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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Discover new, vibrant ways to experience God's presence through Bible study Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus offers a unique pathway to deeper spiritual engagement, using Dallas Willard's revolutionary approach to reading the Bible. More than a study tool, Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus invites you to transform your encounters with Scripture from mere information gathering to profound spiritual experiences. Using primary source material and insights from Willard, Dave Ripper takes you on an immersive exploration of Scripture that mirrors the intellect of a philosopher and the heart of a mystic. You'll find experiential exercises designed to prompt reflection and foster enriching group conversations, helping you not just to read, but to truly know the God of the Bible. Perfect for pastors, ministry leaders, and spiritual seekers shaped by voices like Eugene Peterson and Richard Foster, Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus offers a call to experience God's presence in new and vibrant ways. Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding and connection with Scripture as a disciple of Jesus. It offers practical tools, insights, and exercises that can be applied both individually and in group settings. By incorporating the teachings of Dallas Willard, Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus provides a unique perspective on reading the Bible that goes beyond simple information gathering. "Ripper aims to demonstrate that encountering God through Scripture is, according to Willard, the primary vehicle for a life of authentic Christian spiritual formation. ... Protestant spiritual formation via Dallas Willard for those seeking a deeper spiritual engagement." – Library Journal Review, May 2025
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For Dallas Ripper in honor of Dallas and Jane Willard
Contents
ForewordGary W. Moon
SINCE YOU HAVE THIS BOOK IN YOUR HANDS, I’m assuming you know about the remarkable life of Dallas Willard. So let me ask you a question. Are you surprised that there seems to be even more wind behind the sails of this man’s ideas now than at the time of his death, twelve years ago?
I hate to admit it, but I am at least a little surprised.
Don’t get me wrong; from the time I finished reading the first few pages of The Spirit of the Disciplines, back in 1988, I knew that he, as one friend put it, is from a “different time zone” than the rest of us.1 He was offering a special gift for the body of Christ that would need to be slowly unwrapped and savored. Before finishing that book, I had already begun searching for excuses to be in the same room with Dallas. And since that time, I have devoted much of my vocational and avocational life to telling folks about his soul-shaping ideas.
Eventually, and to my great good fortune, this fixation on Dallas’s teaching led to my being asked to be the founding director of the Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Research Center at Westmont College. And to my joyful surprise, I was presented the opportunity to write his biography. Even so, and after declaring him to be a notable reformer who was making life-giving contributions to the church on par with Ignatius of Loyola, Martin Luther, Teresa of Avila, and John Wesley, I still have to admit that I’m a little surprised that the gales of interest behind this man’s contributions seem to be picking up speed.
Let me now offer a few brief reflections on three why questions: Why the surprise? Why is this movement still growing? Why is the book in your hands so important?
Why the surprise? Dallas Willard was a professional philosopher who became more widely known for his speaking and writing as an “amateur” theologian. So I have wondered if he would be accepted by those in the guild of professional theology. Also, his true north goals were so lofty as to seem audacious to some. To inspire and equip pastors to become “the teachers of the nations”?2 I remember trying to talk him out of those words for a conference theme. I failed. To see “spiritual formation become part of the domain of public knowledge”3? Really?
Dallas was not shy about swimming against the current of a very long and treacherous river of resistance in pursuit of the good. Down deep, I wondered if others would be willing to step into the stream and invest the energy it would take to keep swimming against the current, toward such distant goals.
Why is this movement still happening? Well, for starters, the man just keeps publishing. I remember, while in the process of writing the biography, books using his words from recorded talks kept being published. At one point, years after Dallas died, I said to a friend, “If he doesn’t stop writing, I’ll never be able to finish.” But fortunately, the flow of his recorded and published ideas did not stop and continues to be heard and read across a variety of channels.
I also think that, as Dallas so often reminded listeners, his concepts were not new or trendy. And that is true. His great genius was seeing the synthesis in the ideas and experiences of the great devotion masters through the centuries. Dallas kept his focus on the golden thread of encounter with divine presence that runs through the tapestry of experiential theology, not on denominational distinctives. Dallas knew that Jesus is still making disciples the same way he was two thousand years ago: by walking right up to a student and saying, “Hello, what is it that you really want?” and “Follow me.”
