The Divine Conspiracy

May 22nd, 2008 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

I’ve been meaning to read Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy for a while, and I finally started reading it about a week ago. The book has been amazing so far, but chapter two, entitled Gospels of Sin Management, has absolutely blown my mind. Rather than blabbing on about it, I’m just going to post a few extended quotes that rocked my world. Enjoy.

“We get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from kingdom of the heavens now — the eternal kind of life — as the target. The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that this is indeed salvation, with discipleship, forgiveness, and heaven to come as natural parts. And in this he only continues the teachings of the Old Testament. The entire biblical tradition from beginning to end is one of the intimate involvement of God in human life — or else alienation from it. That is the biblical alternative for life now.”¹

“The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today. They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon inspecting our mind and finding what we believe to be a particular theory of the atonement to be true — even if we trust everything but God in all other manners that concern us.”²

“Strangely, we seem prepared to learn how to live from almost anyone but him [Jesus]. We are ready to believe that the ‘latest studies’ have more to teach us about love and sex than he does, and that Louis Rukeyser knows more about finances… Where we spontaneously look for ‘information’ on how to live shows how we truly feel and who we really have confidence in. And nothing more forcibly demonstrates the extent to which we automatically assume the irrelevance of Jesus as teacher for our ‘real’ lives… We do not seriously consider Jesus as our teacher on how to live, hence we cannot think of ourselves, in our moment-to-moment existence, as his students or disciples. So we turn to popular speakers and writers, some Christians and some not — whoever happens to be writing books and running talk shows and seminars on matters that concern us.”³

“We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly presented to us as gospel… And those in the wider world who reject those gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ himself — when, in fact, they haven’t yet heard it.”⁴

There you have it. Chew on those quotes for a while… I have been for the past several days. What are your initial thoughts? Drop a comment and let me know. Also, has anybody else read the book? Is the rest of the book as amazing as the first two chapters?

1. Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998. 47. ↩
2. Ibid., 49. ↩
3. Ibid., 55-57. ↩
4. Ibid., 58. ↩