Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was an influential philosopher and beloved author and speaker on Christian spiritual formation. He had the unique gift of being able to speak eloquently to academic and popular audiences, and it’s fascinating to observe the ways his philosophical thought pervades and influences his spiritual writings—and vice versa. In this episode, Steve Porter (Senior Research Fellow and Executive Director of the Martin Institute, Westmont College / Affiliate Professor of Spiritual Formation at Biola University) joins Evan Rosa to explore the key concepts and ideas that appear throughout Dallas Willard’s philosophical and spiritual writings, including: epistemological realism; a relational view of knowledge; how knowledge makes love possible; phenomenology and how the mind experiences, represents, and comes into contact with reality; how the human mind can approach the reality of God with a love for the truth; moral psychology; and Dallas’s concerns about the recent resistance, loss, and disappearance of moral knowledge.
Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was an influential philosopher and beloved author and speaker on Christian spiritual formation. He had the unique gift of being able to speak eloquently to academic and popular audiences, and it’s fascinating to observe the ways his philosophical thought pervades and influences his spiritual writings—and vice versa.
In this episode, Steve Porter (Senior Research Fellow and Executive Director of the Martin Institute, Westmont College / Affiliate Professor of Spiritual Formation at Biola University) joins Evan Rosa to explore the key concepts and ideas that appear throughout Dallas Willard’s philosophical and spiritual writings, including: epistemological realism; a relational view of knowledge; how knowledge makes love possible; phenomenology and how the mind experiences, represents, and comes into contact with reality; how the human mind can approach the reality of God with a love for the truth; moral psychology; and Dallas’s concerns about the recent resistance, loss, and disappearance of moral knowledge.
About Dallas Willard
Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was a philosopher, minister and beloved author and speaker on Christian philosophy and spiritual formation. For a full biography, visit Dallas Willard Ministries online.
About Steve Porter
Dr. Steve Porter is Senior Research Fellow and Executive Director of the Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture at Westmont College, and an affiliate Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation at the Institute for Spiritual Formation and Rosemead School of Psychology (Biola University). Steve received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Southern California and M.Phil. in philosophical theology at the University of Oxford.
Steve teaches and writes in Christian spiritual formation, the doctrine of sanctification, the integration of psychology and theology, and philosophical theology. He co-edited Until Christ is Formed in You: Dallas Willard and Spiritual Formation, Psychology and Spiritual Formation in Dialogue, and Dallas’s final academic book: The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge. He is the author of Restoring the Foundations of Epistemic Justification: A Direct Realist and Conceptualist Theory of Foundationalism, and co-editor of Christian Scholarship in the 21st Century: Prospects and Perils. In addition to various book chapters, he has contributed articles to the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care, Philosophia Christi, Faith and Philosophy, Journal of Psychology and Theology, Themelios, Christian Scholar’s Review, etc. Steve and his wife Alicia live with their son Luke and daughter Siena in Long Beach, CA.
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Steve Porter: I'll just quote one line from the Divine Conspiracy where Dallas says, the life and words that Jesus brought into the world came in the form of information and reality. So Dallas thought Jesus was the smartest human being who's ever lived. And of course, when you stop and think about it, you say, I guess that must be right.
Who else could be smarter than Jesus? And that, that Jesus had the best answers to the most important questions. And so Dallas often talks about four fundamental questions that every human has to answer in some way, every philosophy, every religion, what is real? What is the good life? Who is the good person?
And how does one become good? And that, that Jesus had the best answers to those questions. And so what Jesus does is he comes into the world as God incarnate to show us the way, the truth, and the life that he was bringing us information about reality. And he was not only Teaching that information, but he was demonstrating it with his life.
So he embodied his answers to those questions and that he not only called disciples or students in the first century to come and follow him, but that he is ongoing in that process. that that he is alive and well and he is still taking on disciples, students in his way of life.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
I’m Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. In the mid 20th century, there was an interesting miniature revival of Christian philosophy in America. Interesting, in part, because it was also accompanied by the death of God theology of the 1960s. This wasn't the C. S. Lewis apologetics variety, which of course had an impact of its own.
But by the 1960s, young philosophers like Nicholas Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, several others, made their way into philosophy departments around the country and lived and worked themselves to death. To a deeply integrated kind of philosophy. These philosophers weren't incidentally Christian.
Their faith was woven together with their philosophy. In this episode, we're exploring and appreciating the work and influence of another one of those mid-century Christian philosophers, Dallas Willard. He spent a long career as a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, and in the 1980s started writing books on Christian spiritual formation.
He had the unique gift of being able to speak eloquently to both an academic and a popular audience across a wide range of subjects, and it's fascinating to observe the ways his philosophical thought pervades and influences his spiritual writings and vice versa. And joining me to talk about how to read Dallas Willard is my friend Steve Porter, who is Senior Research Fellow and Executive Director of the Martin Institute at Westmont College, as well as an Affiliate Professor of Spiritual Formation at Biola University. He's also the co editor of Until Christ is Formed in You, Dallas Willard and Spiritual Formation. In my conversation with Steve, we cover a lot of ground about Dallas Willard, starting with what it was like to know him and experience him as both a philosopher and a pastor.
We then introduce and discuss some of the key concepts operative in his philosophical and spiritual writings, including epistemological realism, a relational view of knowledge, how knowledge makes love possible, phenomenology, and how the mind represents and comes into contact with reality. and how our minds can approach the reality of God with a love for the truth.
We also discussed moral psychology and Dallas's concern with the recent resistance, loss, and disappearance of moral knowledge. Throughout the conversation, we quote from a variety of Willard's texts to help provide some context for his thought. And just one of those texts was actually an unfinished manuscript.
The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge was completed by Steve, along with two of Dallas's other students, Greg Ten Elshof and Aaron Preston, and then published posthumously following Dallas's death in 2013. Through a career that spans over five decades, Dallas produced a number of books, articles, lectures, sermons, interviews, not to mention all sorts of coursework and syllabi.
And you can find so many of these resources available at dwillard. org. Thanks for listening today.
Steve, it's so good to see you. Thanks for joining me on For the Life of the World. Glad to be here, Evan. I know how formative Dallas Willard was in my own entree into the life of the world. The mind and philosophy, theology, a sort of holistic, I think, approach to thinking about our being in the world.
And I know how deeply formative he was in your own life.