The movement is also still happening because so many of the older voices and ministries that have been influenced by Dallas Willard continue to grow and are becoming stronger. But more importantly, there is a growing stream of younger voices emerging in a variety of vocations: skilled communicators and influencers, such as John Mark Comer and Jon Bailey; philosophers like Steve Porter, Rebecca DeYoung, and Brandon Rickabaugh; theologians like Michael Stewart Robb and Keas Keasler; skilled teachers like Carolyn Arends; and law school professors and social justice advocates like Brandon Paradise; to name only a few. And with the publication of this book, we can add to the list pastors such as Dave Ripper.
Why is this book important? I read the manuscript Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus with great excitement and anticipation. My lofty hopes were exceeded. You will quickly discover that Dave has invested the time—almost two decades—to get the importance of his mentor’s appreciation for Scripture. You will also discover that he has the heart of a pastor and the pen of a storytelling teacher.
Yes, there is a model to follow, a well-designed approach for reading the Bible as Dallas would and did. But if you look closely, you discover at the heart of the plan a simple yet profound idea. If you want to read the Bible like Dallas, you have to believe you have a reading partner; the apprentice-making rabbi who will step right off the page and say hello. A relationship maestro who wants to engage you in conversation and create opportunities for communion as you walk together on a pathway that leads into the life and heart of God.
The sofa where Dallas Willard sat each morning for long periods of Scripture reading has a permanent indentation where he sat by a lamp. I’m sure there would be a second such mark next to his seat, if his rabbi and reading partner had not been sitting so lightly on the blue fabric. That’s how Dallas read and experienced his Bible. He used two lamps.
So if you want to walk along the pathway that leads into union with the Trinity, as you read Scripture like Dallas did, Dave’s book offers lamplights to make that pathway more clear and visible.
IntroductionEncountering Dallas Willard
We should also make every effort to sit regularly under the ministry of gifted teachers who can lead us into the Word and make us increasingly capable of fruitful study on our own.
WHEN DID YOU FIRST ENCOUNTERthe name Dallas Willard?
Chances are you’re holding this book because at some point along your spiritual journey, his words, his ideas, or maybe even Dallas himself left an indelible impression on you or someone you know. Meeting Dallas has led countless Christians to rethink their thinking, as he liked to say, about the possibility of an eternal kind of life with God—not just later, but now.1 He had a remarkable way of saying what many of us suspected or hoped to be true about Christianity, but struggled to put into words. Dallas lived and died as a luminary—pointing the way toward the availability of the kingdom of God among us.
I first came across the name Dallas Willard at the Westminster Abbey bookstore in London in 2005. It was my junior year of college, and I was taking a course called Revisiting the Reformation, taught by two religion faculty members at Grove City College. Our two-week trip through Europe began in England and finished in Germany. While the history of Anglicanism was fascinating to study on location, I felt something was missing as I listened to hours of lectures on the life and work of Thomas Cranmer and his fellow English Reformers. My mind was overflowing with information, but my heart was yearning for something more.
While perusing Westminster Abbey’s bookstore as we waited to depart for our next stop on the study tour, a peach-colored book appeared to leap off the shelves, arresting my attention. It was titled Devotional Classics, edited by Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith. I recognized Foster’s name, and so decided to leaf through the book. I quickly discovered this work was a compilation of what Foster and Smith deemed to be the most important writings throughout Christian history on the spiritual life. A fitting topic for what my heart longed for.
I immediately recognized the first entry: C. S. Lewis and an excerpt from Mere Christianity. Following Lewis, the next selection was a piece from someone named Dallas Willard, on the topic of the of the cost of nondiscipleship.2What a gripping turn of phrase, I thought.
While I had never heard of this man who taught philosophy at USC for decades, I thought he had a really awesome-sounding name. Within a few paragraphs of reading his vision for discipleship, I became enthralled by his thought. “The word ‘disciple’ is used 269 times in the New Testament,” he wrote. But the word Christian he said, “is found only three times and was first introduced to refer precisely to disciples. . . . The New Testament is a book about disciples, by disciples, and for disciples of Jesus Christ.”3
Who reads the Bible like this? I wondered. In all the New Testament classes I had taken, I had never come across an observation that seemed to strike so closely to the heart of what these twenty-seven books are about.
This insight mattered so much to me because at that time all the rage in pastoral training seemed to be solely about the ABCs of church growth: attendance, buildings, cash. The better you are as a pastor, the bigger your church will be—that was the underlying assumption then (and probably is still all too prevalent today). Yet Willard, like a voice crying out in the wilderness, prophetically called the church back to its original mission: discipleship. I had never heard anything like this. Quickly I realized, I want what this guy Dallas Willard has found.
