For Willard, simply, a kingdom is the range of your effective will. As he says explicitly in Divine Conspiracy, “Now God’s own ‘kingdom,’ or ‘rule,’ is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or by choice, is within his kingdom.”
When I wrote the post comparing Comer and Willard’s foundations for spiritual formation, I ended up misspeaking about this aspect of Willard’s thought. As Mike Stewart Robb pointed out to me, I made a passing comment that Christ established the kingdom, when, given his definition, that is not quite right. What I was doing was merging Willard with N.T. Wright (although, admittedly, it is easy to confuse them, especially when Willard makes comments like this from Divine Conspiracy: “The presence of Jesus upon earth, both before and after his death and resurrection, means that God’s rule is here now”). In light of this I figured I would clarify a bit on what I think Willard means when he uses this language.
Willard is using the language of “kingdom” in a way that broadly describes power in the world and, more narrowly focused on God’s kingdom, how God establishes himself and his way in the world. So Willard can write,
“Jesus came among us to show and teach the life for which we were made. He came very gently, opened access to the governance of God with him, and set afoot a conspiracy of freedom in truth among human beings. Having overcome death he remains among us. By relying on his word and presence we are enabled to reintegrate the little realm that makes up our life into the infinite rule of God. And that is the eternal kind of life. Caught up in his active rule, our deeds become an element of God’s eternal history. They are what God and we do together, making us part of his life and him a part of ours.”
Jesus, in this sense, does not establish the kingdom, but he unveils it: “Jesus’ words and presence gave many of his hearers faith to see that when he acted God also acted, that the governance or ‘rule’ of God came into play and thus was at hand.”
Furthermore, given Willard’s use of language, the term “kingdom” is a general term employed to talk about both God’s reign and our own: “Every last one of us has a '‘kingdom,’” Willard avers, “a realm that is uniquely our own, where our choice determines what happens.” He then ties this to being made in God’s image, following the then-emphasized reality (as is still sometimes true, though I think this is not the right way to understand this language), that being made in the image of God is about “having dominion.”
But like God, our kingdom is the range of our effective will for Willard: “Whatever we genuinely have the say over is in our kingdom. And our having the say over something is precisely what places it within our kingdom. In creating human beings God made them to rule, to reign, to have dominion in a limited sphere. Only so can they be persons.” [I’m working on a post I’ll post soon on Willard’s emphasis on persons, which strikes me as really important here.]
Admittedly, it will take a lot to spell this out, undoubtedly in close conversation with Philippians 2:12-13 and Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings. But what this requires is a kind of sharing in and participating in God’s life:
“When we receive God’s gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions. That explains why Jesus said that the least in the kingdom of the heavens are greater than John the Baptist - not, of course, greater in themselves, but as a greater power works along with them. The ‘greater’ is not inherent, a matter of our own substance, but relational.
This focus on the kingdom being made known in Jesus’ life and action - a kingdom that God has established and always been in the work of establishing - leads to a specific kind of reading of the Gospels. This is perhaps the main way Willard has influenced me.
Again, Willard writes, “When he announced that the ‘governance’ or rule of God had become available to human beings, he was primarily referring to what he could do for people, God acting with him. But he was also offering to communicate this same ‘rule of God’ to other who would receive and learn it from him. He was himself the evidence for the truth of his announcement about the availability of God’s kingdom, or governance, to ordinary human existence.”
So why talk about the kingdom of God as realism?
I found that this language of “the kingdom of God as realism” came up more in the conversations I had with Dallas than in his writings. In these conversations he pointed to E. Stanley Jones’ book by that name as signaling its significance for his thought.
Jones writes about Jesus in a way where the impact on Dallas is clear. For instance, Jones writes, “He [Jesus] was not a philosopher spinning theories about life, but One who was giving His answer to life out of life itself.” Likewise, talking about the mood in which Jesus spoke,
“By the use of the indicative He showed Himself as a revealer of the nature of reality - He was declaring what is, and bade men to relate themselves to that reality. Otherwise they would find themselves trying to live against the nature of things. He did not say, ‘Blessed will be the poor in spirit,’ but ‘Blessed are” - He was announcing facts operative here and now.”
