Search Results for: "dallas willard"

O could I flow like thee,

And make thy stream my great example,

As it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear, though gentle not dull;

Strong without storm,

Without overflowing full

Sir John Denham, “Cooper’s Hill”

Those things, which you have both learned, and received, and heard,

And seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.

St. Paul, Philippians 4. 9

Over the decades, we discussed almost every topic under the sun, and sometimes he would be moved to tears over the brokenness of humanity.  Many academicians relish making others feel intellectually inferior.  Not Dallas.  I was always amazed at his sensitivity in adjusting his words to the person and circumstances.  He tried immensely hard to discern the truly important question often hidden behind the presented question.  Many were surprised to find that he was often quite transparent about his own inadequacies and disappointments.  Dallas would never have wanted anyone to think his life was without problems, and tribulations.  (He used these as an entry into the need for God’s grace.)  

Dallas, possibly more than anyone I have ever met, was completely comfortable laughing at himself.  I think that he saw funny situations as part of the human condition, and he had a wonderful sense of what should be taken utterly seriously and what should not.

Willard’s humor is legendary, not only because he could be so nonchalantly witty, but because his spontaneous quips always pointed to something profound.  It’s not that he told yarns or stories in the tradition of Ronald Reagan.  Rather, his humor was insightfully woven into all his teaching whenever it helped reveal the truth.  For example, the philosopher David Hume famously argued that knowledge of the self or the mind is impossible.  Hume said, “When I look into myself I cannot find myself.”  When lecturing on this, Dallas said, “This is like a man who tries to discover whether he’s at home by going outside and looking through the windows to see if he’s there.”  (For philosophy, this is funny!)  As everyone who teaches college painfully knows, some students love to defend absurd views.  Dallas was profoundly skilled at helping students break through their resistance to reality.  Another time, after a student had taken up a good portion of the class arguing for an absurd position, Dallas gently said, “You don’t believe what you are saying.”  But, the student persisted.  Finally, Dallas said in a non-confrontational way, “Okay then, will you run your view by your grandmother and see what she thinks?”  The student was momentarily stunned, and then burst out laughing.  Then the whole class and Dallas were laughing too, because, given the look on the student’s face, we all knew that he didn’t need to run anything by his grandmother.  He had just discovered some truth.  I’ve never forgotten Dallas’ buoyant laughter, nor his weighty question.  

Under his extraordinary teaching at University of Southern California for the last 47 years (1965-2012), thousands of students attended his lectures.  Most had absolutely no idea what they were in for.  Similarly, scores earned a PhD in philosophy under his wise and even fatherly guidance.  (In his home office, literally overflowing with books, is a card tacked up to a bookshelf with all the names of his PhD students who are carrying on his work.  It is simply entitled, “Our Boys”).  They now carry on his vision of ontologically-driven philosophy and life-transforming Christianity wherever they are teaching.  It is not off the mark to say that Willard was the dominant thinker in our time who reintroduced a detailed evidentialism to Christian thought—both on the apologetic and theological sides.  (His exhortation to us was, “Logic will provide the principles on which you will fight your philosophical battles.”)  The singular aim of his life, to convey in the most reasonable and detailed way the loving presence of God in this world, was accomplished: we heard, we watched, we learned, and we remember.

Nobody can be a great teacher without being supported by a myriad of people.  Of course, there were all the great thinkers of the past whose thoughts filled the thousands and thousands of books Dallas carefully studied during his entire life, and there were his great professors.  Things really came together for Dallas at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in graduate school.  It was Professor William Hay who said to Dallas, “Well you are asking all the right questions, so you are now ready to read Husserl’s Logical Investigations.”  This would set the direction for all of Dallas’ subsequent work in philosophy and religion.  (William Hay had been greatly influenced by Gustav Bergmann when Hay taught at the University of Iowa in 1946-1947.  Bergmann had the highest regard for Husserl and introduced Hay to his writings.  Hay and Bergmann corresponded often until Bergmann’s death in 1987.) 

However, far eclipsing these powerful influences was the inspiration that came into Dallas’ life from a young woman who had been born in Macon, Georgia.  One day in 1954 while walking across the campus of Tennessee Temple College in Chattanooga, Miss Jane Lakes, heard the voice of a young man singing in a classroom.  Not only was she profoundly intrigued by that voice, but also soon after by the nineteen-year old man behind it.  That love and friendship grew and inspired him for the next six decades.  Dallas often said that apart from the knowledge of God, Jane had been the greatest blessing in his life. “She not only made my life possible, but she held me steady and preserved me from going off track.”  In the fullest sense of the word, they were partners—not only in life but also in ministry.

