How to Read Dallas Willard / Steve Porter

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was an influential philosopher and beloved author and speaker on Christian spiritual formation. He had the unique gift of being able to speak eloquently to academic and popular audiences, and it’s fascinating to observe the ways his philosophical thought pervades and influences his spiritual writings—and vice versa.

In this episode, Steve Porter (Senior Research Fellow and Executive Director of the Martin Institute, Westmont College / Affiliate Professor of Spiritual Formation at Biola University) joins Evan Rosa to explore the key concepts and ideas that appear throughout Dallas Willard’s philosophical and spiritual writings, including: epistemological realism; a relational view of knowledge; how knowledge makes love possible; phenomenology and how the mind experiences, represents, and comes into contact with reality; how the human mind can approach the reality of God with a love for the truth; moral psychology; and Dallas’s concerns about the recent resistance, loss, and disappearance of moral knowledge.

About Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was a philosopher, minister and beloved author and speaker on Christian philosophy and spiritual formation. For a full biography, visit Dallas Willard Ministries online.

About Steve Porter

Dr. Steve Porter is Senior Research Fellow and Executive Director of the Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture at Westmont College, and an affiliate Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation at the Institute for Spiritual Formation and Rosemead School of Psychology (Biola University). Steve received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Southern California and M.Phil. in philosophical theology at the University of Oxford.

Steve teaches and writes in Christian spiritual formation, the doctrine of sanctification, the integration of psychology and theology, and philosophical theology. He co-edited Until Christ is Formed in You: Dallas Willard and Spiritual Formation, Psychology and Spiritual Formation in Dialogue, and Dallas’s final academic book: The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge. He is the author of Restoring the Foundations of Epistemic Justification: A Direct Realist and Conceptualist Theory of Foundationalism, and co-editor of Christian Scholarship in the 21st Century: Prospects and Perils. In addition to various book chapters, he has contributed articles to the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care, Philosophia Christi, Faith and Philosophy, Journal of Psychology and Theology, Themelios, Christian Scholar’s Review, etc. Steve and his wife Alicia live with their son Luke and daughter Siena in Long Beach, CA.

Show Notes

• The Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture at Westmont College
• Dallas Willard Ministries (Free Online Resources)
• Dallas Willard, The Spirit of Disciplines
• Willard as both spiritual formation teacher/pastor and intellectual/philosopher
• Gary Moon, Becoming Dallas Willard
• Dallas Willard Ministries
• Conversatio Divina
• Phenomenology—“One of the principles of phenomenology is you want to kind of help others come to see what you've seen.”
• Willard “presenting himself to God” while teaching
• “The kingdom of God was in the room.”
• The importance of finding your own way into your spiritual practices
• An ontology of knowing and epistemological realism: “We can come to know things the way they are.”
• What does it mean to say that being precedes knowledge or that metaphysics precedes epistemology? What does that imply for spiritutal formation?
• What is real?
• Operating on accurate information about reality
• Dallas Willard on Husserl: “What is most intriguing in Husserl's thought to me, the always hopeful realist, is the way he works out a theory of the substance and nature of consciousness and knowledge, which allows that knowledge to grasp a world that it does not make.”
• The Cambridge Companion to Husserl
• The philosophical tradition of “saving the appearances”
• Mind-world relationship
• The affinity between concepts and their objects
• Dallas Willard on concepts and objects: “On my view, thoughts and their concepts do not modify the objects which make up reality. They merely match up or fail to match up with them in a certain way. Thus, there would be a way things are, and the realism there would be vindicated along with the possibility at least of a God's eye view.”
• Lying as a disconnection from the truth and therefore from the world
• Agency in our choice to know God and pursue knowing God
• The role of sincerity and honesty in shared reality
• Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity”: “breaking free of the shackles of objectivity”
• Dallas Willard in “Where Is Moral Knowledge?”: “One way of characterizing the condition of North American society at present is to say that moral knowledge, knowledge of good and evil, of what is morally admirable and despicable, right and wrong, is no longer available in our world to people generally. It has disappeared as a reliable resource for living.”
• Knowledge used to justify violence versus knowledge used to counter injustice
• Moral relativism vs moral absolutism—which is the problem today?
• Moral absolutism is often not rooted in knowledge, but a feeling of certainty
• Dallas Willard, *The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge* (also available here)
• Social causes for moral knowledge having disappeared from public life
• Moral knowledge provides the place to stand for justice
• What is it to be a good person?
• Emmanuel Levinas and the face of the other
• Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy, “The life and words that Jesus brought into the world came in the form of information and reality.”
• Becoming a student of Jesus
• Willard’s four fundamental questions: What is real? What is the good life? Who is the good person? How does one become good?
• Dallas Willard on how to understand Jesus’s words: “It is the failure to understand Jesus and his words as reality and vital information about life. That explains why today we do not routinely teach those who profess allegiance to him, how to do what he said was best. We lead them to profess allegiance to him, or we expect them to, and we leave them there devoting our remaining efforts to attracting them to this or that.”
• The contemporary issue of exchanging becoming more like Jesus for other ways of life.
• The real cost of changing one’s life
• Frederica Matthewes Green: “Everyone wants transformation, but no one likes to change.”
• “The good news of Jesus is the availability of the Kingdom of God.”
• Sociologist Max Picard, *The Flight From God* and philosopher Charles Taylor on “the buffered self.”
• Dallas Willard on taking Jesus seriously as a reliable path to growth
• “In many ways, I believe that we are at a turning point among the people of Christ today, one way of describing that turning point is that people are increasingly serious about living the life that Jesus gives to us. And not just having services, words, and rituals. But a life that is full of the goodness and power of Christ. There is a way of doing that. There is knowledge of spiritual growth and of spiritual life that can be taught and practiced. Spiritual growth is not like lightning that hits for no reason you can think of. Many of us come out of a tradition of religion that is revivalistic and experiential. But often the mixture of theological understanding and history that has come down to us has presented spiritual growth as if somehow it were not a thing that you could have understanding of. That you could know, that you could teach, that made sense. And so, we have often slipped into a kind of practical mysticism. The idea that if we just keep doing certain things, then maybe something will happen. We have not had an understanding of a reliable process of growth.”
• Jesus on “The Cure for Anxiety”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Steve Porter
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow & Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give