The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.

The killing fields of Cambodia come from philosophical discussions in Paris.

In the shambles of fragmented assurances from the past, our longing for goodness and rightness and acceptance—and orientation—makes us cling to bumper slogans, body graffiti, and gift shop nostrums that in our profound upside-down-ness somehow seem deep but in fact make no sense: “Stand up for your rights” sounds so good. How about “All I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten”? And “Practice random kindnesses and senseless acts of beauty”? And so forth. Such

“Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.”

What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound.

Now the law is “Be cute or die.” The only sincerity bearable is clever insincerity.

In its deepest nature and meaning our universe is a community of boundless and totally competent love.

Does Jesus only enable me to “make the cut” when I die? Or to know what to protest, or how to vote or agitate and organize? It is good to know that when I die all will be well, but is there any good news for life? If I had to choose, I would rather have a car that runs than good insurance on one that doesn’t. Can I not have both?

The obviously well kept secret of the “ordinary” is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine,

his kingdom is not something confined to their hearts or to the “inner” world of human consciousness. It is not some matter of inner attitude or faith that might be totally disconnected from the public, behavioral, visible world. It always pervades and governs the whole of the physical universe—parts of planet earth occupied by humans and other personal beings, the satanic, slightly excepted for a while.

So when Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth as it is in heaven.” With this prayer we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence.

Jesus came among us to show and teach the life for which we were made. He came very gently, opened access to the governance of God with him, and set afoot a conspiracy of freedom in truth among human beings. Having overcome death he remains among us. By relying on his word and presence we are enabled to reintegrate the little realm that makes up our life into the infinite rule of God. And that is the eternal kind of life. Caught up in his active rule, our deeds become an element in God’s eternal history. They are what God and we do together, making us part of his life and him a part of ours.

The reality of God’s rule, and all of the instrumentalities it involves, is present in action and available with and through the person of Jesus. That is Jesus’ gospel. The obvious present reality of the kingdom is what provoked the responses we have just discussed. New Testament passages make plain that this kingdom is not something to be “accepted” now and enjoyed later, but something to be entered now (Matt. 5:20; 18:3; John 3:3, 5). It is something that already has flesh-and-blood citizens (John 18:36; Phil. 3:20) who have been transformed into it (Col. 1:13) and are fellow workers in it (Col. 4:11).

It came in his person and acted in his actions. This was not an entirely new phenomenon in biblical events. When the Egyptian magicians in Pharaoh’s court saw what happened at the word of Moses, they acknowledged, “This is the finger of God” (Exod. 8:19).

now “the whole earth is full of His glory” (Isa. 6:3). True, few see it. The earth is not yet “filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” But that too one day “shall be” (Heb. 2:14).

Unfortunately, it is not. What the slogan really conveys is that forgiveness alone is what Christianity is all about, what is genuinely essential to it. It says that you can have a faith in Christ that brings forgiveness, while in every other respect your life is no different from that of others who have no faith in Christ at all.

Can we seriously believe that God would establish a plan for us that essentially bypasses the awesome needs of present human life and leaves human character untouched? Would he leave us even temporarily marooned with no help in our kind of world, with our kinds of problems: psychological, emotional, social, and global? Can we believe that the essence of Christian faith and salvation covers nothing but death and after? Can we believe that being saved really has nothing whatever to do with the kinds of persons we are?

History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally.

When we examine the broad spectrum of Christian proclamation and practice, we see that the only thing made essential on the right wing of theology is forgiveness of the individual’s sins. On the left it is removal of social or structural evils. The current gospel then becomes a “gospel of sin management.”

What right and left have in common is that neither group lays down a coherent framework of knowledge and practical direction adequate to personal transformation toward the abundance and obedience emphasized in the New Testament, with a corresponding redemption of ordinary life. What is taught as the essential message about Jesus has no natural connection to entering a life of discipleship to him.

The mere record of a magical moment of mental assent will open the door.

The Christian tradition certainly deals with guilt and the afterlife, but by no means does it take them to be the only issues involved in salvation.

we get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now—the eternal kind of life—as the target. The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that this is indeed salvation, with discipleship, forgiveness, and heaven to come as natural parts.

The entire biblical tradition from beginning to end is one of the intimate involvement of God in human life—or else alienation from it.

