June 16, 2009

The genius of Dallas Willard's new book, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2009), is its explanatory power for many of the ills of contemporary Western society.

Willard, a longtime philosophy professor at the University of Southern California and author of such works as The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines, says the moral confusion we see today stems from one uber-problem: "the trivialization of faith apart from knowledge and … the disastrous effects of a repositioning of faith in Jesus Christ, and of life as his students, outside the category of knowledge."

Our problem, then, is epistemological: What do we know, and how do we know it? Willard says that to actually claim that you possess real but not exhaustive knowledge on a moral issue (what Francis Schaeffer called "true truth") is a scandal in the modern world. Relativists see certainty as a trip-wire for arrogance and extremism, and uncertainty as a recipe for tolerance and peace. The post-9/11 fulminations of New Atheists such Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who label all religions as potentially dangerous, are evidence for Willard's thesis. Better to claim ignorance—and more humble, too.

Yet knowledge need not provoke violence. Willard says rightly that sin is integral to the human condition and is not a specifically religious malady. Sometimes knowledge even sparks humility. And when do we actually possess knowledge, according to Willard? "We have knowledge of something when we are representing it (thinking about it, speaking of it, treating it) as it actually is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience."
  
Once-hallowed religious beliefs, Willard says, have been relegated to the intellectual sidelines as a result of the post-Enlightenment struggle between what he calls "traditional knowledge" and secularism, which claims the mantle of knowledge without warrant and which rules in institutions of higher learning—even Christian ones—as the areas of human life that do not fit the "secularist story" multiply. As a result, knowledge disappears, and the vacuum is filled by others.

"In the context of modern life and thought," Willard says, Christians "are urged to treat their central beliefs as something other than knowledge. Those beliefs are to be relegated to the categories of sincere opinion, emotion, blind commitment, or behavior traditional for their social group." When this happens, Willard says, Christians cannot influence society for the good. Only knowledge, as opposed to mere belief, commitment, or formal adherence, conveys the right and authority "to act, to direct action, to establish and supervise policy, and to teach."
   
Here is recent news event that illustrates the brilliance of Willard's diagnosis.  This past spring Notre Dame's decision to award President Obama an honorary doctorate did not sit well with many alumni and friends of the university, who rightly pointed out that Obama's pro-choice policies contradict clear Catholic teaching (Notre Dame is a Catholic school). While supporters, including the university president and most students, defended the action on the basis of tolerance and diversity, visiting scholar Francis J. Beckwith pointedly noted that the real issue is epistemology:

Unless the university does not believe that the Church's understanding of the moral law is true and knowable, it can no more in good conscience award an honorary doctorate of laws to a lawyer who rejects the humanity of the proper subjects of law than it could in good conscience award an honorary doctorate in science to a geocentric astronomer who rejects the deliverances of the discipline he claims to practice.

At some point, a Christian university must recognize that the truth it claims to know matters, even if the truth is unpopular, and even if the propagation and celebration of that truth may put one's community at odds with those persons and centers of influence and power that dispense prestige and authority in our culture.

So what is Willard's cure? He says, first of all, that Christians cannot hope to return religious knowledge to its rightful place in society unless they believe in it themselves. So the professor—an expert on German philosopher Edmund Husserl's work, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge—attempts to convince us of what we should already know, namely, that God exists, and that miracles (including Christ's resurrection) are possible, even likely.

Willard gives a welcome reminder that Christian truth represents the universe as it really is--in other words, knowledge. 

Willard moves on to "Knowledge of Christ in the Spiritual Life." His key point: "Those who do know Christ in the modern world do so by seeking and entering the kingdom of God." This is a knowledge based upon commitment. Here Willard distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge, knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. We know Christ when we acquaint ourselves with him and with his people.

Willard ultimately gives the task of repairing the breach in knowledge to pastors, defined by him more broadly than as shepherds of local congregations. Pastors, Willard says, are "those who self-identify as spokespeople for Christ and who perhaps have some leadership position or role in Christian organizations."

Acquiring the knowledge they will need for such an expanded role—as teachers of the nations—will require a growth of duties and horizons that will challenge the abilities and calling of many pastors today. Still, a little knowledge can still go a long way.

It is hard to see how the social and personal transformation that we all desire can come to pass without a revitalized and vibrant church. But if the church can get a few more with the range and passion of Dallas Willard, that can't be bad for the kingdom of God.