Abstract
The result of over a decade of research, Michael Stewart Robb has given us a remarkable systematic treatment of Dallas Willard’s theology. Totaling 522 pages and based on his 2016 PhD dissertation at Aberdeen (a mere 246 pages in comparison), it is the most ambitious project to date on the university professor, speaker, and spiritual writer who became a decisive figure in the spiritual formation movement among Protestants and evangelicals over the past half-century. Robb’s monograph is learned but not inaccessible, lucidly written and impressively argued, stunningly novel yet faithful to its subject. At his fingertips he has a seemingly endless reservoir of Willard quotations and citations from obscure audio recordings and unpublished papers, dating from the early 1970s to 2013, the year of his passing. Simply stated, The Kingdom Among Us is a landmark work in the study of Willard’s thought. 1 For the foreseeable future, all serious scholarship on his theology will have to go through it. This essay seeks to guide the reader into Robb’s book, describe some of its main themes and findings, challenge one of its ideas, and above all, reflect on its importance.
The volume may be categorized broadly as a study of Willard’s soteriology, but it is more specifically focused on his view of faith, or “pisteology” as it is sometimes referred to in historical theology. Robb suggests there are “two canonically sanctioned and wholly orthodox ways of viewing the life of Jesus,” the first being a mature Christology, which is God’s eye view (53). The second is a ground-level Christology, from the view of Jesus’ first listeners. Robb chooses the latter route because, he contends, it best aligns with Willard’s reading of not only the gospel narratives but the history of redemption as a whole. 2
Having chosen his path, Robb proposes, using the Willardian corpus, a three-stage framework for exploring how Jesus’ first listeners would have progressively apprehended the person and message (gospel) of Jesus. In the first stage, Jesus is seen as a prophet in the tradition of those in the Old Testament who have special relations to God and act on his behalf; as such, Jesus is perceived to have access to the kingdom of God. In the second stage, Jesus is understood as an anointed teacher or mediator of the kingdom, one through whom his listeners themselves can access God’s kingdom. And in the third stage, Jesus is realized to be the very king of the kingdom, thus the friendship his listeners have with him is a friendship they have with God. Listeners perceive Jesus in the first two stages on the “near side” of the kingdom, as in the creaturely side; in the third stage they recognize him on the “far side” of the kingdom, that is, the God side; but deliverance or salvation (i.e., life in the kingdom) is happening on all three levels (364).
To be clear, this three-stage conceptualization is a creative reconstruction of Willard’s gospel and Christology (from the ground level up), but it is not directly his. The long, exacting way Robb unfolds his argument for the framework is formidable. He takes no shortcuts, and his research of Willard is careful, serious, and comprehensive. Once the three stages are built out and in full view, one realizes how first-century listeners might have embraced Jesus and his kingdom gospel in knowledge and faith, for it is the latter by which they are made “regenerate children (stage 1), then disciples of Jesus (stage 2), and then friends of God (stage 3)” (504).
While these three stages form the basic structure of the book, one must wait 150 pages for the actual analysis of them to begin. What precedes it are three hefty chapters on the linguistic and mental ontology behind Willard’s approach to Scripture (chapters 2, 3, and 4). To some, this may present as academic throat-clearing but I would argue Robb has made the right move. Willard’s particular philosophy of mind, ideas, and language leads him to read Scripture with realist hermeneutics, so this is necessary groundwork if his views on Christ, faith, God’s kingdom, and so on are to be earnestly considered by theologians and exegetes. Though many will find the opening chapter of the book especially enjoyable with its biographical and vocational sketch of Willard (including his unique philosophy of ministry and “backward way of publishing” his works in theology), 3 Robb tests his casual readers’ commitment with these three dense chapters. But again, Willard’s metaphysics and realist biblical hermeneutics cannot be glossed over if he is to be understood. Robb remarks that if he were on a sinking boat and had to choose between throwing out Willard’s churchly writings or philosophy, he would keep his philosophy (26). This is because had Willard left us his philosophical writings but never produced his theological work, it is conceivable we could build on the former to eventually arrive at many of the latter’s conclusions. Conversely, this would be much more difficult, if possible at all, to do moving in the opposite direction – using his theology to arrive at his philosophy – for the simple reason that nearly all of his theological writings assume his philosophical positions but do not argue straightforwardly for them. For those who have read both his philosophy and theology, it is clear that Willard’s philosophy exerts a gravitational pull over the rest of his work.
