The recent passing of Dallas Willard is hopefully prompting people to revisit his work. I first read his masterpiece, The Divine Conspiracy, in 2001, and though I found his main idea—that life in the Kingdom of God begins now—to be inspiring, much of what he wrote went over my head. Willard knows how to pack a wealth of insight into every sentence, so grasping the depth of his ideas requires considerable effort. It requires a close examination of his words to see the nuances found therein.
A few years after reading The Divine Conspiracy, I became (more) aware of the emerging debates about things like justification by faith and substitutionary atonement—things essential to Protestant Evangelicalism. Often, or so it seemed, defenders of these doctrines would be characterized by their critics as preaching a “Gospel of Sin Management”—a description which comes from the second chapter of TDC. In turn, some of the more strident defenders of substitutionary atonement wrote off Dallas Willard as a heretic who denied the Gospel because they had heard his “Gospel of Sin Management” trotted out against something central to it. It was a confusing time. Why couldn’t one affirm both the importance of the atonement and the truth of life in the Kingdom of God beginning now rather than after we are dead?
The answer can be found in Willard’s characterization of what the “Gospel of Sin Management” really is:
History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally….
When we examine the broad spectrum of Christian proclamation and practice, we see that the only thing made essential on the right wing of theology is forgiveness of the individual’s sins. On the left it is removal of social or structural evils. The current gospel then becomes a “gospel of sin management.” Transformation of life and character is no part of the redemptive message. [TDC, 41, emphasis Willard’s]
Note which words Willard empahsizes: essentially, only, no. These define the scope of a “Gospel of Sin Management.” A GSM is essentially only A. B has no part in A. As Willard turns to describe the GSM on the right, he continues using categorical language when he writes that
one theory of the “atonement” is made out to be the whole of the essential message of Jesus. To continue with theological language for the moment, justification has taken the place of regeneration, or new life. [Footnote:] “Gospels of Sin Management” presume a Christ with no serious work other than redeeming humankind. On the right, they foster “vampire Christians,” who only want a little blood for their sins but nothing more to do with Jesus until heaven, when they have to associate with him. [TDC, 42, emphasis Willard’s, footnote from page 403]
A is “the whole of the essential message of Jesus.” A “has taken the place of” B. Christ has “no serious work other than” A. According to Willard, then, a GSM is a gospel in which A (atonement, forgiveness, justification) is sufficient to describe the whole story, and B (regeneration, new life, discipleship) is not a necessary part of it.
What Willard is saying is that a gospel that does not include discipleship and life here and now is like a cheeseburger that does not have cheese. It is no gospel at all. By contrast, a “Gospel of Sin Management” is a “gospel” which treats discipleship and new life like pickles on a cheeseburger. Pickles are perfectly fine and good, but you don’t need them to be able to say that what you are eating is a cheeseburger. In a word, they are optional. But Willard’s point is that life in the Kingdom of God here and now and discipleship to Christ are not optional to the Gospel but necessary to it.
What shall we say then? That because discipleship and life in God’s Kingdom are necessary to the Gospel, the forgiveness of sins is not? By no means! In denying the sufficiency of “sin management,” Willard has never denied the importance of it:
Certainly forgiveness and reconciliation are essential to any relationship where there has been offense, and also between us and God. We cannot pass into a new life from above without forgiveness. Certainly it is Christ who made possible such a transition, including forgiveness, through his life and death. We must be reconciled to God and he to us if we are going to have a life together. But such a reconciliation involves far more than the forgiveness of our sins or a clearing of the ledger. And the faith and salvation of which Jesus speaks obviously is a much more positive reality than mere reconciliation. [TDC, 48]
Note how a few specific words define the scope of Willard’s point: essential, cannot, must. A Gospel without the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation to God is also like a cheeseburger without cheese. A (atonement, forgiveness, reconciliation, etc.) and B (regeneration, new life, discipleship, etc.) both are necessary parts of the Gospel, but neither is sufficient by itself. A Gospel that preaches A but not B, then, is missing an essential part of the story, and a Gospel that preaches B but not A is also missing an essential part of the story. A Gospel that preaches A and B hits the mark.
So, to answer the question that prompted this post—Why can’t one affirm both the importance of the atonement and the truth of life in the Kingdom of God beginning now rather than after we are dead?—we can agree with Dallas Willard that both are essential to the Gospel. By using appropriate qualifiers, Willard has rejected the Gospel of Sin Management which says that “A is essential but B is not” by reminding us that the true Gospel is “not only A, but also B.” Both are essential.
