Attorneys of Dallas

Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

Description

At a time when popular atheism books are talking about the irrationality of believing in God, Willard makes a rigorous intellectual case for why it makes sense to believe in God and in Jesus, the Son.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-15
Summary: "Know Christ Today: Why We can Trust Spiritual Knowledge"

This book really is a challenging book and sure got me to thinking. This
author knows how to express and describe what we need in out

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Rating: 2 / 5
Date: 2010-08-05
Summary: "Dallas Willard's Case for Spiritual Knowledge"

Dallas Willard has carved out a place of authority in evangelicalism as a leader in spiritual formation. The title of his new book, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2009) sounds as if he is making a case for subjective experience as the most reliable way of understanding God and the Scriptures. Actually, this book begins with a robust defense of the objectivity of Christianity's truth claims.

Knowing Christ Today starts out strong:

"This book is about knowledge and about claims to knowledge in relationship to life and Christian faith. It is concerned, more precisely, with the trivialization of faith apart from knowledge and with the disastrous effect of a repositioning of faith in Jesus Christ, and of life as his students, outside the category of knowledge." (1)

Willard claims that "a life of steadfast discipleship to Jesus Christ can be supported only upon assured knowledge of how things are, of the realities in terms of which that life is lived." (7) Far from seeing knowledge in opposition to faith, Willard believes that "knowledge is a friend to faith, essential to faith and to our relationship with God in the spiritual life." (10)

For Willard, belief is not powerful enough to govern our life unless it is connected to knowledge - specifically, the truth and evidence that knowledge is built upon. Our belief is strengthened when we understand that our knowledge of Christianity is just as vital and valuable as our knowledge in other spheres in life. The Christian faith is based, not merely in preferences or emotions, but in actual knowledge.

Willard makes some great points in the first third of this book. He emphasizes the need for those who profess faith in Christ to back up their commitment with knowledge. He sees knowledge as important for our Christian witness in the world. He calls Christians to stand firm on what we know to be true, even if society relegates our truth claims to the realm of belief.

Willard describes recent shifts in Western thinking about morality. He writes:

"This is what has now changed - not just which things are good or bad, right or wrong, but the very status of good and right themselves and of the difference it makes whether you are good or right or their opposites." (68)

Willard's analysis goes to the root issues that have led to our degenerating society:

"To say that moral knowledge has disappeared is just to say that what those people knew, and know now, is no longer made available to the public as knowledge by the institutions of knowledge in our social and political system, though it was so made available at times in the past." (72)

Willard is right. The decline of moral values did not take place because some people in society simply woke up one morning and decided that certain taboos of the past were now acceptable. The true shift took place when morality was removed from the public sphere and treated as subjective.

Though Willard emphasizes knowledge in this book, he understands that knowledge is not enough. The human heart is irrational, leading us to choose not to believe what we know. We know we're probably not going to win the lottery and yet we continue to play the lottery. Human life is full of self-delusion.

Willard also makes good points regarding the separation of church and state. He writes:

"The real significance of church and state is that religion is not teaching something that would be known in the knowledge of morality... If it were seriously imagined that the teachings of Christianity or other religious constituted a vital and irreplaceable knowledge of reality, there would be no more talk of the separation of church and state than there is of the separation of chemistry or economics and state." (32)

Though Knowing Christ Today starts out well, the middle section focuses on rational reasons for the existence of God. These chapters are substantive, but there is nothing particularly new in Willard's approach. It would have been better for him to footnote other apologetic resources and continue on with his initial thesis. Instead, the middle of the book feels like an academic excursus that goes on too long.

Later, the book takes a turn for the worse. Whenever Willard writes about Jesus, it is in the context of following Jesus as just a moral example. While Christ's teaching is indeed a window into the love of God, I believe we learn much more about God's love by examining his sacrificial death. But Willard never takes us to the cross - the very heart of our faith. His picture of Jesus in this book is so tilted to Jesus-as-example, that we miss out on the richer, more glorious picture in Scripture.

