released 9/5/2025

In this conversation from 2009, Dallas Willard (1934–2013) discusses the truth of spiritual knowledge and its epistemological validity. His book, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2014), arose in response to interactions he had with a wide range of business, legal and political leaders which revealed their skepticism of the validity of religious, spiritual or ethical knowledge; as opposed to publicly valid knowledge, spiritual claims were seen as mere subjective traditions or opinions divorced from objective reality. He traces this skeptical belief in the U.S. back to the desire of liberal Christian theologians to protect Christianity from what they believed to be threatening developments in science, and the desire of conservative Christian theologians to emphasize the importance of understanding faith as a gift and not rational knowledge — a dichotomy Willard does not see any reason to accept. He describes in detail how this false dichotomy had led to great distortions in the understanding and practice of faith among everyday Christians and in churches, forcing believers to understand themselves as “committing” to essentially irrational claims. This sort of irrationalism leads to damaging consequences, including a loss of authority and the reduction of truth to the imposition of will and desire. Willard argues that it is imperative that clergy recover their calling to speak truth to society, not just to their own flock, and to do so with humility and confidence.

63 minutes

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