The sad tendency in contemporary Evangelicalism which pits the Gospel of justification by faith (as found in Paul) over/against the Gospel of the Kingdom (as found in the Synoptics), as well as the response, which pits the latter over/against the former, is eliminated if we view them as two sides of the same coin, rather than different coins. We are then free to join in the song that the elders sing to the Lamb:
Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth. [Revelation 5:9-10]
Although this will happen at some point in the future, new life in the Kingdom of God begins now because we have been ransomed by the blood of Christ. A and B.
When I read The Divine Conspiracy, I thought Willard’s discussion of the Gospel of Sin Management was one of the strongest parts of the book. It was clear to me that he wasn’t denying any specific model of atonement, but reminding us of the call of discipleship. When one considers the historical context of when the book was published, one can see how The Divine Conspiracy came as a needed corrective to the tendency within some of evangelicalism toward easy decisionism (to borrow from Eddie Gibbs) in which one says the “sinner’s prayer,” receives the Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Card, and is never again concerned with actually following Jesus. All those years of well-meaning Bible tracts and mass evangelism events that pushed for an on the spot decision unintentionally communicated that discipleship was a one-time event rather than a life-long journey. Willard helped correct that tendency within contemporary evangelicalism and I’m thankful for that.
I had not heard that some people were calling Willard a heretic for his description of the Gospel of Sin Management. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given the crap that gets flung at Willard’s close friend, Richard Foster and his work on spiritual formation. Human brokenness manifests itself in ugly ways.
How is it rereading The Divine Conspiracy? Though it’s a book a lot of my friends love, I never really got into it. His way of arguing didn’t resonate with me. I largely agreed with his conclusions, but didn’t care for the way he got to them. I thought he could have been a lot more concise. Also, I found the commentary on the Sermon on the Mount really lacking in its exegesis. It reads as a classically trained philosopher’s interpretation of Matthew. Willard shows lots of understanding of Plato and Aristotle, but not much understanding of first century Judaism or Second Temple texts and I think that leads to some significant interpretive mistakes.
What are some of the mistakes you recall? I likewise remember it feeling that it could be more concise, though given where I was intellectually at the time, that’s probably why I missed so much of what he said. I agree that it reads more as an interpretation of Matthew from a classical philsophical perspective, but I think that there’s merit to that approach. While a modern New Testament scholar may know more about Second Temple Judaism, if he was cultured in modernist reductionism concerning ethics, he may miss the practical import that is clearer to a philosopher cultured in classical ethics. Wright’s After You Believe, for example, has a stronger biblical grounding than Willard but a weaker philsophical grounding, yet they agree with respect to their conclusions. At any rate, it will be interesting to read it again (I have been delayed by our impending move so I haven’t gotten past chapter 2 yet).
As for Willard being called a heretic, much of it does stem from his association with Foster, but for a while it seemed like some who agreed with Willard’s critique of the easy-believism of evangelicalism wrongfully enlisted him into their objections about substitutionary atonement. It wasn’t that he called out the GSM for the reductionist gospel that it is, but that the GSM was wrongly portrayed as a denial of an essential part of the gospel. In turn, this led to condemnation of Willard as someone who was throwing out the substitutionary atonement baby with the easy-believism bathwater.
I had to dig up my notes, but here are some of my critiques. I had just finished an exegesis of Matthew course and a lot of my seminary career surrounded the Sermon on the Mount — e.g., I was taking Stassen’s ethics course just as Kingdom Ethics was published. Therefore I admit I may have been more opinionated about Matthew than usual.
Willard says Matthew’s use of the term, “Kingdom of Heaven” was not another way of saying, “Kingdom of God,” but is a distinct reality from Kingdom of God. I don’t think that can be substantiated exegetically or historically. Second Temple literature uses both terms interchangeably, often employing Heaven as a circumlocution for God so as to avoid taking God’s name in vain.
His explanation of some of the people in the Beatitudes doesn’t reflect that he paid much attention to how the terms were used in Jesus’ time. Willard runs the risk of spiritualizing the Beatitudes. He says the “meek” are shy and unassertive, while commentaries see it more as a social term referring to those who suffer injustice. The “pure in heart” are seen as perfectionists rather than those who are single-minded, as the term is used in other contemporary literature.
Later Willard talks a lot about the Greek term dikaiosune, which we translate as righteousness or justice. But he bases a lot of his discussion of the term’s meaning on Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle without showing that Jesus or Matthew read those philosophers. He thus uses Plato’s notion of the term as his basis, whereas, I think it would have been better to look at how the term is used in the Septuagint and other early Jewish literature. In Matthew in particular, Jesus isn’t speaking into a Hellenistic culture, but expounding on Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish faith.
While Willard is right to carefully avoid a new legalism, I think at times he undercuts the importance Jesus puts on doing — he sums up the Sermon with a parable contrasting those who listen and do what he says with those who listen and do not obey.
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