DALLAS WILLARD
PART 2 OF 3- “THE
LOST INTERVIEW” WITH KEITH GILES
KG- “I have so many
possible questions and directions we could go from here….so, I’ll
just pick one. I’m curious how and when and in what way did this
distinction of the Gospel of the Kingdom become clear to you? Have
you just always understood this? Were you raised in a church that
taught this? Or did you discover this over time?”
DW- “Well
I can tell you very easily about that. First of all, anyone who goes
through a theological education will be given a version of the Gospel
and it will be said that it is different from the Gospel that we’re
supposed to preach. On the Liberal side, the Kingdom of God was taken
to be a condition of society towards which they were supposed to
work. Both Left and Right, theologically, share the idea that Jesus
was going to bring the Kingdom of God, but he didn’t. So, the
Liberal version was that Jesus expected a political order to emerge
among the Jewish people and instead they rejected it and so he was
wrong because Jesus thought the Kingdom was going to come and it
didn’t. The Conservative version was the one that was most common
among the people in Jesus’ own day, namely that there was going to
appear the King and the Kingdom would come, politically, because the
King appeared. Well, the King appeared on the cross and so that’s
where you get the dispensational teaching. You see it in the old
Scofield Bible and elsewhere, the idea that we were then put into
this odd thing called “The Church Age”. So, they believe that the
Kingdom will come at the end of the Church Age and that’s where you
get your Left Behind books and so on.
“There’s no New
Testament scholar who would ever tell you that the Gospel of Jesus
was about anything other than the Kingdom of God. What they don’t
understand is how that connects to the development in the book of
Acts, and later in the Church, where people come to understand The
Kingdom through Jesus and that’s where, if you do an inductive
study on The Kingdom of God in the book of Acts, or of “The
Kingdom”, you’ll see how that develops. So, for example, in 1
Corinthians 15 where Paul spells out the Gospel he preaches, it is
presenting The Kingdom, in the form of Jesus. That’s the way we’re
supposed to do it. We’re not supposed to say, ‘Won’t it be
wonderful when the Kingdom of God comes?’ or whatever.
“My
theological education took all that in and I began to serve as a
pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention, in the Church, as a young
man. As I did that I began to see something strange. I spent a lot of
time trying to get people to come to church. I looked at Jesus and I
saw that He spent a lot of His time trying to get away from
people.”
KG- (laughs) “Because he had so many people
following Him around?”
DW- “Absolutely. When you read the
Gospels you see people walking on one another in Luke to just get to
hear Him and be around Him. It wasn’t just a signs and wonders
show, they came because of His teaching. Publicans and sinners
thronged around Him, flocked to Him and to hear Him present the
Kingdom of God because, again, that’s all Jesus talked about. But
it wasn’t a political thing, it was a reality that is here now and
you can, by trusting Him, live in that Kingdom.”
“So, all
of these zany things He talks about; the birds and the flowers and so
forth, that’s the presence of the Kingdom and that’s what He
taught. So, I knew I must find out about this. I knew I must preach
what Jesus preached. Although I was far from having His effect. Once
I began preaching this way, then this issue of trying to pump people
up and come to church and trying to get people to do things, that
just disappeared.
“I began to say to people, ‘The real
issue is your life when you’re not in church and what are you going
to do with that?’ Now, then if you want to know how to do that you
begin to become a disciple of Jesus. You trust Him to the extent that
you believe that He knows the best about everything and you want to
learn from Him. That means how to run your business, how to run your
home, personal relations of all sorts, etc., come under His control
and authority. That’s the path of a disciple.
“So, to put
that long story simply, I just realized that what Jesus was saying in
the Gospels is for us now. But to access it we have to trust Him with
our whole life and then the whole New Testament lights up and the
great passages like Ephesians chapter 3 and 4 and Galatians 5 and
Colossians 3, all those you suddenly realize, ‘Well, this is
talking about life in the Kingdom of God’. So, it ceases to be Laws
and becomes an expression of the life you live in Christ.”
KG-
“So, forgive me if this seems like a loaded question but, is
discipleship to Christ necessary for salvation?”
