It feels odd to be writing a post as a memorial for Dallas Willard. Certainly, he is one of my heroes, but he is a hero that I met only a few times in passing, while so many others were deeply influenced directly by his life and guidance. Our own J.P. Moreland has as much claim on his guidance, support, and mentoring as anyone. So, I can’t share many personal stories of my own. However, there is a particular piece of Willard’s legacy that I would like to shine a light on, and it is precisely because I am “one degree of separation” from him - one degree by way of so many that knew him - that I can share.

I grew up in Southern California, lived and worked here most of my life, went to - and sometimes worked at - Baptist and Vineyard and Anglican churches here, and have studied and taught at both Christian and pluralistic universities in the area. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve heard the name “Dallas Willard” in all those places, not as an author - not primarily - but as a mentor. Some were close friends of his, like J.P., others had brief but significant encounters with him.

I hear about mentoring often. There are frequent calls for young men and women to seek out mentors, though they’re rarely given any practical advice on finding them. There are similarly frequent calls for older generations in the church to invest in the young. Both calls can tend to equate age with the ability to be a mentor. Sadly, experience may be a necessary but is certainly not a sufficient qualification for mentoring others.

Dallas modeled three necessary qualities in a mentor. First, he intelligently pursued his own spiritual growth. This is such a dominant theme in his writings that I will give it little detail here, referring readers to instead turn to almost anything he wrote to learn more. For the purposes of mentoring, it is important first to mournfully note that many older Christians are still living on “milk” rather than “meat” as the Apostle Paul laments in 1 Corinthians 3, and that many who are mature have lacked the reflection to understand and articulate their growth. Proverbs models the acquisition of wisdom through observation and reflection, on your own life and the lives of others, over time. Wisdom is gained through working toward an articulate understanding of the world as it actually is. We do not all need to be as intellectually gifted as Dallas to become mentors, but we do need a consistent faithfulness to seek out our spiritual growth wisely and become able to communicate about it to others.

Second, Dallas related to others in a quiet, disarming humility. This is an important virtue for everyone, but it is essential for mentors, particularly for men. Deborah Tannen, the eminent cultural linguist, describes a culture of communication among men that is consistent across age and ethnicity (she typically uses the phrase “one-up, one-down” to describe dynamic). Men vary in their individual comfort and identification with this culture, but all men need to navigate through this culture. As a result, being sought out for advice can feel deeply honoring to many men, but being on the receiving side of advice can feel threatening or even demeaning to some men. Dallas modeled a humility so genuine that it could seem utterly refreshing and the most natural attitude to have at the same time. He neither lorded his wisdom over others nor became apologetic about it (which tends to make people self-conscious and can feel as demeaning as overt arrogance). Accepting life-changing advice from Dallas felt no more loaded than trying a restaurant recommendation, and once you understood him, his wisdom often seemed so obvious that it was sometime difficult to remember that it ever was advice to begin with.

Finally, Dallas was a man of generosity, particularly in his mentoring. How generous Dallas was to others with his time and wisdom truly only God knows, since he gave in so many subtle and quiet encounters as well as long-term relationships. The first time I met Dallas, I was at an outdoor mall food court, and he was having dinner with his wife. I shyly approached just to tell him that I was on my way to an event he would be speaking at later that evening, and I appreciated his writings. Without hesitation, he asked me to join them for dinner and invited me into conversation as if we were old friends. He wasn’t especially gregarious, not a habitual extrovert on the lookout for someone new to charm. Rather, his attitude was something like, “I have some time right now, why wouldn’t I give it to you?”

This combination of intelligent formation, humility, and generosity served God by loving others in countless brief encounters, as well as deep and lasting relationships. Alongside all of Dallas Willard’s public legacy of teaching and writing, this quieter legacy should be remembered as an example for us all.

This Saturday, May 25 at 10:30 am, there will be a Memorial Service for Dallas Willard at Church on the Way to celebrate his life and grieve our loss of his departure.  The service will be broadcasted through the church's website.  Dallas asked that three people share at the service--John Ortberg, Richard Foster, and I.  It is very hard for me to express adequately my emotions about all this.  On the one hand, it is one of my life's greatest honors to have been asked to so participate.  On the other hand, I do not feel worthy or adequate for this task, and would ask for you to pray that I will sense God's presence prior to and during the service.  The Willard family is so precious that I want the time to be a healing one for them.