As our bus boarded, and as I heard someone yelling “C’mon, Ripper!” I hurried to scrounge together the eleven pounds needed to purchase the book and make it back before the doors closed and the bus departed. In this case, I’m glad to have only learned later that Dallas insisted, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”4
As I reflect on this basement bookstore experience twenty years later, it’s not an overstatement to say that moment changed my life forever. No, it was not the history, not the grandeur, not the royal traditions of Westminster Abbey—or even the Reformational theology I learned on the trip. It was the discovery of a name, a person who God used to birth a passion within me personally and pastorally for Christian spiritual formation. Meeting Dallas helped me meet God like never before.
TWO LANDSCAPES
Through nearly two decades of reading, studying, and even getting to know Dallas personally as a student in one of his classes, I’ve observed an essential feature of his life and teaching: he endeavored to “live at the cross section of two landscapes.”5 A visible realm and an invisible realm. A physical world and a spiritual world. We must “get used to . . . looking at things you cannot see,” Willard would insist—taking his cue from Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 4:18.6 To live in only one of these two landscapes—the physical or visible world—is to miss life’s greatest opportunity: experiencing the kingdom among us now as Jesus’ disciple.
Not only do I find myself struggling to live at the cross section of the visible and invisible realms, but as a pastor, I also find myself attempting to live across the expanse of two other worlds God has called me to inhabit: the local church and the spiritual formation movement. For those not familiar with the term spiritual formation, in Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard states that distinctly Christian spiritual formation “refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.”7 This, according to Willard, is fundamentally what the work of discipleship is all about.
While the spiritual formation movement finds its origins in the life and ministry of Jesus—and certainly even earlier in the Old Testament eras—its current resurgence dates back to the 1970s. James Bryan Smith, the Dallas Willard Chair of Christian Spiritual Formation at Friends University, writes, “As a young man, I was privileged to be an eyewitness to the rise of the Christian spiritual formation movement. It began its modern form, in 1978, when Richard Foster wrote what has become the perennially standard text on the spiritual disciplines, Celebration of Discipline.”8 Within a decade of the release of this seminal work (which was influenced by Willard’s Sunday school classes that Foster participated in), thousands of people who had hardly taken spiritual disciplines seriously before—disciplines like solitude and silence, service and study—were now practicing them regularly.
Given the widespread desire for focused teaching on the spiritual disciplines of the Christian life, Foster launched a new ministry called Renovaré (Latin for “to renew”), one of the first of dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of ministries and nonprofits committed to the work of spiritual formation worldwide.
This makes me wonder: Why do so many organizations like these exist? While I’m thankful for the great formational work done by many in these ministries, I believe so many exist because the local church—by and large—has failed to live out its primary calling of helping people become conformed to the image of Christ and to do everything Jesus said (see Gal 4:19; Rom 8:29; Mt 28:19-20). While you would naturally assume spiritual formation would be the central work and aim of the local church, it is sadly far from it.
To close the gap between the visible and the invisible, Willard wrote adamantly and repeatedly that the local church must make its mission to be a center for spiritual formation.9 This charge is one of the reasons many pastors and ministry leaders like me have found the writings and teachings of Dallas Willard so alluring.
But while thousands of pastors have been drawn to what Willard has said and often quote what Willard wrote, few have enacted his compelling vision within the context of the local church. Spiritual formation remains incidental to the mission of the church rather than integral to it—even among those of us who treasure Willard’s works. How might this change?
Before answering this question, let me first make a confession to all the pastors and ministry leaders reading: integrating spiritual formation into the life of a local church is hard! While I want to drive this essential initiative forward within my own context, plenty of things always seem to interfere. Pastoral needs arise, emails stack up, crises occur. Sunday keeps coming! Amid everything it takes to continue doing what seems indispensable to the work of the local church—worship services, preaching, life-stage ministries, pastoral care, outreach—it’s hard to imagine how to do even more. Where is there room for what looks like the added work of spiritual formation?
Consider this with me for a moment: What if spiritual formation wasn’t meant to be an addition to your work in church, but was the mission of your church? Let me state this declaratively: spiritual formation was not meant to be in addition to the work of the church, because spiritual formation is the mission of the church.10
To bridge the gap between the spiritual formation movement and the local church, I’m convinced a key aspect of Dallas Willard’s thought deserves fuller attention and implementation: his approach to reading, teaching, and living the words of Scripture. If local evangelical churches are largely anchored by the words of Scripture in their preaching, programming, and outreach, then shaping how churches approach Scripture is essential.