At the end of the book, Willard opens the door to inclusivism. He writes:

"Many people who are Christians by certain identifiable human standards - say, by baptism church membership, having `prayed to receive Christ,' or regular partaking of the sacraments - still lack the inward `circumcision' of which Paul here speaks. On the other hand, any who lack those recognizable marks, but have the inward heart God looks for is acceptable to God - no matter in what other ways they may or may not be identifiable." (180)

It is interesting to watch as Willard himself pulls back from embracing the implications of his statements. He knows that inclusivism could affect our missionary passion. So he writes:

"...the Christian pluralism of which we here speak is not the Christian gospel. In fact, Christian pluralism is not really very `good news' at all. It is more like a `loophole' than a gospel. There is little or nothing in it that gives hope to the individual." (188)

I appreciate Willard's admission that inclusivism leads to bad missiological implications. But he has already flung wide the door for those implications by leaving the "loophole" in the first place.

Overall, Knowing Christ Today is a very uneven book. It starts out well and then takes a turn that, in the end, left me as baffled. Willard's proposal is designed to help Christians consider the source and authority of morality, religion, and spiritual knowledge in our society today, but many of his affirmations lead to confusion rather than clarity.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-07-03
Summary: "Foundational Knowledge"

[...]

This is a book about knowledge; what it is, how it is attained, and why it is so important. In his introduction, Willard makes the statement: Belief cannot reliably govern life and action except in its proper connection with knowledge and the truth and evidence knowledge involves. One of his key concerns is that when our religious faith is separated from knowledge, it becomes difficult to sustain.

Willard addresses several common misunderstandings about knowledge including the relationship between faith and knowledge. He traces how moral knowledge has been lost largely because of the influence of the university and its methods of specialization and research. The resulting bias against religious faith is very pervasive especially in higher education.

Willard explains the extreme importance of worldview and its relationship to knowledge. As a part of this discussion, he presents a series of key questions that a worldview must answer. He goes on to make the point that the loss of moral knowledge is the result of a naturalistic worldview.

Willard carefully explains how it is possible to know that there is a God. One of the key components of this line of reasoning is the existence of the universe. He then moves on to the possibility of miracles, unusual happenings that are hard to explain, and the extensive evidence for, perhaps the most important miracle of all, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In a very important chapter, Willard gives extensive coverage of the possibility of attaining first hand knowledge of the spiritual life through acting on the teaching of Jesus. He goes on to address the responsibility that knowledge places on someone to share it.

This is a very important book for people that want to be able to "give the reason for the hope that you have." Although it is not an easy read, it is well worth the effort.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-05-17
Summary: "What if you woke up"

and realized that YOU were a disciple? Wouldn't that feel strange? Of course knowing my own circumstances I would immediately protest: "I'm not right for the job!" I'm a sinner and I'm confused and I often don't even want to do it. I hardly participate at all. I have a list as long as my arm as to why I would make a poor disciple! I'm barely a prodigal. Yet, if I still felt compelled, the whole thing weighing on me like a sack of multiplied fish, perhaps I could persist. Or perhaps unlike Paul I would want to go immediately back to tent making. The disciples didn't even review or buy books on Amazon. Being a disciple in modernity is a crushing burden. The Gospel According to Me: A heretic finds his way in modernity using Jungian psychology, science, dreams, and, well, the Gospels

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-04-23
Summary: "Jesus Christ = Knowledge"


Dallas Willard has had a huge influence on the evangelical Christian community over the last couple decades. He has written some very important books during that time. His latest, `Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge' is the first book that I have read by this author. Reading a book by Dr. Willard by me is long overdue!

Here is the biography of Dr. Willard from the book cover flap:
Dallas Willard (http://www.dwillard.org) is a bestselling author and professor at the University of Southern California's School of Philosophy, and has held visiting appointments at UCLA and the University of Colorado. His groundbreaking book The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines forever changed the way thousands of Christians experience their faith. Willard won the Christianity Today book award in 2007 for The Great Omission. He lives in Chatsworth, California.

Dr. Willard explains the purpose for this book in the Introduction:

This book is about knowledge and about claims to knowledge in relationship to life and to Christian faith. It is concerned, more precisely, with the trivialization of faith apart from knowledge and with the disastrous effects of a repositioning of faith in Jesus Christ, and of life as his students, outside the category of knowledge. This is one result of the novel and politically restricted understanding of knowledge that has captured our social institutions and the popular mind over the last two centuries in the Western world.