Willard’s emphasis on the Sermon on the Mount finds its moorings in Jones’ account and his focus on the realism of Jesus. Jones’ writes, “The Sermon on the Mount breathes the air of realism in every line,” something that Willard, himself, internalized deeply. If you know the work of Dallas, you can almost hear him utter these lines from Jones:
“In cutting the root of murder at the place of anger; the root of adultery at the place of looking; the root of false swearing by abolishing all swearing; the root of wars and clashes by forbidding all revenge and all hating of enemies; the root of all unrealism and play-acting in giving of alms, praying and fasting; the root of Mammon by repudiating its sway; by getting rid of anxiety about tomorrow and living for today; by ceasing to have critical attitudes toward others and judging them; by the application of the Golden Rule to human conduct - entering a narrow gate; by emphasizing that good fruit can only be had from good trees; by summing up the whole thing in His insistence that the man who acts on His way will be a man whose house is on rock and will thus be able to stand up against life when floods and storms do their worst - in all these things there is stark realism. He lays it all down with an air of finality: take it or leave it, but this is the way to live.”
For Jones, Jesus was unearthing the human capacity to take the things of God - the law, the ceremonies, and the religious culture of the day - precisely to reject God. This, of course, is standard biblical teaching and standard fears in the Protestant tradition. But each generation forgets it. Instead of quoting him, let me just give you the page:
Jesus is the stone the builders rejected because they couldn’t fathom building on it - it seemed like unrealism. It didn’t seem like it would work.
As an aside, in a very telling conversation with some former church elders, one of them was critical of my book The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb. When I asked if he thought I interpreted Scripture wrongly, he said no, and then he sort of shook his head and said, “It just won’t work.” This is the great lie of the flesh that continues to blind every age. We look at Jesus’ realism and think, “That just isn’t realistic,” and, of course, in one sense they are right. If we don’t have eyes to see, it will just appear as nonsense.
When Willard ends up explaining his own account of the kingdom of God as realism, in The Divine Conspiracy, he turns to the story about the widow’s mite, commenting about Jesus’ words, “that the widow has put more in the offering than all the others did.” He explains,
“Viewed in the context of the physical or merely human, these can only be more ‘pretty words.’ That, in fact, is true of nearly everything Jesus said, for he lived and taught in full view of the heavens opened. This causes multitudes to dismiss his teachings as ‘unrealistic.’ They do not see his world.”
In this sense, Jesus is casting a vision of reality as it actually is within the range of his effective will. This is reality where his will is being done on earth as it is in heaven.
What this means, practically, for us, is that if our lives make sense without God’s presence and action then we are living the life of practical atheists. If our strategies of success, power, and virtue are explainable outside of God’s presence and action, we are affirming God’s Word in letter alone while rejecting the Spirit.
But, more than just needing God’s presence and action generically, we need to be shaped by the crucified Lord of glory. If our strategies lead us to bearing false witness, to not controlling our tongues, to being flippant about other Christians, we are practicing a kind of atheism and unrealism. We are living as if we don’t have eyes to see and ears to hear the truth of God in our midst.
Rather, confronted by Jesus, we come to see that the only proper way to live is through faith in Jesus. He is the vine. He is the source of true life. But not only that, his life unveils the shape of the properly human life. I cannot merely imitate him, as if God the Son became incarnate to model a life I could live on my own. Rather, confronted with Jesus, I see the life available in him as a life within the presence and action of God.
If you are interested in how this sort of vision looks in experience and practice, John Coe and I have a book coming out February 3, 2026 that exposits this (and it is currently 40% off here for preorders).
For some contemporary evaluation of what is going on culturally, and how and why people are missing these things, I want to reflect a bit with you on what I see going on. I hope it proves both personally helpful and also fruitful in evaluating the things you might be hearing.