This book’s focus is to present Willard’s experiential approach to reading Scripture theologically, biblically, practically, and accessibly, in hope that local churches may become centers for spiritual formation. Reading Scripture like Dallas Willard will not only help close the gap between the work of local churches and spiritual formation organizations, but will help followers of Jesus—like you and me—live at the glorious cross section of the visible and spiritual worlds.
THE PATH AHEAD
Over the past decade, I’ve been privileged to have opportunities to talk about Dallas Willard’s vision of spiritual formation at conferences, retreats, churches, and in academic settings. At the conclusion to my presentations, there’s often a time for questions. Surprisingly, the question I seem to be asked most is: “Dave, if you could ask Dallas Willard anything, what would you ask him?”
Over the years I’ve typically responded by noting how Dallas said he operated under the assumption that he was wrong about a few things. I’d ask him what he thought he might be wrong about. More recently, though, my answer has shifted. Just as Jesus’ disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray (Lk 10), I would ask Dallas to teach me to read the Bible like he did. While I wish I had asked Dallas this question directly when I had the chance, I’m grateful that I’ve discovered, in the years since studying with him, what I believe he would have taught me.
In what follows, I will present how I’ve learned to read Scripture more like Dallas did. While he never devoted an entire book to reading the Bible, his theology of Scripture, methodology for studying it, and personal practices of Bible engagement can be found scattered throughout his lectures and the five primary books he wrote, which have been referred to as the Willardian corpus: Hearing God, The Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy, Renovation of the Heart, and Knowing Christ Today.
I developed this content over the course of my doctoral program through Fuller Theological Seminary and the Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Research Center at Westmont College, under the advisement of Willard’s biographer and friend, Gary W. Moon. It’s the culmination of my efforts to weave together what Willard has said about reading Scripture throughout the body of his work, in hopes that this important aspect of his thought could become more widely known, accessed, and applied. My vision: to demonstrate how encountering God through Scripture is a primary vehicle of authentic Christian spiritual formation. My desire: for you to experience the Bible as a disciple of Jesus so that you will become and live more like Christ.
In chapter one, I share why we should read Scripture like Dallas did. I introduce you to his experiential approach to interpreting and teaching the Bible. If you’ve ever been awed by one of Willard’s interpretations of Scripture but wondered how he arrived at such a conclusion, this chapter provides an avenue to help you interpret Dallas Willard’s biblical interpretations.
Chapter two examines how Willard read the Bible with the reverence of a Southern Baptist, the intellect of a philosopher, and the heart of a mystic. These categories help explain why Willard’s interpretations are so resonant to his readers yet so unlike what is ordinarily found in evangelical biblical commentaries. We will discover that Willard advocated for what he called biblical realism. Inviting you to read the Bible realistically is one of my central purposes for this book.
Building on these categories, chapter three uncovers how Willard read the Bible transformationally—not merely informationally. While much of what Willard wrote appears new to his readers, Willard believed he merely recovered what has been lost or forgotten throughout Christian history. Given this, chapter four focuses on how Willard’s approach to reading Scripture has striking parallels to the work of Ignatius of Loyola.
In chapter five, I attempt to assimilate all that has been taught into a practical and memorable way of reading Scripture, following the manner of Dallas Willard. The pattern I developed is called the IMMERSE method. This acronym stands for Immersion, Meditation, Memorization, Encounter, Response, Supplication, and Experience.
Chapters six and seven explore specific ways Willard read the Old and New Testaments respectively. Finally, chapter eight outlines how pastors, ministry leaders, and Bible teachers can learn from the unique way Dallas Willard taught Scripture and apply it to their own contexts.
At the end of each chapter are experiential exercises for personal reflection, spiritual practice, and group conversation. Following the conclusion, an appendix summarizes twenty key principles for reading Scripture like Dallas Willard.
As a preacher, I often ask myself as I prepare a sermon: (1) What do I want them to know? (2) What do I want them to do? (3) What do I want them to feel? Throughout this book, there’s a lot that I want you to know—to renew the mind biblically, theologically, spiritually. There’s also a lot that I hope you will do—to put into practice Willard’s Bible-reading approach. Apprehension comes through application. But there’s also much I desire for you to feel.
