If you are wondering if this book is worth the $16 or if the book is only worth a quick read from the library, the answer is: it is worth every penny !! Buy many copies! Buy some for friends, family, and especially your beloved university professors! This book is a God-send.
Exactly what is the book about and does Dallas disappoint?
If you have read any of Willard's previous books, you will know that mediocrity just does not seem to be a possibility for him - neither does unoriginality! Okay, the book is simply about addressing the state of "spiritual knowledge" in today's world. Know that may sound vague, so let me quote a blurb from the book and then expound:
"Serious and thoughtful Christians today find themselves in a quandary...In the context of modern life and thought, they are urged to treat their central beliefs as something other than knowledge --something, in fact, far short of knowledge. Those beliefs are to be relegated to the categories of sincere opinion, emotion, blind commitment, or behavior traditional for their social group. And yet they cannot escape the awareness that those beliefs do most certainly come into conflict with what is regarded as knowledge in educational and professional circles of public life. This conflict has profound effects on how they hold and practice religious beliefs and how they present them to others."
This book basically points out that the information/truths that Christianity provides is knowledge. No less than the information/truths that other fields from science and mathematics present is knowledge. This claim is significant, as if Christianity's claims about reality : human nature, creation, salvation, Jesus, forgiveness, love, etc is knowledge and not merely "a belief" it will dramatically change everything.
How so?
Suppose I told you that i BELIEVED that 113458 was going to be the winning lottery ticket number
Suppose I told you that i had KNOWLEDGE that 113458 was going to be the winning lottery ticket number
You would laugh at the former statement, but you inquire further at the latter (how do you know? what is your source? or even "I always knew those machines were rigged! Who is your inside source?" or even better why would you they tell you?) - Knowledge means something "stronger," "more secure" than mere belief, something grounded in reality and knowable to those who would seek it!
It operates the same way in our lives. If the bible presents knowledge instead of of just statements to be believed. It will make all the difference in our decision making, proclamation, commitment, and obedience.
In addition to showing that what the Bible offers is knowledge, Willard also touches on topics such as: Evidences for the existence of God such as the cosmological argument, design argument, and poses interesting questions about evolution. He also talks about miracles and interacts with the thorny issue of pluralism. The main issue of the book is about "spiritual knowledge" so these other issues at best get one chapter each (the cosmological and design argument are combined in one chapter). So it is not exhaustive on the evidences issues (see J.P.Moreland's Scaling the Secular City or William Craig's Reasonable Faith), but provides much food for thought and discussion.
Mentioning discussion, another beautiful fact about this book is that after each chapter it has discussion questions! I mean good discussion questions, for example:
1. What is changed, what is lost, when a belief someone has is rejected from the domain of knowledge; that is, when it is discovered that they do not know it?
2. Would biological evolution, it it were true, affect the argument for a personal creator? How would it do so? (It would be one more case of intricate order, and it would have to be accounted for.)
3. "I have in my office a copy for which there is no original" can this be? .
These are some questions (they are divorced from the actual chapters they came after ward so its clarity might at best might be hazy.) There are about 10 or so questions per chapter.
I personally don't find the book difficult to read or understand. But the nature of this book is different from his other books in that his previous books Divine Conspiracy, Renovation of the Heart, The Spirit of the Disciplines, Hearing God, The Great Omission required biblical knowledge as a essential aid to understanding what Willard was saying and the majority of his readers already had the background knowledge from sunday school, etc. With this book, biblical knowledge will help you, but you having other external knowledge about the "new atheists," "hume", "epistemology," "Barth," "Kierkegaard" etc would make the ride less bumpy in terms of maybe not having to fetch a dictionary or re-read a sentence twice to grasp it meaning. But i deem the book to be highly readable and a timely addition!
The chapter headings for this book is as follows:
1. Can faith ever be knowledge?
2. Exactly how we perish for the lack of knowledge
3. How moral knowledge disappeared
4. Can we know that God exists? (on the way back to Christ)
5. The miraculous, and Christ's presence in our world
6. Knowledge of Christ in the spiritual life
7. Knowledge of Christ and Christian pluralism
8. Pastors as teachers of the nations
Total pgs : 245
Once again I highly recommend the book! As John Ortberg's recommendation at the back of the book said: "Only Dallas Willard could have written this, but I don't know anyone who doesn't need to read it."
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For another book on this topic from a legal perspective see:
The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law, and the Rule of Law by Dr. Ellis Washington