For those of us who knew and loved him, studied under him, or labored with him, ten lifetimes with him would not have been enough.  The experience of missing a loved one is a small clue that we were made for eternity.  Each time with him was an intellectual, emotional and spiritual adventure as his mind and heart were always open to, and overflowing with, new insights and applications of the great truth that God has poured out His unfathomable love in the historic Jesus.

The last time I spoke with him on the phone he was as joyously content as ever, fighting to regain his strength so he could get back to his beloved writing.  He expressed his interest in helping others by writing about all the new things he had been learning in his struggles with cancer.  We spoke about getting together this summer, sitting in his backyard garden relaxing and drifting from topic to topic, “talking the old, old talk that has no end.”  Now, that garden will have to be on the other side of what he liked to call “the pre-life,” when he will no longer be “a peasant” in any sense, but a cherished child of the King Himself.  And, He “shall wipe away all tears.”

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is   with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.  And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

St. John, Revelation 21. 3-4         

Two lines come to mind whenever I think of Dallas Willard.  The first is from John’s Gospel:  “No one ever spoke the way this man does” (John 7:46). The second is Plato’s description of Socrates from the closing line of the Phaedo: “the best, the wisest, and most righteous of all the men whom I have ever known.”

I first met Dallas when, as a sophomore at USC, I enrolled in his course on British Empiricism.  At the time, I had no idea what Philosophy, let alone British Empiricism, was.  Nor had I heard of Dallas previously.  But some of my Christian friends at USC had told me that he was a major Christian thinker, a “C.S. Lewis type”, and that I should really take a course with him while I was there.  And so I did.  Little did I know how it would change my life.

I found the reading dry, but Dallas’ teaching so rich and interesting that I couldn’t get enough.  With his encouragement, I decided to major in Philosophy.  At least that’s what it says on my diploma.  But looking back I think it’s more accurate to say that I decided to major in Dallas.  For me, philosophy doesn’t seem nearly so interesting or worthwhile when it’s done too differently from the way Dallas did it.  But done his way, I find it very worthwhile indeed – so much so that I took as many additional courses as I could (roughly ¾ of my major courses!) with Dallas, and after graduation and a brief stint studying Theology, I returned to USC to take my Doctorate under his supervision.

Dallas’ “way” of doing philosophy is difficult to adequately describe, because so much of it was a function of who he was as a person, an expression of his unique combination of intellect and character.  As Joe Gorra has so rightly observed, Dallas never approached philosophy from the standpoint of current disciplinary norms, which tend to be narrow, technical, and faddish.  Instead, he focused on broad, fundamental, and enduring issues, approaching them in a way that was rigorous but non-technical, and always historically informed (as opposed to focusing only or mainly on “the current debate”).

But this general description fails to do justice to the unique grandeur of Dallas as a thinker and teacher.  Part of that grandeur came from the astonishing scope of Dallas’ knowledge.  USC’s Philosophy Department Director and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Scott Soames, describes Dallas as “the teacher with the greatest range in the School of Philosophy [at USC], regularly teaching courses in logic, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, history of ethics, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy from the 17th through the 20th centuries, including both sides of the 20th century split between analytic philosophy and phenomenology.”   His colleagues at USC might be surprised to know that this impressive range represents only a portion of Dallas’ learning.  His range in Philosophy was matched by an equally impressive range in Christian theology and spirituality.  Several years ago Paul Weithman wrote of Robert Adams’ introduction to John Rawls’ posthumously published theological work, “I doubt that there is anyone else in the academy with the breadth of philosophical and theological learning needed to write it.”  My immediate thought upon reading this line was “He must not know Dallas!”

And then there were the countless lines of verse and song, from Shakespeare to Janis Joplin (yes, Janis Joplin!), and of course countless lines of Scripture, that Dallas had committed to memory, with which he’d occasionally season his talks, lectures and conversations.  I’ll never forget an instance after a talk at Wheaton when, in response to a question, Dallas quoted from memory what must have been nearly a full chapter from the book of Hebrews (the quote went on and on), weaving it into an impressive answer that left the audience amazed!