DW- “If
you mean life in the Kingdom, it is. If you mean going to heaven when
you die, I think a lot of people are going to be in Heaven who don’t
understand this. I think they may have to wear a dunce cap for
several million years but uh…”
KG- (laughs)
DW-
“…but I think people are going to go to heaven in different
conditions. I do think that what Paul the Apostle says, that ‘whoever
shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved’ includes that,
and you don’t have to understand everything perfectly to be on
Jesus’ side. See, our situation now is one where we are under a
severe mis-teaching and I don’t think that people under that
teaching are going to be automatically condemned for it. God knows
their hearts and I’m sure that many people who wouldn’t know how
to talk Kingdom language if their lives depended on it will be in
heaven. But of course the question that faces us is, ‘What are we
going to do until we go?’ and is that all just lost?
“Many
people treat the time before you die as if somehow it had nothing to
do with God. God has nothing to do with your life here, we’re just
hanging on, trying not to sin and we all fail and we have a whole
teaching that you never make any progress, and that you don’t have
to make any progress, because you’re saved by Grace. Grace, to
them, relates only to forgiveness it doesn’t relate to life.”
KG-
“This leads right into what I was going to ask you next which is
the whole fascination we seem to have, as a culture, with Grace.
Although, it seems that the version of Grace that we’re so enamored
with isn’t the complete, Biblical version of Grace.”
DW-
“It has almost nothing to do with it. But, see again, that follows
this basic line, which I believe is inspired by evil to keep our
lives out of touch with God. If you do an inductive study of Grace,
in the Bible, you would never come to the idea that it has only to do
with forgiveness. I have heard nationally-known speakers say, and
these are the exact words, ‘Grace is only for guilt’. Now, if you
take that and, for example the words of Paul the Apostle in
Ephesians, “..unto me, who is the least of all saints, is this
Grace given that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable
riches of Christ”. Now just take that context. Does this mean that
all that is involved here is forgiveness? Not at all. What Paul was
referring to is that Grace was a gift of a ministry of life to the
Gentiles. The general idea that fits all the contexts of Grace found
in the both the Old and the New Testaments, is that Grace is God
acting in my life to accomplish what I cannot accomplish on my own.
Now then, if you take that idea and you go back to all the passages
about Grace you will see that suddenly things begin to light up. Paul
in Colossians 15 is talking about he was the last one who witnessed
the resurrected Jesus. He says he doesn’t deserve to be an Apostle,
even though he was late, he says, “I have labored more abundantly
than they all” and he catches himself then and adds, “yet not I
but the Grace of God that is in me.” Now, that wasn’t
forgiveness. That was God acting in Paul and then you watch his life
and you see what that means. So that when Paul acted he knew that God
was acting with him and through him. Again, Grace is God acting in my
life to accomplish what I cannot on my own. Of course, it’s much
bigger than that because it also has, not just an individual but a
social presence in history. Now you come to the very famous passage
in 2 Peter 3:18- “Grow in Grace” (and that means to grow in the
presence of God in your life, doing what you cannot do on your own),
“and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”. Now,
knowledge, Biblically, always refers to interactive relationship and
that’s Grace. So now, that I would say that, of all the things that
we have to go back and re-do the vocabulary, to get it right, Grace
is the big thing and the next thing is Salvation, or what does it
mean to be saved?
“Once you get those right then you see a
picture of a life lived in the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of God
is God in action. It’s God reigning. I often say it’s where what
God wants done is done. Now all that comes together and you get a
coherent picture of what it means to trust Jesus, enter the Kingdom,
be saved and live by Grace.”
(END PART 2 OF 3)
Saturday, August 26, 2006
DALLAS WILLARD: THE LOST INTERVIEW (PART 3 OF 3)
DALLAS WILLARD: "THE LOST
INTERVIEW" - PART 3 OF 3
KG- “Thank you so much for
taking the time to go through that description, that clarification,
of Grace. I agree with you that we have grossly misunderstood Grace
and then you said the second thing we need to understand is
Salvation. Could you do the same thing for this concept also?”
DW-
“Right. What it means to be saved is to be living a life of
interaction with Jesus and that’s the only description of Eternal
Life in the New Testament is John 17:3 where Jesus says, in his
prayer, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent”. Now again, “Know”
does not mean “to know about him”.
KG- “It’s not about
knowledge”.
DW- “Biblically ‘Knowledge’ is interactive
relationship. As Mary said to the angel, “But how can this be since
I know not a man?” See that word ‘know’ is different than
knowledge. What she meant is that she had not had sexual intercourse
with a man, that is called ‘Carnal Knowledge’.
