The Allure of Gentleness

Dallas Willard

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780062114105
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

The revered Christian author whose bestselling classics include The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines provides a new model for how we can present the Christian faith to others.

When Christians share their faith, they often appeal to reason, logic, and the truth of doctrine. But these tactics often are not effective. A better approach to spread Christ's word, Dallas Willard suggests, is to use the example of our own lives. To demonstrate Jesus's message, we must be transformed people living out a life reflective of Jesus himself, a life of love, humility, and gentleness.

This beautiful model of life—this allure of gentleness—Willard argues, is the foundation for making the most compelling argument for Christianity, one that will convince others that there is something special about Christianity and the Jesus we follow.

Chapter One

BEGINNING TO THINK FOR CHRIST

And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

PHILIPPIANS 1:9–11

For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.

COLOSSIANS 1:9–10

Apologetics is a New Testament ministry that uses thinking and reasoning, in reliance on the Holy Spirit, to assist earnest inquirers in relinquishing disbelief and mistrust in God and God’s good purposes for humankind. Apologetic work helps people believe and know the things that are especially related to Jesus Christ: his coming into the world, his life and death, and now his continuing to live in us. Apologetics is a vital ministry of the New Testament.

Today apologetics is a rather foreboding word. If you say to your neighbors, “I’m going to do apologetics with you,” they would probably run away and hide. But what we’re really talking about is aiding others in removing doubts that hinder their enthusiastic and full participation in the kingdom of the heavens¹ and their discipleship to Christ. We have many clear indications in scripture that we are intended to add to our faith: that we start with faith, but we move on to knowledge; that we are to grow not only in grace, but also in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ (2 Pet. 1:5; 3:18).

There’s nothing wrong with faith. Faith is a confidence or trust in something, which we may or may not know to be true. But one of the things we need to keep in mind about faith is that it may be wrong. Sometimes we trust and have confidence in things that betray us, because they are false. Christians are not the only ones who live by faith. Everyone lives and dies by faith. Faith in itself is not necessarily a good or a bad thing. Now, there is a saving faith, and that’s a good thing. But there are damning faiths as well. And there are also the situations where we live neither in knowledge nor in faith; we’re just in doubt. These are situations that Jesus dealt with often, and we want to learn to have his spirit in dealing with doubt. (A good example of his methodology is found in his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.)

Faith is not opposed to evidence that we might gain from perception as well as from reason. Anything that we can use to remove and settle doubt that afflicts us or others around us is good. God has given us natural abilities, and it is right and good to devote them to God.

The intellect is good. Our natural abilities of perception are good, and they are not opposed to faith. Please hear me: our natural abilities are not opposed to faith. Yes, we live by faith and not by sight, but try not using your sight at all and see how that works. When Jesus walked this earth, he used all of his human powers—all of them—and we are called to devote all of our human powers to God in order that we might live under him as he intended.

So we use our natural reason, under the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit, in the work of apologetics to bring information and logic to bear on doubts that prevent a steady, clear perception of the realities of God’s kingdom.

HIDING FROM GOD

People can also use their reason to hide from God, and he will cooperate with them (up to a point). God has so ordained that if we wish to hide from him, he will hide from us. He has created the world and arranged history so that human beings can have a way to avoid him, but also so that they can find him in their own way. Many people wonder about this arrangement, and I will go over it carefully in Chapter 6.

You may remember the old “village atheist” trick of putting a watch on the podium and saying, “Now, if there is a God, in five minutes he must strike me dead.” Not a single person who has given that challenge has ever received a response. This whole routine is a piece of Americana that may be on the verge of being forgotten. People like the nineteenth-century orator Bob Ingersoll and others used to go across the country and try to bait churches with this kind of thing. As if that was really proof! It’s the equivalent of an ant walking through your room and saying, “If there is a person up there reading a book, in five minutes he will throw the book down on me.” Well, you’ve got more important things to do than throw this book at an ant! And after all, if you wanted to approach ants, one of the things you wouldn’t do is go around throwing books at them. This is just one example of the little tricks based on assumptions about the nature of God that are totally wrong. And in truth, the people who are pulling tricks like this don’t want to find God, and they don’t want you to find him either.

Another way people hide from God is through idea systems. Let me tell you about one idea system that Christians need to address. It’s the idea that we just have faith in the church, but we don’t know anything. It’s the idea that knowledge is opposed to faith. People know things over in the shopping center, they know things at the bank, and they know things at school. But when you come to church, there is no knowledge, just faith.