As I have already commented in an earlier post, Willard was someone who actually achieved genuine competence at life in the Kingdom, and he absence leaves a large whole in this world.  Yet, the way he left us was very uplifting.  In my research and reading on Near Death Experiences, nurses say that it is not uncommon for people who are at the point of death to see beyond the veil into heaven, to see an angel coming for them, and so on.  This is what happened to Dallas.  He was given glimpses "beyond the veil" and I am certain that these were deeply encouraging to him.

As for me, I have decided to read Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy, and Renovation of the Heart in that order.  I plan to read them slowly and to ponder how I might use their contents to enter more deeply into the life of Jesus.  In this way, even though he is gone, Dallas will continue to be my teacher.

Dallas Willard at USC. Courtesy of Becky Heatley.

I met Dallas Willard my first year at USC (1995), as a student in his "History of Western Philosophy" class.  I didn’t know anything about him but even the first day I remember being struck by his kindness and gentle presence.  His lectures were more like conversations:  he would make eye contact with us, smile and encourage us to question him, saying, “Anyone speaking so much is bound to make mistakes, so you make sure you stop me.”

The very first thing that struck me, however, was when reading the class syllabus I noticed he didn’t have the title ‘Ph.D.’ next to his name.  It simply said Dallas Willard.  I remember being puzzled by this and thinking, “He can’t teach here without a Ph.D.?  What’s going on?”  A few years later I read in The Divine Conspiracy,

The hunger for titles and public awards in human life--indeed, in  religious life--is quite astonishing... The children of the kingdom...are to have none of all this.  ‘Don’t seek to be called ‘Professor’ or ‘Doctor,’ Jesus says, ‘for you have only one teacher, and all of you are students (189).

I loved how slow and soft-spoken he was because it allowed me to think through the difficult concepts, and thinking back, I’m convinced, this gave him an opportunity to pray for his students and invite God into our midst, even while lecturing.  I was deeply blessed during these lectures as were many others.  He was as brilliant as gentle and caring.

One day,  a Buddhist monk, also a student, asked Dallas if he could teach the class about Buddhism (this was a philosophy of religion class).  Dallas graciously agreed and stepped aside.  I remember there was a lively discussion afterwards.  I can hear Dallas’s words now, “If there were a better way, Jesus would be the first one to encourage us to take it.” What quiet and steady confidence!

By the time I was done at USC (1997), I had dropped my deeply dissatisfying, atheistic view of the world.  I had come to a point where, after desperately seeking God, I could say, “I have finally found Him-- in Dallas Willard.”

Thank you, God, for the gift who was Dallas Willard!

Dallas was a man with a deep, pervasive, penetrating intellect.  He was a Christian first and a philosopher second.  From him I learned how to do metaphysics and how to think metaphysically.  He taught me to make distinctions when I was blurring categories.  He was a committed substance dualist, and never tired of defending the existence of and talking about the flourishing of the (embodied) soul.  He taught me to be a particularist, a foundationalist and a direct realist in epistemology.  And no one knew more than Dallas about the history of ethics, especially in the last 150 years.  He will be remembered most for his writings on spiritual formation, but the man was also a first-rate academic philosopher.

His spiritual writings are not only deep in content; they also have a texture or tone to them that accurately express Dallas’s own life.  He lived and practiced what he wrote, and there was a Presence in, around, and through his presence.

I cannot begin to share all the memories I have of him, but I will mention two, one at the beginning of our relationship and one at the end.  In 1983, while I was a doctoral student at USC, an undergraduate philosophy student named Joe came up to me and asked if I were religious.  I assured him that I was not, but that I was, indeed, a follower of Jesus of Nazareth.  His eyes grew big and he asked me if I thought Jesus could come up to a person.  I had no idea what he meant, so like a good philosopher, I pretended I did and replied by asking him a question!  Where did he get this idea, I queried.  Well, he said, that morning he had been in Dallas’s office, Dallas has lead him to Christ, and Dallas had told him that when he prayed to Jesus, Jesus would come right up to him and listen.  In typical Willardian fashion, Dallas had put a truth in terms no one have ever thought of, and the way of speaking had its intended impact on Joe and on me.

