Month: August 2020

If you have visited this site before, you might want to read again the “Conclusions” page. It has been updated a bit to better capture the real message of this review. Thank you for reading.

In one of the early videos from the seminar on The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas talks about a problem that people sometimes have when they encounter a point of view which they really do not want to accept. Quite often, if a person does not like the conclusions that another person has reached, they dismiss that other person’s reasoning before they even consider it. The basic assumption is that there must be something wrong with the logic of the arguments, because the conclusion is upsetting or too far outside of the person’s current view of things.

Now in some cases, this can save us from some unnecessary effort. I know enough about what Karl Marx represents in the world, that I do not have to give any time to studying his theories to see if they might be useful in solving social problems. But when it comes to meaningful discussion about such things as how God designed us to grow and develop, it is in our best interests to consider the various points of view and not dismiss some point of view prematurely.

Interestingly, we have seen this problem quite a bit in various responses to this website. Many people simply find it too hard to believe the conclusion we have reached here, which is that Jim Wilder has misunderstood Dallas’ teachings in very significant ways and consequently misrepresented those teachings in the book. The difficulty of accepting that conclusion then leads them to assume the arguments presented on this site must be faulty, and then either not read them at all or read them through the lens of disbelief.

A variation of this problem can be seen in those who want to compare the credentials of the two sources. How does the authorship of this website stack up against the resume of Jim Wilder? Or to put it another way, “Who do I believe more?” Again, this skips over the process of weighing the individual points, and instead accepts or dismisses them based on who they think is more reliable (which is one of the reasons why the authorship has been left out).

But as Dallas often said, facts are stubborn things. When we lay the teachings of Dallas side-by-side with some of the statements in Renovated, it becomes quite clear that Jim is talking about something else, and not about what Dallas taught. But one must do the work to see the facts of the case. It is not enough to judge the entire set of arguments based on who wrote them or whether one wants to accept the conclusions.

We would simply ask the reader to take the time to read through the various points made on this site, while having “ears to hear” what is being said.

As we have said elsewhere, Dallas did nothing less than restore to the church the understanding of what it means to become an authentic follower of Jesus, an understanding and process that had largely been lost to us for centuries. Lives are now being changed all over the world, because his work is helping people build a relationship with God that goes far beyond what most of us would have ever known otherwise. By definition, that involves the whole mind and body of those who are being transformed.

To suggest that Dallas overlooked any of that is frankly much harder to believe than the possibility that Wilder may be working from faulty premises.