Over the last ten years the tide of Young Restless and Reformed evangelicalism has noticeably subsided as a new day has dawned. The best-seller list is now dotted by a few pastors and authors who are also drawing hordes of evangelicals to large conferences that have surpassed Desiring God, T4G, or G3, like the Holy Spirit Conference 2025 hosted by Bridgetown Church. These authors–John Mark Comer, Tyler Staton, Tim Mackie, and Jon Tyson, among others–share a brand of charismatic evangelicalism that focuses on spirituality and owes significant debt to authors from the previous generation like Richard Foster and Eugene Peterson. But, if influence can be weighted by citations in books and podcast episodes, then perhaps no figure is more influential to this new movement than Dallas Willard.
Dallas Willard grew up in poverty in the midwest, and faced significant adversity in his upbringing. His mother died when he was two and his father remarried a woman who didn’t want anything to do with him. Willard would mostly be raised by his older brother and sister-in-law who were both committed Southern Baptists and fundamentalists. Willard eventually went to a fundamentalist bible college Tennessee Temple where he met his wife and graduated with a degree in psychology (a new discipline at the time). After graduation he began to serve in pastoral ministry, but all the while was reading widely in theology and Christian history. His personal reading led him to question whether he was truly equipped to provide answers to the questions his parishioners faced.
He convinced his wife that he needed more education and moved to Baylor where he began to study philosophy. Oddly when he first began his education at Baylor he worked for John R Rice and Jack Hyles, famed fundamentalist church-growth experts of the sixties and seventies, but quickly realized he had little in common with these men. After graduating from Baylor, he pursued a PhD in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Madison. There he discovered the work of Edmund Husserl who would become the subject of most of his academic work.
During his PhD, he arrived at a few theological convictions that informed his work as a pastor. First, Willard believed that the Kingdom of God was a here and now reality. He believed that embracing the gospel should directly inform and impact a person’s daily life. Second, Willard believed that salvation was life with God and that it couldn’t be reduced to a decision or a moment in time. And, finally, Willard believed that ancient spiritual practices were a way to objectively pursue spiritual formation.
With these new found convictions, Willard found tremendous joy ministering to a small congregation outside of Madison. After he completed his studies, he labored over the decision as to whether he should pursue academic work or ministry, but someone told him that if he stayed in the academy the churches doors would always be open, but the same couldn’t be said in reverse. After his doctoral work, he took up a post as a professor of philosophy at USC and taught there until his retirement.
Willard is hardly known today as a philosopher, but instead as a guru of spiritual formation. The two aspects of his work, however, are deeply intertwined. Moon identifies four key themes in Willard’s thinking. First is metaphysical realism. Willard became an professional philosopher because of his interest in classical philosophy. He was interested in answering the big questions, but he found success in the academy because he latched onto a modern philosopher, in Husserl, who was attempting to carve out a path for realism. Willard’s interest in realism was applied to concepts like soul, Kingdom of Heaven, and God as he insisted that they really existed and should be contemplated as such. His book Divine Conspiracy applied metaphysical realism to spiritual concepts. Divine Conspiracy also explores his second major theme: epistemic realism. Willard believed that human persons had direct unmediated knowledge of reality.
The third major theme of his work was the need for a coherent and integrated anthropology. Willard believed that it was essential for Christian theologians and ministers to think deeply about the human condition and articulate the nature of spiritual formation in light of a sophisticated portrait of human nature. Renovation of the Heart is Willard’s book on spiritual formation and human nature. The fourth theme is the objectivity of spiritual disciplines. Willard believed that the spiritual disciplines were an objective and observable process by which human persons can change. His book on spiritual disciplines is Knowing Christ Today.
All of Willard’s thinking flowed from the big four questions: how can one be happy, what is the good, how does one know anything, and what’s real. Jonathan Pennington in his book Jesus the Great Philosopher argues that today very few people are attempting to wrestle with these questions systematically or with any depth. Willard was an exception as a man who brought significant intellectual ability and genuine spiritual sincerity to the task. Though Moon’s biography borders on hagiography at times, it told his story in a compelling and clear way. I’m eager to read more of Willard’s work.
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