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263 of 276 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE SILVER BULLET BOOK, July 14, 1998
This review is from: The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God (Hardcover)
During my apologetics class, professor J.P. Moreland said that we (his students) MUST check out this book. Richard Foster (author of Celebration of Discipline) calls it "the book I have been searching for all my life" (makes it sound like the "silver bullet book"). I found Divine Conspiracy to definitely live up to this hype.
The title refers to God's conspiracy to undermine evil with good. Among other things, Willard discusses the fundamental problem of nondiscipleship in the church, what it looks like to be Christlike (with an excellent exposition of the beatitudes and sermon on the mount), what it looks like to be a disciple of Christ, how to become disciples of Jesus and how to make disciples of Jesus.
Prior to reading the book, I thought I was well on my way towards becoming a mature disciple of Christ. After reading it, I've discovered that I'm nowhere close to where I thought I was. I realized that I have a real long way to go to becoming the kind of person who is so secure that I don't seek to find faults and weaknesses with people.
I also have gained tremendous new insight into how I can more effectively make disciples and how local churches could do the same.
The Divine Conspiracy is a comprehensive, practical, meaty, challenging, and extremely helpful book which I pray will be widely read.
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121 of 130 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally, a book besides the Bible that can change your life., December 26, 2000
This review is from: The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God (Hardcover)
I had heard the name of this book dropped here and there, always seemingly with some special excitement that stuck in my mind. So when I saw it in the store I decided for some reason I needed it. Just one of those things where the Spirit leads and you don't know what's happened until later. Dallas Willard's grasp of the Christian life as exposited by Christ himself, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount, is absolutely compelling. Willard mildly castigates both the theological Right and Left for, respectively, emphasizing saving faith alone in the Christian life as though how we live our lives on earth doesn't really make a difference, and preaching a 'social gospel' bereft of the spiritual or eternal significance that gives it its meaning or moral impetus. He then goes on to put forward a very vivid picture, using a wonderfully consistent and contextual view of Jesus' teachings, of what God intends for our lives here on earth. The author's treatment of the subject seems entirely original and unfettered by the various passing trends of thought that seem to color so many Christian books, and as such also sounds almost radical. But read it for what it is, and you'll find it to be as clear and natural an interpretation of Kingdom living as you'll ever hear. I can hardly imagine a more welcome book for my own spiritual life, and expect it may be so for others too. I would put this book on a par with C.S. Lewis; perhaps even higher since Dallas Willard has crafted a work of not only intellect, but great applicability. This book seems like a life's work, and if so, then I'd have to say it certainly seems to have been worth it. It can be difficult, out of the deluge of Christian books out there, to pick one out as absolutely essential, but as far as I'm concerned this would definitely be such a one, and I ardently hope others find it too.
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60 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Powerful Book on Spiritual Formation, July 19, 2003
This review is from: The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God (Hardcover)
This is, without doubt, one of the most powerful books on Spiritual Formation that has ever been written. Dallas Willard tackles issues of discipleship and discipline in a fresh and invigorating way. Willard is rightly convinced that "the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ" has weakened the effectiveness of Christianity in today's culture. "Discipleship or apprenticeship to Jesus is, in our day, no longer thought of as in any way essential to faith in him," Willard says. "It is regarded as a costly option, a spiritual luxury, or possibly even an evasion." This concern led Willard to write the third book in his trilogy on the spiritual life (along with In Search of Guidance and The Spirit of the Disciplines) which "presents discipleship to Jesus as the very heart of the gospel." Willard's path is a well-traveled one, though he views some of the familiar sights a bit differently than most of us are accustomed to. The Kingdom of the Heavens is seen primarily as the realm of God's rule (kingdom) which is as near to us as the atmosphere around us (the heavens). A new thought for me, and one I'm still mulling over. Eternal Life is mainly a quality of life - an eternal kind of life. Willard's reading of the Sermon on the Mount is certainly unique. Frankly, his understanding of the Beattitudes is one of the more novel and unbelievable parts of the book. But his analysis of Matthew chapters 6 and 7 is very helpful. The heart of the book, found in chapters eight and nine, tackles what it means to be a student, or disciple, of Jesus, along with developing a curriculum for Christlikeness. Those two chapters alone are worth their weight in gold. I found them immensely helpful. Willard stresses the necessity of intention in our pursuit of the disciple's life and the importance of changing beliefs in order to shape behavior. Regarding a curriculum for Christlikeness, Willard helpfully shows that the objective is NOT "external conformity to the wording of Jesus' teachings about actions in specific contexts" or "profession of perfectly correct doctrine." Not that these things are unimportant - but they are not the goal. The goal is not faithfulness to activities in church or special religious experiences, either. The goal, very simply, is coming to "dearly love and constantly delight in" the Father and removing the "automatic responses againt the kingdom of God" so that we are free from the dominion and enslavement of "old habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action." The goal is to develop automatic, reflex responses to life that mirror those of Christ. Willard's exposition of this is very good and will be eye-opening for many young disciples. The strategies which help us develop this Christlike character are the spiritual disciplines. The disciplines, which Willard groups into two catagories (disciplines of abstinence and disciplines of engagement) are designed to help us enthrall the mind with God and aquire new habits of goodness, as we interact with both the work of the Holy Spirit and the testings and trials of life in our pursuit of Christlikeness. Willard fleshes this out briefly with a discussion about the disciplines of solitude, silence, study, and worship. The final chapter is a glorious discussion on the Restoration of All Things, as Willard describes where this whole Christian thing is headed. Now, my brief caveats. I do have a couple of qualms about this book, but I tack them on the end and really do not want to overplay them, because they are really peripheral to Willard's message. My concerns are these: 1) In the helpful chapter "Gospels of Sin Management," I think Willard overreacts to Evangelicals (the Right, as he calls us) in his discussion of the atonement and "Lordship Salvation." In particular, the criticisms of John MacArthur seem completely unwarranted to me. I wondered if Willard had really read or heard anything by MacArthur apart from this one issue. 2) In chapter four on the Beattitudes, Willard is just out to lunch. I think he totally missed it on this point. 3) Willard's discussion (very brief) on the relationship of God's sovereignty and human responsibility reflects a very Arminian perspective. "God has paid an awful price to arrange for human determination," says Willard. Other statements hint at a sympathetic view of Open Theism. Disappointing. In Willard's zeal to preserve the truth that prayer does change things, he has gone to the unhelpful and unbiblical extreme of elevating human autonomy too high. 4) In the midst of a very good discussion on the "elephant in the church" which everyone tries to ignore (namely, the lack of discipleship) Willard strongly states that he does not believe that only true disciples make it to heaven after death. In light of the overall message of Willard's book, it is hard to see how he can say this. It certainly doesn't comply with Jesus own words in John 8. So, those four things give me a little pause concerning this book. But not much. Just enough to make it a four star instead of a five star recommendation. The material I balk at could be contained in less than thirty pages of the book (out of 400!). So, I still say "read it." Just be careful on the finer points of Willard's theology.
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