As you read this book, I pray you have the sense that a renowned teacher and Christ-follower like Dallas Willard has invited you to go on retreat with him to learn how to experience the Bible as a fellow disciple of Jesus. Sometimes you’ll hear Willard speak professorially from the lectern. Most often, though, you’ll hear Dallas’s loving voice in conversation over a shared meal as he gently draws your attention toward the presence of God. Know that I count it a privilege to be on retreat with you as together we imagine what it might be like to learn to read Scripture like Dallas did.
THE BIBLE DALLAS READ
In June 2023, following my graduation from Fuller in Pasadena, California, I brought my family to the Willard home in Chatsworth, California, so I could introduce my wife and kids to Dallas’s lovely wife, Jane. Specifically, I wanted her to get a chance to meet my oldest son, Dallas, who—not shockingly—was named after her late husband. (Despite the Cowboys, it really is an awesome name. But this is coming from a Pittsburgh Steelers fan.) Their home felt like a thin place, as the Celtic Christians would say—an ordinary place that seemed a step or two closer to heaven.
As part of Jane’s generous hospitality, she let me peruse the personal Bible of Dallas Willard. Willard’s NASB Bible had a cloth cover to keep its contents intact. Tape supported the binding and held together many of its delicate pages. The Bible was still bookmarked—perhaps to signify where Dallas had last left off before he died in 2013—at John 15. For a person who lived such a with-God life, as he called it, it was only fitting that his Bible was bookmarked at Jesus’ grand invitation to abide with him.
What made this Bible unlike any other Bible I have ever seen, though, was that virtually every chapter of every page of it was filled with underlined phrases, circled words, highlighted verses, and handwritten notes that arguably only Dallas could have understood. (Jane was unsure about the significance of the various ways Dallas marked his Bible.) The margins of each page were imprinted with impressions made from Dallas’s hands during the long hours he spent studying, memorizing, and being with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through these ancient, living words.
A black-and-white photo of a two-page spread of Willard's Bible, opened to John 14 and 15. The impressions from his hands can clearly be seen in the margins, and there are literally hundreds of various marks from Willard's pen on these two pages.
As I ran my fingers along the tattered edges of Dallas’s Bible, I thanked God for the sacred privilege it was to hold my earthly hero’s most treasured text. Initially I thought, One day I hope my Bible will look like this. But then I hoped for more: May I encounter the author of the Bible like Dallas did, when he sat down to read God’s Word.
The experience of looking at, reading, and even praying the words of Dallas’s Bible reminded me of what I had long thought about through the research of my doctoral dissertation. Scripture itself is like a thin place, an invitation to live at the cross section of two landscapes with God. The Bible is a gateway to eternal living.
WILLARD’S PRAYER FOR YOU
As you go on this journey of reading Scripture like Dallas Willard, know that I am praying for you, the reader. I hope that you will share moments with God like I did at Westminster Abbey’s bookstore, as I discovered the unique and powerful way Dallas read the Word of God. As a blessing over you, I’d like to offer this prayer from Dallas—a prayer he extended to his many students and readers. In the summer of 2013, it was printed as a bookmark that was shared with those who attended his funeral.
My Prayer for You
That you would have a rich life of joy and power, abundant in supernatural results, with a constant, clear vision of never-ending life in God’s World before you, and of the everlasting significance of your work day by day. A radiant life and a radiant death.11
1Scripture as a Gateway to Eternal Living
We cannot have a relationship with the Bible, but the God of the Bible.
I SHOULD HAVE TAKEN my high school typing class far more seriously.
I thought this about a hundred times as I furiously tried to capture everything Dallas Willard said throughout the weeklong class I took with him in 2010 through Denver Seminary.1 The course was held at The Hideaway Inn and Conference Center in Colorado Springs, in the shadow of what has been called America’s Mountain, Pikes Peak. It was a fitting setting to meet and study under the person who has become the most towering spiritual influence in my life.
In the conference room at The Hideaway, I learned the essential message of Dallas Willard through his profound lectures. While he is often and generally associated with the spiritual disciplines, the scope of his teaching extended greatly beyond this. During our time together, through the use of an old-school transparency projector—a Willard staple—he helped us discover a picture of the gospel Jesus preached. He enabled us to understand what the kingdom of God is really about and its availability here and now. Eventually, he made his way toward the spiritual disciplines and concluded the course by casting a vision for the local church to become a “school for eternal living”—whatever that meant.