KG- “So,
it’s an intimacy that conceives something then?”
DW- “It
most certainly does. The intimacy is one of interaction. When the
prophet says, on the behalf of Jehova to Israel, ‘You only have I
known or all the peoples on the Earth’, he’s not saying he
doesn’t know “about” the others, he’s saying ‘You’re the
only one’s that I’ve entered into a covenantal relationship with,
an interactive relationship’. So eternal life then is an
interactive relationship with God. That’s what Salvation is.
“Now
what about forgiveness? That’s a natural part of that interactive
relationship when you trust Jesus you trust him for everything,
including forgiveness. But God’s point of view, as Paul says in
Romans about Abraham, ‘He believed God and it was accounted unto
him as righteousness’, but if you trust Jesus Christ, God would
rather have that than sinlessness. When God saw Abraham’s
confidence in Him, God said, ‘I like this better’ and to be
accounted as righteousness means that the proper relationship between
a human being and God is now resumed. That is an ongoing relationship
in which progress in understanding and practice of holiness and joy
and obedience and all these things come together as a part of a life.
So, you don’t get a little thing that says you get heaven when you
die and you’re left with the option of saying, ‘Well, shall I
obey?’ and then of course if you say, ‘I shall obey’ the next
step is ‘I learn to obey’ because that isn’t done for me,
though we do it with God it’s not something we do on our own and so
that, too, is Grace. When the person comes to the place where they
can actually love their enemies, that is Grace. But it’s not
passive. That’s where we have to learn that true Grace is not
opposed to effort. It’s opposed to earning, but not to effort.
Earning is an attitude but effort is action.”
KG- “There
is a connection then, as you describe Grace as ‘God helping me to
accomplish the things I cannot accomplish on my own’…”
DW-
“I would say, ‘God acting in my life..’, the wording there is
very important.”
KG- “Ok. So, it seems that this is the
necessary fuel for the spiritual formation of a person.”
DW-
“Spiritual Formation is a word for the process you go through in a
life.”
KG- “So, Spiritual Formation should not be
optional. It is a natural process that would occur if you were
completely trusting Christ.”
DW- “That’s exactly right.
It’s the process of actually trusting Christ. If you really trust
Christ then He will be your teacher and you will be His student.
Where will He teach you? About everything that is going on in your
life. You will come to the place where, as Colossians 3:17 says,
‘Whatsoever you do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ, giving thanks to God the Father..’”
KG- “It
seems that, for some people, the Spiritual Disciplines are too heavy.
It’s like, ‘Fasting and Solitude are such a drudgery’ to most
of us.”
DW- “No see, that is a person who, whether they
know it or not, they are still living their life on their own. So,
they come to something like these disciplines and they say, ‘Now
this doesn’t fit into my plans, I couldn’t do this, or I don’t
need to do this’, and it’s because they are living their life on
their own. That of course is the basic sin, living your life your
way, on your terms.”
KG- “So, in this case a complete
surrender has not taken place?”
DW- “That’s right. Of
course, they haven’t been taught what that would mean. They haven’t
been given an opportunity to do that. So, it’s almost natural that
they would be in that position.
“See, the ordinary preacher,
when he goes to his church what he’s actually facing as he looks
out at his congregation is a wall of unbelief. Now, of course you
might say, it’s well-intentioned unbelief, and it is. Most of the
folks you’re dealing with in churches, they have head knowledge of
a lot of stuff. For example, they know there’s a Trinity perhaps
but it has no connection with their lives. They never think, ‘I’m
living in a Trinitarian Universe’, and that’s why it does no
goods for ministers to moan and groan about the lack of involvement
or obedience, about how they have to keep entertaining people so
they’ll come back next week and keep giving and so on. That’s the
situation these ministers are in. They’ve now accepted that as
normal. Whereas that’s not normal.”
KG- “No. That’s
not what Jesus works so hard for and died on the cross for and rose
again for. Not to create this kind of mediocrity.”
DW-
“Absolutely. We can sing a song about ‘Joy unspeakable and full
of Glory” but nobody’s got it and the rest of the things that are
talked about in scripture are missing. Even the social issues are
fundamental to the Kingdom; loving our neighbor as ourself and so on,
but they are not additional things we’re trying to tack on, they
are more expressions of the kind of life that is moving in us
appropriately under our discipleship to Jesus.”