Steve Porter: Yeah. I mean, if I had to think of the people who have been most formative, he would certainly be right there. Maybe the top, certainly one of two or three.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if you could start by just telling us a little bit about your context and Knowing and studying with Dallas at University of Southern California, and a little bit about what it was like to know him, what it was like to work with him and his concerns that became apparent through that time.
Steve Porter: Yeah. If I could go back Even a little bit earlier, I think my first awareness of Dallas Willard was in my undergrad years. I remember reading his book, Spirit of the Disciplines, and I didn't know who Dallas Willard was other than that he was the author of this book. And I didn't like the book. I was, I had kind of been raised in a very conservative form of evangelical Christianity.
And with that came my own version of legalism and try hard to be good. And if you can be really good, maybe God will like you. And even though that wasn't the theology that was taught, that's how I imbibed it. And so I read Spirit of the Disciplines and I thought, these are like 15 more ways to be good, all these disciplines that I'm not practicing.
And, and so I read it as a recovering legalist and read it as more legalism and it wasn't. I wasn't happy with the book at all. I remember writing in the margins, kind of angry, young, 20 something words. And then as I got exposed to his teaching and went to some of, went to some conferences where he was teaching on the Christian life, I began to be able to have ears to hear.
Something different in what he was saying. So eventually I ended up at USC and studied with him, did my PhD in philosophy and he was my supervisor and I made it a practice that anytime I went into his office to ask a philosophical question about metaphysics or epistemology or. History of ethics or something like that.
I made it a practice to also ask him something about the Christian life. And I told him that once I said, Dallas, I, before I go, I have to ask you, I'd ask some question about God or relationship with God or, spiritual practices. And one time I told him that I always made sure I asked him a question and he said, Oh, Steve, you don't need to do that.
And I said, Oh yeah, I know I don't need to, but I do. I want to. So I felt like I got his education in spiritual theology while also getting a first rate education at USC and in philosophy.
Evan Rosa: I mean, the way you tell this story from one vantage, there's two Dallas Willards. There's the philosopher and there's the spiritual formation teacher, and it's possible to have encountered Dallas Willard only as spiritual formation teacher slash pastor.
And it's possible, of course, to have studied under Dallas just and only receive the philosophical thinking. Talk a little bit about, I mean, that claim, that perception, that the fact that he's both in the world of academic philosophy and in the world of Christian formation.
Steve Porter: Yeah, I think that's right, Evan.
And I think a lot of people who approach him through his spiritual writings appreciate, but maybe can't get much from his philosophical writings. And certainly it goes the other way around as well. But for Dallas, it was all of one piece. It was who he was and the word integrated or integrity comes to mind because it was all.
consistent with who he was. I mean, in one sense, even though he didn't wear his Christianity on his sleeve when he was at USC and I was just reading the biography of Dallas written by Gary Moon called Becoming Dallas Willard and someone made that point. I think it was someone that Gary Moon interviewed in the biography.
But that, um, Dallas wasn't quick to mention his Christian faith or beliefs, uh, you could see it if you knew about it in his classes and whatnot, but he didn't, he didn't bring that in. And yet, if you hear him talk about his practices, his own spiritual practices in his life as a professor and teacher, I mean, one of the things, He did is, I didn't know this until he shared this in one of his talks or books, but while he was teaching, he would practice the presence of God that every time he went from one point to another in his outline or in his teaching, in the lecture notes, he would pause, and present himself to the Lord just silently.
So he would kind of consciously take a moment between points in his lecture to just say, Lord, I'm yours. I'm here before you. Again, just in his own silent prayer, just kind of returning his gaze. to the Lord. And so in one sense, hearing that you think, even though he didn't talk about spiritual life explicitly in his philosophy classes, it was there, the kingdom of God was in the room, so to speak.
And at least Dallas was tapping into it if no one else was. So yeah, so he felt all of a peace in that sense. And again, I, and I think this is part of where we're going here in our conversation, but certainly A through line in understanding Dallas's philosophical work and his writings in Christian spiritual formation is his study of knowledge because he was an epistemologist, but also a metaphysician of knowledge, so to speak.
I mean, philosophically, he was dealing with the nature of knowing and the act of knowing. And that, that looms large in his spiritual writings too. So that's a way to see it all hanging together.
Evan Rosa: First, I just find it so interesting, like those sort of anecdotes around the figures that we come to know and respect, particularly they're in a kind of pastoral or influential kind of role.
When we see them as wise, we really start wondering, Oh, what are the, what are those little practices that, that they try to implement? And this is again, to make the point that, that there is sort of Christianity in the room, the kingdom of God is in the room. Yeah. Wherever Dallas goes. And that's an interesting way to think about.
Maybe knowledge, but more being in this case, that his way of being brought the kingdom of God to bear on wherever he was, there's a humility to his mode of presentation. And then hearing later, I think from you that whenever he would speak, when he was, Hearing a respondent, whether it was a critical voice or a question or a comment from the public, maybe the kind of question that the other folks in the audience go, Oh boy, he would have this practice of putting his arms behind his back and just holding his hands there in a kind of spirit of openness to receive from the person who is speaking in that moment, a kind of embodied expression of listening and embodied expression of vulnerability of avoiding defensiveness, avoiding any form of preemptive attack back.
So it's just a simple little thing to do. And yet a powerful reminder, even in the moment
Steve Porter: that was one of his practices. And, and I think it, It bore itself out, right? I mean, even the way spiritual practices are meant to work is to habituate an overall posture. And so even when Dallas didn't put his arms behind his back, he had learned to respond to people with the kind of openness and vulnerability and receptivity that you're describing, Evan.
And I think if you, I mean, there's loads and loads of audio and video of Dallas Willard on. online and on YouTube and the Dallas Word Ministries and Sure. Conversatio Divina is another website and you can hear it a lot of Q& A times and he is, he's very, I mean, lots of people are good at this, but he's one of them.
He's very careful to make sure he understands. The question, well, he was a phenomenologist in terms of his philosophical training. And one of the principles of phenomenology is you want to kind of help others come to see what you've seen. And Dallas was very good at that in his teaching and where he's engaging with people.
He's trying to lead, lead the horse to water, so to speak, right? You can't make them drink, but you can at least bring them to the right position so that they might see things in a different sort of way. And so Dallas is very much a history of ideas. thinker. And so he thought we were oftentimes approaching issues, whether philosophically or in the Christian life with a certain tradition and background and the force of zeitgeist and culture kind of always in play.
