Dallas Willard, 1935-2013

Dallas Willard died today.  He recently revealed that he had very advanced cancer.  Willard was an ordained Baptist minister, a philosophy professor at USC, and the godfather of the contemporary spiritual disciplines movement.  I have been hugely influenced by his work and had the privilege of spending a few days with him.

Back in the year 2000 we had just instituted the philosophy major at Bethel.  We wanted to have an inaugural lecture of some sort to properly christen our new program.  We talked about the people who might best embody what we hoped our program would be like, and after a few names were brought up, everyone settled on Dallas Willard.  So we invited him, and he graciously came.  I picked him up at the airport and was immediately struck by his gentle demeanor and the holiness that seemed to ooze out of him.  For the next few days I accompanied him about everywhere.  Because of the personal impact he made on me, I was determined to read everything of his I could get my hands on.

Particularly important for me was his Spirit of the Disciplines which details the "why" of spiritual disciplines. Willard's disciple Richard Foster (who is more well known by the mainstream of Christian people) has written importantly on the "how", but for me it took the "why" before I understood these things well enough to implement them in my own life.  I'm sure there is some disciplinary bias here, but I think it is because Willard is a philosopher that was able to penetrate so insightfully into the topic.  I remember the first time reading through the book I was taking a retreat at the local monastery and got to chapter seven, "St. Paul's Psychology of Redemption" and I had an epiphany of sorts.  Since then, I've taught through the book and spoken on the topic numerous times.  I tell people that I'm basically a Willard impersonator.  I can't leave this book without quoting from the appendix on the good life.  Lots of people want to talk about the cost of being a disciple, because it takes some work, it means denying yourself and so on.  But Willard asks about the cost of nondiscipleship:

Nondiscipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God's overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil.  In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring (John 10:10).  

I also highly recommend Hearing God, The Divine Conspiracy, and Renovation of the Heart for spiritual formation.  Willard is not the easiest writer to read, but just like the disciplines themselves, if you persevere, they amply reward the effort.  (And remember, as Willard used to say quite often, the grace of God is not opposed to effort on our parts.)

A few years after Willard visited Bethel, I was at a conference where he was one of the speakers.  I was hoping to get a chance to talk to him again, but wasn't very optimistic about this because of the throngs of people that were constantly around him.  Then one afternoon I was skipping some sessions and sitting in the fairly deserted lobby of the conference center, and I saw him walk by himself into the men's room.  I decided then and there that I too had the urge to relieve myself, and tried to time things so I'd be able to "bump into him" in less than awkward circumstances.  I went in and pretended to do my business in the amount of time it took him to finish his so that we would meet at the sink.  It worked like a charm!  I said very casually, "Professor Willard, you meet hundreds of people and I don't expect you to remember me, but you had a big impact on me when we spent a few days together when you were at Bethel College in Indiana a few years ago."  We shook our newly washed hands and he looked at me more carefully and said he did remember that and wondered how things were going for us there.  A bit more chit chat followed, and then I asked a more substantial question and he said, "That might take a little longer to answer.  What are doing now?"  If I would have had an appointment with the queen, I would have said "nothing".  So we went and sat down at a table and talked for an hour.

Willard has said that he thinks the best one word descriptor of Jesus is "relaxed".  Jesus was completely confident that the Kingdom of God was being enacted and that no matter what happened among the affairs of humans, that kingdom would prevail.  Willard himself was relaxed in just this sense.  Would that we might all cultivate the same attitude and approach to life.

Meandering Thoughts on Memorial Day

My feelings are always torn on Memorial Day.  I don't want to disrespect at all the honor and sacrifice of our military personnel.  I'm sure that many of them have performed admirably in service to a cause.  It's just the cause that sometimes causes me to feel unpatriotic.

The military has marketed itself very well.  We've largely bought into the idea that it is all about honor and sacrifice for the good.  Read some of the first-hand accounts of the enlisted men in Afghanistan and you get a different picture.  You might try Kent Russell's "Ryan Went to Afghanistan" to begin with.

Of course there is the familiar rhetoric of protecting our freedoms.  Who doesn't want to be free??  And freedom has a cost.  We celebrate today one kind of cost.  Men and women have given their lives in the course of protecting our freedoms.

But there is another kind of cost.  The fundamentalist Muslim world sees our freedom mainly as licence to pour filth into our lives: Watch our television commercials for a weekend, and what is the vision of the good life that we're peddling?  Out of control beer, sex, and violent video games.   Baywatch was the most popular TV show in the world last decade.  MTV was the most popular television network in the world last decade.  That's the price of freedom too.  We have to put up with such trash because we don't anyone telling us what we can and can't do.

When does the church flourish?  Not when Christianity has become trivialized because it is so easy.  Do I want some persecution?  No, of course I don't.  I want easy.  Would some persecution be good for me?  Probably.  In a sense, that is what the spiritual disciplines do for us: we willingly subject ourselves to more difficult circumstances because they produce in the kind of fruit that doesn't grow during easy times.

"I pledge allegiance to a country without borders, without politicians."

I'm sure glad I live in a country where I can write such stuff and not worry about the government showing up at my door to haul me in...

Running the Race

Last night was the Living Waters 5k at Oxbow County Park.  One of Casey's friends from school was in charge of it, raising money for drinking water in Africa.  The whole Stump crew decided to go over to Elkhart last evening for the event.  It is also the cross country course where our high school team runs a couple of meets per year, so I thought it would be fun to see the course from the runner's perspective.  (And it is the same park where I ran high school cross country sectionals and regionals many moons ago, but the course has changed.)