You may have a hard time believing that, but if you want to understand why the Christian gospel is being treated in this country as it is now by those running the legal and school systems, you have to realize that they have been trained by a system of ideas to believe that Christianity is just another superstition—one, moreover, that has had a legal advantage in this country and should now be dispossessed of that legal advantage. This is very deeply ingrained in the idea system that governs life around us.

Many Christians, in their heart of hearts, also believe that their faith is just another superstition. They really do. That is why I often say that I know many people who believe in Jesus, but don’t believe in God. I may say a number of things in this book that I hope you will worry about, really. You see, I don’t live with the assumption that I am right about everything, but I do live with the assumption that we should earnestly inquire and use our minds together under God to seek understanding.

I encourage you to do your own study on what scripture says about knowledge as opposed to faith. Go to www.biblegateway.com, search the word know, and compare it to belief and faith. I think you are going to be tremendously surprised at the place of knowledge in following Christ.

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?

We need a good understanding of what knowledge is and how it works, because one of the greatest issues facing the church is whether we have knowledge or just belief. When you believe something, you are ready to act as if it were so when the circumstances are appropriate.

Now, it’s also important to distinguish belief from commitment here. You may be committed to something even though you don’t believe it. We see this in sports all the time. The fans keep cheering for their team—when they are behind by thirty points and there are two minutes left, the crowd is yelling, “C’mon! Beat ’em! We’re gonna win!” You can believe or be committed to things that turn out to be untrue. But when you know something, you can count on it.

I define knowledge as being able to deal with things as they are on an appropriate basis of thought and experience. That includes things we know by authority, because we learn so much of what we know from authorities like teachers and books. You probably won’t take your car to a repair shop that has a sign out front saying, “We have a lot of luck with our repairs.” You want to take it to people who know how to fix it. You will find a place that is able to deal with your car as it is on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.

What “an appropriate basis” is depends upon the nature of the subject matter of the knowledge in question. There is, as far as we know, no perfect general formula for “appropriate basis” or “conclusive evidence” for all kinds of knowledge, and many of the unfortunate results of “modern” thought might be attributed to outstanding thinkers who insisted on one or another such formula. We do, nonetheless, determine perfectly well in specific contexts when people do or do not know a certain subject matter—for example, the Greek alphabet, multiplication tables, or how sewing machines work.

Today it is not uncommon to hear people talk as if there were something identifiable as “scientific method” and claim that it alone is the appropriate basis of knowledge—that it alone is the “pipe” from which knowledge flows. The scientific method is used to draw conclusions based on measurable and testable data, and because those conclusions have been tested, they are considered to be verifiable knowledge. Anything that cannot be processed in this way does not count as knowledge. This is, in effect, to propose a general formula for “appropriate basis” or “conclusive evidence.”

There are various problems with this view. One is that almost everything we know turns out not to be this kind of knowledge. We do not use the scientific method for knowledge of the Greek alphabet or the best way to get from point A to point B or for knowledge of art, morality, and personal relationships. Another is that we have not the slightest clue about what a “scientific” solution to many urgent human problems would look like. If the scientific method cannot help us with some problems, must these be abandoned to power and other forms of irrationality?

Another problem with the “only science has knowledge” view is that a significant amount of what has come out of the “pipe” in the past has turned out to be false. You will find numerous examples of this in Wikipedia under “Superseded Scientific Theories.” Is it still knowledge, since it did come out of that scientific pipe? (Some actually say so.) But this point actually leads to further questions about how to identify the “pipe” and how to be sure whether something really does come out of it.

What we concretely have in real life are individuals with scientific credentials saying one thing or another. We say “science,” but in actuality there are sciences like physics and biology. We say “religion,” but it would be more accurate to say religions like Christianity or Buddhism.

Scientists will tell you that they do have a method, but the method of one science doesn’t work in another science. The method of validating a theory in biology doesn’t work particularly well in astronomy. Method is always tied to subject matter, and in dealing with life in general there is no such thing as a single scientific method. This has become the quandary of our culture, because everything that really matters in guiding life falls outside of science. Can any of the sciences or the scientific method tell you how to become a truly good person? Science can’t deal with something like that, because some questions can’t be quantified. Science turns out to be only a portion of the much broader field of knowledge.

Knowledge is a result of continuous engagement with a subject matter, and when knowledge comes, a certain authority comes with it. If you have knowledge, you are authorized to act, to supervise action, to formulate policy and supervise its implementation, and to teach. If all you have is belief or faith, you don’t have this kind of authority. People acting on knowledge—something they hav...