We include here a few more significant examples of how Wilder misrepresented Dallas’ approach to spiritual formation.
Perhaps the clearest example of misrepresenting the ministry of Dallas Willard is on page 71: “I see Dallas’ teaching solidly in the mainstream of Christian understanding … in keeping with everything I have read or heard.”
Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact Dallas has been repeatedly attacked for his non-traditional, non-mainstream views on the spiritual life, the gospel, sanctification, and a host of other areas. If you think his teaching is “solidly” mainstream then you have failed to grasp the enormity of his paradigm shift away from the dominant approaches to Christian growth.
Another quote from the book: “By thinking with God rather than about God, we do what God would have us do” (p.117). In context, the implication here is that Dallas is teaching us to use our slow track to think about God, and that will never do. Again, this seriously misrepresents what Dallas taught.
From the book: “Transformation comes when our mind goes beyond correcting our beliefs to practicing attachment love … we cannot stop there” (p.87). Again we see Wilder truncating spiritual formation down to the act of correcting beliefs (which itself he has misunderstood), and then implying that Dallas’ approach to spiritual formation does not work very well to grow our relationship with God.
Wilder quotes Richard Rohr in order to emphasize the relational aspect of formation (p.157): “Now surely you see why a positive and loving God-image is absolutely necessary for creating happy and healthy people.” Well this is exactly what Dallas would call a necessary belief, which is a prerequisite to forming a meaningful, strong bond with God. Here Wilder is presumably supporting his position by quoting Rohr, who is actually providing an argument for correct beliefs! Yet all through the book he argues that beliefs do not help us much. Wilder seems to be unable to accept Dallas’ definition of belief and instead creates his own definition, which he then argues against at length. This kind of methodology is used throughout the book, greatly misrepresents Dallas’ perspective, and is not a legitimate way to examine another author’s point of view.
More generally, the way Life Model now talks about “transformation” is in need of some correction itself. Bear in mind that the good news was first preached to (and Scriptures written to) a people who had a far deeper sense of community than any of us will ever experience here in the West. Yet the New Testament authors repeatedly called for these highly relational people to “be transformed.” They all needed something their common experience of “joint-directed attention” could not provide. While it must be admitted that reintroducing life skills into the West would certainly be life changing (because our culture has become so immature), confusing that with the spiritual transformation spoken of in Scripture is a mistake.