Becoming Dallas Willard

The Formation of a Philosopher, Teacher, and Christ Follower

Gary W. Moon

• Publisher: IVP Formatio
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780830899210
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

- ECPA 2019 Christian Book Award Finalist- 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalists - BiographyDallas Willard was a personal mentor and inspiration to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers. His presence and ideas rippled through the lives of many prominent leaders and authors, such as John Ortberg, Richard Foster, James Bryan Smith, Paula Huston, and J. P. Moreland. As a result of these relationships and the books he wrote, he fundamentally altered the way tens of thousands of Christians have understood and experienced the spiritual life. Whether great or small, everyone who met Dallas was impressed by his personal attention, his calm confidence, his wisdom, and his profound sense of the spiritual. But he was not always the man who lived on a different plane of reality than so many of the rest of us. He was someone who had to learn to be a husband, a parent, a teacher, a Christ follower. The journey was not an easy one. He absorbed some of the harshest and most unfair blows life can land. His mother died when he was two, and after his father remarried he was exiled from his stepmother's home. Growing up in Depression-era, rural Missouri and educated in a one-room schoolhouse, he knew poverty, deprivation, anxiety, self-doubt, and depression. Though the pews he sat in during his early years were not offering much by way of love and mercy, Dallas, instead of turning away, kept looking for the company of a living, present, and personal God. In Gary W. Moon's candid and inspiring biography, we read how Willard became the person who mentored and partnered with his young pastor, Richard Foster, to inspire some of the most influential books on spirituality of the last generation. We see how his love of learning took him on to Baylor, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Southern California, where he became a beloved professor and one of the most versatile members of the philosophy department. The life of Dallas Willard deserves attention because he became a person who himself experienced authentic transformation of life and character. Dallas Willard not only taught about spiritual disciplines, he became a different person because of them. He became a grounded person, a spiritually alive person as he put them into practice, finding God, as he often said, "at the end of his rope." Here is a life that gives us all hope.

Foreword

Richard J. Foster

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If we are fortunate, once in our lifetime a human supernova presence streaks across our mental and emotional horizon, and the intensity of this light changes us forever. Dallas Willard was such a supernova for me.

The gnawing question is, exactly how did a person with the rare combination of exceptional brilliance and unadulterated goodness come to be? Brilliance is often marred by arrogance. Goodness is often combined with an absence of rigorous intellectual effort. So, how did this unique blending of brilliance and goodness happen?

This is precisely the complicated, even tangled, issue Gary Moon seeks to unravel in Becoming Dallas Willard. And he does so with unusual success.

Weaving a story that stretches all the way back to the heart-rending losses Dallas experienced in the Missouri Ozarks, and all the way forward to him becoming an international authority on Edmund Husserl and his philosophical system known today as phenomenology. Both sides of the story are crucial to understanding how Dallas Willard became such an extraordinary person.

The pain-filled losses of childhood are almost too much to bear. His mother dying suddenly . . . his father making a tragic moral choice . . . Well, perhaps I had best leave these stories for you to discover from the book itself.

There are also amazing graces. As a child of nine, Dallas becomes convinced that “Jesus Christ [is] the greatest person that ever lived, and I wanted to be on his side.” As a teenager he reads every book in the high school library. (“Oh, it was a small library,” he once told me.) This leads him to adventure stories like The Count of Monte Cristo and the sweeping histories of Flavius Josephus, a book his father buys for him. And then his favorite, Plato’s Republic, a book he carries with him all through his time as a migrant agricultural worker. And more.

Now, to speak of Plato’s Republic leads us to consider the brilliant side of this man. Over the years I have been around a fair number of genuinely bright people, but Dallas, I think, is the only person I have known that I would place in the genius category. I once asked him if he had a photographic memory. He demurred. Well, if his mind was not photographic, it certainly was close.

Scott Soames, the department chair of USC’s School of Philosophy, says that Dallas was “the teacher with the greatest range in the school of philosophy, regularly teaching courses in logic, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, history of philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, including both sides of the split between analytic philosophy and phenomenology.”

It is in discussing the brilliance of Dallas that Gary Moon’s skills shine brightly. Somehow, don’t ask me how, he is able to take concepts like “metaphysical realism” and “epistemic realism” and make them understandable for ordinary people like you and me. Even more, he skillfully shows us how these concepts are absolutely critical for Dallas’s teaching on, for example, the invisible realities of the Trinity and the kingdom of God.

Dallas, of course, is best known for his writing and teaching in Christian spirituality. I would consider The Divine Conspiracy a masterpiece and his most important work. The Spirit of the Disciplines lays a philosophical, theological, and psychological foundation for the practice of the Christian spiri­tual disciplines in ordinary life. Renovation of the Heart is a careful unpacking of how the human person can be formed, conformed, and transformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ. And Hearing God is the best book on divine guidance I have ever read. Other books and essays by Dallas are out there in abundance.

Of course Dallas’s brilliance, as important as it is, is far from the whole story. He possessed in his person a spiritual formation into Christlikeness that was simply astonishing. Please understand, Dallas and I had a working friendship for more than forty years, so, believe me, I knew the warts and the wrinkles. Still, I saw rich character-forming realities deepen and thicken in him over many years.

I am struggling for the words to share with you what I mean. To put it negatively, Dallas was amazingly free from manipulation and control. To say it positively, he showed graciousness and kindness to everyone who came in contact with him.

Every society, every culture, every age needs models of a life well lived. The deepest, most fundamental reason for studying the life of another person is so we can learn to live our lives more fully, more truly, more authentically. This is why Becoming Dallas Willard is a genuinely important book.

