McKnight opens a series on Keas Keasler's book on Dallas Willard by recalling his own debt to Willard, especially The Divine Conspiracy. He adopts Keasler's summary of Willard as a practice-oriented theologian of the Christian life whose view of formation joins grace and effort and is inherently missional. He also holds that Willard's ecclesiology was thin, but says he may change his mind, and he calls Willard's focus on the person we become virtue ethics.
Reviewed
Its text teaches none of the positions Doxa lists.
- Endorses a source· Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy
Dallas Willard's writings and speaking have been of great benefit, and The Divine Conspiracy is the best of his books.
- Endorses a source· Keas Keasler, Kingdom Apprenticeship: Dallas Willard's Formational Theology and Missional Vision
Keasler's book gives a wide-ranging, well-informed perspective on Willard's thought, and Keasler knows Willard's books better than the author does.
- Adopts· Keas Keasler
Willard is best understood as a theologian of the Christian life, oriented to practice rather than theory, and so belongs with neither practical theologians nor systematicians.
- Adopts· Keas Keasler
Willard's approach to formation joins divine grace and human action in a participatory way that is not Pelagian, correcting a reductionistic, intellectualist soteriology that arose from Protestant anxiety over works righteousness.
- Adopts· Keas Keasler
Willard's theory of spiritual formation is inherently missional, meaning participation in the triune God's ongoing work to redeem and renew the world.
Willard's ecclesiology was thin because it centered so heavily on individual spiritual formation, though the author is open to changing his mind.
Willard's conviction that the most important outcome of life is the person we become is virtue ethics, a characterological form of spiritual formation.
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