The book makes two other contributions to elucidating Willard’s views that deserve mention. First, Robb makes a convincing case that, despite what some prior interpreters have said, Willard thinks very methodically and holistically about whatever doctrine or subject matter is in view. As a result, there is a “remarkable logical coherence in his thought” (22) and “if one knows where to look, one can find an espoused and often well-refined view of all major and many minor topics in theology” (23). Implied here is that Willard’s theological output can and should be studied systematically (and perhaps also, that it can and should be compared to that of some leading lights in church history). Robb does not just state this but demonstrates it over the course of the volume. Willard may be an “odd duck” (3, 497) in twentieth- and twenty-first century theology (I refer you to my next point), but he has a love for rational congruence and his work overall reflects how he thinks comprehensively in an orderly way.
Second, Willard’s teaching on the kingdom, as described by Robb, has some teeth. It is known that the availability of God’s kingdom through Jesus is a hallmark of Willard’s theology. However, due to the meekness with which he communicated this (he did not, as a general rule, critique living theologians), one may miss its sharp edge toward a predominant view in modern scholarship. But for those who have ears to hear – and Robb certainly does, having listened to all of the known recordings of Willard – the dissonance reverberates. The kingdom is an eternal reality, says Willard. It is all that God rules over, beginning with the spiritual order that derives from God’s personality and action. This means Jesus did not “bring” or “inaugurate” God’s kingdom; it has existed since before creation and is older than time. What was new in Jesus’ ministry was, again, the availability of that kingdom, the good news that all may now enter and experience life under the reign of God through the person of Jesus. Willard recognizes there is also more kingdom to come, more of the domain of God’s effective will to be in effect. But he thinks that talk of the kingdom as “already” and “not yet” leads most people to delay life in the kingdom until the “not yet,” going so far as to say on one occasion that such talk is “dangerous because it’s false” (50n30).
This may appear as much ado about nothing, since modern scholars advocating an already-and-not-yet view (George Eldon Ladd, N. T. Wright, etc.) also grant that God’s kingdom has always existed. What they mean by “not yet” is that it is “not yet fully realized on earth” due to sin and the fallenness of creation. But Robb insists there are subtle and not so subtle theological issues at stake in Willard’s emphasis on the eternality of the kingdom of God: where the kingdom is placed in systematic theology (for Willard, it belongs to theology proper) and how it relates to personhood and the will (for humans as well as God), to the continuity in God’s work before Jesus and after Jesus, and most importantly, to the underlying reality to which the Bible attests, what Willard calls the “with-God life” or “Immanuel Principle.”
In nearly every substantive respect, I agree with Robb’s representation and analysis of Willard’s soteriology/pisteology, his hermeneutic (the three stages) for interpreting it, and the points above about Willard as a systematic thinker and the distinctiveness of his kingdom theology. The one possible concern I do have with his reading of Willard, I will explain momentarily. But having commended his main thesis and argument, it may come as surprise that I do not count the many insights directly gleaned from the thesis as the key contributions of his study. This is not because those insights are insignificant (they are not) but because Robb’s research is, as I said before, a landmark work. Its three key contributions, ordered in terms of importance, are as follows.
To begin, Robb’s work is to be lauded if for no other reason than for arguing that the recordings of sermons and public lectures are crucial for the scholarly study of Willard. In addition to his professorial duties at the University of Southern California where he taught for forty-seven years, Willard kept a relentless outside speaking schedule. Although there is no indication that he ever brought a tape recorder with him or requested that his presentations be recorded, many others felt compelled to do so. As a result, there exist hours and hours of audio and video recordings of his sermons, Sunday school lessons, conference talks, seminary teachings, and invited lectures. Before Robb’s research project, little consideration within the academy was given to these extant recordings. 4 The scholarly study of Willard was limited to his theological books and essays and philosophical writings. That must change in the wake of Robb’s book. In the opening chapter he describes, in the style of a detective tale, how he came to believe in the importance of these recorded talks: “I was making a discovery that would change how Willard’s mind could be known and lays at the heart of this book” (27). When he began his research project, he was aware of less than a hundred talks that he either possessed or could easily access on the Internet. Listening to these talks, a shift took place in his research method: he went from seeing them as auxiliary to primary. As he began hunting and accumulating more of these recordings, chronologically organizing talks that span four decades, he came to conclude that “the primary genre for Willard’s theology was the spoken word” (28). This zeal for the extant recordings may lead him to at times overstate their place in the corpus, 5 but no doubt, Robb has altered how Willard’s thought will be studied henceforth.
