Dallas Willard begins The Divine Conspiracy with a story about a jet fighter that crashed. The pilot was flying upside-down without knowing it, and when she made an ascent maneuver the plane flew into the ground.
He uses this image throughout the first chapter: a world where things are upside-down, but no one realizes it. A lack of meaning and coherence aflicts us.
The mantle of intellectual meaninglessness shrouds every aspect of our common life. Events, things, and ‘information’ flood over us, overwhelming us, disorienting us with threats and possibilities we for the most part have no idea what to do about.
He tells a story about a young woman who went to Harvard. Because her family was limited in income, she cleaned student’s rooms at the college to support herself; frequently the other students derided her. Eventually she left Harvard for another school. Willard notes the students who treated this woman in such a shameful way were the same ones attending classes on ethics — they learned about different ethical systems, but they didn’t learn to be better human beings.
Rootless, disoriented human beings can turn right-side up by orienting themselves to Jesus, in whom they see God’s activity in the world.
Jesus’ enduring relevance is based on his historically proven ability to speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition. He matters because of what he brought and still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weakness he gives us strength and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity… Suddenly [we] are flying right-side up, in a world that makes sense.
Willard will spend the rest of the book describing how to align ourselves to Jesus. For an analogy, he says it’s like when people in rural areas first connected to an electical grid and found a power that gave them an new kind and quality of life.
A friend of mine read this book and asked me to read it to discuss it with him.
My impression is that if one asked Willard what Jesus did he would say that he taught us how to live right. My impression is that Willard mainly subscribes to a moral theory of atonement, something like Abelard’s, a theory common in liberal protestantism.
Is that your impression too?
I think that theory of atonement is more credible to people in modernity than the others, if they have a hard time with more cosmic or supernatural theories.
For me, the moral theory also lacks credibility. I think the older theories of atonement were born of an attempt to explain why the messiah died in cosmic terms. They are not credible to a modern mind, but in their context they made sense. The moral theory, especially in its modern usage, does not seem to maintain enough connection with the past to be plausible. In addition, to the extent that the morality involved matches modern moralities, it is not plausible to connect it with Jesus because the moralities of today are so different, and because we don’t need Jesus to be moral in modernity.
Ultimately, I think the modern inability to relate to myth, and the tendency to see the Bible and Jesus in moral terms, supports the disbelief so common in modernity more than it supports faith. Religion as morality seems like a waste of time.
I think Dallas Willard is an evangelical with an awful case of “spiritual flu” and is trying to find a cure in morality, trying to salvage something of faith from the moral theory of atonement.
I want to suggest to Ken that each of the half dozen or more theories of atonement illuminate some part of what, in the end, remains a holy mystery. All of them are incomplete and inadequate, but together they begin to form something of a mosaic of what atonement might mean.
CP
Steven,
I think a mosaic is what the church had for many centuries, but in modernity it was shattered. In modernity neither the pieces nor the whole remained credible.
Evangelicalism continues to maintain the mosaic is whole. I know.
I think Dallas Willard believes the mosaic is broken and that we only need the morality piece. I think that his belief supports disbelief more than it supports faith. I think that the modern inability to relate to myth prevents faith. I am saying something like Mircea Eliade said.
Ken, I see that argument in academic circles all the time. And living where I do, I’m surrounded by fundamentalists who will have nothing but the substitutionary doctrine. But in my preaching and teaching I find very hungry and confused people who are overjoyed to discover that there is not one answer, but many, that it doesn’t meant relativism but is well rooted in tradition, and that Holy Mystery is not voodoo. If I had to pick a contemporary writer with whom to travel I would go with two: Rowan Williams (Resurrection) and Ray Brown (The Death of the Messiah). I confess that I have not read much of Dallas Willard. My wife has, and I get out loud summaries along with pithy quotes, and that’s what I know about Willard.
I think Dallas Willard is also reacting against fundamentalism, perhaps in his own past, or in his church. He does make some effort in his writing to argue that he is not moving too far to the left theologically. That suggests that his intended audience is moderate to liberal evangelicals.
BTW, where I live we are mostly quite liberal theologically or atheistic. The morality most evident is of the liberal type too, although southern California tends to be pretty relaxed about morality, no matter which kind. It is nihilism with which we mainly must cope. But even that is not taken too seriously. It is, after all, sunny here and warm almost every day.
Ken, I live in a similarly liberal, largely atheist community in Oregon: Corvallis (one-time headquarters of Marcus Borg).
I read (and enjoyed) this book a few years ago. I think that Willard strikes a respectable progressive stance at the edge of conservative evangelicalism. Willard has by no means rejected his roots, and I think it’s assumptive to judge this book on its own. I sincerely doubt Willard would say that the core of Christianity is right living. Instead, I think he’s presupposing all of the conservative doctrines of his ecclesial tribe (INCLUDING substitutionary atonement) and with some cultural savvy, injecting a progressive, socially-redemptive counterbalance.
The Divine Conspiracy is not a REJECTION of conservative evangelical theology. Rather, I think it’s Willard’s attempt at REDEEMING it. Ken, I may be very wrong. You may be very right.
My two cents.
I resonate more with Steven’s “mosaic” worldview.
Peter,
I agree that Dallas Willard’s work is an attempt to redeem evangelicalism and an attempt to be both evangelical and progressive.
I think evangelicals are more likely than liberals or Catholics to find his book interesting and persuasive.
I grew up with liberal theology and it continues to influence my view of life. Generally, no view of atonement is important in liberal theology. It is often considered backwards.
Nevertheless, I have no wish to argue with the mosaic view – I simply see it as part of history. I don’t get the sense in Willard’s book that he subscribes to the mosaic view.
As an evangelical, Dallas Willard continues to give atonement a central place in his theology. What I am saying is that in his work (Divine Conspiracy) he has moved the moral theory of atonement to the center and has marginalized the other theories that are part of the traditional mosaic. His move is not unprecedented – nor is its failure.
Ken, Peter and Steven, thanks for your comments. I haven’t read far enough to make an assessment on Willard, although I saw in chapter 2 how he distanced himself from the religious right and left. I’ll be on the look out for his understanding of the atonement, among other things.
I told my congregation I’d be reading this book during Lent and invited them to join me.
Peace to you all.