Becoming the Hermeneutic of the Gospel: Dallas Willard's Formational Theology and the Missional Church

This dissertation is a critical analysis of Dallas Willard’s theory of spiritual formation placed in dialogue with the mission scholars associated with the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN), with the goal of developing a theologically integrated approach to missional spiritual formation for the church. Even though there are growing streams of literature on spiritual formation and on mission in North America, these two discourses have developed rather separately, and there has been little attempt to integrate the insights of each into a comprehensive framework. Thus, by bringing together a specific representative of the spiritual formation movement and a specific thread from the missional church movement, this study also instigates a deeper exchange between these discourses. Part I describes the need for a theologically integrated approach to missional spiritual formation, which is the cultivation of Christlike character for missional witness, and surveys the GOCN literature on the topic. It is shown that while the GOCN and its derivates demonstrate an increasing interest in spiritual formation, much of this interest is still underdeveloped. Part II reconstructs and critically examines Willard’s theory of spiritual formation as a potential contribution to the missional discourse as exemplified in the GOCN. More specifically, I analyze seven main themes of his theory and reflect on the implications thereby for missional spiritual formation. At different intervals, his ideas are brought implicitly or explicitly into dialogue with GOCN scholars or key positions that characterize their work. In so doing, Willard’s theory is also put to the test by theological challenges posed by the GOCN or by contextual questions arising from our current cultural situation. Part III elaborates on and engages more constructively the key insights gleaned from my treatment of Willard’s formation theory, therefore extending the conversation in various ways. With the whole of the research and its findings in view, an attempt is made, with the aid of the missional voices of the GOCN, to (more) fully articulate a theologically integrative paradigm for spiritual formation anchored in the missio Dei and missional church and framed within the cultural context of America in late modernity.