The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

The eternal life of which Jesus speaks is not knowledge about God but an intimately interactive relationship with him.

James Findlay

Church People in the Struggle

social gospel radicalism of the 1920s and 1930s.

Twenty years later, Findlay reports,

Shadows of the Social Gospel

John A. T. Robinson.

But That I Can't Believe

Love comes out on top.

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.

just as there was a serious question as to what constitutes saving faith, so there is a problem with the precise nature of redemptive love.

William James

Varieties of religious experience

We have from the Christian left, after all, just another gospel of sin management, but one whose substance is provided by Western (American) social and political ideals of human existence in a secular world.

The Search for God at Harvard, Ari Goldman

Where we spontaneously look for “information” on how to live shows how we truly feel and who we really have confidence in.

And nothing more forcibly demonstrates the extent to which we automatically assume the irrelevance of Jesus as teacher for our “real” lives.

Thomas Oden

After Modernity ... What?

while those to the left claimed to regard Jesus’ ethical teachings highly, the ethic they ascribed to him turns out upon examination to be derived from the reflections of philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx—or even, in more recent years, thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Michel Foucault.

(Matt. 5:44).

(Col. 3:17, 23).

We are flooded with what I have called “gospels of sin management,” in one form or another, while Jesus’ invitation to eternal life now—right in the midst of work, business, and profession—remains for the most part ignored and unspoken.

Does the gospel I preach and teach have a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural “next step”?

What can we reasonably expect would result from people actually believing the substance of my message?

“Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.”

we must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can naturally become his students or apprentices. We can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now.

the Kingdom of God?”

The Coming Kingdom of the Messiah

GUSTAVE MARTELET, THE RISEN CHRIST AND THE EUCHARISTIC WORLD

MAX PICARD, THE FLIGHT FROM GOD

Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.

Vladimir Nabokov

Beneficence

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).

It is deeply illuminating of kingdom living to understand that his steady happiness was not ruled out by his experience of sorrow and even grief.

we must understand that God does not “love” us without liking us—

through gritted teeth—as “Christian” love is sometim...

Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the ear...

our daily experience, under pressure from many quarters, constantly keeps us from thoughtful living and “dumbs us down,” in many ways—especially theologically.

If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.

We learn from the psalms how to think and act in reference to God.

They show us who God is, and that expands and lifts and directs our minds and hearts.

In the grand and carefully phrased old words of Adam Clarke, God is 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 infinit...

Think of someone whose every action, whose slightest thought or inclination, automatically assumes the reality of the God Adam Clarke describes.

When you do this you will have captured nothing less than the thought of Jesus himself, along with the faith and life he came to bring.

And with such realities in mind, 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 Go...

make it your top priority to be part of what God is doing and to have the kind of goodness he has. Everything else you need will be provided.

When Paul on Mars Hill told his Greek inquisitors that in God we “live and move and exist,” he was expressing in the most literal way possible the fact learned from the experience of God’s covenant people, the Jews. He was not speaking metaphorically or abstractly.

The same is true when Jesus chided Nicodemus, who took himself to be a “teacher in Israel,” for not understanding the birth “from above”—the receiving of a superhuman kind of life from the God who is literally with us in surrounding space. 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.”

God called to Hagar out of heaven,

(Gen. 21:17–19).

the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven and said…Don’t touch the boy” (Gen. 22:11, 15). In such passages “heaven” is never thought of as far away—in the clouds perhaps, or by the moon. It is always right here, “at hand.”

Jacob on the run, asleep in a ditch on his pillow of stone, saw the earth and heaven connected by a passageway, with angels coming and going, and the Lord himself standing beside him. He awoke in awe, saying, “God lives here!…I’ve stumbled into his home! This is the awesome entrance to Heaven” (Gen. 28:12–19 LB). God spoke to Moses from heaven in the presence of the people of Israel while giving the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20), and thundered from heaven upon the enemies of Israel during battle (1 Sam. 7:10).

On numerous occasions fire materialized out of the air (Gen. 15:17; Exod. 13:21; 1 Kings 18:38; 2 Kings 1:10; 1 Chron. 21:26, etc.). The manifestation in atmospheric fire became almost a routine event in Israel’s history, so much so that God came to be known a...