KG- “I
think we touched on this a little bit the last time we spoke, but it
seems that the other factor is, not just that it’s not being
preached in our churches, but it’s also not something that the
average Christian could see a role a model for, to help him or her to
get an idea for how to live this sort of life. I’m not saying it’s
not happening, but I’m suggesting that the idea of mentoring or
discipling one another is a bit of a lost art these days. I guess
because it isn’t being taught from the pulpit then it therefore
also isn’t being practiced either.”
DW- “Well, two
things. One is, the kind of so-called fellowship we have in our
churches does not allow people to know one another. If it did, they
might actually find some people who are remarkably exemplifying life
in the Kingdom of God. Second thing, we do have cases at a distance,
for example people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or Billy Graham,
or the late Pope, and I’m not talking about perfection here. That’s
one thing you really have to stay away from in this discussion. We’re
not talking about perfection, we’re talking about doing a lot
better. The fact is, there are many people that Christians know at a
distance that exemplify life in the Kingdom. They recognize this.
They know this. They may even have to travel to Calcutta to be with
Mother Teresa, and I’ve met many people who have made that trip,
but they’re not going to do what she does. They come back and they
talk about her, and maybe they are different in some respects, but
they don’t do what she does. The same way you go to Francis of
Assisi and all these people talk about him and what he did but you
don’t see anyone doing what St. Francis did. At a distance we have
these exemplars. Jesus Himself is “The” exemplar. We know about
Paul and others in the New Testament, and sometimes with their
imperfections because perfection is something you have to put out of
your mind. You have to think in terms of learning to do the things
that Jesus said to do. The models are there. The problem is, Keith,
we have this automatic theological adjuster in our minds that says,
‘That’s not for me, that’s for special people’.
One
of the most touching things I observe, as I come across people who
have read Brother Lawrence’s book on Practicing Presence of God and
immediately they translate that into feeling at peace and being calm
and so on. They don’t translate that into obedience. They don’t
look at the life that Brother Lawrence lived as essentially a servant
in the kitchen and apply that to themselves. That’s because they
have this little theological adjuster, it’s like one of these
dimmer switches on the wall where it has a knob and you can turn it
down. So, they turn it up so they can see Brother Lawrence but when
it comes to themselves they turn it down, and they’ve accepted
that, see? The main reason why they’ve accepted that is because
they’ve accepted the idea that Salvation is about forgiveness of
sins.”
KG- “Yes, I agree.”
DW- “Now on the
Liberal side, they don’t talk about sin or heaven when you die,
they don’t even talk about that. They talk about getting involved
in social issues and then if you’re really serious you’ll join
Sojourners and help out in the soup lines and protesting the war, and
all sorts of things like that. But they’re not going to put their
lives on the line for that. They have a mild little version of what
they would call discipleship which is about being engaged, or at
least concerned about, social issues.
“Both of these, in
the whole spectrum, basically leave your life untouched. We need to
communicate that, what you’re doing now is where God wants to be in
your life and you can invite Him in and begin to expect Him to act,
and you will know the Kingdom of God, you will know God in action,
you will know Christ, and you will be inwardly transformed,
progressively, by spiritual formation, as a disciple who is one who
is learning to live his life as Jesus would lead his life is Jesus
were that disciple.”
KG- “What I want to ask, now that
we’ve identified this condition, what’s been going on in American
Christian Culture, how do we turn this ship around?”
DW- “By
preaching. This is really the heart of the matter and it’s very
simple. I say this over and over to people, to pastors, ‘Just start
with Matthew and just preach what Jesus preached’. Now that’s
going to really jerk you around. You have to avoid things like going
to your church and saying, ‘We’re going to keep doing things the
same but now we’re going to really mean it’. That’s really what
they think, but as long as they do that they’re really going to get
nowhere. Spiritual formation, as a hope, will flame out within just a
few years unless people understand that they really are doing
something different than they’ve done before. So, I say to anyone
who asks, ‘What do we do?’ I just suggest that you just start and
teach what Jesus taught and begin to put your own life into it and
progressively you will see people respond. It will take a little
while to realize that you really are saying and doing something
different. Then when they do that you’ll see various reactions,
just like the Parable of the Sower, some people will say, ‘You’re
not preaching the Truth anymore, brother’, or maybe that you’re
teaching salvation by works..”
