Willard, the Gospel, and the Failure of Spiritual Formation

For those who know my story and my work know how profound an impact Dallas Willard has had on me. Both through his writing and in person, Willard rescued me from a kind of biblical and theological abstraction that failed to recognize the call into the presence and action of God.

But one of the things I continue to appreciate and love about Dallas is often ignored by those who follow him. When Dallas would go to a conference he would often encourage people to push back on him to show him ways he is wrong and to teach him so that he could learn. Dallas was a profoundly humble man and wasn’t deluded into thinking he had it all together. He even went so far as to articulate his failures personally in very corporate settings.

But I find that when I raise questions or offer critiques of things he said, I hear from folks about “the takedown piece you wrote about Willard” or “your rejection of Willard’s thought.” But this assumption actually stems from a failure to follow him faithfully.

If you accept wholesale everything he said without critically engaging you are failing to do as he asked. If you think any disagreement with him is a “takedown piece,” you are not following the sturdiness he had in the Lord but are reacting from your own fragility.

In this piece, I want to name one aspect where I think Dallas was right but his approach to dealing with it was, in my mind, unhelpful and misguided. I don’t like being critical of how Dallas approached things, but it is particularly important to name these not only because he asked people to, but because those who follow him have a tendency to perpetuate this error.

What is this mistake?

It is the tendency in the spiritual formation world to say things like “the gospel people have heard is too small,” or, “the gospel presented today is justification without a life,” or “the gospel is depicted today is half of a gospel.”

Willard had a very in-depth historical understanding of these sorts of things. This wasn’t just an off-hand critique, or an angsty rebuttal to how the church failed him. This was a claim about how, in certain segments of evangelicalism, there was a tendency to preach a gospel that offered forgiveness in exchange for mental consent (and mental consent was called “faith”).

Today, however, folks that follow him tend to throw these phrases around without the knowledge he had, the understanding of the Christian tradition, and the broader context of teaching in which he situated these sorts of claims.

Too often, as well, they don’t have his humility.

Pause for a second and just think about that.

Is it possible to say something true that is still not a proper way to approach others? Yes.

Just go and sit with 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 and think about how Paul talks about the weaker brother or sister, or consider Romans 14 and ask why Paul tells us to “decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother or sister.”

Even when it is true that people have heard a gospel that is reducible to forgiveness alone without calling them to a life, the way of love demands more of us.

How so?

To tell someone that they have been given half of a gospel, or something like that, is to say that they have been given a false gospel. It is to question their pastors, elders, and leaders, and will probably lead them to question their entire church tradition.

Even if it is true in their context and experience, we should expect one of two things to happen: 1. Either they are incredibly wary of what you are saying and think you are a false teacher, or 2. They accept what you say and it erodes their trust in their leaders, their prior teaching, and could very well awaken questions of whether they are even a part of a Christian church.

In fact, I would say that if someone isn’t troubled and a bit incredulous at someone who says this to them, that is exactly the kind of thing that should trouble us!

But I can’t even begin to count the times I’ve heard someone say something absurd like “We lost the gospel after World War II and maybe even the Reformation,” and then act as if it is shocking that people relate to them as false teachers. That is exactly what you should expect, because this is exactly how false teachers relate to people (even if they are not, in this case, actually false teachers).

Unfortunately, not only do we say this at coffee shops and in the purgatory that is the comment sections of YouTube, but I increasingly see people make these kind of remarks and assertions on podcasts and social media broadly (one of the many reasons I believe that engaging in theological debates on social media is what Paul warns against when he talks about gossip and arguing about words).

Proper Christian faithfulness should lead us to show them that they have the truth, but they have just failed to fully hear and internalize it. As Dallas himself would tell people, we need to go back to the original visions of whatever denomination of people we are engaging and remind them of the depths that their tradition offers.

Willard also liked to remind people that he wasn’t doing anything that couldn’t be found in Luther or Calvin (whether that is entirely true is a different question, but the broad scope of it, which is how he meant it I think, is exactly right).

To speak with others faithfully is to help them see what they believe as Protestants. If it is true that their church hasn’t preached a full gospel, show them how they have deviated from their own tradition.

The idea that there is a Protestant gospel that doesn’t call you to a life is utter fantasy. There simply isn’t, nor has there ever been, a Protestant gospel that separates justification from sanctification. You wouldn’t find that in Luther, Calvin, Vermigli, Melanchthon, Turretin, Owen, Wesley, or Edwards (for more on Calvin and Wesley specifically, see my book that is coming out soon, Sanctification and the Life of Faith, which is on sale here).

If we meet a Protestant pastor who is teaching that the gospel is reducible to justification, we should’t argue that they only have half of a gospel. We should argue that they have failed to articulate the full gospel as both Scripture and the Protestant tradition have articulated it, which is the very gospel they claim to believe! If they don’t claim to believe it, that leads us to a different conversation, but I don’t tend to find that to be the case.

Unfortunately, what tends to happen is that two assertions are leveled at people who don’t really know their own tradition very well: First, you’ve only embraced half of the gospel, and second, the half they have failed to embrace is about truly being a Christian.

Employing guilt, shame, and a decent amount of fear, people hear that they haven’t really received the good news only inevitably leads them to believe they have to generate a life that looks like Jesus. Embracing a new law, because they are unable to understand how their good works relate to Jesus, they turn to spiritual disciplines to somehow “complete the gospel” they have received.

There is a deeper and more historically informed way to understand the gospel. For Calvin and Luther, for instance, Christ is salvation, and in him we know justification and sanctification for a continual life of abiding in Christ in the presence of our heavenly Father.

On this vision, faith, hope, and love continually orient a person, not to their formation, but to Christ, in whom they are formed.

We don’t need a new gospel.

We need to learn the gospel that Scripture articulates and that defines Protestantism. If you think you are beyond such things, or if you have declared to others that they just don’t have the full gospel, you need to really step back and look into the mirror of the Word and discern your motivations. The damage that has been done by folks who erode the trust in the church and in Protestant theological traditions is immense.

And for what?

In none of the cases I have heard over the past decade, where someone speaks against the Protestant vision of the gospel, has the person actually had knowledge about what they asserted so confidently. Too often the spiritual formation conversation has turned to these sorts of claims, reacting more from a place of their own angst and frustration than resting in Christ and embracing the call of faithfulness.

There is a deeper and more faithful way. For more on this, seem my mini-class on bringing spiritual formation to the church.

For a more recent discussion of a Protestant understanding of spiritual formation, see my discussion with Mike Horton here:

For my paid Subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about the nature of the gospel as it was understood by Calvin and Luther and the broadly Protestant theological tradition and why that matters for spiritual formation. See the video below for more on that.

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