Book Review: The Kingdom Among Us: The Gospel According to Dallas Willard

The result of over a decade of research, Michael Stewart Robb has given us a remarkable systematic treatment of Dallas Willard’s theology. Totaling 522 pages and based on his 2016 PhD dissertation at Aberdeen (a mere 246 pages in comparison), it is the most ambitious project to date on the university professor, speaker, and spiritual writer who became a decisive figure in the spiritual formation movement among Protestants and evangelicals over the past half-century. Robb’s monograph is learned but not inaccessible, lucidly written and impressively argued, stunningly novel yet faithful to its subject. At his fingertips he has a seemingly endless reservoir of Willard quotations and citations from obscure audio recordings and unpublished papers, dating from the early 1970s to 2013, the year of his passing. Simply stated, The Kingdom Among Us is a landmark work in the study of Willard’s thought. For the foreseeable future, all serious scholarship on his theology will have to go through it. This essay seeks to guide the reader into Robb’s book, describe some of its main themes and findings, challenge one of its ideas, and above all, reflect on its importance. The volume may be categorized broadly as a study of Willard’s soteriology, but it is more specifically focused on his view of faith, or “pisteology” as it is sometimes referred to in historical theology. Robb suggests there are “two canonically sanctioned and wholly orthodox ways of viewing the life of Jesus,” the first being a mature Christology, which is God’s eye view (53). The second is a ground-level Christology, from the view of Jesus’ first listeners. Robb chooses the latter route because, he contends, it best aligns with Willard’s reading of not only the gospel narratives but the history of redemption as a whole. Having chosen his path, Robb proposes, using the Willardian corpus, a three-stage framework for exploring how Jesus’ first listeners would have progressively apprehended the person and message (gospel) of Jesus. In the first stage, Jesus is seen as a prophet in the tradition of those in the Old Testament who have special relations to God and act on his behalf; as such, Jesus is perceived to have access to the kingdom of God. In the second stage, Jesus is understood as an anointed teacher or mediator of the kingdom, one through whom his listeners themselves can access God’s kingdom. And in the third stage, Jesus is realized to be the very king of the kingdom, thus the friendship his listeners have with him is a friendship they have with God. Listeners