And in that sense, him and Charles Taylor had a lot in common in terms of how we're being shaped in ways we don't realize our life is framed. And so Dallas was always kind of, I think, trying to, again, it was a little bit of a subversive. way of teaching where he's trying to uncover what the hidden assumptions and ideas might be that would help someone come to see.
So yeah, he had various practices that helped him with that to, to engage. Again, I can't recommend enough this biography of Dallas because in that biography, there are some stories told of Dallas in his younger years at USC as a professor. Where he wasn't always kind and he did get into it with, with others in terms of philosophical debate and argumentation.
And so he had to learn this way. He wasn't just born with those kinds of dispositions. One thing about Dallas is he didn't talk a lot about his practices, and part of, I think, his wisdom was, is that you have to find your own way into spiritual practices, that, that trying on certain spiritual practices, uh, in a sense before their time in one's life can actually be detrimental in a certain sense, where we're imitating others practices, but we really don't have the intentionality.
We're not kind of approaching the practice in the right sort of way and spirit. And so Dallas was hesitant because he knew that people would kind of run out and do what he did and he himself had kind of found his way. into these practices, some of those practices that are not your traditional practices necessarily, but nevertheless make up a whole life spirituality.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Let's go to some concepts. Sure. What conceptually lies at the center of Dallas's thinking?
Steve Porter: One of the things you might say is at the heart is this concept of knowledge, because that is what Dallas studies in a sense from beginning to end in his. philosophical work is the ontology of knowledge. So, I mean, normally in philosophy, when we think about knowledge, we think of epistemology, but one of the things that Dallas brings to epistemology is you have to have an ontology of knowing before you can have a theory of knowledge.
So Dallas thought metaphysics or ontology preceded epistemology, and that you had to work out, um, your ontology of knowing. Uh, in order to understand, um, how to know and the methods of knowing and, and the idea of realism. He was an epistemological realist and he thought that the only way to make sense of the idea that we can come to know things as they are.
was an ontology of the act of knowing, and he builds off Edmund Husserl's kind of work in terms of that. So knowledge is his philosophical center in many respects in both metaphysics and epistemology. And then in ethics and the history of ethics is where he also spent a lot of his philosophical work.
And the history of ethics was for him all about, uh, moral knowledge. What is an account of how moral knowledge is possible? How we can communicate moral knowledge and how moral knowledge becomes enculturated, for lack of a better term, how it becomes part of one's cultural context and what happens when moral knowledge is removed from, from the, uh, institutions of culture.
And this is what he called. Yeah. The disappearance of moral knowledge. And then you can trace that all the way into his, this emphasis on knowledge into knowing Christ himself and knowing the way of Jesus. And so knowledge of God, knowledge of the kingdom, and then also knowledge about the way of life with Jesus in his father's kingdom.
So there's a, there's kind of that through line of knowledge, both in his philosophical and in his Christian writings.
Evan Rosa: Why do you think it was so important to him to think of the ontological ground of knowledge? I think that could use some untying a little bit, some teasing out to say that being precedes knowledge or the metaphysics precedes epistemology.
I want to go in the spiritual direction as well, but I think it seems like for Willard, this is a kind of grounding feature, even of his approach to theology and spiritual formation.
Steve Porter: Yeah, I think that's right, Evan. I think one of the perennial questions of Western philosophy has been the question of what is real and is, is there a reality that we can come to know?
And of course, everyone in one sense agrees that we do find ourselves Thinking we're in touch with reality. We think just kind of common sense that we know some things that I know. If I take a left out of my house, I go towards the grocery store. And if I take a ride, I go towards the gas station and I don't.
If I go right, I don't go towards the grocery store. And if I go left, I don't go towards the gas station. It just looks like that's the way the world is. And I know that and having accurate information about leads me a right in reality. So that's the common sense view. But of course, philosophers have come to question that common sense view.
And so I think Dallas rightly thought that we have to come to grips with With that question, is there a real world that exists mind independently and can we come to know it? And if there isn't a real world that exists mind independently and we're constructing reality, then all bets are off that we're just living in a dream world.
different kind of world, and it's not a world that is stable and ordered in any sense of stability and orderedness that we would commonly think of. It's constructed, and it's either socially constructed or individually constructed, and I mean there's lots of things that follow from that, but not much in the way of kind of, you know, Developing accurate understanding of things.
It just turns out that things like accuracy and truth and knowledge in a realist sense just don't exist. And so Dallas, I think rightly saw that we have to deal with that question of realism. Is there a real world? That's mind independent. Is the mind capable of knowing it as it is? What are the barriers to that?
The obstacles to that such that we can come to verify our experience of reality? I mean, Dallas was just as concerned about People who were realists about things and thought we could know, but had come to have mistaken views. I mean, a lot of what he is working on in his Christian writings are mistaken understandings of salvation and of Jesus and of the atonement and of the kingdom of God.
So it's not just that. Coming to the positive view that there is reality, spiritual reality, physical reality, moral reality, interpersonal reality. It's not just coming to the positive view that there is reality. And that we can know it, but then it's coming to the question of methodology. How do we know these different domains of reality accurately so that we can be guided a right in the world?
And so Dallas will always come back to that kind of pragmatic, practical, where the rubber meets the road, that, that the reason why we want to have knowledge is because it leads us a right. in reality. And that is the way it is in terms of getting to the grocery store. And that is the way it is in terms of following Jesus.
That if we are not operating on accurate understanding and information, then we're going to bump up against reality. We're going to, one of Dallas's well known sayings that others say as well is reality is what you bump up against when your beliefs are false. And of course, sometimes having false beliefs and bumping up against reality isn't much of a collision.
I thought the meeting was Wednesday and it turns out it's on Thursday. No big deal as long as I haven't missed it, perhaps not that big of a deal. But when you think the light was green and it actually turns out to be red, that might have more consequence. Or if you think that a certain spiritual practice is a reliable way of becoming like Jesus, and it turns out it's not, then that's going to again, when you bump up against that reality, it's going to lead to at least frustration, maybe discouragement, maybe despair and disdain and contempt for the way of Jesus.
So, so that coming to have knowledge of these sorts of things, It is oftentimes just very, very significant, very important.
Evan Rosa: It kind of highlights the fact that, I mean, as knowers human nature itself, to be connected to reality is to know, I mean, you. We think of ourselves as having a certain kind of physical and mental being in the world, of course, and yet you can be in the world and yet seem to be unhinged from reality.
