Dallas Willard
Dallas Willard (1935 – 2013) was ordained a Southern Baptist minister but left the ministry to pursue an academic career. He was a Professor of Philosophy at The University of Southern California and a well known advocate of Spiritual Formation. In his book Spirit of the Disciplines, Willard identified the Spiritual Disciplines as the “yoke” of Jesus – in this he completely misrepresented Matthew 11:28-30 where Jesus declared:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
There is absolutely no hint within these verses of Jesus commanding the practice of the Spiritual Disciplines. To the contrary, it is best understood that Jesus was implicitly referring to the yoke of religious duty that the Jewish leaders (“the wise and learned” referred to in Matthew 11:25) bound the people to under the Law. They taught the requirements – as they saw them – to achieve righteousness and right-standing with God. This yoke made people “weary and burdened”. In Luke 11:46 Jesus condemned them:
“… you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”
In contrast, however, the yoke of Jesus was “easy” and His “burden … light”, because faith in Jesus and the introduction of the New Covenant by His blood overturned the religious requirements of the Law and abolished the priesthood. Thus, Willard turned the meaning of the verse on its head, making it the very opposite of Jesus’ intention, bringing people back under the yoke of religious duty and setting up a new priesthood comprising the Catholic mystics. (Note: One of the hallmarks of Catholicism is a priesthood with the Pope at its head, who dictate to members of the Catholic church the requirements – as they see them – to be made acceptable to God.) In this regard, Willard wrote:
“The disciplines are activities of the mind and body purposely undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order.”
So Willard imposed the Spiritual Disciplines of the Catholic mystics as the means by which we achieve right-standing with God, “the divine order”.
Willard was critical of traditional Protestant doctrine because it failed to preserve the Disciplines which he claimed were necessary to achieve Christian maturity and were a vital part of the early church. He decried:
“It [Protestantism] precluded ‘works’ and Catholicism’s ecclesiastical sacraments as essential for salvation, but it continued to lack any adequate account for what human beings do to become, by the grace of God, the kind of people Jesus obviously calls them to be.”
And he asserted:
“Salvation as conceived today [in Protestantism] is far removed from what it was in the beginnings of Christianity and only by correcting it can God’s grace in salvation be returned to the concrete, embodied existence of our human personalities walking with Jesus in his easy yoke.”
However, the Spiritual Disciplines that he described as Christ’s “easy yoke” are completely absent from the Bible! He argued that, although there was no list of disciplines provided:
“[the Apostle] Paul’s teaching … strongly suggest that he understood and practised something vital about the Christian life that we have lost—and that we must do our best to recover.”
Contrary to Willard’s assertion, the Apostle Paul expressly spoke against such practices in Colossians 2:20-23:
“Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.“
The ascetic disciplines identified by Willard – which he attributed to and sourced from the Catholic mystics, because the Bible was silent – fall exactly within this denunciation. His list of disciplines include voluntary exile, night vigils refusing sleep, Sabbath keeping, physical labour, solitude, fasting, study, and prayer. Willard defines “disciplines of abstinence” (solitude, silence, fasting, frugality, chastity, secrecy and sacrifice) and “disciplines of engagement” (study, worship, celebration, service, prayer, fellowship, confession and submission). In his discussion of these Willard cites the mystics including Thomas Merton, Thomas à Kempis and Henri Nouwen. It is from this polluted well of false teaching that Willard draws up his list, rediscovering the so-called “lost” spiritual disciplines.