Chapter 2 Summary: The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard

Gospels of Sin Management

In chapter 1 of The Divine Conspiracy* Dallas Willard, speaking about the wide availability of God’s invitation (the gospel), remarks: “The major problem with the invitation now is precisely overfamiliarity... People think they have heard the invitation. They think they have accepted it—or rejected it. But they have not.”

The misunderstood invitation that is accepted, or rejected, is heard as a “gospel of sin management.” This gospel proclaims a message that God wants to forgive sins; this is salvation. “It says that you can have a faith in Christ that brings forgiveness, while in every other respect your life is no different from that of others who have no faith in Christ at all.”

Understanding this invitation of forgiveness without transformation is akin to something Willard calls “Bar-Code faith.” “There is something about the Christian that works like the bar code. Some ritual, some belief, or some association with a group affects God the way the bar code affects the scanner. God ‘scans’ it, and forgiveness floods forth. An appropriate amount of righteousness is shifted from Christ’s account to our account in the bank of heaven... We are, accordingly, ‘saved.’”

This form of salvation, though widely proclaimed in our day, is actually foreign to the bible. Nowhere does it speak of God being merely concerned with forgiving sins. (To be sure, forgiveness of sins is vital, but it should not bear the weight many have placed on it regarding salvation.) What it does speak of is God being concerned with the lives people live; he is concerned about our character (almost obsessively, if I may say that). Therefore his plan of salvation (Jesus) would mirror his concern and come offering news that affects our present life.

If this is true why is today’s church so weak, and why does she make so little impact upon the culture? “Why are Christians indistinguishable from the world?” The answer, according to Dallas, is found in what we are doing. “[Our] system is perfectly designed to produce the results [we’re] getting.” In other words, because a message is proclaimed that does not involve the salvation of our daily lives, the daily lives of those who accept this message are, by and large, left unaffected.

This is true for those proclamations on the right and left (theologically). On the right the message is, “Jesus died for our sins and if you believe this you will go to heaven when you die.” On the left, “God is on the side of the oppressed, therefore we can join God in eliminating societal ‘sins.’” Both of them are concerned with managing sin. Neither of them are concerned with real life, right now, transformation. Thus there is a gap in our gospels because neither presentation leads a person, naturally, into the transformative life of Christ.

Because of this “gap” many have lost the idea of Jesus as a teacher, and instead people are prepared to be taught about life from almost everything and everyone except Jesus. “This disappearance of Jesus as teacher,” says Dallas, “explains why today in Christian churches—of whatever learning—little effort is made to teach people to do what he did and taught... it is a natural consequence of our basic message.”

Since the proclaimed message is one of the primary culprits in the miscommunication, it is here that the change must begin; especially since people tend to believe what is repeatedly presented to them. So first the proclaimed message must change to reflect the invitation that Jesus and his disciples gave. Sermons need to “have a tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus.” They should lead people towards becoming apprentices of Jesus as a “natural next step.”

If this is not the expected reaction to our proclaimed gospels we will just continue reinforcing the same old “go to heaven when you die” message. But if we change the focus of our gospel to Jesus and his invitation to enter the kingdom of God by faith and repentance, then people will hear a message about how heaven can get into them right now. They can hear a message about the availability of eternal and abundant life, with Christ, that begins right now.

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