The Divine Conspiracy - Dallas Willard

In this book Dallas Willard presents the life of the Christian as a disciple of Jesus. He attempts to mediate between evangelical and liberal perspectives and provide an approach to the Christian life brings out what both perspectives have missed. While containing occasionally nuggets, this book (from my perspective) misses the mark at several points.

First, in the noble attempt of rescuing a view of Christianity that sees faith and salvation as separated from life and actions, he defines salvation’s primary concern as conformity to a way of life (Willard likes to refer to it as "...the eternal kind of life..." or "fullness of life"). Willard makes broad and sweeping stereotypes of evangelicals (or the Christian "right") when he says, "[they say that] being a Christian is a matter of having your sins forgiven…That's it." And again, "[evangelicals would say that] getting into heaven is the sole target of divine and human efforts for salvation." With this as a premise, he juxtaposes the liberal and evangelical positions and offers as an alternative a way of life as embodied in Jesus' incarnation. He claims we are able to enter continuity with this life by conforming to the patterns for life provided by Jesus. The dimensions of humankind as sinners deserving God's wrath and the mediating work of Christ in this regard are by and large marginalized (although cursory mentions to it are made). That which should be center stage implicitly becomes secondary.

Secondly, the empowering work of Spirit is almost completely lacking from his concept of the Christian life. This results in a life that nearly any "spiritual" person (I say "spiritual" in the popular sense) can imitate.

Thirdly, Willard appears to use poor exegesis. When basic rules of exegesis are violated in familiar passages (thanks to D.A. Carson’s Exegetical Fallicies), it raises doubts in my mind about the other passages in which he departs from traditional interpretations on the basis of his own personal translation.

Although there is a serious lack today of authentic Christians who imitate Jesus with their lives, to make salvation from sin anything less than the central purpose of Jesus' incarnation, life, and death takes us to a very dangerous place, indeed. The power to live life as a disciple of Christ is not found in by simple conformance to a pattern given us, but is derived from the empowering work of the Spirit.

Willard does, however, accurately identify a weakness in contemporary evangelicalism. Many Christians today view salvation from sin as the end all of the Christian life and Christ's incarnation and call to discipleship are ignored, overlooking passages such as 1 Corinthians 11:1 and 1 Peter 2:21.