And I mean, this opens up, of course, uh, a huge feast of philosophy that we could argue about. What I'm interested here in, for Dallas, with respect to knowledge, is phenomenology training. How did his reading of Husserl in particular help inform this kind of value on his part? He wrote in an installment, The Cambridge Companion to Husserl and the World of Philosophy.
There's lots of these Cambridge companions to these historical thinkers and Dallas's contribution is of course on knowledge. And he writes What is most intriguing in Husserl's thought to me, the always hopeful realist, is the way he works out a theory of the substance and nature of consciousness and knowledge, which allows us that knowledge to grasp a world that it does not make.
That's interesting to me to start with the sort of phenomena, right? And there's this long tradition in philosophy that goes all the way back to probably the pre Socratics of trying to save the appearances, right? If the phenomena are what appear to us, philosophy is the practice of trying to understand and save and make sense of those appearances as they kind of come to our perceiving minds.
And as a realist, uh, his, his realist commitments and the way that informs his epistemology, I find it just very interesting that he's, he's able to parse out the distinctions here. And that's what really bumps into me in this quote, right? Is that knowledge is grasping at a world. It doesn't make.
Steve Porter: Yeah, that's a great quote to look at.
Willard found in Husserl someone who was trying to analyze the act of knowing, the conscious act of knowing. And so, yeah, the phenomenological tradition is a back to the cases, right? Back, back to the things themselves, back to the cases of knowing. So what, what is involved when the mind Grasps reality as it is.
And you might say, how do we know it? Grass reality is, but cases of misperception or cases, I always come back to this example of one time I was sitting on the edge of my bed and I was pretty much literally putting my socks on and I see some object in a, in our bedroom. It was about eight feet away, far enough away that I was looking, it's on the floor and I'm like, What is that?
What, is that a crumpled sock? I mean, I knew it was white. I knew it was kind of some, a little mound. I was like, is that a sock? Is that, what is that? And there was even some memory of, hold it, I dropped something over there, but I couldn't quite conceptualize it. as it is, right? I was confused. And so that's a case of the mind world relationship and Husserl and Dallas are saying, ah, pay attention to that case.
What's happening. And, and, and Willard taking off from Husserl develops a theory of concepts where what's happening in the mind world relationship is that our, our concepts, these are kind of properties of the mind property of conscious intentionality that our concepts have a natural affinity. For objects.
So our concepts are kind of going out into the world and, and I was trying to conceptualize that little object on the floor and, and I, I take my sock concept and it come back disappointed. It's no, it's not a sock. That's not what that is. And, and you take another concept. And then finally, it was actually an interesting this case that I really couldn't make out what that object was.
And I realized, of course, anyone else would have just gotten up to see what it was, but I was like, Oh no, this is a philosophical moment. I'm struggling to accurately conceptualize the world. And I actually had a memory from the day before that, Oh, I bought something at the store. And I remember now I took it out of its packaging and I dropped the packaging over there.
I know what it is, it's the empty white cardboard carton that I crumpled up from that thing I bought. But once I conceptualized that object correctly, I saw it for what it is. I all of a sudden moved from a state of confusion or disappointment and my concepts changed. Kind of grasp that object. And so Husserl and Willard in his own way are saying, yes, when the mind comes into contact with reality, there's something that happens there.
And we can analyze the act of knowing and, and explain, at least in a certain kind of explanation, explain kind of theoretically, phenomenologically, what's happening in a successful or accurate grasp of reality and what's happening in cases where that's We're misapprehending reality. And again, that's, I gave a case of kind of physical sense perception, but extrapolate that to moral knowledge.
You can extrapolate that to interpreting scripture, right? Grasp what Paul is saying in Romans. chapter one, as it actually is. And that's an interest. There's a different methodology there and a different kind of humility that needs to attend biblical interpretation, but it would be the same basic understanding of the process of knowing where we're bringing certain concepts and pre understandings to the text.
And we're kind of trying to accurately conceptualize what in this case, St. Paul is intending to communicate in Romans chapter one or whatever it might be. What my wife's trying to tell me as she. And he, tries to describe some sort of issue she's having with our kids or something like that. So conceptualization is always involved in interpretation.
And what Husserl and Willard kind of brought and others have brought is an understanding of conceptualization where concepts don't construct reality, but con stru, concepts open us to reality as it is because there's an affinity between concepts and their objects.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, it's this, it's like getting the relation right.
We talk about the mind world relation, the idea from Willard's perspective that there is a world to know, or there is an other to know, right? We can then like, when it becomes about not just proposition knowledge, but knowledge by acquaintance, and then there's another person to know that is not me, then it's now this wonderfully fascinating and Bountiful question of trying to get our knowledge of the other, right?
That's right. And getting that relationship between us and the world that's out there that starts when we're young and we start collecting data and we start putting that data together and our knowing minds construct an understanding, right? If they don't construct the world, they construct an understanding of the world.
Right. And as that map becomes more nuanced and more carefully detailed, we start getting things right. We start getting things wrong all the time. It's really fascinating.
Steve Porter: That relational and personal view of knowledge is part of why Dallas would say, God gifted us with the possibility of knowing. And it has to do with the nature of being a person because knowledge Knowledge by nature doesn't force itself on one.
Reality doesn't, in a sense, doesn't force itself on us, particularly complex kinds of reality. I can resist having knowledge of it. And so, Because God is a loving God, and because relationship with Him is a personal process that's dependent on knowledge, we have a choice in the matter. We have a choice whether to submit to the ways in which we can come to know God and what He's up to in the world.
And even once we commit to knowing God, But we still have a role to play in, do I really want to know him? And so knowledge gives, the nature of knowledge itself and the nature of human knowing is a way that God loves us and treats us as agents and persons in the world and gives us a choice regarding him.
And so again, knowledge for Willard, uh, it was at the heart of it all because it was only possible because God loved him. Created the world and created human, uh, agents to, to be able to have knowledge, and it allowed for love. Knowledge allows for loving internet, allows for understanding, it allows for compassion.
But it, but again, it allows for, for moral agency to, to, to make choices to either come to know. and interpret the other or interpret important realities aright, but it also gives us various ways to deceive ourselves and to resist knowledge, to hide from knowledge, to, to even shelter ourselves, push off from knowledge in order to do what we want to do when we know it's wrong.