At some point in time, it became a popular notion that believing in Jesus and knowledge are not necessarily compatible; that thought has even been accepted by Christians. Dr. Willard posits that knowledge matters:

Knowledge, but not mere belief or commitment, confers on its possessor an authority or right - even a responsibility - to act, to direct action, to establish and supervise policy, and to teach. (p. 17)

Dr. Willard expands upon a particular passage of scripture which deals with knowledge, Hosea 4:6:

My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.

Dr. Willard asserts:

To say that "the righteous (or just) shall live by faith" does not mean that they live by blind and irresponsible leaps in total absence, or even in defiance, of knowledge. It does not mean that the "just" live in a state of ignorance or stupidity. They do on occasion act in specific ways beyond what they know, but only within a framework of knowledge that makes such action reasonable. (p. 37)

Dr. Willard points out that Jesus answers five worldview questions (pp. 50-55):

Question # 1: What is real? What is reality?
Answer # 1: God and his kingdom
Question # 2: Who is well-off, blessed?
Answer # 2: Anyone who is alive in the kingdom of God
Question # 3: Who is a really good person?
Answer # 3: Anyone who is pervaded with love.
Question # 4: How do you become a really good person?
Answer # 4: You place your confidence in Jesus Christ and become his student or apprentice in kingdom living.

Dr. Willard asserts that there are currently three competing worldviews (p. 62):

1. Theistic story - consists of Christianity's four answers of Jesus and his tradition to the four worldview questions.
2. Nirvana story - most familiar today through current presentations of the teaching of Buddhism and through many of the popular arts along with "New Age" presentations of various kinds.
3. Naturalistic/secularist story - often tries to present itself as the findings of science. This one now attempts to dominate our main social and political institutions.

This fine author explains that law is now more important than morality in the United States:

What is permissible and what is done, much less what is required in social and governmental institutions and policies, are no longer to be decided by reference to what is morally good, admissible, or right, but ultimately in the United States by reference to the Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court. (p. 69)

Dr. Willard uncovered four major causes of the elimination of moral knowledge from the knowledge institutions of our society (p. 79):

1. The failure of the church to guide the development of modern societies into the ways of Jesus Christ
2. The failure of modern thinkers and scholars to find a secular basis for Christian moral principles
3. The emergence of many "moralities" at the hands of anthropological "research"
4. The disappearance of the human self at the hands of the "advances" in psychology

Dr. Willard brings up the important subject of the resurrection of Jesus, and how it relates to knowledge:

Can we know that Christ rose from the dead? Yes, if we will but "do the math." That he arose is the only plausible explanation for what happened after his death and what still exists today as a consequence. The established mental habit of many people today is to say with no thought, no hesitation, that he did not arise. There are numerous causes of this. For one thing, to many people this is a "religious" question, and therefore it automatically falls outside the domain of facts and knowledge. (p. 134)

I loved how Dr. Willard explains our interaction with Jesus and His Kingdom:

To know Christ in the modern world us to know him in your world now. To know him in your world now is to live interactively with him right where you are in your daily activities. This is the spiritual life in Christ. He is, in fact, your contemporary, and he is now about his business of moving humanity along toward its destiny in this amazing universe. You don't want to miss out on being a part - your part - of that great project. You want to be sure to take your life into his life, and in that way to find your life to be "eternal," as God intended it. (p. 139)

That's the most exciting news I have read in a long time!

One of the most important sections of this book is found in Chapter 8: Pastors as Teachers of the Nations:

To make "disciples" of Jesus is to bring knowledge of him to people in such a way that they want to know his answers to these questions, and the roles of pastors is to help them attain the knowledge they seek. Their task is not to get people to believe things, to share "Christian" feelings or rituals, to join Christian groups... The task of Christian pastors and leaders is to present Christ's answers to the basic questions of life and to bring those answers forward as knowledge - primarily to those who are seeking and are open to following him, but also to all who may happen to hear, in the public arenas of a world in desperate need of knowledge of what is real and what is good. (p. 198)

I found this to be a very valuable work; it lived up to my expectations of what a Dallas Willard book would be. Dr. Willard has the credentials that will be respected by Christians and non-Christians alike, and should be read by everyone, regardless of one's worldview. He writes on a scholarly level; this is not easy reading, but it's worth the effort. In addition to the valuable content, which chapter also concludes with Discussion Questions; therefore, it could work for individuals or small groups.

This book was provided by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, for review purposes.

Reviewed by Andrea Schultz - Ponderings by Andrea - http://andrealschultz.blogspot.com