On Wednesday, May 8, 2013, I am boarding an early morning flight to Detroit when my cell phone rings. It is my wife, Carolynn, sharing the heartbreaking news that only a few moments earlier at 5:55 a.m. Dallas Willard stepped from this life into greater life. Flurries of calls come in from magazine editors wanting a statement. I turn my phone off (not to airplane mode, but off) and step into this missile of steel that will soon be hurtling across the country. I sit in the packed flight, alone and isolated with my thoughts.

A great light has gone out. I shudder. Already, I miss him desperately. Right now, the world feels more empty, more vacant. Indeed, it feels like a much darker place.

For some reason my mind drifts to the Lamplighter, the unassuming restaurant where Dallas would meet with students and visitors without number. In years long past I too had sat with Dallas on multiple occasions in one of the nondescript booths of the Lamplighter, munching on my Reuben sandwich, discussing and dreaming the future together.

As I ruminate on our past conversations, the restaurant’s name begins to take on an almost prophetic dimension: Lamplighter. Isn’t this precisely what Dallas has been lo these many years, a lighter of human lamps? In so many ways he lit my little lamp. Indeed, he has been lighting the lamps of so many folk, near and far.

You see, the providential presence of God brings to us just what we need, just when we need it. Our age needed Dallas Willard’s vibrant example of how to live well, and his life-giving writings of hope and promise.

Today, the supernova has flamed out. How shall I now live? I do not know. But, in the words of the childhood song, I will seek to let my little light shine in the midst of the darkness.

Preface

And they shall live with His face in view, and that they belong to
Him will show on their faces. Darkness will no longer be. They will
have no need of lamps or sunlight because God the Lord will
be radiant in their midst. And they will reign through
the ages of ages. (Rev 22:4-5, paraphrase)

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

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The Holiday Inn Express in West Plains, Missouri, was not somewhere I expected to find a connection with Dallas Willard. But there it was. The sign right across the street, framed in the window of my second story room: “Willard Brothers Motor Sales.”

I’d gone to southern Missouri as part of my research, hoping to get a feel for the small towns and farming communities where Dallas Willard grew up—those small one-store villages where his family struggled to make ends meet during the years of dust bowl and depression.

The Willard Brothers whose car showroom I could see from my hotel room were part of that same story. A conversation with one of the brothers revealed that the business had been in operation since 1945 and that the founding Willards grew up in one of the small communities that Dallas had called home—Rover, Missouri. For almost seven decades the mission of the Willard Brothers dealership has been to provide “superior customer service” from a staff that is “friendly, knowledgeable and desirous of helping others make the right decision.”

The mission statement made me smile. It had a kind of Dallas Willard ring about it. All his life, he applied his friendliness, knowledge, service, and desire to help people make the right decisions—life-changing decisions—in an arena far away from his hometown. He didn’t remain in southern Missouri. But something of southern Missouri always remained in him.

He Lives in a Different Time Zone Than the Rest of Us

Life is the sum of your experiences. At least that is what Dallas Willard said.1 By that measure every person’s life is unique.

But what about an extraordinary life; how is that formed? What experiences produce an existence like that—one so radiant that it begins to draw others to it? Where does a person from depression-era rural Missouri, who was educated for years in a one-room schoolhouse, gain the ability and the courage to shake the foundations of the evangelical church and challenge the most sacrosanct assumptions of the academy? And how does that person come to live a life that matches his words?

How, to put it another way, does someone become Dallas Willard?

Dallas was one of four siblings. Each shared the same DNA and much of the same environment and experiences. But one of Dallas’s siblings, his older brother Duane—who had been a fellow classmate with Dallas for many years as an undergraduate and graduate student, and like Dallas became a professor of philosophy at a major university—stayed away from church until he lay on his deathbed, humorously referring to what was so sacred to Dallas as, well, “dung” would be putting in politely.2 Why? Why would one brother walk away from a church that did not have answers for his pain, while the other dug deeper through personal layers of pain and theodicy to find a faith that did, and a God who was always with you?

Dallas Willard’s life deserves serious study because he became a man who experienced authentic transformation of life and character. It only took a few minutes of watching his life to know that “he lives in a different time zone than the rest of us.”3

But that was the last part of a long journey. It was the experience of those who encountered Dallas as a fifty-plus-year-old professor who spoke with self-assurance and wisdom while employing precise definitions about topics ranging from philosophy to Christian spiritual formation. The brilliant professor loved by his students; a devoted husband and attentive father, who always lived what he taught with great calmness and confidence.

This—the respected spiritual guide—is who Dallas became. But before that? Before that, there was another Dallas: someone who had to absorb some of the harshest and most unfair blows life can land; someone who knew about death and loss, poverty and deprivation, anxiety, self-doubt, and depression; someone who learned about grace and love and mercy while sitting in the pews of churches not offering much good news about life here and now; someone who, instead of turning away, kept looking for the company of a living, present, and interactive God.

The man many people knew during the last decades of his life was a markedly different person from the man who lived through the first decades of the journey. Dallas Willard was a man who taught about transformation from the things he learned and put into practice throughout the ups and downs of life. When asked how we find God, he often said, “God’s address is at-the-end-your-rope.com.” That is the man I would like to introduce to you in the pages of this book: the man who became Dallas Willard.

He Lived During an Important Time in Church History

But before we begin the story, it is important to say something about the religious context Dallas Willard lived in. While serving as the religion editor for Newsweek for decades, Kenneth L. Woodward began writing about religion in America. He had a front-row seat, and published his reflections in Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama. He witnessed dramatic changes in religious life in America across the later decades of the twentieth century, the decades of Dallas Willard’s adult life and ministry.

Early in his career as a college s...