I mean, I think one of the things that happens with weakness of the will, when it comes to moral choice is when we really want to lie. We suddenly go into this rationalization process thinking, generally, I think Lyon's wrong, but maybe this isn't a case of Lyon, or maybe there's some exceptions to Lyon, right, where I'm doing some sort of mental gymnastics when it comes to my knowledge of what's right and wrong in order to kind of give permission to my will to do what it wants to do.
And so there, the human, the moral psychology is knowledge is a constraint, and yet we have The ability to kind of shelter ourself from knowledge in order to justify or to kind of, again, take, take us off the hook. I just won't think about it in some way, kind of allow my volition to. So, so again, I think a lot of the stuff that Willard says about spiritual disciplines and moral and spiritual formation, it can be understood in terms of a moral psychology where knowledge.
It has a very important role to play in constraining desire when it comes to the will.
Evan Rosa: Willard talked about knowledge as a potential God's eye view that we could end up either matching or sharing in some sense or approximating perhaps. And I'm quoting here from an article he wrote in 1999. On my view, he says, thoughts and their concepts do not modify the objects.
which make up reality. They merely match up or fail to match up with them in a certain way. Thus, there would be a way things are and the realism there would be vindicated along with the possibility at least of a God's eye view. And what's interesting about this is let's just map it on to contemporary disconnection.
I can't remember when I started saying this, probably when my kids started lying, but I said, Hey, listen, when you lie about stuff. You're disconnecting yourself from the world, right? When you choose to try to cover up the truth in some significant way, you are building a wall between yourself and the world.
You're building a wall in between you and me. And of course these are little fibs for the most part, but nonetheless. It's interesting to think about that centrality of truth and the ability to have a, an arbiter when it comes to matters of faith. especially heated disagreement. Yeah. When there is an arbiter around which we could humbly approach, right?
Supposing that both sides have the ability to humbly approach a topic, it's at least presents a possibility under which we could have a shared experience of the world. And the alternative to me suggests that if there was not that, then really things do boil down to Who's more powerful. It just becomes a zero sum game of power rather than a shared experience.
Steve Porter: No, I think you're right, Evan. And I think that's a really important point. There is an independent court of appeals. And again, whether you're talking to your kids about what the truth is when they might be lying or yes, whether we're talking about a global political situation between two countries or something, if the parties involved are willing to admit that there is a fact of the matter about.
What's right and what's good, or even just what reality is about climate change or whatever, then at least we have, everyone has the same goal, which is to align with the truth and to understand how things really are so that we can effectively deal with whether there's a problem or what the problem is.
But if we don't have any, Anything outside of us that again is constraining our views of the matter, then we can't cooperate together. Or if we have something outside of us, constrained our views, namely reality, but someone's willing to lie or shield themselves from the truth, you know, not humble themselves as you were talking about and admit that.
Yeah, we were wrong, or I misjudged that situation, or your view is right. If we're not willing to be sincere seekers of what is true, then it just breaks down trust, it breaks down the ability to cooperate with one another, and ultimately breaks down the ability to find ways to make the world better for everyone, because we're not able to solve the problem.
And address the problems that do exist. So, so knowledge, I mean, it's, in that sense, it is a great gift that, that God has created a stable reality that can be known by the human mind. And then we shouldn't be surprised. If one of humanity's strategies to resist God becomes the denial of knowledge and the denial of reality, even it's the ultimate escape from, from God is to, uh, yeah, I'm thinking of Richard Rorty here because Richard Rorty actually thought epistemological realism was manufactured Like, we got rid of God in modern Western intellectual life.
We don't believe in God anymore. But then we invented objective reality as this new external constraint, and Ren Rorty actually argues in this article called Solidarity or Objectivity. And he says, objective reality is really just a holdover from the idea of a mind independent God who exercises authority.
And so we really need to kind of break free of the shackles of objective reality too. And Rorty thought that leaves us in what he called solidarity. I mean, I think solidarity there is kind of, we're all in this together. There's no hope. So let's at least not kill each other kind of solidarity rather than the kind of solidarity we were describing, which was.
Cooperation about coming to know reality as it is, which is, you can imagine a different kind of community that's fostered through that
Evan Rosa: method. Yeah. It's worth pointing out the ways in which, and I think this is currently in vogue in contemporary philosophy, which is, and it's, so it's worth pointing out the ways in which knowledge and rationality can be weaponized.
In certain ways, right? So this is not to suggest that that knowledge has any kind of exclusivity to a particular method. It's really, it's, it's way up the river in the sense that it's accessible to each and every human at the level of. human equality and human nature. But I want to continue to talk about the resistance to knowledge because this is another sort of important component to Dallas's work, a loss, a resistance to knowledge at a personal, at an ecclesial, with respect to the church and at a cultural level.
Steve Porter: And he actually mentions this point of domination and oppression that's that you are mentioning, Evan, and I think that is important to. To note is that he certainly understood that knowledge has been or purported knowledge has been used to oppress and marginalize people. and justify atrocities. And so again, like many other things, knowledge has an incredible power.
And, and so kind of that Nietzschean will to power, so to speak of those who claim to, to know reality are in a position of authority and power over those. And that has been used in horribly disastrous ways. The question is whether the best thing to do in response is to say there is no knowledge, and that's the way you get out from knowledge being used to oppress, or whether you stand against oppression and injustice in the name of knowledge.
I mean, that was certainly Martin Luther King Jr. 's way was he wasn't trying to say, you Here's the way to stand against racial discrimination against black Americans is to say there is no knowledge. He was saying, I mean, to Christians, he was saying, look, this is what love entails. If you understand if the God of love, then you would stand against racial injustice.
And so that's to stand against injustice and oppression on the basis of knowledge, not to discredit knowledge as a way to get out from, because ultimately Rorty's attempt to try to call for solidarity without. knowledge or without reality is a hope and a prayer. I mean, you're just hoping that more people agree to lock arms and, and not kill each other than for someone else to say, why not?
If there is no point to it all, and there is no objective truth about things, then why can't I just? Take matters into my own hands and do what I want to do. And there'd be no, there'd be no basis on which to respond to that person if there is no reality on which to stand. So I do think that's an important point.
Evan Rosa: So one of the really interesting things about you, Steve, is that you helped to complete a project. of Dallas's on what he was calling the disappearance of moral knowledge. And you did this with Greg Tenelsoff, our mutual friend and Aaron Preston. And that is such a provocative Idea, right? The disappearance of moral knowledge.
