Dallas Willard "The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives" - Review

Introduction

Dallas Willard is heralded as one of the premiere minds on discipleship and his book “The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives” as a classic on spiritual disciplines. However, there is reason for concern over how he deals with the spiritual disciplines, and ultimately his overall claim within the text.

Summary of Book’s Content

            The book consists of a preface, eleven chapters and an epilogue. Within the preface Willard states, the central claim of his book is, “…We can become like Christ by doing one thing – following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself” (ix). In addition, he rightly asserts that, “No social or political revolution has changed the heart of darkness…” (x).

            Chapter one “The Secret of the Easy Yoke” sets out with the usage of a baseball analogy that carries through the rest of the chapter. Its main use is to show the time and effort the baseball player goes through to in order to become a professional at the game, and thus show that we too can become perfect. “The secret of the easy yoke, then, is to learn from Christ how to live our total lives, how to invest all our time and our energies of mind and body as he did” (9).

            In chapter two “Making Theology of the Disciplines Practical” Willard shows the difficult dichotomy between our perfection, that is, that we are seen as Christ is seen, and our continuing to sin. He continues on in a section titled “New Life Breathed into Old Disciplines” to say, “Failure to act in certain definite ways will guarantee that this transformation does not come to pass” (20). Therefore, “Full participation in the life of God’s Kingdom and in the vivid companionship of Christ comes to us only through appropriate exercise in the disciplines for life in the spirit” (26).

            Chapter three entitled, “Salvation is Life” tackles the perennial issue faced by the church today, that salvation is not merely a one-time event, but a lifetime. “Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we received from God” (28)? Within this chapter Willard points to the missing recognition of the body and its implications that foster this low view of salvation and therefore remove faith from the realm of real life. Thus, he discusses the the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus as being the reason why we must deal with and develop our understanding of the body because, “it is with our bodies we receive the new life that comes as we enter the Kingdom” (31).

            While up to this point Willard’s treating of this topic has not be terrible, it is in chapter four where he begins to move sideways. He makes the assumption that, “We were not designed just to live in mystic communion with our Maker, as so often suggested. Rather we were created to govern the earth with all its living things – and to that specific end we were made in the divine likeness” (48).

            Chapter five begins with a statement most would find in a Deepak Chopra book, “Life is always and everywhere an inner power to relate to other things in certain specific ways” (57) as he continues through this chapter and chapter six he attempts to divorce physical and spiritual life and therefore begins to sound more like a gnostic than a Christian. “… It is the spiritual life alone that makes possible fulfillment of bodily existence – and hence human existence” (73).

            Chapter ten and the epilogue deal with the problem of evil and Willard’s cry that something radical must be done to make disciples. “We have one realistic hope for dealing with the world’s problems. And that is the person and gospel of Jesus Christ…” (237). Thus, Willard ends in a healthy place, the understanding that the radical need for our culture and modern man is nothing short of the the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Critique and Evaluation

G.K. Chesterton sums up my thoughts on Dallas Willard’s “The Spirit of the Disciplines” well when he, in Orthodoxy, writes of an English yachtsman, “who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas” (Chesterton). For Willard ends with proper recognition that the person and work of Jesus is the only thing radical enough to impact modern man but the course in which he gets there is terribly awkward.

Additionally, his book can be easily confused with a cult religion such as Mormonism, or send the reader into legalistic Christianity. While ‘doing’ is not bad and the Christian life is something we ‘do’ it is additionally important to note the Christian life’s absolute dependency on what Jesus as done, something Willard lacked in showing.

Application to Ministry

            While I would not encourage anyone with an unsure foundation in Christianity to read this work without close supervision there are a few points Willard discusses which are beneficial to ministry. His conclusion of the gospel being necessary for ministry is spot on, as is his critique of how salvation is viewed primarily as a one-time event rather than a daily belief. The analogy of a baseball player is, on it’s own ground, helpful to ministry for, as a baseball player’s life reflects his training so to the life of faith must reflect its belief (6-7).