Willard on grace

Before I share the second installment of Gerald May, I want to share an excerpt from an interview with Dallas Willard in "Stillpoint," the quarterly magazine of my alma mater, Gordon College. Willard wrote "The Spirit of the Disciplines" and "The Divine Conspiracy" (and several other books) which were both very helpful to me.

Here he speaks concisely of the body, grace, and effort - this ties in with both the addiction and grace themes, and a resurrection ethic of the body. Note especially the last paragraph.

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SP: Your chapter “St. Paul’s Psychology of Redemption” in The Spirit of the Disciplines was enormously helpful to me in understanding the body’s role in our spiritual lives.

DW: Psychology is bodily. The body is a primary spiritual resource. I love this quotation from Sir William Ramsey’s St. Paul, the Traveler and Roman Citizen: “In Paul, for the first time since Aristotle, Greek philosophy made a genuine step forward.” It’s so appropriate to put him in that context because it’s actually true. Ramsey was able to help me see Paul in a different light, to see how really bodily spirituality is. Paul really meant it. Take those passages like “I buffet my body, and bring it into bondage: lest by any means, after that I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected.” That doesn’t mean asceticism--just sensible training of the whole person to do the will of God.

SP: There’s so much you miss in the Pauline writings if you’re only looking at him through the lenses we often see him through.

DW: Before I began studying the spiritual disciplines, I was reading St. Paul through the lens of dispensational theology. Basically what that does is relieve us of any genuine responsibilities to do anything except believe correct doctrine. That’s important, but that’s not life. I had to get past the idea that grace had only to do with forgiveness; that grace was opposed to effort--which it isn’t; its opposed to earning--and to understand the power of grace as an activity and a life . . . that was difficult coming from the theological sources I had.