Closely related to the first key contribution, and possibly of equal or greater importance, is the resulting availability of this catalogue of recordings to the general public because of Robb’s work. In conjunction with his compilation and organization of the recordings for his own research, Robb began curating them for the newly formed Dallas Willard Research Center. In 2019, the Center made the majority of these recordings available online, 6 and in 2022, to accompany his book, Robb published a 109-page bibliography of Willard’s work, which covers all these recorded assets. 7 As it stands now, there are some 1,200 recordings of Willard in the Center’s permanent collection, with more being added as they are discovered.
The recordings are admittedly a more cumbersome resource for research than those in printed form. (This will become less so as hopefully more talks are transcribed.) But in comparison to the other source materials of Willard’s corpus, such as the pentalogy – his five theological books – these recordings address a wider range of subjects and many subjects in more detail. This is bound to be the case from the sheer number of extant recordings that exist. The recordings also provide a better sense of how his thought developed over time, especially since he was never in the habit of journaling and thus did not leave behind that sort of personal documentation that can be consulted for understanding his early thought. Moreover, the recordings help reveal verbally how he connected the dots, logically arrived at certain conclusions, and the organic connection between related subjects in his thinking not generally spelled out in his theological writing (except occasionally in footnotes). That is because in his speaking (as opposed to his writing) he often felt the need to “back up” one or two more steps when explaining a concept or interpreting a scriptural passage for an audience. All this to say, present and future scholars of Willard are beneficiaries of Robb’s (and the Center’s) toil for making this valuable resource available.
The third key contribution is how Robb’s book clears the way for Willard to be taken more seriously as a theologian in his own right. There is undeniably a practical nature to Willard’s spiritual writings. They deal with weighty subjects and are not light reading, yet they were not written as academic monographs. Behind the pulpit and in other teaching settings, Willard was trying to help ordinary people comprehend the spiritual realities of God and his kingdom and develop Christlike character through interaction with them. His books and articles reflect that. This is a main reason he does not show more of his homework, so to speak, in footnotes and with citations in his theological writing like he does in his philosophical writing. 8 Because of this, he is perceived by some scholars and exegetes as a theological lightweight. The dearth of scholarly engagement with his work is empirical proof; more anecdotal is a conversation I had with N. T. Wright some years ago. He told me he once tried reading Willard but found himself frustrated and “just couldn’t make it through the book.” As a side note, little did Wright know that later that evening he would be honored on stage with the Dallas Willard Lifetime Achievement Award (!) at the conference we were both attending.
Robb’s analysis flips the script on this perspective. He contends that along with a competence in the fields of philosophy and psychology, Willard read nearly all the significant thinkers in church history – especially Augustine, Francis, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin (more on that in a moment), Wesley, and Finney – leaving “very few theological rocks unturned” in pursuit of becoming “confident in all aspects of gospel ministry” (8). In a telling section titled “Theological Amateur or Genius?,” Robb explains part of the methodology he followed when first studying Willard seriously. Curious as to what great theological thinkers or systems Willard was drawing upon and popularizing, from 2004 to 2011 he read the books referenced in the footnotes of Willard’s main theological books,
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as well as the books Willard assigned in his famed Fuller Seminary DMin course (four thousand pages of reading, mind you). What lesson did he learn from this attempt to reconstruct the sources of Willard’s theology? I eventually realized that with Willard, this exercise was futile. . . . I had successfully located and studied many of Willard’s favorite authors. He was not popularizing them. I came to the conclusion that if he was popularizing anything, he was popularizing his own complex thought. Though there were discernable influences, these influences had been carefully and creatively pieced together, often twenty years prior to publication, and infused with fresh biblical exegesis and critiqued by Willard’s own life experiences (12-13).
