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palmsey's review
5.0
I'm not sure how to adequately praise this one. The ideas are certainly old, but we seem to have forgotten them. The message is simple, practical, inspiring, empowering, humbling. Sometimes a book has to come to you at the right time, and the timing of this one for me was perfect. It's the best book I've read in years, as important in my mind as "Mere Christianity" or "The Cost of Discipleship."
gbdill's review
4.0
If you start to read this book and you find yourself struggling to get into it, I encourage you to push through. The first chapter in my opinion is a bit weak and convoluted, but I assure you it gets much better. If by the end of the 2nd or 3rd chapter you are not captivated by Willard's thought process and content, then you might as well put the book away.
I like how Willard describes the two prevailing views of what the Gospel is in modern day Christianity. Namely, a gospel of sin management that emanates primarily from the conservative Christian camp. And, a social gospel of liberation that often emanates from the liberal Christian camp. But, while Willard does a great job telling us what the Gospel isn't, he fails to clearly describe what it is. It seems to me he may be trying to bridge the gap between the two divergences by saying that the gospel is a yielding to Jesus as Teacher while living in the Kingdom of God.
Willard introduces the premise that heaven is here and has invaded human space. The kingdom of heaven is not only in us, but God occupies the very space around us. He is not some celestial voice or vision in our head, but he is very real, talking with us and guiding us every moment of the day if only we avail ourselves to Him. Willard gives plenty of scriptural support for this premise including how God regularly spoke and interacted with Abraham, Moses, David and many other figures in both the Old and New Testaments.
Willard enters into an understanding of the Beatitudes. He makes it clear that obeying the Beatitudes do not make for God's approval, salvation, or blessing. In other words, they are not a means to an end. Rather, they serve to clarify Jesus' fundamental message that the free availability of God's rule and righteousness extends to all of humanity through reliance upon Jesus himself.
The Sermon on the Mount, or as Willard likes to call it, "Discourse on the Hill" is explained in great depth. He explains that the Sermon should be taken as a whole, rather than piece by piece, nor is the Sermon to be construed as more rules or laws. Rather, the Beatitudes are to "help people come to hopeful and realistic terms with their lives here on earth by clarifying, in concrete terms, the nature of the kingdom into which they are now invited by Jesus' call to repent, for life in in the kingdom of the heavens is now one of your options."
Willard goes into great details about the subject of condemnation. That, when we condemn someone, we are essentially telling that person he or she is in some fashion or another irredeemable and to be rejected. And, nobody generally responds well to condemnation. He explains that rarely does anyone who is condemned will respond in such a way that is desirable to the condemner. Instead of driving people to change their ways Willard proposes that we instead walk with them in kingdom fashion.
Prayer is addressed. Willard proposes that our prayers are in fact heard by God and He acts accordingly. Prayer really does make a difference in what God does or does not do. Willard provides many examples throughout Scripture of how God in essence changes His mind due to the prayer of righteous men and women. Interestingly, Open Theism ascribes to this premise as well to which I ascribe.
Willard describes tangible ways in what it's like to become more of a disciple and student of Jesus. Proposing ways to learn what it means to truly live with Christ. Willard uses the term of curriculum, developing objectives of kingdom values to teach and model. Not in order to merely gain more knowledge, but to turn the mind toward God, actualizing and experiencing the true kingdom life for the believer. Willard proposes there are three ways that God comes before the mind where we can lose ourselves in love of Him: 1) through His creation; 2) through His public acts on the scene of human history; 3) through individual experiences of Him. Willard goes on to explain some of the disciplines that we can adopt in order to walk with Christ on a daily basis: abstinence, solitude, silence, study, and worship.
Willard concludes the book with an eschatoligical glimpse of the future. He calls it the redemption of all things. Ironically, he references George McDonald who is a proponent of universal salvation. A theological ideology that I myself am currently wrestling with to some degree.
In summary, The Divine Conspiracy is, in many ways, a difficult and challenging book to read. Willard does at times seem to ramble on. The book is long and was difficult to push through. But, this book is so full of spiritual meat that transformed the way I look at my own walk with Christ. It offers a lot of practical ways that, when implemented, can indeed bring us into a much more intimate and closer relationship with Jesus. However, because of the depth this book contains, it is one of those books, similar to "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis that I will likely need to read again in order to better grasp. I highly recommend this Christian classic especially for those who are seeking a deeper relationship with our King Jesus and who want to know more about what it looks like to walk and live with him on earth today.
I like how Willard describes the two prevailing views of what the Gospel is in modern day Christianity. Namely, a gospel of sin management that emanates primarily from the conservative Christian camp. And, a social gospel of liberation that often emanates from the liberal Christian camp. But, while Willard does a great job telling us what the Gospel isn't, he fails to clearly describe what it is. It seems to me he may be trying to bridge the gap between the two divergences by saying that the gospel is a yielding to Jesus as Teacher while living in the Kingdom of God.
Willard introduces the premise that heaven is here and has invaded human space. The kingdom of heaven is not only in us, but God occupies the very space around us. He is not some celestial voice or vision in our head, but he is very real, talking with us and guiding us every moment of the day if only we avail ourselves to Him. Willard gives plenty of scriptural support for this premise including how God regularly spoke and interacted with Abraham, Moses, David and many other figures in both the Old and New Testaments.
