We are happy to announce www.jpmoreland.com as the new and official home for J.P. Moreland's content. We anticipate that it will be a dynamic clearinghouse of his material from both the past, present and the future!
Dallas Willard’s Knowing Christ Today is a stunning achievement. I could not put it down. It is the foundational book for all of his other works on the spiritual life, and a must read for all who wish to grasp the appropriate framework for knowing and following Jesus in the contemporary setting. Far too often, Christians interested in the intellectual aspects of Christianity do not pay much attention to the distinctively spiritual formation side of things. But just as importantly, those who are committed to spiritual formation frequently set aside the more philosophical, cognitive side of the journey. Both sides in isolation are truncated and, fortunately, with the publication of Knowing Christ Today, the intellectual and spiritual facets of walking with Jesus are brought together in one place in such a way that their essential inseparability is laid bare for the reader in a life-changing, persuasive way. This is one of the most important books published in my lifetime, and I urge everyone to read it with care. However, I am happy to announce that those of us in the So Cal area do not need to rest with merely reading the book; no, we can attend a critical conference at which Willard himself will interact about the themes and implications of his book and handle questions from the conferees. I am deeply involved in this conference and consider it to be of critical importance. I urge everyone who can to attend it.
In November, at the 2009 annual meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, JP gave a talk to over 100 members in attendance about how Christian intellectuals can serve the Non-Western church.
While audio is unavailable, here are the main points from JP's talk. We are happy to feature these ideas here since this topic echos so many wonderful aspects of Kingdom Triangle.
the gospel of the kingdom of God is to justification by faith as the whole is to the part, or as the beginning of a journey is to the rest of the journey. The gospel of the kingdom includes justification as an essential ingredient. And it specifies the purpose of justification, namely, to be the entry into a continuing journey, or, perhaps more appropriately, to be the start of a continuing journey. The point of becoming justified? Justification is the way one begins a life of sanctification. The gospel invites us to an entirely new, rich life lived from the resources of and according to the nature of another realm. I become justified so I can learn this new life, a life that will be mine forever ...
the gospel of the kingdom bids me to start by trusting something Jesus did for me (died and rose), and to continue that trust by enlisting daily as Jesus’ pupil so that He can teach me regarding living my life as He would if He were me, that is, living out the kingdom in my own setting.
My evangelism has been transformed by recovering this broader gospel. When I speak evangelistically, I now spend most of my time painting a picture of what life in the kingdom is like. I contrast it to life outside the kingdom. I offer an invitation for listeners to rethink their life in light of the invitation to live from within the kingdom of God. And, finally, I proclaim the need for justification by faith as the essential first step into kingdom life. By connecting justification by faith with this broader gospel, I have good news to offer people. And I have come to recognize that the gospel of the kingdom and kingdom life, generally, should be accompanied with manifestations of God’s power and presence as we see in His ministry and in the book of Acts. And Jesus’ own ministry is to be understood as an example of how to live in and from God’s kingdom in dependence on God’s Spirit. This is our invitation and what an honor it is.
The ABHE is an agency involved with several Bible Colleges and Seminaries across North America.The ABHE meeting was attended by several hundred Christian educators, and I was honored with the opportunity to do plenary sessions on the first leg of the Triangle, the life of the mind. I tried to emphasize the importance of general revelation in the integrative task for apologetics. I also did a seminar on building a case for Christianity.
This conference was unique in that it represented a balance among the life of the Christian mind, the inner life of spiritual formation, and the overt supernatural nature of the Kingdom.
I spent two wonderful days from February 12-13 at the NPC in San Diego. The conference brings together about 1500 pastors from all over the country. I was honored to present two workshops on the three legs of the Kingdom Triangle. The workshops were well-attended and very stimulating. I take away from these sessions a few lessons:
(1) There is a growing interest in Kingdom power and the supernatural aspects of Christianity across theological lines and denominational divisions. I sense that pastors are getting that this is a matter of the Kingdom, not primarily of spiritual gifts, and while there is still concern about abuses, more and more pastors are desiring to see the Kingdom preach in to their churches. The Kingdom Triangle book provides them with a theological and intellectual rationale for moving wisely into this area.
(2) There is a growing awareness and acceptance of spiritual formation, along with a desire to learn how to practice spiritual disciplines in the corporate setting. Much progress has been made in awakening the church to the need for disciplines in individual believer's lives, but more work needs to be done in applying these disciplines to the church as a whole.
(3) I was impressed with the desire among the pastors to learn more about how to think about worldviews. I presented some fairly tough material, but the audience was hungry for more and more. In all, my heart was encouraged by these men and women, especially by their openness to get the job done somehow.
My first workshop was a review of my recent work The God Question.
There were about 120 people packed into a room that held 100, and there were dozens of folks in the hallway who could not get in. I explained how to explore the contemporary rise in depression and concomitant loss of happiness with the shift of ideas from biblical theism to secularism, especially as regards the nature and limits of knowledge. I then offered a précis of the sorts of arguments for God I have found helpful in doing evangelism, I shared a number of illustrations for why people should seek religious truth with their minds and not pragmatic help with their feelings and desires. I closed by offering four criteria for selecting one’s religion and claimed that Christianity satisfies these better than its alternatives. A very stimulating time of Q&A followed.
My second workshop was a review of my other recent book with Klaus Issler entitled In Search of a Confident Faith. Because of the large crowd at my first talk, the room was moved to a small auditorium on campus. About 350 attended. I addressed the nature of faith as confidence or trust, explained that it is based on knowledge (and teased out some important facets of knowledge) and claimed that it comes in degrees. I then explained the difference between vague doubts from the culture’s plausibility structure and specific doubts that can be written down in a paragraph or so, and showed the way to address these different sources of doubt. This was followed by a brief treatment of emotional sources of doubt, e.g, trust issues, woundedness, inability to form attachments and healthy friendships, and I closed by emphasizing the importance for growth in God-confidence of testifying to the things we have seen and heard God do.
My message at Vineyard Anaheim centered on the need to focus on change for one's life in 2009 or else inertia, drift, habit will keep one from growing. And I claimed that, as legitimate as the normal topics for New Year's resolutions are (e.g., getting in shape, getting more education), there are two other deeply related biblical goals for the next year from Phil 3:12-15: Growing in the ability to be intimate with God (and by extension, friends and loved ones) and developing strength of character.
These goals are really expressions of all three legs of the Kingdom Triangle which, I continue to emphasize, as an approach to life itself.
It was a wonderful time! People are hungry for authentic spiritual living and, based on feedback from the church staff, the message was quite impactful. We sold about 100 copies of Kingdom Triangle people were very enthusiastic about reading the book. Before the second service, I met a person who had already read Kingdom Triangle and enjoyed it immensely.
It is so very sad to me to see part of the church reject the experiential, more "mystical" aspect of our walk with the Lord Jesus, thinking that they are biblical and doing the right thing. All they are actually doing (though I believe they are well-intentioned, but, of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions) is robbing themselves of their God-given invitation to a tender, intimate walk with God. I have even seen it argued, that because Henri Nouwen was uncomfortable with the claim that Jesus was the only way, that anyone who loves his spiritual writings and promotes some of those teachings is hurting people and promoting heresy.This sort of "argument" would not last a day when Christians were more aware of why they believed what they believed. If a person teaches about a-k, and is wrong about, say, b, it does not follow that the person was wrong about d, e and f. I seldom agree with every thing anyone teaches, including Nouwen, but there are treasures in his thought that have enriched millions to walk more faithfully with God.
