I’m reading a new book — listening to it read to me, to be more precise — it’s an audio book and I’m listening during my commutes and errands. It’s Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy.
I’m glad I picked it up. Willard has a thesis that is startling in its simplicity, and one which I think can benefit many Christians. He teaches that we have unwittingly put God further away from us as a consequence of intellectual trends in Western culture since the 1700s. Not a new idea, but it is striking me in a new way. Willard explains that in our ideas about heaven, we tend to either postpone our opportunity to experience God until our death, or we see him only as a standard of goodness that is impossible for us to meet, so we don’t much bother trying.
Willard makes a good case that we really don’t believe that God is present and accessible to us, either in the risen Jesus or in any manifestation common to that of ancient Israel. We simply don’t believe anymore in anything we can’t see. However, as Willard argues in a careful explanation of the meaning of the “kingdom of God” in the Gospels, Jesus meant what he said: the kingdom of God has come near, and is near, and is not relegated to some faraway afterlife. We’re meant to enter it now.
Do we dare believe again in a God who is present and active?
This is Eternal Life 
We have also just recently found out about Dallas Willard (who just died I am sad to say) via a film series titled Hearing God. It is a six part lecture series he gave, each lecture followed by a panel type discussion with Richard Foster and a presbyterian minister named Ortberg whom I don’t know. I thought it was the most challenging and profound series I have ever seen. Kathryn is also reading The Divine Conspiracy now and I plan to. One of our parishioners described the film as life changing. At any rate, I wanted to confirm what you said above.
Carroll Boswell