In the Gospels, by contrast, “the gospel” is the good news of the presence and availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance on Jesus the Anointed.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the older liberal theology, with its “social gospel,” had pretty well proven itself unable to accomplish the transformation of human existence that it had envisioned and promised. Bludgeoned to its knees by world events, its intellectual capital exhausted, and incapable of providing concepts that could clarify exactly what was happening in Western life and society at the time, it awakened to find itself, as a social and institutional reality, on the side of the oppressor when the civil rights movement began to dawn.

However, for many in the liberal church, clergy and layperson alike, that language was not just a substitute for religious belief. It became their faith.

The older liberal theology, which indeed was still primarily a theology or a view of God, died and was resurrected in the form of a social ethic that one could share with people who had no reliance on a present God or a living Christ at all. Total inclusivism of all beliefs and practices except oppressive ones, such as the exclusivism of traditional Christianity itself, was the natural next step.

the real Jesus, as is now commonly said, is “one who identified with and loves oppressed people and those who are different,” calling us to do the same. These words now express the redemptive vision of the Christian left, just as “trusted Christ for forgiveness” or “prayed to receive Jesus” does for the right.

in the hands of the theological left, church creed and ritual become mere comforting symbols of “another” realm, remote and inaccessible at best, and possibly one of mere imagination or sentiment.

the American dream is that “people can do or be what they want if they just go ahead and do it.”22 Desire becomes sacred, and whatever thwarts desire is evil or sin.

We lose any sense of the difference between information and wisdom, and act accordingly.

Who among us has personal knowledge of a seminar or course of study and practice being offered in a “Christian Education Program” on how to “love your enemies, bless those that curse you, do good to those that hate you, and pray for those who spit on you and make your life miserable”? (Matt.

There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action.

One of the most outstanding features of Jesus’ personality was precisely an abundance of joy. This he left as an inheritance to his students, “that their joy might be full” (John 15:11).

his steady happiness was not ruled out by his experience of sorrow and even grief.

the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.4

it then becomes illuminating to say that God is love. This proves to be very different from forcing a bedraggled human version of “love” into a mental blank where God is supposed to be, and then identifying God as that.

This bold and slyly humorous assurance about all the basic elements of our existence—food and drink and clothing and other needs of life—can only be supported on a clear-eyed vision that a totally good and competent God is right here with us to look after us. And his presence is precisely what the word heaven or, more accurately, the heavens in plural, conveys in the biblical record as well as through much of Christian history.

But it is precisely from the space immediately around us that God watches and God acts.

To be born “from above,” in New Testament language, means to be interactively joined with a dynamic, unseen system of divine reality in the midst of which all of humanity moves about—whether it knows it or not And that, of course, is “The Kingdom Among Us.”

But do we actually believe this? I mean, are we ready automatically to act as if we stand here and now and always in the presence of the great being described by Adam Clarke, who fills and overflows all space, including the atmosphere around our body?

The damage done to our practical faith in Christ and in his government-at-hand by confusing heaven with a place in distant or outer space, or even beyond space, is incalculable. Of course God is there too. But instead of heaven and God also being always present with us, as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away and, most likely, at a much later time—not here and not now.

But the response to this mistake has led many to say that God is not in space at all, not that “old man in the sky,” but instead is “in” the human heart. And that sounds nice, but it really does not help. In fact, it just makes matters worse. “In my heart” easily becomes “in my imagination.” And, in any case, the question of God’s relation to space and the physical world remains unresolved. If he is not in space at all, he is not in human life, which is lived in space. Those vast oceans of “empty space” just sit there glowering at the human “heart” realm where God has, supposedly, taken refuge from science and the real world.

It gives us a pretty metaphor but leaves us vainly grasping for the reality.

This is how the call to spirituality comes to us. We ought to be spiritual in every aspect of our lives because our world is the spiritual one. It is what we are suited to. Thus Paul, from his profound grasp of human existence, counsels us, “To fill your mind with the visible, the ‘flesh,’ is death, but to fill your mind with the spirit is life and peace” (Rom. 8:6).

Our “lives of quiet desperation,” in the familiar words of Thoreau, are imposed by hopelessness. We find our world to be one where we hardly count at all, where what we do makes little difference, and where what we really love is unattainable, or certainly is not secure. We become frantic or despairing

“Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.”21 They are relentlessly driven to seek, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, “Doors in the Wall” that entombs them

The awareness that the passage of time alone would bring everything he loved and valued to nothing left him completely hopeless. For years he lived in this condition, until he finally came to faith in a world of God where all that is good is preserved.

The mind or the minding of the spirit is life and peace precisely because it locates us in a world adequate to our nature as ceaselessly creative beings under God. The “mind of the flesh,” on the other hand, is a living death.