The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

Dikaiosune Jesus’ account of dikaiosune, or of being a really good person, is given in Matt. 5:20–48. We need to stop for a comment on this special term that plays such a large part in the thought world of classical and Hellenistic Greek culture, as well as in the language of the Bible and in the early form of Christianity that emerged to conquer the Greco-Roman world of the second and third centuries. The human need to know how to live is perennial. It has never been more desperate than it is today, of course—in Los Angeles and New York, in London, Paris, and Berlin. But this need is always desperate. That is an unalterable part of the human condition. It is especially urgent in times and places where there is social instability. Such instability does not allow us to maintain the illusion that being a good Jones or Catholic or American or Armenian or Jew solves the problem. We have to have something deeper. The search for something deeper had become a serious intellectual and spiritual project in the Mediterranean world by the fifth century B.C. or even earlier. That search was, in fact, worldwide in scope,8 but nowhere did it achieve a higher result than in the great prophets of Israel, such as Amos, Micah, and Isaiah. Its first thorough and systematic treatment within the powers of human reason is found in Plato’s Republic, which would be more accurately translated The City. This book is really a study of the human soul and of the condition in which the soul must be in ...