Willard enters into an understanding of the Beatitudes. He makes it clear that obeying the Beatitudes do not make for God's approval, salvation, or blessing. In other words, they are not a means to an end. Rather, they serve to clarify Jesus' fundamental message that the free availability of God's rule and righteousness extends to all of humanity through reliance upon Jesus himself.
The Sermon on the Mount, or as Willard likes to call it, "Discourse on the Hill" is explained in great depth. He explains that the Sermon should be taken as a whole, rather than piece by piece, nor is the Sermon to be construed as more rules or laws. Rather, the Beatitudes are to "help people come to hopeful and realistic terms with their lives here on earth by clarifying, in concrete terms, the nature of the kingdom into which they are now invited by Jesus' call to repent, for life in in the kingdom of the heavens is now one of your options."
Willard goes into great details about the subject of condemnation. That, when we condemn someone, we are essentially telling that person he or she is in some fashion or another irredeemable and to be rejected. And, nobody generally responds well to condemnation. He explains that rarely does anyone who is condemned will respond in such a way that is desirable to the condemner. Instead of driving people to change their ways Willard proposes that we instead walk with them in kingdom fashion.
Prayer is addressed. Willard proposes that our prayers are in fact heard by God and He acts accordingly. Prayer really does make a difference in what God does or does not do. Willard provides many examples throughout Scripture of how God in essence changes His mind due to the prayer of righteous men and women. Interestingly, Open Theism ascribes to this premise as well to which I ascribe.
Willard describes tangible ways in what it's like to become more of a disciple and student of Jesus. Proposing ways to learn what it means to truly live with Christ. Willard uses the term of curriculum, developing objectives of kingdom values to teach and model. Not in order to merely gain more knowledge, but to turn the mind toward God, actualizing and experiencing the true kingdom life for the believer. Willard proposes there are three ways that God comes before the mind where we can lose ourselves in love of Him: 1) through His creation; 2) through His public acts on the scene of human history; 3) through individual experiences of Him. Willard goes on to explain some of the disciplines that we can adopt in order to walk with Christ on a daily basis: abstinence, solitude, silence, study, and worship.
Willard concludes the book with an eschatoligical glimpse of the future. He calls it the redemption of all things. Ironically, he references George McDonald who is a proponent of universal salvation. A theological ideology that I myself am currently wrestling with to some degree.
In summary, The Divine Conspiracy is, in many ways, a difficult and challenging book to read. Willard does at times seem to ramble on. The book is long and was difficult to push through. But, this book is so full of spiritual meat that transformed the way I look at my own walk with Christ. It offers a lot of practical ways that, when implemented, can indeed bring us into a much more intimate and closer relationship with Jesus. However, because of the depth this book contains, it is one of those books, similar to "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis that I will likely need to read again in order to better grasp. I highly recommend this Christian classic especially for those who are seeking a deeper relationship with our King Jesus and who want to know more about what it looks like to walk and live with him on earth today.
kaaleppii's review against another edition
5.0
This book should probably be required reading for the serious student of Jesus. It took me a good bit longer to get through this than I was expecting based on the length, due to how "full" each page was.
The general aim of the book is to first widen or clarify what the "kingdom of the heavens" is, and then to demonstrate that the Sermon on the Mount is indeed a sermon (and not just a collection of loosely-related moral laws), "a concise statement of Jesus’ teachings on how to actually live in the reality of God’s present kingdom available to us from the very space surrounding our bodies. It concludes with a statement that all who hear and do what he there says will have a life that can stand up to everything—that is, a life for eternity because it is already in the eternal." Willard then concludes the book with a section on how someone might realistically become the kind of person (a disciple) who can attain that "life that can stand up to everything"--someone who thinks Jesus's teachings are more than just "pretty words" but rather pour out of the wisest intellect and deepest spirit to in habit our world and are therefore worth taking seriously.
I found this to be an incredibly helpful guide to reading and understanding the Sermon on the Mount. The section on the Beatitudes was a real highlight for me. I'd recommend going back and forth between this book and scripture itself, as that produced a lot of new insights for me I may not have gotten had I just skimmed over the verse references in the book itself.
This is going to go on my "to read again" shelf for sure.
The general aim of the book is to first widen or clarify what the "kingdom of the heavens" is, and then to demonstrate that the Sermon on the Mount is indeed a sermon (and not just a collection of loosely-related moral laws), "a concise statement of Jesus’ teachings on how to actually live in the reality of God’s present kingdom available to us from the very space surrounding our bodies. It concludes with a statement that all who hear and do what he there says will have a life that can stand up to everything—that is, a life for eternity because it is already in the eternal." Willard then concludes the book with a section on how someone might realistically become the kind of person (a disciple) who can attain that "life that can stand up to everything"--someone who thinks Jesus's teachings are more than just "pretty words" but rather pour out of the wisest intellect and deepest spirit to in habit our world and are therefore worth taking seriously.