One, it suggests that there was moral knowledge in the first place. And two, it suggests that it's disappeared to some extent. I want to talk a little bit about this as a form of the human resistance to knowledge in its cultural and personal and ecclesial contexts. How has moral knowledge
Steve Porter: Yeah, good. And we could do a whole episode on the disappearance of moral knowledge.
By that, Dallas didn't mean that moral knowledge wasn't available and wasn't possible, but that it had disappeared from public discourse and from the public mind, at least in the Western world. and perhaps particularly North America. So, so reading from an essay called Where Is Moral Knowledge? He says, but one way of characterizing the condition of North American society at present is to say that moral knowledge of good and evil, of what is morally admirable and despicable right and wrong is no longer available in our world to people generally.
It has disappeared as a reliable resource for living. And he thought there were social causes to this. And so he would He would point back to a time in which it could just be assumed and even taught and presented, for instance, within public schools, that lying was wrong and cheating was wrong. And you shouldn't do that.
And even here are some reasons why it wasn't just that it was kind of a cultural assumption that lying was wrong, but that we could kind of articulate that life is better when you don't lie or you don't cheat. And here's why. And so we were presenting these things as a better way to live, to live truthfully, to live honestly.
And he would give the example of teaching a class on ethics at USC, and he said now if he had on his ethics exam, true or false, lying is morally wrong, and a student said false, I don't think it's morally wrong, I think there's nothing wrong with lying, that he actually couldn't mark the student wrong. If he graded a student down, for having a, uh, a different moral belief that student could appeal and say, who are you to impose your moral views on me?
And if the teacher stood his or her ground and said, no, that's your moral view is wrong. That's in an incorrect view. That's false. That the student could appeal to the Dean. And if the Dean didn't go with the student, eventually a court would that, that in our world, there is no moral knowledge in our public discourse that you can believe whatever you want to believe about morality as long as you don't hurt anybody, but you can actually believe things that would lead you to hurt somebody as long as you don't act on them.
And Dallas was just pointing out that as a social condition in Western society, that's new. And he pointed to various social causes that have led to this situation. where knowledge where moral truths can no longer be presented as knowledge within public discourse and oftentimes even to present arguments for certain moral positions gets dismissed because You're imposing or you're somehow doing something wrong, surprisingly, by, by kind of defending your moral point of view.
It's okay to raise up a picket sign and shout at people and tell them that you're morally right and they're morally wrong or vice versa, but to actually sit down and have kind of reasoned discussions about these things as if there's actually a, a right answer, a truth to the matter, a fact to the matter.
That has been largely given up in North American society, and we're kind of experiencing the fallout of that. So Dallas thought there were social factors and also philosophical reasons why moral theory was not taken to be an enterprise or an endeavor of coming to have knowledge of the world.
Evan Rosa: What I'm hearing here is a kind of between the options, seeing an authoritative moral knowledge and being free from that authority within the confines of harm or consent, right?
Acknowledging the autonomy of the other, there's a tension that seems to be existing there. And we've opted for one side of that, at least in Western societies and in the American experiment. We've opted for autonomy over the, and what is Dallas's response to this? There is a form of lament that you might say is there, of course.
But is this a decline narrative for Dallas? What ultimately would he bring to this particular problem that might taking the alternative, which is to live under the authority of a particular moral way of being, regardless of what the principle is, right? Like we can speak at a kind of broader, Metaethical level, which is to say that we're just no longer thinking there's any, anything really riding on that moral authority.
We're just sapping it of its power and removing its authority in our lives. And yet not across the board, right? Because I mean, now more than ever, I think people are becoming more and more morally absolutist about particular elements. Yeah. Relativism is not, it's not the problem anymore.
Steve Porter: Yeah. Just to comment first about the absolutism.
I mean, it still is interesting that I was just having an experience with my kids at the dinner table last night where they're both in high school and my son was proposing a certain moral position on a certain social issue. And I got the distinct impression that it was obvious that this was true. And there was really no willingness to enter into even a hypothetical case for the other side, that the other side of the issue was just a bigoted, closed minded, irrational.
So even when we are absolutists about some things culturally, it oftentimes still is part of this spirit of the age. It's, if you're going to be on the right side of these issues, You darn well better believe this. And if you even want to hypothetically kind of try to give a case for that, you're almost seen as betraying the cause because you're either an ally or you're nothing.
And so, so even there, the absolutism isn't rooted in knowledge. If it was really rooted in knowledge. And I do think there are some things by the way, that are just morally clear and morally repugnant, but even still, I think we have a duty to. Yeah. It's not to speak to any individual issue. I was just gonna say, we have a duty to give a case for it because oftentimes in giving a case for even the most kind of morally reprehensible act, we are still then acquainted with, again, kind of why it is we hold this as a culture and as a society or as a group or as an individual, and we see that, oh, it's the dignity of persons, or it's the, or it's the right treatment of those who are vulnerable, and so we understand kind of the basis for it, and it's not, and it becomes not just what I was taught or what I heard, but it becomes part of my own conviction and I'm grounded in it.
And so moral knowledge gives us a place to stand for justice and stand for truth. But sometimes our moral absolutes, they may be the right absolutes. But again, if they're not grounded in knowledge, they're not sustainable and they're not communicable in a way that's going to help us. And I think that's what Dallas would say, what he came down to in the last chapter of his book, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge is what does it mean to be a good person?
And ultimately what he wants to call people to is not to solve the grandiose kind of moral problems of our age, or at least not to start there, but to start with, what does it mean to be? a good person and to have a good will and to actually will the good of those around you and then to see what goods you're in a position to accomplish in your own life and in the lives that you're closest to.
And Dallas, I mean, he was optimistic in one sense. It isn't a decline narrative. It's kind of a call to persons. Come back to themselves. And he appealed to Emmanuel Levinas, who had this idea of the face of the other, and to really come to grips with how we're treating the other and what there is to do to become persons.
of goodwill, and that there's a way into that life. And again, Dallas thought the ultimate way into the life of a good person was to follow Jesus into life in the kingdom of God as the ultimate and most reliable path of becoming a person of virtue.
Evan Rosa: It really does come back to that understanding the threads of connection between the mind and the world.
