ok brothers, here is my diatribe about the great doctor's delivery in chapter 9. like rodilic, i have many things to comment on, but i will limit myself to this one for now.
(pg 315)
The fact is that there is now lacking a serious and expectant intention to bring Jesus' people into obedience and abundance through training.
My question/observation is this ... i don't believe that the issue is necessarily in the hands of those who plan out and implement the discipleship curriculum, (although there equal amounts of blame to go around, ignorance of history, spiritual laziness, and others), i wonder if the root of the cause in the portrayal of the gospel message from all of our lips. Easy believism so to speak. we present a gospel message that smacks of "pray a prayer and your in". the way that i see it, each time that jesus dealt with someone he seems to give them a corresponding task to "test" their obedience. faith is referred to as trust and obey. mathematically the equation is faith = (trust + obedience). we seem to have turned it into a flow chart that looks like ...hear the message -- respond by prayer---you are now a christian--- maybe you should do some good stuff. myself, i think i have been misleading people with a flow chart and have been disappointed by the lack of lasting results. i think obedience needs to be presented as part of the original package.... what do you think?
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I've got a lot of things preying on my mind from this chapter. I think Greg's questions deserves mucho discussion (perhaps his frustration too), so I'll just cast lots and toss one of my things out.
I feel very nervous talking about this, but in an environment that experiences the two wings of theological approach Willard presents on page 329, I feel often that I meet people who love theology, love the study of the Bible, love "church", etc., but are totally unaware that these all fall short of loving God. I can't rule my self out of this confusion. When Willard then, talks about a theology that offers a
lovable God, how do we bring disciples to an understanding of love that allows this criterion to be consistent? Willard presents this criterion as if it is the only thing needed to measure the validity of the theology. The problem for me is that the definition of "loving God" is different for those in the two wings that he references. Each set are sure that their theology passes Willard's test.
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reading is a solitary endeavor. two eyes, one brain. read aloud or read the same book as others (as we are doing) and it becomes a part of a communal endeavor. divine consp. is a book, as we all know. (one with long chapters i might say.) adding on to greg's question, how could we model a healthy reading-together process that differentiates kingdomlearning from self-help-like endeavors? in other words, shouldn't the ways we pursue our education about kingdom living model the type of living itself? (i'm not saying solitary reading is a bad thing. i'm trying to figure out if the way we go about learning should match the way we want to live.)
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This is hard, because I have a lot I want to say (first time in a while) before I ask the question. Maybe I can borrow some comment space on Rod's blog this morning to get some of this out. Basically the gnawing frustration I have had with
Conspiracy has evolved into a full-fledged gripe - the emphasis on introverted individualism must be acknowledged so we avoid taking this book to be more authoritative than it is. For all his talk about learning being more than information, bless Willard's heart - he can't help but be thoroughly academic and philosophical, can he? He mentions (in his footnotes) fellowship as a discipline, but he reduces the "indispensable four" down to individual and intellectual pursuits (silence, solitude, study and worship, the only one he doesn't explain in detail). The writer of Hebrews tells us emphatically not to give up the HABIT of meeting together (actually we are no avoid the habit of NOT meeting together!). Sounds like "community" is not one of the optional disciplines to me. I don't mean that we should find a place to sit in a pew and sing songs and hear a sermon (Jolie and I have been doing plenty of that), but that we must be part of a community of faith in order to be a growing apprentice. We can start with our own families being seen as micro communities of character.
OK, sorry. There's plenty more there. This is actually a good chapter, especially for you institutional church staff member-types! As Rod has already blogged, discipleship is not a program or an series of instructions. It's about changing habits in order to indirectly change our inner selves (Willard's other books are very good in this respect). Dang, got distracted again. All right, my question is:
Since Willard's "4" are sort of arbitrary, can we come up with our own "core disciplines"? [I'll try not to answer my own question until everyone else has chimed in.]
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