The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

We do not have to—we cannot—surrender the valid practice of distinguishing and discerning how things are in order to avoid condemning others. We can, however, train ourselves to hold people responsible and discuss their failures with them—and even assign them penalties, if we are, for example, in some position over them—without attacking their worth as human beings or marking them as rejects. A practiced spirit of intelligent agape will make this possible. Recall the words of Paul and the example of Saint Dominic referred to earlier. But that is a complicated task at best: not only because we may not know how to do it, which is often the case, but also because those we appraise may not know how to take our appraisal in any other way than as an attack on their person. This is especially true today, when people are so desperately seeking approval. Having no adequate sense of themselves as spiritual beings, or of their place in a good world of God, they regard any negative appraisal of what they do as condemnation of themselves as persons. They have nowhere to stand to do otherwise. It is interesting and important to observe that today the old phrase “hate the sin and love the sinner” no longer is accepted. If you disapprove of what I do or how I do it, it is now generally thought, you can only be condemning me and rejecting me. This is another evidence of the devastating effect of the loss to our culture of any idea of the self as a spiritual being that not only has but is a...