He finished his formal teaching with the most freeing words I ever heard as a young pastor: “What God gets out of your life is the person you become.” What God gets out of my life is not my success as a pastor or the size of my ministry. The person I become matters most. That is good news.
Never before or since have I come across a person whose teaching carried so much weight. Every sentence he uttered spoke volumes. Every idea he introduced possessed authority. Every pause pulsated with spiritual power.
Like most students of Dallas Willard, I wasn’t able to come close to understanding all the revolutionary things he said in real time, so I resolved to capture as much as I possibly could for later reflection. Fifteen years later, these are some of the takeaways from Dallas’s teachings that I’ve come to treasure most from my notes:
Joy is “a pervasive sense of well-being.”2 It’s possible for you to be okay even if everything around you isn’t.
Beauty is goodness made sensibly present.3
Does the gospel I preach have a natural tendency to produce disciples or only consumers of religious goods and services?
If you want to do everything Jesus said, don’t try to do everything he said. Instead, train yourself to become the kind of person who would “easily and routinely” do everything he said.4
While I learned the message of Dallas Willard in the conference room, what left an even greater impression on my life was interacting with the man in all the other spaces of The Hideaway. For a person who was once described as “a man from another ‘time zone,’” Dallas was surprisingly down-to-earth.5
He was funny. When talking to my wife, Erin, and me over a meal, he described how he met his wife, Jane, at his college’s library. “I checked her out, but I never checked her back in.”
He was normal. One evening, Dallas watched the college football national championship game with us—even though USC wasn’t playing. Other retreat leaders I had interacted with over the years were almost impossible to connect with outside of the formal sessions. It was a relief and a joy to discover that this philosopher seemed more at home hanging out as our friend than alone as a monk.
He was helpful. Dallas slowly and patiently guided me through some of the confusion I had around spiritual practices and theology. For instance, I posed a “hypothetical” situation to him.
“Dallas, if you’re fasting and your wife cooks you dinner, what do you do? After all, Jesus tells us to fast ‘in secret.’”
“Dave, if you’re fasting and your wife cooks you dinner, you eat. The point of the spiritual disciplines is not to get good at them, as much as they are designed to help you love God and love others more fully. The more loving thing to do is to eat what your wife has prepared.” It wasn’t the answer I was looking for in the presence of my wife, but I’m confident it was the right answer!
And yet Dallas was devout. As the only married couple in the class, my wife and I ended up staying in a suite that shared a wall with the room Dallas was in. Every morning we awoke to the sound of Dallas’s baritone voice singing hymns as part of his morning time with the Lord. Our class followed Dallas’s spiritual practice of fasting on Wednesdays along with him. Somehow being with the man—experiencing his personal presence and his personal spiritual practices—seemed to confirm his message, adding even more gravity to his groundbreaking thought.
Since that course, I spent years first trying to learn what Dallas said about the topics he addressed—especially his unique interpretations of many passages of Scripture. In more recent years, though, as part of my doctoral studies, I have sought to discover how Dallas reached the conclusions he did.
I have been grateful to learn that others have pursued similar ends. In his outstanding academic work The Kingdom Among Us: The Gospel According to Dallas Willard, Michael Stewart Robb shares his email correspondence with Willard, regarding how he arrived at many of the biblical and theological conclusions he came to hold—viewpoints that do not seem to fit squarely in any one Christian tradition. In response to Robb, Willard writes:
Nearly all of my “influences” are from people long dead. I have arrived at my views by studying the Bible philosophically, if you wish, and by reading widely through the ages, and trying to put it all into practice. It is presumptuous to say, but I believe that God has guided my thinking. Certainly nothing I have is really new or “my own.”6
In the next chapter, I will attempt to explain the basics of the philosophical terms and approaches that characterized Willard’s work, like robust metaphysical realism, epistemic realism, and phenomenology. Before then, though, I’d like to use more accessible language to explore how Willard read the Bible philosophically. To do so, we must first build a foundational theological understanding of Willard’s view about the nature of God and what the gospel is. To rightly perceive what the Bible is, we must know the God who lovingly gave it to us. Second, I’ll present a case study of the text Willard arguably quoted the most through his teaching and writing, John 17:3. By building this foundation, we will be prepared to craft the core framework for how Willard read Scripture like a Southern Baptist, a philosopher, and mystic.
WHAT COMES TO MIND WHEN DALLAS THINKS ABOUT GOD
In The Divine Conspiracy