Theologians and exegetes will have to judge for themselves the merit of Willard’s theology, but Robb’s book convincingly argues that Willard is every bit their peer, not an amateur. 10
A few clarifications for potential readers. Those who appreciate Willard’s theory of spiritual formation and hope to find a sustained treatment of it here may be disappointed. Borrowing phrases from Jonathan Edwards and Oswald Chambers, respectively, Willard spoke of both “the history of redemption” and “the psychology of redemption” (38). The first concerns the salvific workings of God in human history, while the latter is God’s salvific workings in the individual soul. Robb forays into the psychology of redemption at times but is clear his main concern is Willard’s view of the history of redemption, which is not as well known (410-411). This is due in no small part to his desire to expand Willard’s appeal beyond the spiritual formation movement and the three “d’s” which he has become famous for: disciples, discipleship, and disciplines (18). I should also add that Robb explicitly admits his is an “uncritical” analysis of Willard. 11 The rationale he gives is simple: he says what is needed at this moment in time is illumination of, not distance from, Willard’s thought (29-30). His point is valid, and I see no need to contest his decision; in fact, scholars should be grateful he devotes so much energy to the descriptive task. But moving forward, for Willard to be engaged constructively by theologians, study of his thought should also include the critical task.
The areas where I diverge from Robb’s interpretation are, for the most part, minor and thus do not warrant mention. But there is one issue more major that should be addressed here. It concerns his repeated classification of Willard’s theology as Calvinist and the many ways he insinuates this throughout the book. By now, it should be clear I find far more with which to agree than to disagree in Robb’s work, so my objection here may have the appearance of a needless quibble; that perhaps in light of what I have just said about the critical task, I am hunting for some minor point to dispute to make sure this review is, indeed, “critical.” This is not my intent. With so little solid scholarly material on Willard’s theology in existence and given that Robb’s book will prove to be monumental in the field, I worry this particular “Calvinist” reading of Willard could become the standard interpretation for the next generation of researchers. 12
Willard’s view of the divine-human interchange involved in Christian spiritual formation that brings about the progressive, sequential transformation of the self is a major theme in his theological work and deserves its own book-length study. Thus, much could be said here that must be left aside for the time being. But let it be noted that Willard was consistently strategically vague on one of the most important questions about the relation of God’s sovereignty to human volition, namely to what extent regenerating grace can be resisted by a rebellious will. So, to bluntly categorize his view as “Calvinistic” (94) or “soft Calvinism” (169) as Robb does, without adding serious nuance and more importantly, explaining what exactly is meant by these descriptors, risks mischaracterization. 13
While Robb never explicitly states what doctrine(s) he has in mind when referencing the Calvinistic flavor of Willard’s theology, it is inferred by the topics in discussion: how faith enters a person’s life (94-95), regeneration (229-230), and to a lesser extent, divine sovereignty (169-171). His main support for placing him in the Calvinist tradition is commentary Willard gives in a talk on Ephesians 2. As Willard states, it is the initiative of God that is the foundation of all the good that comes into our lives. You’re dead. You can’t do anything. God sends his Word and he sends his Spirit into us and things begin to move. . . . The first move in salvation is life. . . . If we have faith, it is because God has given it to us through his grace (94-95).
This shows, says Robb, Willard’s view on the gratuity of faith – that faith is a divinely initiated gift. And it does indeed show that. But there is nothing particularly “Calvinistic” about Willard’s exegesis of this passage. Wesley would have said the same, as would even Arminius – that faith and regeneration are works of grace and totally dependent on God’s first move. 14
But does this mean Willard believes the human will has no part to play in the reception of regenerating grace? Consider what Willard says about this Ephesians passage in a talk delivered a few years later. Rehearsing much of his earlier exegesis, this time he adds a word about the intimate inward dialogue of grace and freedom: Paul beautifully describes it in Ephesians 2, “You were dead in trespasses and sin.” Now, when the will is brought to life, not passively but again, not on its own (the Word and Spirit come). And some people when they come under conviction, they still say, “No, . . . I would rather be God myself, thank you,” and they turn away. But the person who says “I give myself to Christ, I turn my life over” – then it gets interesting, doesn’t it?
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God’s grace and first move are absolutely necessary and essential, because without such divine enablement the human will would be unable to respond. But the will can still resist the overtures of the Word and Spirit. Even with regeneration the will has some agency, even if it is tiny; it must either receive or resist the gift of enlivening grace.
It is true that, as Robb points out, Willard did once say in a 2002 interview, “If you were to get to the bottom of my theology, you would find me pretty Calvinistic” (94).
