is what drove Luther and the Reformers personally and pastorally to articulate the “walled orchard” view of salvation. As evangelization and outreach become more important in later Protestantism, there is a related drive amongst the evangelists and missionaries to articulate, we might say, the USP, the “unique selling point” of Christianity. What is it that I should be telling people who are making up their minds? It is the latter which is largely motivating Dallas’s work as a theologian.

And that’s because – and here’s where it gets interesting – he sees how the former, the Reformational drive, has become twisted in contemporary Protestantism and you have lots of people supposedly resting in their divinely-accomplished salvation and they’ve completely missed the point. That’s how we’ve ended up with a discipleship-less Christian life and discipleship-less churches. These are people who have been told that getting in is all that matters.

And I think there are nominalist and non-nominalist versions of that. The nominalist version has been dumped on for centuries. Read Kierkegaard’s essay “For Self Examination” in which he impersonates a nominalist Christian reading Luther, saying “Excellent! This is something for us. . . . Long live Luther!” Sometimes today the non-nominalist version will label itself “Reformed.” I’m an ordained Presbyterian minister and I can say with confidence that nobody is getting this discipleship-less, sanctification-less “Reformed” faith from reading Zwingli and Calvin. I don’t deny their sincerity or faith but I think they’ve mislabeled themselves. On this point Dallas is way more Reformed, way more evangelical! And he knows it.

But Dallas is sensitive to Luther and the Reformers’ question. To those who asked, am I in?, he always, to my knowledge, tried to answer it in a way that encouraged action, movement, discipleship, growth, like Jesus himself did with the rich young ruler. This is where Husserl’s “horizon,” and progressive apprehension and meadows and multiple ways to know Jesus and the gospel come in. Because salvation is an ongoing process. Just because we’ve got Jesus and, more importantly, he’s got us doesn’t mean there’s nothing more to the story, that we know all that there is to know of Jesus and are saved in all the ways that that there are to be saved. Just because we’re in the orchard doesn’t mean there’s nothing important left to discover. Remember that line from C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle: Further up and further in!

 

MVD: Mike, thank you for clarifying. Using the history of Protestantism as a way of contextualizing Willard’s view on salvation and sanctification is super helpful. What you’ve done here is show how the diversity of themes in Willard come together to highlight both his desire to clarify the entry point of the Christian faith (the gospel) and the purpose or point of entering, as action, discipleship, and growth. In this way Willard brings together his “gospel-ed” message with a robust vision for the ongoing transformation of the life of the believer. You’ve made it more clear to me why Willard holds the all too often disparate themes of salvation and formation so close to one another and to his heart. It seems to me that his linking salvation to the ongoing formative (sanctifying) work of the Spirit has something to do with why Willard resonates with evangelical readers who find themselves longing for more. Thank you.