Trevor and I did some warm up jogging along one of the parts of the course, and after doing so I was nervous that my projected finishing time of sub 22 minutes was a bit optimistic.  The course is much more winding with small rolling hills than is apparent from the spectator's perspective.  And running in long grass is not as easy as running on asphalt.  Then, almost right at the opening gun, the weather turned bad.  Very dark clouds, high winds, spitting rain.  The weather sirens went during the whole race.  Well, all that to say that I didn't get the time I was hoping for.  The clock read 22:54 when I crossed the finish.  Disappointment and resolutions to do better next time are part and parcel of running.  Still, the event was fun and a job well done by its organizers.

Over the past several years, running has been a significant spiritual discipline for me.  You can see my shameless self-promotion on the sidebar under "Sound Body" where the running workouts from my Running Ahead accountdump into this page.  It has become a part of my life.  I'm convinced that the discipline of consistently running translates into improved discipline in other areas of life.  Was Paul just giving a culturally relevant metaphor in 1 Cor 9:24-27?  I think it was that, but it is hard to dispute positive effects of physical exercise.  "I beat my body and make it my slave" is given a Platonic or gnostic interpretation by some.  But it could just as easily be translated, "I discipline my body so it serves me."

We are physical creatures.  Philosophers and theologians debate what the "me" is in this conglomeration of blood and guts and bones and neurons.  Whatever it is, in my case it is served well by running.

Blank Spaces

In one of John Wesley's addresses ("An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion") he writes:

"And, indeed, it is obvious that the earth, as it is now constituted, even with the help of all European arts, does not afford sufficient employment to take up half the waking hours of half its inhabitants."

I've always been intrigued with this claim, because it is so obviously false in today's culture. He claimed that in the blank spaces that were a matter of course in 18th century life, people were forced to reflect on themselves and the futility of life apart from God. Such reflection, I'll claim, is an important (I'll almost say, essential) component of being a rational creature.

TV, Ipods, internet, etc., do pretty well at filling up all the blank spaces in life today, and it is pretty easy for people to go through life and never have to reflect at all, but merely react to the constant stimuli they encounter. I'll almost claim that makes such creatures less human.

Flesh is neutral

The last post could leave the impression that the flesh is bad. On the interpretation I'm trying to articulate, flesh in itself is not bad. Christ became "flesh" -- the same Greek word the NIV translates as "sinful nature" most of the time in Paul's letters.

What I'm claiming is that flesh itself is neutral. Flesh can be trained or "programmed" to be a positive or a negative in our lives, because it is so capable of sustaining habits (see earlier post on this). The issue is that given the tendency to sin that we've inherited and given the fact that we exist in a very fallen culture which encourages the development of certain habits, the "flesh" for most of us is something we have to overcome when we become Christians.

The point of the spiritual disciplines, then, is to retrain the flesh to sustain positive habits. This is what Jesus did (WWJD). His flesh was a boon to his spiritual life, rather than a bane.

More to come...

(this bonus post for the day is brought to you by the fact that Red Sox are on TV again and I'm sitting here with the laptop!)

Spiritual Disciplines

So unless other noteworthy things happen and need blogging about, I'm continuing to work through the main points of my spiritual disciplines class. By way of review, so far we covered:

1. There is a gap between what we are called to be and what we too often settle for.


2. There is usually not some divine ZAP from on high that turns us into mature disciples; rather, we have a role to play in preparing the soil for God to grow his holiness in us.


3. Most of our churches have not done that great at Jesus's last injunction in the Great Commission: Teach them to obey all that I have commanded.


4. We can't expect to do what Jesus did unless we train like Jesus did.

OK, today's installment: A discipline is any activity I can force myself to do that brings about in me a disposition I can't just force myself to adopt.

This is a general definition that does not pertain only to spiritual disciplines. These, however, are more easily seen as a type of the more general group. Again, examples about from the world of sport. Athletes like to talk about muscle memory. They do a particular task over and over and over again, until it becomes the natural thing for their bodies to do. Or consider musicians playing scales on the piano or the guitar. It takes lots of (tedious) work to get your fingers to do that naturally. But then once the flesh has been formed, it does it naturally. That is, it is disposed to react in a certain way in a given set of circumstances.

The spiritual application becomes clear. Spiritual disciplines train our flesh (in the biblical sense) to respond in certain ways. Then our automatic or natural responses can become positive and life-giving, rather than life-sucking.

Spiritual Disciplines

I just finished teaching a six week class on the spiritual disciplines at NMC. It was designed to be a sampler class, exposing people to various disciplines with assignments to practice a different one each week. I've done such a class several times now, and it never ceases to amaze me at the outset how few of the evangelicals who've spent their whole lives in the church know much about the substance or purpose of the spiritual disciplines. By the end, though, I've yet to have a member of such a class believe the spiritual disciplines not to be worth pursuing as a component of a life of discipleship. Thoughts about the spiritual disciplines will be a prominent feature of future Stump Speeches. I believe them to be crucial.

For now, here's a quote from Amma Syncletica, a fourth and fifth century Desert Mother:

“It is dangerous for someone not ‘formed’ by experience of the ascetic life to try to teach; it is as if someone whose house is unsound were to receive guests and cause them injury by the collapse of the building… For the mere articulation of words is like the inscriptions painted in perishable colours which a very short period of time has destroyed with blasts of wind and splashes of rain. Teaching that is based on ascetic experience, on the other hand, not even all eternity could destroy. By chiseling away the rough edges of the soul, the spoken word bestows on the faithful Christ’s everlasting image done in stone.”

The Life of Blessed Syncletica, trans. Elizabeth Bryson Bongie (Toronto: Peregrina 1999) v. 79, 50.