Knowing Christ Today
Dallas Willard's final major work addresses the crisis of knowledge in contemporary Christianity, written as secularism increasingly relegated religious claims to the realm of private opinion rather than accessible truth. Willard, a philosopher at the University of Southern California, witnessed firsthand how academic culture had marginalized Christian knowledge claims, and he wrote this book to demonstrate that knowledge of Christ and Christian truth claims could meet the same standards of reliability as knowledge in other domains.
Willard argues that knowledge consists of representing reality as it is, on an appropriate basis, and that Christian faith provides exactly this kind of access to spiritual reality. He systematically dismantles the assumption that only empirical science can yield genuine knowledge, showing instead that knowledge comes through multiple reliable sources including testimony, logic, and direct acquaintance. The book demonstrates how Jesus Christ can be known today through the same kinds of evidence and experience that ground other forms of human knowledge. Willard particularly emphasizes how the ongoing reality of God's kingdom provides a testable framework for evaluating Christian claims, arguing that the transformation of human character through spiritual disciplines offers empirical evidence for Christian truth.
The work has continued to influence Christian apologetics and spiritual formation by providing philosophical rigor for claims about spiritual knowledge that many believers intuited but could not articulate. Willard's integration of analytic philosophy with traditional Christian spirituality offers resources for believers navigating secular academic environments and for churches seeking to ground their practices in defensible truth claims rather than mere preference or tradition.
Who should read this: Christians struggling to defend the rationality of their faith in academic or professional settings, pastors wanting philosophical grounding for their teaching, and anyone interested in how traditional spiritual practices connect to questions of truth and knowledge. This work is not for readers seeking a simple evangelical apologetic or those uninterested in philosophical argumentation.