I found this to be an incredibly helpful guide to reading and understanding the Sermon on the Mount. The section on the Beatitudes was a real highlight for me. I'd recommend going back and forth between this book and scripture itself, as that produced a lot of new insights for me I may not have gotten had I just skimmed over the verse references in the book itself.
This is going to go on my "to read again" shelf for sure.
crazy_mr_earl's review
5.0
Heavy lifting, but glorious in depth, score, and sequence. I'll be chewing on this eternally.
alanyoung's review against another edition
4.0
Overall I found this book helpful and challenging.
The emphases on the Sermon on the Mount and Discipleship I found very helpful.
I was less convinced by the last part on the new heaven and new earth where there seemed to be a vagueness about the resurrection of the body which, with the quotation from Plato, left me uncertain.
I also found it too long so that I had trouble remembering the arguments from earlier in the book to apply them to the end of it.
The emphases on the Sermon on the Mount and Discipleship I found very helpful.
I was less convinced by the last part on the new heaven and new earth where there seemed to be a vagueness about the resurrection of the body which, with the quotation from Plato, left me uncertain.
I also found it too long so that I had trouble remembering the arguments from earlier in the book to apply them to the end of it.
neilrcoulter's review
3.0
Twenty-three years after its initial publication, I can see why The Divine Conspiracy made such a splash in American Evangelical Christianity. Dallas Willard serves up a challenge to the status quo of the time, drawing people back into the history of the church and a slightly different perspective on some key passages of Scripture. (The most time is spent on an interesting interpretation of the Beatitudes, which remains puzzling to me; it doesn’t seem that Willard’s approach has been taken up by translators and teachers in the years since. I’m left wondering what to think about all of it.) As N. T. Wright and others have taught often in the past couple of decades, so Willard also emphasizes that Jesus came to launch the Kingdom of the Heavens now, not merely a promise of paradise after we die. That must have been a little startling to an Evangelical Christian culture that had been very focused on the moment of conversion as the point at which someone’s post-death citizenship transferred from hell to heaven.
Woven into the big themes of what the point of all life is, Willard challenges readers to take seriously the spiritual disciplines, really welcoming Jesus into their midst as a fellow traveler and guide. The book confronts a number of dominant areas of culture and lifestyle that are counter to what Jesus taught in the Gospels.
I like all of this, and there were too many good points in the book even to highlight just a few. It’s a weighty volume, and our Bible study group has spent some months working through it together. However, the book’s age is showing. The American culture that Willard wrote to in 1997 is now quite different. In the case of American church culture, much of the change in fact has a lot to do with Willard’s influence, and The Divine Conspiracy specifically. It’s great to see those changes, but it means large sections of this book now feel like something from a very different time.
In addition, Willard’s prose often seems to me rambling and convoluted. He takes a long time to say good things that could be said more concisely, with less repetition and fewer mildly related tangents. Overall, the book could easily be cut by at least 30% and still be fine. Much improved, actually.
For those reasons, I recommend that readers pick up either a more recent book on a similar topic of “kingdom living” (Wright, of course, has a number of books that are right in this area), or another book by Willard (I’ve enjoyed his posthumous Life Without Lack, and his book The Spirit of the Disciplines may have aged better for current readers interested in practicing the spiritual disciplines). Regardless of how this particular book has aged in the past couple of decades, however, Willard’s influence on Christian thought and practice is enormous. In his life he pointed out many, many ways that Christians were “flying upside down” without realizing it. I know my faith is better because of Willard’s guidance.
Woven into the big themes of what the point of all life is, Willard challenges readers to take seriously the spiritual disciplines, really welcoming Jesus into their midst as a fellow traveler and guide. The book confronts a number of dominant areas of culture and lifestyle that are counter to what Jesus taught in the Gospels.
I like all of this, and there were too many good points in the book even to highlight just a few. It’s a weighty volume, and our Bible study group has spent some months working through it together. However, the book’s age is showing. The American culture that Willard wrote to in 1997 is now quite different. In the case of American church culture, much of the change in fact has a lot to do with Willard’s influence, and The Divine Conspiracy specifically. It’s great to see those changes, but it means large sections of this book now feel like something from a very different time.
In addition, Willard’s prose often seems to me rambling and convoluted. He takes a long time to say good things that could be said more concisely, with less repetition and fewer mildly related tangents. Overall, the book could easily be cut by at least 30% and still be fine. Much improved, actually.
For those reasons, I recommend that readers pick up either a more recent book on a similar topic of “kingdom living” (Wright, of course, has a number of books that are right in this area), or another book by Willard (I’ve enjoyed his posthumous Life Without Lack, and his book The Spirit of the Disciplines may have aged better for current readers interested in practicing the spiritual disciplines). Regardless of how this particular book has aged in the past couple of decades, however, Willard’s influence on Christian thought and practice is enormous. In his life he pointed out many, many ways that Christians were “flying upside down” without realizing it. I know my faith is better because of Willard’s guidance.
jess_nel's review against another edition
4.0
Thought-provoking and deep. Generally enjoyed what I read, but found myself glazing over and tuning out. Wouldn't mind picking-up again someday ... just not for read-by-the-pool season.