My next memory was a phone conversation with Dallas three days before he passed on.  He was lucid, in good spirits, but so weak that he could hardly project his voice over the phone.  He knew he was dying.  I told him that I wanted to take a minute to celebrate his life and remind him of the impact for the Kingdom he had had.  Well, being the humble, unassuming person he was, Dallas would have none of this.  I told him he had to listen to me whether he wanted to or not, and he responded that he would take the praise as from the Lord, and I filled his ear with his wonderful legacy.  He closed our conversation by remarking on “what a glorious future we all have in the Kingdom,” and that was how the man approached his death.

Upon reflection, Dallas Willard challenged—and still challenges—me to finish my life here well and to have a victorious death.  Please join me in that commitment.

I want to share two reflections of my time there.  First, it was very encouraging to see, time after time, how geography and archeology have regularly confirmed the historicity of the biblical text.  To be sure, many alleged cites of biblical events are based on mere tradition and we do not know if they are accurate.  But many cites are, indeed, accurate.  For example, I stood in the very synagogue in Capernaum where Jesus launched his mission, prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, and walked in a number of places where Jesus walked.  It was eerie and wonderful to be at these places and the Lord’s presence was there.

Secondly, with a qualification to be mentioned shortly, it is hard to see how Jesus’s movement ever got off the ground.  Nazareth was, and is, a mediocre town in an unimportant location.  Jesus only ministered for around three years and most of that was within a 15 mile area around the Sea of Galilee where, in Jesus’s day, uninfluential people lived.  He was executed by crucifixion along with thousands of others under the authority of Rome.  You feel the power of the Jewish temple and various purification laws over the Jewish people of the first century.  I realized in a deeper way how utterly implausible it was that Jesus’s teaching and movement would have any chance of being perpetuated.  However, there is one qualification on all this that, in my view, provides the only plausible explanation for the movement’s success:  Jesus actually performed miracles during his ministry and he actually rose from the dead.   In my view, that alone can adequately explain the subsequent history of the movement he set afoot.  Jesus is, indeed, the very Son of God who is alive today.  Among other things, that means that he truly loves us, he walks with us, he is with us in suffering and he has called us into the world to serve a purpose.  It doesn’t get any better than that, and it is a supreme privilege to be numbered among his followers.

It was an honor to directly study under Dr. Hendricks during my years at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) from 1975-79. I took several courses from him and was in a small discipleship group with Hendricks my last year at DTS. I was a very young believer, serving my first year on Campus Crusade staff. The model of his leadership could not have come to me at a more integral time. I saw a discipline and dedication in him that was infectious.

What were the values I saw him? Unquestionably, three stand out to me: His radical commitment to Christ, to reading in general and studying scripture in particular, and then the priority of marriage and family. These have all become my values, due in no small measure to Dr. Hendricks.

But I must also say something about his temperament and the manner in which he presented himself. He had a commitment not to bore people while teaching, in general, and when teaching the Bible, in particular, and to exhibit a keen sense of humor. Hendricks gave me an image of someone who could be (and he was!) funny, yet very serious about his commitment to Jesus Christ. I have tried my best to follow him in this.

His love for the Bible was highly impressionable to me. Frankly, he spent more time studying scripture than any single human being I know. Why? Well, for one thing he was actually convinced of its power to change lives, especially when first-hand study was part of the picture.

Dr. Hendricks also taught me a lot about marriage and family. While a student at Dallas Seminary, I majored in "Hendricks," and among the courses I took was Christian Marriage. Wow! What a course! It set the direction of my own values and beliefs about marriage, and I am the better for that.

All in all, Howard Hendricks was a man who had a huge impact for Christ and we will miss him terribly. With his passing, a very large tree in the forest fell.

In Matthew 7:1-5 we find the classic New Testament text about judging others.  Before we look at it, we need to distinguish two senses of judging:  condemning and evaluating.  The former is wrong and is in view in Matthew 7.  When Jesus says not to judge, he means it in the sense that the Pharisees judged others:  their purpose was to condemn the person judged and to elevate themselves above that person.  Now this is a form of self-righteous blindness that vv. 2-4 explicitly forbid.  Such judgment is an expression of a habitual approach to life of avoiding self-examination and repentance and, instead, propping oneself up by putting others down.

But there is another sense of judging that is central both to moral purity/holiness and to showing tough love to another: evaluating another’s behavior as wrong, pointing that out to the person with a view to their repentance, restoration and flourishing.  This form of judging another may bring short-term pain in the form of guilt, embarrassment and a experience of the need to change, but its long-term effect is (or is supposed to be) the flourishing and uplifting of the other.