KG- “Yeah, that’s usually
the first comment that rises up.”
DW- “So, you have to, as
a Pastor, you have the Grace of God with you to deal with that. You
have to show people that Grace doesn’t equal passivity, we still do
things. My background is Baptist and I like to rib them a little bit
so I’ll say, ‘We’ll preach to you for an hour telling you you
can’t do anything to be saved and then sing to you for an hour
trying to get you to do something to be saved”. It’s really
confusing to tell you the truth.
“So, the pastor, as he
preaches will begin to react in different ways. In nearly every case,
if that pastor does his work from the Bible, the people will be
joyously won over to what he is doing and they will say, within a
short period of time, ‘Yes, we want to live in the Kingdom. We know
what trusting Jesus means now. We want to make disciples. We want to
be disciples. We want to teach people how to do everything He said’,
but you can’t go there and start. You can’t go into the church
and say ‘Now we’re all going to be disciples. If you’re not a
disciple you’re not one of us’, and so forth. That’s just
terribly misguided behavior and it doesn’t come from the love of
Jesus. So, you accept the transition and you stay with it and
eventually your people will come around, but you have to give them
time to replace this whole string of concepts we’ve talked about
like Salvation and Grace, and so on. The way to go about it is
through teaching the Bible.
“Here’s what I found out years
ago, and if I hadn’t I would’ve been out of the business thirty
or forty years ago, and it’s this; You don’t have to make it
happen. The little parable that Jesus tells in Mark about the farmer
that goes out and sows the seed and then takes a nap? There’s a
little phrase there that says, ‘the farmer knoweth not how this
works’. There’s a plant coming up out of the dirt and pretty soon
there’s something edible there. But although the farmer doesn’t
know how it happens, you can be sure it’s going to happen and that
takes the load off of you. You don’t have to make this happen. This
is one of the most important thing for pastors to understand. Don’t
try to get people to do anything, just speak the Word of the Gospel,
live as a disciple, lovingly teach, be with people, and it will
happen.”
KG- “It’s funny, last night I was getting ready
for bed and I was reading a chapter from A.W. Tozer’s book “The
Knowledge of the Holy”..”
DW- “Oh you can’t beat
that!”
KG- “Yeah, it’s a wonderful book. There was a
paragraph here that goes along with what you’re saying…if you
don’t mind me reading this to you, ‘When viewed from the
perspective of eternity, the most critical need of this hour may well
be that the Church should be brought back from her long Babylonian
captivity, and the name of God be Glorified in her again, as of old.
Yet we must not think of the Church as an anonymous body, a mystical
religious abstraction. We Christians are the Church and whatever we
do is what the Church is doing. The matter, therefore, is for each of
us, a personal one. Any forward step in the Church must begin with
the individual.’”
DW- “That’s absolutely correct. The
Church is a pretty ragged bunch of people and actually one of the
surest signs that the Church is on the wrong path is when it tries
not to be.”
KG- (laughs)
DW- “I’ve seen Churches
die when they try to go around the neighborhood to collect the right
sorts of people, when the wrong sorts of people were right under the
shadow of the building but they would not reach out to them and say,
‘It’s ok for you to come. Jesus accepts you and we do too.’ Of
course, Jesus got into more trouble for hanging out with the wrong
kind of people than almost anything else, but of course those were
the ones who were happy to hear. Those were the ones who were
breaking down the wall to get in.”
KG- “That’s why Jesus
had the response that it’s the sick that need a doctor. The point
being that, all of us are sick and in need of a doctor, it’s just
that some of us are more aware of our need for the Physician than
others.”
DW- “As Jesus said to the Pharisess, it was
because they claimed to see that they were guilty of sin. If they had
not claimed to see they would not have been in sin. That’s the
problem with the leaders of our churches because they say, ‘We
see’, but they are not doing what Jesus says to do. The idea of
doing it doesn’t even appear on the horizon of most of those who
are leading others. They hammer away on righteousness but often
righteousness is defined in terms of culture, (don’t smoke or
drink, etc.), than in terms of how you live your life as a disciple
of Jesus.”
KG- “Thank you so much, Dallas for taking the
time to sit and talk to me about these very important issues. I’m
very grateful to you for this.”
DW- “We can talk
again.”
KG- “I’ll be in touch.”
