Saturday February 20th 2021
urrently I am reading Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy. Many good things can be said about this book, and I will likely write about some of those things after I finish reading the book.However, today I started reading Willard's first discussion of the Beatitudes, which he will refer to throughout the book. Dallas Willard argues that the Beatitudes of Matthew 5 and Luke 6 are not prescriptions of "how to be" in order to win God's favor: they are not conditions for attaining or becoming worthy of eternal life. He says that the conditions that are blessed are not conditions for people to try to attain. Willard also points out that if this were the case, then we should expect the list of conditions on the Beatitudes to be complete, and any condition not on the list is excluded.
Willard's interpretation is that in the context Jesus is speaking to the crowd - which Willard assumes is full of the spiritually destitute and spiritually incompetent - to proclaim the good news that Jesus's kingdom is accessible to them: not based on their merit, but that God is graciously making His kingdom accessible to them. Jesus is not proscribing a list of works for achieving salvation; if He was, then perhaps He would not even be necessary in the picture.
Acknowledging that the list of conditions in the Beatitudes is not complete, that the good news of the gospel is that access to God and salvation is available to all regardless of condition or merit, and that works are not required or a factor in salvation - which cannot be earned, I disagree with the extreme of Willard's interpretation in that I would not go so far as he tends to go in dismissing common interpretations of the Beatitudes as Jesus blessing certain attitudes, attributes, or conditions.
Dallas Willard says (my comments in brackets):
The Beatitudes, in particular, are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings. (106)I can appreciate that Willard's main goal is to promote the truth that God's kingdom is now here on Earth, accessible to us, not something reserved for a future Millennium or heaven. I agree with Willard that the Beatitudes (yet amongst other purposes, in my opinion):
They single out cases that provide proof that, in him, the rule of God from the heavens truly is available in life circumstance that are beyond all human hope. (106)I agree that the Beatitudes are not a new legalistic list of "how-to's" for achieving blessedness.
I suggest that the Beatitudes are a kind of "and also" list, and, as Jesus was constantly at odds with the Jewish religious establishment of the day, a rebuke and rebuttal of what traits appeared to be or were presented as holy. Jesus was telling the crowd that you don't have to be knowledgeable, spiritually competent, educated, strong-willed and articulate like mature Christians might seem to be: the kingdom and salvation is also for the meek, the spiritually immature and spiritually destitute, the persecuted, people who are mourning and do not seem to have it all put together and are certainly not in power. Jesus was contradicting the opposites that appeared in the Jewish religious establishment of the day (the Luke 6 version particularly makes this clear), and which might have been incorrectly relied upon for favor with God. Jesus was telling the people that you don't need to be like "that" which the current Jewish tradition may have implied: you have to be re-born and your mind and assumptions transformed. Jesus will mercifully and lovingly tear you down so that you can be built up in a better way because it is the true, gracious, and God-given way. Along the way you will pick up and manifest new attitudes as you imitate Christ. Jesus specifically called out and blessed these conditions and attributes because no one else authoritative was doing so, hence "and also": God can and will bless people who seem to have it all together and also - as there is a time and season for everything: sometimes joy and sometimes mourning, sometimes prosperity and sometimes difficulties - even those who are downtrodden or who do not appear or feel "blessed".
Put together with the rest of Christ's teachings and the rest of the Spirit-inspired epistles (e.g. Col. 3:12), we can see that these attributes in the Beatitudes are encouraged: meekness over proud self-reliance and failure to cede control to God; not giving in and remaining steadfast, faithful and trusting even when facing persecution; being spiritually poor in the sense of full reliance on the mercy of God and approaching Him with child-like faith, even as we mature and grow in knowledge and experience as Christians in our period of "new" life here on Earth where we are never fully perfected and always being sanctified and prepared as a bride for Christ, and never relying on our own spiritual knowledge and theological competence; poor instead of seeking wealth for the sake of wealth or, if wealthy, rather than hoarding for ourselves (James 5:1-6) distributing to those in need and to the work of the Church because that is where our priorities and first love are, recognizing that we are stewards of what is God's and has been given to us in trust; mournful over sin and fallenness, knowing that there is a time and place for this and a time and place for joy. These are non-intuitive conditions and not usually desired - when following secular standards or the impulses of fallen nature.
Willard does cite examples of how the Beatitudes contradict common assumptions or presumptions of Jesus's day about God's favor, and we are in agreement there. Speaking of the rich young ruler in Mark 10:
So being rich does not mean that one is in God's favor-which further suggests that being poor does not automatically mean one is out of God's favor. The case of the rich young ruler corrects the prevailing assumption, shocking the hearers but making it possible to think more appropriately of God's relation to us. (108)So we may be in agreement there. It is the wholesale dismissal of the conditions/attitudes being blessed as being something to pursue where we seem to disagree. Yes, if we are pursuing those attitudes as legalistic how-to's thinking that they earn us God's favor, then we are wrong. However, pursuing those attitudes should not be dismissed entirely, as some are attributes of a sanctified life.
Moving on from conditions or attitudes already mentioned, other conditions in the Beatitudes are more obviously attitudes that Christians should pursue, though by no means do they earn salvation and in every case they are Spirit-enabled gifts from God: blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the peacemakers.
All of these conditions or attributes were displayed by Jesus ("poor in spirit" might be the most difficult to argue for here, especially depending on interpretation, but I suggest that this was displayed, for example, when Jesus prayed his agonized prayer in Gethsemane or that the temptations in the wilderness were real temptations since Jesus took on human nature, though he rejected those temptations and such an outcome should never be in doubt since Jesus is also fully God): as followers of Christ who will - as he commanded - take up His cross and follow Him, and live as His disciples, we should expect these attributes to develop in our own lives to various degrees based on the sufficiency of the distribution of gifts and graces by God (1 Cor. 12:11).
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