I mean, of course, in this moral context. In this case that we're talking about, but an appreciation of the very strands that connect you to moral realities. That's right. It's such an important part of how we communicate that at a public level. That's right.
Steve Porter: You might, we might have a strong emotional response or, or kind of moral sentiments against or for certain behaviors.
But of course, there are certain theories, emotivist theories of ethics that just say, those are just strong feelings, whereas a view of the mind world relationship says, no, actually what's happening there is you're conceptualizing moral reality as it is, and that's causing within you a certain kind of response to the situation, which is an indicator.
Not that it's always perfect and always truth conducive, but it's, you're trying to approximate. Moral reality and there's various indicators and sometimes we're alive to them. Sometimes, oftentimes we need other people's help to kind of make us alive to the situation that we are kind of geared to navigate moral reality and to come to see it as it is.
And then again, to stand. For what is true and right, good and beautiful in the world. And again, it's, it's a beautiful vision. I mean, realism has fallen on hard times, but if you really kind of see the, the kind of life that it can, can build, uh, it's, it's really a beautiful vision of.
Evan Rosa: I mean, there's simply no way to conduct a conversation about how to read Dallas Willard without spending.
significant amount of time on the person, the work, the way of Jesus Christ in Dallas's life and thinking. It makes sense to, to wrap up here. And so it still has an important epistemological component here, and yet we're really just thinking about a different object of knowledge. But in this case, it's a sort of, it's the, it's the primordial object of knowledge.
It's that archetypal. Object of knowledge, Jesus himself. Explain exactly what Jesus meant to Dallas.
Steve Porter: Yeah. So I'll just quote one line from the divine conspiracy where Dallas says the life and words that Jesus brought into the world came in the form of information and reality. So Dallas thought Jesus was the smartest human being who's ever lived.
And of course, when you stop and think about it, you say, I guess that must be right. Who else could be smarter than Jesus? And that, that Jesus had the best answers to the most important questions. And so Dallas often talks about four fundamental questions that every human has to answer in some way, every philosophy, every religion, what is real?
What is the good life? Who is the good person? And how does one become good? And that, that Jesus had the best answers to those questions. And so what Jesus does is he comes into the world as God incarnate to show us the way, the truth, and the life that he was bringing us information about reality. And he was not only teaching that information, but he was demonstrating it.
with his life. So he embodied his answers to those questions and that he not only called disciples or students in the first century to come and follow him, but that he is ongoing in that call that, that he is alive and well, and he is still taking on disciples, students in his way of life. Willard was a realist about Jesus, that Jesus's personal presence is available by his spirit, and you can just as much enter into a life of following him in the 21st century as you could in the first century.
In fact, Jesus would have said that it's, we're actually at an advantage that he says in, in John's gospel, that it's better that he leaves so that he can send the spirit to be with us always. So there's a sense in which The presence of Jesus is more available, uh, now that he's not physically present. And yet that also brings with it its own, its own challenges in living a Christian spiritual life.
Evan Rosa: There's something that he says just in the passage that follows the one that you were there. Quoting, which is, and I'm here, I'm quoting Dallas, it is the failure to understand Jesus and his words as reality and vital information about life that explains why today we do not routinely teach those who profess allegiance to him how to do what he said was best.
We leave them to profess allegiance to him, or we expect them to, and we leave them there. Devoting our remaining efforts to attracting them to this or that. And when I think of conversations around Christian nationalism right now, around the co opting of Christianity for political power, and then just other ways in which we see a disappearance of moral knowledge, if not morality itself within Christianity, these words from Daoist.
They really do sting a bit more.
Steve Porter: Because we don't understand how to make reliable progress in becoming like Jesus. And then we trade transformation in Christ for other things. And so the church and the Christian life becomes a social arrangement or it becomes a cause evangelism or a certain political cause.
And so we, a lot of Christians have gotten a really bad reputation and oftentimes, rightly so because they've exchanged becoming more like Jesus with some other way of life that is inconsistent with. The way of Jesus. And yet that Dallas would say that is the state of large swaths of American Christianity.
And so the reputation problem, the PR problem, so to speak. that we have in the church is kind of earned, unfortunately, in a lot of cases. And the way out of it is to enter back into knowledge and understanding of Jesus and His way in His Father's kingdom by the Spirit. And the road is narrow and few are those who find it.
It has its own difficulties and challenges to follow Jesus on this narrow way. which again is part of the reason why Christians have found so many ways to get out from under. Jesus is teaching, uh, because again, as Frederica Matthews Green once said, every, everyone wants transformation, but no one likes to change.
And so I think there's something about the cost of actually changing one's life. And as Jesus put it, if you're going to come after You need to deny yourself and take up your cross daily. And that's just a way of life that, that doesn't sit well with a lot of kind of our modern comfort and convenience, particularly here in North America.
So here's a quote from Dallas in his book, The Divine Conspiracy. The practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ. accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith.
to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well being. So, so the actual, you read that and it says the practical irrelevance of the actual beings to Christ accounts for all the problems in the world, right? Of personal, social. And I think that's what Dallas is saying. He's saying, look, here is what God is up to in the world.
As C. S. Lewis would put it, the whole point of Christianity is to make us become And so, if what God is up to in the world is to make us become little Christs or to become conformed to the image of Christ, if that is the good life, that is what we were made for, and God is giving us an opportunity to be conformed into the image of Christ, then of course, our failure to do that, our failure to take Jesus seriously as having important things to say about that process or essential things to say is going to lead to everything else going haywire.
And so Dallas thought Jesus is the answer to the world today, right? This, but Jesus is the answer, not in some reductionistic sense. He's not the answer that he had some social ethic that if we just And understood his social ethic, then we could change the world. Or he's not the answer in that he had some scheme of getting your sins forgiven.
And if you just get your sins forgiven, no, Dallas says, no, the good news of Jesus. is the availability of the reign of God. It's the availability of the kingdom of God. And that's what we were made for that, that we were made to align our will with the will of God in such a way that we are reordered and transformed.
And it just turns out that there's a whole lot of us. that doesn't want that kind of transformation. And so we can enculturate that. If personally, I don't want to change, I may surround myself with people who don't think I need to change. And I may start a church that says, Oh, you're fine. You don't need to worry about gluttony, Steve, or you don't need to worry about that problem, Steve.
So I may build a church that keeps me insulated from the ways I don't want to change. And that church may be part of a culture that insulates us. And so pretty soon we're distracted from the places of change and we find it easy to justify our way of life. And again, that's where there can be kind of.
