Here is one:
The test of character posed by the gentleness of God’s approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel ”” or one desperate for another life ”” therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.”
I was accused of not being an intellectual because I would not study Carl Jung. I guess that dates me. At the time I was studying Koine Greek. It was my first encounter with the intellectualism Willard describes. If you are orthodox, you just do not get it.
So true, Pb. Willard was spot on in debunking the skepticism of the debunkers, both in academia where he lived and taught for decades, and especially in the pop culture we all are surrounded by in North America.
One of the lessons I learned from Dallas Willard was his claim that Jesus Christ was the smartest man who ever lived. Somehow, that idea hadn’t occurred to me. Or as Willard put it in the quote featured in the box by Dunn, no one can outsmart God. It’s amazing to me how many people seem to assume (although they’d never say it out loud) that they are smarter than God. The brashness of such arrogant folly is staggering.
David Handy+