From Sin Management to Holy Living: Dallas Willard in Conversation with the Wesleys

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One of the books through which God spoke to me as I was coming out of fundamentalism was Dallas Willard’s classic, The Divine Conspiracy. The work remains as relevant as ever, though it was not an easy read for me as a college freshman. Willard’s classic of Christian discipleship is a long and at places dense work. Willard was, after all, a professional philosopher, though most known for his popular writings. His reflections on the Sermon on the Mount and living the life of the Kingdom were a balm for my soul. I still return to his work frequently, for both personal and pastoral use. 

One of his insights that has proven perpetually relevant was his concept of “sin management,” the focus of chapter two. There Willard describes how,

"…history has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally.” (p. 41, emphasis original)

This takes different forms in different branches of Christianity, according to Willard. On the left, sin management looks like a nearly exclusive focus on social action: sin is always in systems and institutions, and in fighting various social ills, Christians are practicing their loyalty to Christ. On the right, it is the inverse: sin is almost all personal. Wider matters of justice are largely ignored, and personal sins–usually around matters of sex, alcohol, and other illicit behaviors–are typically the target. Having inhabited both the fundamentalist world and the Mainline world, I have seen each iteration of sin management in operation.

Both of these, Willard argues, miss the point. The point is Jesus: actively following him as our rabbi and master, seeking the Kingdom life he embodied and taught. Put differently, in our fights against individual and collective sin, we forget what (or really who) we are for. 

Of course, Wesleyans have never gone light on sin. We are a holiness movement, after all, although the bifurcation Willard describes certainly exists both within and among various Wesleyan/Methodist bodies. John Wesley, though, was careful to suggest that the movement he and his brother began was not primarily about avoidance. He spells this out in The Character of a Methodist:

Our religion does not lie in doing what God has not enjoined, or abstaining from what he hath not forbidden. It does not lie in the form of our apparel, in the posture of our body, or the covering of our heads; nor yet in abstaining from marriage, or from meats and drinks, which are all good if received with thanksgiving. 

Certainly, fasting and other forms of asceticism were practiced and preached by the early Methodists; sin was confessed and repentance practiced individually and in groups, but these were not distinctive marks. Famously, Wesley–citing a characteristic verse–says it is "the love of God shed abroad" in the heart that is the clearest mark of a Methodist. This, of course, has social consequences. In pursuing the holy love of God, we also find the neighbor placed before us as fellow travellers beloved by their Creator. Note the synergism here between the twin poles of the Great Commandment:

And while he thus always exercises his love to God, by praying without ceasing, rejoicing evermore, and in everything giving thanks, this commandment is written in his heart, "That he who loveth God, love his brother also." And he accordingly loves his neighbor as himself; he loves every man as his own soul. His heart is full of love to all mankind, to every child of "the Father of the spirits of all flesh." That a man is not personally known to him, is no bar to his love; no, nor that he is known to be such as he approves not, that he repays hatred for his goodwill. For he "loves his enemies;" yea, and the enemies of God, "the evil and the unthankful." And if it be not in his power to "do good to them that hate him," yet he ceases not to pray for them…

The end is not the defeat of sin but the pursuit of God. To place the early Wesleys in conversation with Willard, we might say that prayerfully seeking a grace-enabled growth in love for God and neighbor–holiness, in other words–will always involve battling personal and social sin. The inverse is not necessarily true, however. Fighting against one's own sin or against structural sin does not necessarily lead one to grow in love. 

There are plenty of miserable saints who have spent their best energies waging war on their sin or on others’ sin without having hearts renewed by God’s love. Activism on the American left and right gives us a sense of what fighting sin without a robust vision of God’s love can do: it typically turns us into mirrors of what we despise. Advocates of free speech suddenly want to limit speech they find unpleasant. Defenders of traditional marriage are caught in illicit affairs of a kind they had preached against for decades. Those shouting the loudest against personal and systemic sins are often discovered to have a legion of skeletons in their closets. 

Warring against sin without loving God is bound to atrophy the soul. Again, in his essay The Character of a Methodist, Wesley describes this pursuit of holy love as possessing “the single eye”:

…and because "his eye is single, his whole body is full of light." Indeed, where the loving eye of the soul is continually fixed upon God, there can be no darkness at all, "but the whole is light; as when the bright shining of a candle doth enlighten the house." God then reigns alone. All that is in the soul is holiness to the Lord.

C.S. Lewis famously wrote, "Aim at heaven, you get the earth thrown in for free." To modify his insight for our purposes: if you aim to love God utterly and completely, to surrender to God above all else, the Spirit will ensure that the sin that binds you and your neighbor will not be overlooked. In the Wesleyan way of salvation (via salutis), we could think here of convicting grace leading to repentance. On the other hand, if we aim only at sin management, we can do a great deal of fighting the darkness without ever looking toward the light. Aim at sin management, and you might miss the love of God and neighbor. Aim at holiness, and you will (super)naturally desire to battle the sin that harms you and your neighbor.

Common to the Wesleys and to Dallas Willard was a sense that salvation is "a present thing," as John wrote in "The Scripture Way of Salvation.” Similarly, Willard emphasizes the “free availability of God’s rule and righteousness to all of humanity” in this life. (p. 116) In other words, there is a continuity between our mortal life and eternity. By God’s grace, we can live in and through God’s love in such a way that we experience God’s Kingdom now, a foretaste to the full and final consummation to come. Our faith will one day become sight, our hope will be fulfilled, but love (the “greatest of these” from 1 Cor. 13) remains, because there is no end to our enjoyment of God’s love. We can, by the power of the Spirit, live that eternal quality of life now, even as we look forward to the fullness of God’s redemption in the New Creation. This is why we can enjoy the Reign of God before we enter the Church Triumphant. As Charles Wesley’s wonderful Easter hymn closes:

King of glory, soul of bliss, Alleluia!
Everlasting life is this, Alleluia!
Thee to know, thy power to prove, Alleluia!
Thus to sing, and thus to love, Alleluia!

Drew McIntyre is the pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Greensboro, NC. He serves on the Editorial Board for Firebrand.