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But the problem is that read in the larger context of the conversation – let alone his corpus – it is not all that clear what he means by this one liner. And we might also ask, if he is “pretty Calvinistic,” in what sense is he not “thoroughly Calvinistic”? In a different interview given that same year, after stating that “while grace works in many ways, it does not obliterate a person’s will,” Willard is asked if his thinking on this doctrine has changed over the years. He replies, Well, I guess I was raised in a theological context where the battle was often fought out in that way, between people who tended to think that one’s will was totally immobilized by sin and others who thought that was not true, and normally those people were charged with works salvation. But, this is just an unfortunate misunderstanding about the nature of the will, which, of course, is not forced. We are capable of receiving or not receiving grace. I’m sure there are actions of God’s grace that go far beyond our consciousness, but at the moment where we are faced with a decision as to whether or not we are going to give our lives to Jesus Christ, that is a conscious decision. And there must be a movement of the will, and it must be supported and met with by grace.
Shortly after, he adds, “Of course, I’ve spent a great deal of my time in philosophy working on issues around free will and determinism and so on, and it has sharpened my awareness that you have to have both elements if you’re going to treat this as a personal transaction and not some mechanical gig.” 17
To see his “sharpened awareness” at work, let us consider what Willard says to a class of seminarians in a dense yet illuminating 2010 lecture on the nature of the will. Highlighting a problem in William James’s theory of the will – a problem he says can be solved but not by “dyed-in-the-wool” empiricism or Cartesianism – he states, Now, I am inclined to take a rather radical view of the metaphysics of the will, which leaves it free and yet responsible. But my purpose is to try to impress upon you the importance of treating the will as a reality in your life, which opens up possibilities for change. And the difficulty with a strongly Calvinist view, which isn’t well thought out (and often it isn’t), is that it tells you you can do nothing about your condition. . . . It doesn’t matter what your theory is about that kind of determinism is, you still have to act. And at the practical level it will make no difference what your theory is unless you become psychotic and decide that you should just do nothing and see what happens.
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As we see, Willard is not the easiest to pin down on this issue. And, I would argue, intentionally so. As the last line of the passage indicates, he is concerned with what makes a material difference in people’s lives. He does a fairly good job of dodging this issue – especially in his theological writings – because, I contend, he was trying to be all things to all people. He was trying to convince both Calvinists and non-Calvinists that effort was needed in sanctification. But this much can be said: his views cannot be reconciled with divine monergism and in particular, the doctrine of irresistible grace. A couple of days earlier, commenting on the third book of Calvin’s Institutes (far and away Willard’s favorite of the four books), Willard lets fly a very revealing statement: “You know, Calvinism did not become an incredible, world-beating movement by emphasizing the five points. It became a world-beating movement because it brought incredible life to people in all kinds of situations. And that is the heart of Calvinism.” 19
Willard is, I would suggest, Calvinist in numerous ways, but not in the way Robb seems to imply. Readers of the book may make up their own mind, but I would counsel they take into account other pervading themes of Willard’s work – such as the primacy of the will, the notion of genuine human freedom, God’s willingness to modify his actions in response to prayer, the principle of grace and effort working together, the “hiddenness of God” (Deus absconditus), and relatedly, how God’s way of working in human persons is, in a word, gentle – asking how such themes cohere with his supposed “Calvinism.” Furthermore, one should consider the other major influences upon Willard’s theology, not least Charles Finney, whom Willard placed at the top of the list when asked late in life which authors most influenced his thinking, 20 and John Wesley, whose A Plain Account of Christian Perfection Willard considered to be the best explanation of sanctification he had ever read. 21
That I end by challenging this particular interpretation of Willard should not detract from my overwhelming enthusiasm for and endorsement of The Kingdom Among Us. To potential readers, I hope this review essay above all else conveys something of the stunning originality and potential genius of Robb’s engagement with Willard’s theology. I predict Willard will continue to be read and appreciated by those within the spiritual formation movement for decades to come. Such conjecture is not much of a gamble. But whether his theology at large will be studied more broadly in the church and academy – and not just in the next decade but in fifty or a hundred years from now – is an entirely different set of questions. There are some of us who feel Willard’s work is worthy of such attention. And if that were to happen, it will owe no small part to the astounding efforts Robb has made to preserve, re-present, and interpret Willard’s thought – of this I am sure.