Reading Blog: Knowing Christ Today, Chapter 5

(This is part 6 in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4)

The Miraculous, and Christ’s Presence in Our World

In Chapter 4 Willard laid the foundation for establishing the logical existence of a god, that is, “a vast non-physical being underlying – perhaps also interpenetrating – the reality of the physical universe.” The fact that many either don’t know this, refuse to know it, or refuse to acknowledge it has no bearing on its truth. Indeed, people frequently refuse to believe what they know to be true (gambling or smoking is a prime example).

This, as Alex right pointed out in the comments on Chapter 4, merely leaves us with Deism – which is a far cry from the Theism of Christianity. To be a Deist gets you halfway there, and puts you in company with virtually all the Founding Fathers of the United States, as well as many Christian scholars (I’m looking at you Marcus Borg) and some of the proponents of liberal Christianity today. As Willard points out, this is no secret. To say that some Christian scholars are Deists is generous; some are plainly atheists.

But it is the peculiar claim of historic, orthodox Christianity that Christ was the divine incarnation of God; that such gave witness to the frequent intervention of God into this world, and that such intervention continues to this day. In other words, the faithful witnesses of historic Judaism and Christianity have always made the claim, beyond Deism, that God is often breaking into this present world to make contact with people and change their lives.

This amounts to Willard’s second argument for the existence of God and his source of particular knowledge about God: For millenia people have been claiming to have encounters with this God, they are remarkably consistent, and they constitute a genuine body of knowledge.

There is, in this Chapter, an extensive conversation about the miraculous and a logical defense of their validity. As with his treatment of the Cosmological argument for the existence of God – and in similar logical fashion – here Willard feels he has established the logical necessity of the possibility of the miraculous. From there he goes on to apply this same logical method to the question of the resurrection of Jesus – the central claim of the historic Christian faith. Again, Willard concludes that there is no other logically plausible explanation other than that Jesus indeed was raised from the dead.

(Again, there is simply no time or space in this kind of overview to rehash Willard’s arguments. If you’re interested, you have to buy the book. Obviously, I recommend it.)

He concludes:

“The established possibility of resurrection, resting upon the openness of the physical universe to a nonphysical source of creator of it all, opens the door to consider fairly the evidence that strongly favors the resurrection of Christ as an actual event and favors his continued presence in this world. So the factuality of a major miracle in this world can be known by those who would like to know and who are willing to give adequate consideration to the available evidence. Perhaps the main responsibility for knowing it lies upon those who believe it. A reasonable next step would be openness to God’s intervention in other contexts and, especially, in the events of their own lives today. Thus they could come to know the reality of a “spiritual life” for ordinary human beings (see the next chapter).”

Question:

1. Have you ever experienced what you believed was the intervention of God in your life? If so how?
2. How can you know it was God?
3. If not, has that been a source of frustration for you?

Technorati Tags: Books, Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today, Knowledge