The scope of Dallas’ knowledge distinguished him from all but a handful of intellectual heavyweights.  But what distinguished him even from them, intellectually, was his ability to distill the wisdom of the ages and present it in accessible, memorable, and maximally insightful terms.  John Ortberg has given some examples of this in his recent tribute to Dallas.  Here are a few more:

• Knowledge is the ability to represent something as it is on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.   (I like to call this “JTB without the jargon”!)
• Reason is the ability to know things merely by thinking.
• Wisdom is the settled disposition of the soul to act in accordance with knowledge.
• A good person is one who has a settled intention to advance the various goods of human life with which he or she is effectively in contact.

Lines like these, defining important concepts and encapsulating key insights from the history of philosophy, were common fare not only in Dallas’ lectures, but also in informal conversation.   They fell from his lips like rain, usually expressed with a nonchalance that was entirely disproportionate to their significance, but beautifully consonant with Dallas’ own intellectual humility. Many of them burned their way into my mind upon first hearing them as an undergraduate, and they have stayed there ever since.  Even now I hear his voice echoing in my mind.

Dallas’ ability to formulate these intuitively clear and maximally insightful statements on just about any topic or concept you might ask him about, even off the cuff, is the single most impressive intellectual gift I have ever observed in any human being.  I have never seen it matched, and (alas!) have never been able to come close to doing it myself despite having studied with him for so many years.   In virtue of this gift, and insofar as the sorts of concepts Dallas dealt with are ultimately more significant than gravity and motion, it has always seemed to me that Sir Edmund Halley’s tribute to Newton is actually more fittingly applied to Dallas:

Then ye who now on heavenly nectar fare,

Come celebrate with me in song the name

Unlocked the hidden treasuries of Truth:

So richly through his mind had Phoebus cast

Nearer to the gods no mortal may approach.

Of course, Dallas himself would balk at any such comparison – he was humble to a fault.  This fact points beyond Dallas’ intellectual gifts to his equally unmatched character.  Almost everyone who has ever written anything about Dallas mentions, and describes more adequately than I can, the aura of otherworldly peace and love that he exuded, and which suffused the whole atmosphere around him.  There was a calmness and stillness in Dallas that pervaded all of his other virtues, and which I think tended to impress people more than almost anything else about him.  He “radiated” peace and love, but not like a microwave or a light bulb; more like a “radiant heating” system which slowly and subtly sends heat through the floor, gently warming the air above.

Imagine, if you can, the kind of intellectual feast described above, held in a room warmed by Willardian “radiant heating,” gently bathing his students in peace and love while showering them with the aforementioned pearls of wisdom.  That is what it was like to be a student in one of Dallas’ classes. I count it as one of the greatest blessing of my life to have had this as a regular weekly experience for the better part of a decade.

Obviously, all of this entails that Dallas had a profound effect on my intellectual and professional life.  It is no exaggeration to say that whatever degree of intellectual sophistication and academic success I’ve achieved, I owe entirely to Dallas.  But Dallas was much more than a teacher and an academic supervisor to me.  Some people’s spiritual lives are colored more by angst than joy, and characterized better as a series of crises than as a consistent movement from glory to glory.  I am one of those people.

For me, philosophy began not in wonder, but in painful confusion about God and about the character of Jesus in the aftermath of a run-in with what Ronald Enroth would call an “abusive church” during my Freshman year at USC.  In that year before I met Dallas, I had been struggling to make sense of the experience, to figure out what true Christianity looked like, and how to carry on in the Christian life after having my faith shaken to the point of collapse.

Dallas’ calm kindness and deep wisdom were my most important sources of guidance and reassurance as I continued to struggle with these issues for many years.  He taught me not only philosophy, but theology; and not only taught me, but counseled me; and not only about faith, but about dating, about marriage, about having children, and on and on.   And not only did he counsel me, he also prayed for me, both in general, and in very specific terms when I needed it.

I have never told this story publicly, but I feel compelled to tell it now, to honor this great Man of God (and just so you know, “Man of God” is a term I never use precisely because it’s overused in some Evangelical circles; but when it comes to Dallas there’s no way around it:  that’s what he was).  On one occasion I was suffering from a rather severe depressive episode related to my spiritual angst.  Dallas spent an hour or more praying over me after which the depression was simply and entirely gone, and it has never come back.  Life has not been a bed of roses ever since – that’s the stuff of fairy tales – but since that moment I’ve always been able to find the strength to cope with life, often by remembering his prayer and invoking it over myself again.

As you can see, Joe Gorra’s statement that Dallas “never lost sight of the value of shepherding and caring for people” even in his role as a Professor is absolutely true.  Dallas was not just my teacher and my dissertation supervisor.  He was my beloved Rabboni.  I am grateful for his life. I will miss him for the rest of mine.