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A review by kaaleppii
The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God by Dallas Willard
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.