They made their hearts as hard as flint and would not listen to the Law or to the Words that the LORD Almighty had sent by His Spirit through the earlier prophets. So the LORD Almighty was very angry. (Zechariah 7:11)

Opposing Ideas Of What Is Falsely Called Knowledge

And with Willard’s statement we see the beginning of the usual misrepresentation of the Reformed Christian faith by those involved in this Emergent rebellion against the Bible. We have never said “once saved, now you can do whatever you want to.” But this is one of the excuses deceivers like Willard will use when they reject Bible-based Christianity in order to create the supposed “need” for the core doctrine of so-called “Christian” mysticism within the neo-liberal cult of the Emergent Church.

This CT article A Divine Conspirator by Christine Scheller points out that Willard is known to many Christians from his book “The Divine Conspiracy (CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S Book of the Year in 1998).” We also find out that God Personally announced to Willard:

“If you stay in the churches, the university will be closed to you; but if you stay in the university, the churches will be open to you.” He had no idea what this meant, because, at the time, the church was still the primary cultural authority.

However, as a young Baptist assistant pastor, he had become convinced he was "abysmally ignorant" of God and the soul. He decided to study philosophy, because he believed that "Jesus and his teachings and the philosophers and their teachings were addressing the same questions."

But, this working through the universities lends itself quite well to the reeducation process that the original cult of liberal theology employed. In his work The Cult of Liberalism Dr. Walter Martin explains:

And finally they had emptied the Gospel of all its content; they were simply using the outward shell so that they go on collecting money from the people and the churches; because they knew that if the people in the pew knew that they were apostate, they’d throw them out. So the strategy was hang on to the trust funds; hang on to the money we’ve got; hang on the properties we control, and we will gradually educate the laymen into this new approach to theology.

And then finally we will take control of everything. The gradual process of feeding you theological poison until you become immunized enough so that you don’t know what’s happening to you. And when you wake up to what’s happening to you, it’s too late they’ve got everything.

Rejecting The Substitutionary Atonement

Scheller also gives us further insight into Willard’s contention that ordinary people i.e. unregenerate mankind can become “disciples of Jesus.” We’re told:

[Willard’s] Arminian bent can be traced to the influence of his Methodist grandmother, but also to his failings as a young pastor. That’s when he began reading John Wesley and Charles Finney and aspiring to emulate them.

“Generally, what I find is that the ordinary people who come to church are basically running their lives on their own, utilizing ‘the arm of the flesh’–their natural abilities–to negotiate their own way,” he says, “They believe there is a God and they need to check in with him. But they don’t have any sense that he is an active agent in their lives. As a result, they don’t become disciples of Jesus.”

“They consume his merits and the services of the church….Discipleship is no essential part of Christianity today.” He says these problems are theologically grounded: “We don’t preach life in the kingdom of God through faith in Jesus as an existential reality that leads to discipleship and then character transformation.”

But what is missing here in this Charles Finney model for failure is that the Person of God the Holy Spirit must first regenerate a genuine child of God, and it is the Lord Himself Who then transforms the born again Christian. All Willard is describing is the pitiful state of an evangelicalism that never renounced its humanism in the first place and which has been filling churches with more and more unregenerate people who think they are saved. You may also recall another “Christianity Astray” article The Emergent Mystique where Emergent Guru and Spiritual Director (read: Defector) Brian McLaren brings out the growing influence of Willard and Foster when he cites them as “key mentors in the Emergent Church.”

I covered this before in Brian McLaren and Vampire Christians but what follows will give you a bit of perspective from his friend McLaren about how to perceive Dallas Willard’s concept of what he calls “Vampire Christians.” The version of the atonement we are talking about here is likely a hybrid of a moral influence and mystical atonement where the willingness of Jesus to be obedient to the Father and die on the Cross supposedly shows God’s great love for humanity. Then because Christ is Himself is God and is now in union with all of mankind the Lord mystically elevates man’s soul thus deifying it.

You should also know that men like Willard and Foster and McLaren are well aware of the supposed “divine spark” within mankind which is a classic teaching of Gnosticism and its ugly stepchild so-called “Christian” mysticism. On the webite of Guru McLaren we read:

Theory of Atonement

Could you elaborate on your personal theory of atonement? If God wanted to forgive us, why didn’t he just forgive us? Why did torturing Jesus make things better?

This is such an important and difficult question. I’d recommend, for starters, you read “Recovering the Scandal of the Cross” (by Baker and Green). There will be a sequel to this book in the next year or so, and I’ve contributed a chapter to it.

Short answer: I think the gospel is a many faceted diamond, and atonement is only one facet, and legal models of atonement (which predominate in western Christianity) are only one small portion of that one facet.

Dallas Willard also addresses this issue in “The Divine Conspiracy.” Atonement-centered understandings of the gospel, he says, create vampire Christians who want Jesus for his blood and little else. He calls us to move beyond a “gospel of sin management” – to the gospel of the kingdom of God. So, rather than focusing on an alternative theory of atonement, I’d suggest we ponder the meaning and mission of the kingdom of God.

Tangible Deceptions

Finally at the very end of this current CT article I have been discussing here we are further enlightened by some very telling information in that Willard had an “early experience that set him on his life course.” It seems that while being prayed for:

Willard lost consciousness, later describing the experience as being enveloped in a cloud. A spiritual reality became tangible for Willard in that moment.

And the result of his spiritual deception is now becoming even more “tangible” through the alleged “spiritual disciplines” he teaches with co-conspirator Richard Foster which are working against the actual Gospel of Jesus Christ, The Gospel that Willard says creates those vampire Christians in the first place. But the truth is through the new spirituality of a misquided mysticism taught by men like Dallas Willard what has now come emerging is a different kind of “Christian” faith all together, and one that best be surgically removed from the Body of Christ before this spiritual cancer can spread any further.