Personal psychological resistance that gets kind of embodied and concretized in our life. And then that can become ecclesial resistance where I'm part of a church that, that doesn't put the needs of the world in my face in such a way that I, I realize that I need to give more of my money away that I can justify my lifestyle or whatever it is.
And then I can be part of a larger culture that, and Willard would often reference this book by a guy named Max Picard called The Flight from God. And Picard was a sociologist, I think it's like a 1950s book. And this Picard said that, that Western culture is on a flight from God, that we are fleeing from God.
Even those of us who claim we know him and believe in him, we're still fleeing from God and we're trying to buffer. Again, going back to Charles Taylor's kind of language, we're trying to buffer ourselves from the transcendent and namely God and not have to deal with his claim on our life. And I think what's insightful, lots of things are insightful about Willard's diagnosis of that problem, but I think he sees it in the church.
He sees how we have constructed a view of the gospel of the good news of Jesus that insulates us from discipleship and allows us to live out a good Christian life by being faithful church attenders and, and tithing and maybe a little bit of involvement or leadership and you're patted on the back and told that you were a good and faithful servant when that's, that, that's not Jesus's vision of the and so Willard is continually tapping us on the shoulder and pointing us back to the risen Lord Jesus and saying, he's not about what you're about.
He's, he wants all of you, as Lewis would say, he doesn't want just a part of you. He wants all of you. And so the only response that he'll take is utter surrender. And again, that's the response that for various reasons, we We don't want to, we don't want to go there.
Evan Rosa: Steve, one of the things that you sent me in preparation for this conversation is a little blurb from an unpublished talk of Dallas's, and I find it a really fitting way to end today because of the ways that it does address both the desire for growth and the sense that, that there is something missing to this formula, that there's the desire for transformation.
There is no willingness to change. And Dallas has a good way of really putting his finger on. and diagnosing. She was so good at doing that kind of cultural diagnosis for Christianity. So I'm wondering if you could, one, read that blurb and then say a little bit about it.
Steve Porter: Yeah. And this comes from a, an audio recording.
Actually, I think it was a video of Dallas. In many ways, I believe that we are at a turning point, Dallas says, among the people of Christ today. One way of describing that turning point is that people are increasingly serious about living the life that Jesus gives to us. And not just having services, words, and rituals, but a life that is full of the goodness and power of Christ.
There is a way of doing that. There is knowledge of spiritual growth and of spiritual life that can be taught and practiced. Spiritual growth is not like lightning that hits for no reason you can think of. Many of us come out of a tradition of religion that is revivalistic and experiential. But often the mixture of theological understanding and history that has come down to us has presented spiritual growth as if somehow it were not a thing that you could have understanding of, that you could know, that you could teach, that made sense.
And so, we have often slipped into a kind of practical mysticism. The idea that if we just keep doing certain things, then maybe something will happen. We have not had an understanding of a reliable process of growth. And yeah, I love that quote because he gets into the history of it. And as you said, Evan, he gets into, we want to grow, but, but again, for many of us, we've inherited a tradition, whether it's revivalistic and experiential, or there's other, you know, liturgical traditions, but we can inherit a tradition that actually doesn't.
Take Jesus and His way seriously as a reliable pathway of growth. And I think about my own local church experience where I find it easy to imagine that someone could be struggling with anxiety or something like that. And we would recommend Buddhist mindfulness meditation. We might recommend anti anxiety medication.
We might recommend breathing exercises or a massage or something like that. In my own church, would we actually say, Jesus taught something about this. He said, we don't need to be anxious that your, your heavenly father knows you need these things. And to actually take Jesus seriously. As having what one of the editors of, of, of, of one version of the Bible I have put a, put above Jesus's teaching in Matthew chapter six about anxiety, the editorial heading was the cure for anxiety.
That Jesus has the cure for anxiety. I mean, do we take Jesus seriously as the maestro of a life well lived and that there's a way to come to him? and his people down through the ages. And that doesn't exclude what good there is in mindfulness meditation or what good there is in psychology and medication.
That, that can be all understood as part of God's way of life and Jesus's way of life. Finding freedom from anxiety, particularly in a fallen world, but that we actually see Jesus as the author and finisher, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, of our life of faith. So I think Dallas, at the end of the day, this knowledge, he's bringing it to bear on The reality of what it means to enter into life with God through the person of Jesus.
And there's a way to do that. And Jesus presented it. And the important thing too, is that one of the things we come to know is not only did Jesus teach it, but he said, lo, I am with you always, even at the end of the age, right at the end of the age. the book of Matthew there. And so Jesus does not abandon his disciples or as he puts it, leaves, leaves them as orphans, but he stays with us.
He remains with us. And so he is our teacher. He is the one who continues to lead us kind of live in person in this process of spiritual formation.
Evan Rosa: This connects so well, I think, with what the Center for Faith and Culture is trying to point out about the nature of human flourishing as well. And saying that Christ is the key.
to human flourishing. Yeah. It's really picking up on, uh, that's a different metaphor than Dallas might've used presenting the conversation about human flourishing, mental health, personal sanity, character development. And of course, uh, Society to bring normativity into the equation, to bring truth, knowledge, belief, as access to access points for those things, and then seeing it in the person of Christ as a kind of A moral stranger, in Miroslav's words, a moral stranger to contemporary society, and yet one who holds the key.
Dallas brought so much to contemporary Christianity and in a thoughtful Christian way. And, uh, it's really just, it's a great pleasure to think about the nuances of that with you as kind of picking up and being one of his standard bearers going forward. So thank you for swimming around in some Dallas Willard with me today.
Steve Porter: It's been fruitful for me and I'm happy to do it. And, and Evan, I'll just say, I mean, what you described as the Yale Center is very much a place to be. part of the mission of the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture at Westmont where we in our own way are trying to take Jesus and His way seriously, uh, as a field of study and then to articulate the reality of Christ and to understand it psychologically, philosophically, theologically, sociologically, to bring the reality of Christ and His way to the local church, to the broader society in various ways.
Evan Rosa: Steve, thanks so much for joining me on the show.
Steve Porter: Thanks for having me, Evan. It's been a pleasure. I hope we can do it again. World
Evan Rosa: is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Steve Porter and the writing of Dallas Willard Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow and Kacie Barrett. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources.
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