Sometimes the most loving thing you can do for another is to tell him or her something hard to hear.  This form of judgment is absolutely biblical.  In fact, in Matthew 7:5, Jesus basically says that after one has appropriately engaged in self-examination and personal repentance, he/she is now in a position accurately and helpfully to evaluate another.  This very same form of judgment is commanded in Galatians 6:1-2.  It is moral confusion and cowardice to eschew evaluating other’s behavior.  It is moral clarity and courage not to condemn others.

Today it is more important than ever for the church to recover and proclaim judgment as evaluation gently yet firmly.  As a case in point, think about how the media are processing the recent, horrendously evil shootings of innocent women and children in Newtown, Connecticut.  The only categories being employed come from scientists (heath-care professionals, e.g., psychologists and psychiatrists) and they try to explain what caused the shooter to act in terms of his various environmental, psychological and psychiatric disorders.  Now, these factors had their influence, but they were not coercive and the shooter was an evil person who did an evil act freely and with responsible agency, no matter what influences were present.  But bringing such moral categories to bear on the incident involves judging, and when Christians refuse to judge others in the proper sense, they lose their credibility in a culture that is already slouching towards scientism, therapeutic justice, and moral sentimentalism.

From a Christian perspective, Machen offers a trustworthy saying.  Christianity is a dualist, interactionist religion in this sense:  God, angels/demons, and the souls of men and beasts are immaterial substances that can causally interact with the world.  Specifically, human persons are (or have) souls that are spiritual substances that ground personal identity in a disembodied intermediate state between death and final resurrection (See John Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting [Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Eerdmans, rev. ed., 2000)].  Clearly, this was the Pharisees’ view in Intertestamental Judaism, and Jesus (Matthew 22:23-33; cf. Matthew 10:28) and Paul (Acts 23 6-10; cf. II Corinthians 12:1-4) side with the Pharisees on this issue over against the Sadducees (N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God [Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2003], pp. 131-34, 190-206, 366-67, 424-26).

In my view, Christian physicalism involves a politically correct revision of the biblical text that fails to be convincing (See Joel B. Green, Body, Soul and Human Life [Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Baker, 2008].  Cf. John Cooper, “The Bible and Dualism Once Again,” Philosophia Christi 9 (2007):  459-69; “The Current Body-Soul Debate:  A Case for Holistic Dualism,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 13 (2009):  32-50; “Exaggerated Rumors of Dualism’s Demise,” Philosophia Christi 11 (2009):  453-64).

Nevertheless, today, many hold that, while broadly logically possible, dualism is no longer plausible in light of advances in modern science.  This attitude is becoming increasingly prominent in Christian circles.  Thus, Christian philosopher Nancey Murphy claims that physicalism is not primarily a philosophical thesis, but the hard core of a scientific research program for which there is ample evidence.  This evidence consists in the fact that “biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science have provided accounts of the dependence on physical processes of specific faculties once attributed to the soul” (Nancey Murphy, “Human Nature:  Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues,” in Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy and H. Newton Malony, Whatever Happened to the Soul? [Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 1998], p. 17.  cf. pp. 13, 27, 139-143; cf. Nancey Murphy, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?  [N. Y.:  Oxford University Press, 2009).

Dualism cannot be proven false—a dualist can always appeal to correlations or functional relations between soul and brain/body--but advances in science make it a view with little justification.  According to Murphy, "science has provided a massive amount of evidence suggesting that we need not postulate the existence of an entity such as a soul or mind in order to explain life and consciousness" (Nancey Murphy, “Human Nature:  Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues,” p. 18).

I cannot undertake here a critique of physicalism and a defense of dualism.  Suffice it to say that dualism is a widely accepted, vibrant intellectual position (See J. P. Moreland, Scott Rae, Body and Soul [Downers Grove, Illinois:  InterVarsity Press, 2000].  Cf. John Foster, The Immaterial Self [London:  Routledge: 2001]; William Hasker, The Emergent Self  [Ithaca, N. Y.:  Cornell University Press: 1999]; Richard Swinburne, Rev. ed. (1997) The Evolution of the Soul [Oxford:  Clarendon Press]).  I suspect that the majority of Christian philosophers are dualists.  Still, it is important to mention that, upon reflection, it becomes evident that neuroscience really has nothing to do with which view is most plausible.  Without getting into details, this becomes evident when we observe that leading neuroscientists—Nobel Prize winner John Eccles, U. C. L. A. neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz, and Mario Beaureguard, are all dualists and they know the neuroscience.  Their dualism--and the central intellectual issues involved in the debate- are quite independent of neuroscientific data.

