“and may the change abound”: RIP Dallas Willard
Dallas Willard passed away this morning after battling cancer. His last words were, “Thank you.”
Many of his words, I think, are going to have a lasting impact on a lot of us. For many Christians, he’s a speaker and author who has critiqued the church and has promoted life transformation in the most positive ways. For many college students and philosophy colleagues, Dr. Willard is one who got them interested in phenomenology and particularly in how Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology. For readers of Husserl’s works, he is their translator.
For me, Dallas Willard is one who helped me engage ideas with my own father. The two men went to college together and took a course in Logic together. (Coincidentally, when I was an undergraduate student, I went to the same college and took the same course in logic and took it from the same professor who had taught my father and Dallas Willard; I have mentioned a bit of this little factoid in a blogpost elsewhere.) When I started reading some of what Dallas Willard wrote (when my mother gave me one of his books for my birthday some years ago), there was new reason for me and my father to talk. Both he and Dallas Willard were Southern Baptist ministers, and former classmates of course, and the former for that respected the latter. Besides all that, Willard challenged my thinking and pushed me and my father to think more, together, about our differences, about logic, for example, and much about Christianity and Southern Baptist life.
Others in the blogging world now are beginning to remember Willard. For example, Rachel Held Evans is calling on her readers to recall their favorite quotations of the writer. (A couple of my favorite Willard quotations are here, fwiw.) T. C. Robinson quotes the Christianity Today blog and also links to one of his own earlier posts on him. And Alan Fadling (from the blog “Notes from an Unhurried Life”) has written a tribute to Dallas Willard, noting his indebtedness to the speaker/author, who lived and said, “ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” [UPDATE: Brian LePort has posted a round up of tributes to Dallas Willard and to Geza Vermes here.]
If there’s one thing this man was about it was about transformation of life. He was committed to changes for the better. And so I’ll just leave us with his last words from the Forward he wrote for How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals:
So the issue of women in leadership is not a minor or marginal one. It profoundly affects the sense of identity and worth on both sides of the gender line; and, if wrongly grasped, it restricts the resources for blessing, through the Church, upon an appallingly needy world. The contributors to this volume have served well in allowing us to see the paths of study and experience through which their minds were changed, and may the change abound.
BLT 
In marginally related news, Geza Vermes has also passec from this life.
The flag of my heart flies at half-mast.
Am saddened by this loss. He was one of a kind and has greatly impacted my life.
Blessings
-Jen
http://thelilyandthemarrow.wordpress.com/
Kurk: Thanks for posting this blog post; although I am not familiar with Willard’s work, I found it moving.
Brant: I did know Geza Vermes’s work. I did not hear that he died yesterday. Thanks for sharing that (sad) news.
Geza Vermes we have to thank for the translation of The Dead Sea Scrolls in English. Here’s Colin Garbarino’s tribute to Vermes, mentioning some of his other impacting works.
Thanks Brant and Jen and Theophrastus for responding here to the news about Willard’s passing and impact.
Cancer is such an ugly disease. What loss we share. May better preventions and the cure come quickly.
From Vermes in his own words, here’s more of his story, of what motivated him:
http://m.guardiannews.com/education/2008/mar/18/academicexperts.highereducationprofile
Thanks Kurk. Willard’s “Divine Conspiracy” changed my life, all for the better.
You may be interested to know that in the last 15 years or so, his home church was a Vineyard (the second one, a friendly split from Kenn Gullickson’s church in Santa Monica in the 1970s, so that folks in the San Fernando Valley wouldn’t have to drive so far). This was our church when we lived in the LA area. On a visit in the early 2000s, I was blessed to be able to tell Dallas how grateful I have been for DC.
Sorry to hear about Vermes as well. Willard prepared my mind and soul to read N.T. Wright; if not for the latter, I would not even know who Vermes is…
Dana
Marc Goodacre’s tribute to Vermes is here. Goodacre writes:
Vermes was, it seemed to me, all about conversation across ordinary lines. His brilliant revision (together with Fergus Millar and Martin Goodman) of Emil Schurer’s 19th century History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ was a conversation among scholars across a century and across religions. For me, it was a seminal text. His “Jesus the Jew” books (Jesus the Jew, Jesus in his Jewish Context, The Religion of Jesus the Jews, The Changing Faces of Jesus, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus, Jesus: Nativity, Passion, Resurrection, and The Real Jesus) directly put ancient documents in conversation with each other. His history of Christianity’s first three centuries focuses on the Jewish-Christian interaction and was warmly reviewed by Rowan Williams.
Dana,
Thank you so very much for sharing how you changed by reading The Divine Conspiracy and the personal things about Dallas Willard that clearly informed his thinking. It’s wonderful that you and he met! Sounds as if he’s continuing to impact you, as you are introduced to other thinkers and writers who introduce you further to others.
Theophrastus,
Thanks for linking to and excerpting from Marc Goodacre’s tribute. Thank you for sharing how Vermes’s work was influential to you. (I do believe that Williams is too hard on Vermes.)
Here’s from Susan Bell for USC regarding Dallas Willard:
http://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/1401/in-memoriam-dallas-willard-77/