The irrelevance of neuroscience also becomes evident when we consider the recent best seller Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander.  Regardless of one’s view of the credibility of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) in general, or of Alexander’s in particular, one thing is clear.  Before whatever it was that happened to him (and I believe his NDE was real but no not agree with his interpretation of some of what happened to him), Alexander believed the (allegedly) standard neuroscientific view that specific regions of the brain generate and possess specific states of conscious.  But after his NDE, Alexander came to believe that it is the soul that possesses consciousness, not the brain, and the various mental states of the soul are in two-way causal interaction with specific regions of the brain.  Here’s the point:  His change in viewpoint was a change in metaphysics that did not require him to reject or alter a single neuroscientific fact.  Dualism and physicalism are empirically equivalent views consistent with all and only the same scientific data.  Thus, the authority of science cannot be appropriated to provide any grounds whatsoever for favoring one view over another.

The reduction Smith has in mind proceeds in two steps:

(1) Identify semantic meanings with indicator meaning;

(2) reduce thought to the brain's computational functioning on a brain language of Mentalese.

I want to say a word about step (1). Some physical stage P contains indicator meaning M just in case (i) M caused P and (ii) P was designed or evolutionarily selected precisely to register M. Thus, the state of a thermometer "means" the temperature; a brain state caused by a cows "means" that a cow is present given that such a state was selected by evolution to indicate the presence of a cow. Now there are many problems with this reduction (e.g., it turns out that cow piles "mean" cows, and it's hard to thing of cow piles as having semantic properties!), but I want to mention one here. Genuine semantic contents, e.g., that snow is white, have the properties of being true or being false.

Now consider the face of the Grand Canyon. It does have information/indicator meaning in the slim sense above in that it registers the effects of erosion, fish fossilization, and so forth. Thus, in a sense we can say that a certain section of the face "means" that erosion occurred during such and such time. But it makes no sense to saw that the face of the Grand Canyon is true. Contrast this with a picture of the Grand Canyon places in the wall of a geology class by the instructor with labels indicating various areas of the face. These labels or map locations could be true or false because they were put there intentionally to mean certain things to the students. If semantic meanings have truth values and "information" or "indicator meaning" does not, then the latter is not a legitimate candidate for the reduction of the former. And that point supplements Smith's arguments in his wonderful book about the impossibility of knowledge, given a widely accepted form of naturalism.

In addition to issues about semantics and syntax, there is a further one about the nature of intentionality relevant to professor Smith's book. He argues, correctly in my view, that intentionality is a primitive monadic property of ofness/aboutness that cannot be reduced to anything physical. Now if this is true and given that intentionality is a mental property, if it is indeed basic in the universe, it would be fairly easy to develop an argument that there is a fundamental Thinker whose various mental states exemplify intentionality. Most naturalists (John Searle is a notable exception) reduce intentionality to a causal relation, e.g. to have a sensation of a rose is for the brain to stand in an appropriate causal relation to the rose.

But I think it is possible to show that standing in such a causal relation is neither necessary nor sufficient for having a sensation of a rose. First, it's not necessary: If God decided to suspend causality for, say, a day, and run the world in an occasionalist way such that He directly caused all events in the world and there were no causal chains between "natural" phenomena, then if one had the relevant sensation of "being appeared to rosely", it would still be of a rose even if it wasn't caused by the rose. Second, it's not sufficient. Suppose that every time Jones looks at a rose he stands in a regular lawlike causal relation with it such that he is caused to have a sensation of an elephant. Surely, there is a possible world where this takes place. If so, then standing in the appropriate causal relation would not be sufficient for having the relevant rose sensation. For these and other reasons (e.g., I can tell what my sensation is of by just directing my attention to it in total disregard of any causal relation I sustain to the relevant object), I believe Dr. Smith is correct in saying that intentionality is basic and irreducible.

Scott Smith's overall argument in Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality is a force to be reckoned with. It's no wonder that Durham's E.J. Lowe said that "All self-proclaimed naturalists, as well as their opponents, would do well to reflect on its arguments."