I’ve been reading James K A Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom and finding it quite stimulating. The book was awarded Christianity Today’s best theology / ethics book award for 2010, though I didn’t know that when I started reading it.
Smith begins by introducing the idea of cultural liturgies with an extended description of visiting a shopping mall as an experience of worship, in which you are taught to desire a particular image of yourself and your life. This idea is then central to everything he develops, as he argues that human beings are essentially homo liturgicus, lovers whose loves and desires are shaped by embodied social experiences. “I love, therefore I am,” where that love is never a simple emotion or intellectual attitude, but part of our physical embodiment as people with desires.
He argues therefore that thinking in terms of beliefs or world views as what shapes us is quite simply inadequate. We are shaped more by practices, habits and desires than by ideas, however much there is interplay between them. Simply equipping Christians with better apologetic, or a confidently different world-view is not enough, because Christian education and development is about formation (or transformation) not information. In connexion with this he makes a telling observation about the relative power of a university induction into your education versus the powerful socialisation of Freshers week.
The answer he proposes is to pay a great deal more attention to Christian liturgies and liturgical communities as a shaping of desires and practices in a God-directed, gospel-narrating culture. This for him offers the best hope of constructing a Christian “social imaginary” – an idea of Charles Taylor, which he finds much more descriptive of human living than the ideational “worldview”. On the back of this he opens up some significant questions about Christian colleges and universities, and the role of liturgical practices as central to their identity if they are to be formational.
In all of this there is a lot I find very attractive, not least the emphasis on worship, the significance of the body to being human, and the concomitant sacramental understanding of Christianity. His way of analysing the shopping trip to the mall, or the Freshers’ week experience as liturgical events is extraordinarily fruitful, and helps more than argument does to make the case for paying much more attention to Christian liturgy as a potential counter-cultural movement of formation. It is lex orandi, lex credendi (the rule of praying is the rule of believing) with a vengeance.
I agree with him that liturgical experience is a necessary part of a proper Christian formation, and that it can, if we take it more seriously than we in the West customarily do, truly make a counter-cultural difference. If Lent had something of the seriousness of Ramadan, rather than being an opportunity for giving an air of piety to a diet programme, it might have more force on questions of how we enflesh the idea of offering our bodies as a living sacrifice.
The emphases on the body of good sacramental liturgy, and on the different rationality of love and desire, are to be welcomed. We are not simply Cartesian disembodied thinkers. I do wish, however, that he would not abuse the word καρδία (kardia – the Greek word for heart). Yes, the heart was the organ of thinking in the world of the New Testament, but locating thinking in the heart does not make it any less an ideational process for them than locating it in the head does for us. Equating it to thinking with the gut, as a more embodied type of thought is a linguistic nonsense. (Smith shares the Radical Orthodoxy love of giving technical meanings to Greek words – no self-respecting RO sympathiser seems able to say purpose, goal or end, but must always write telos as if the word were a repository of all its varied meanings. Meh!)
However, there are some larger problems with this overall view. Smith appears to have been brought up in an a-liturgical church, where, as it were, bits of liturgy are optional extras. (He knows, as I do, that in truth even non-liturgical churches develop their own liturgical patterns, but the broad point still stands.) For him , liturgy is something to be recovered, and it appears vital and new. Those of us who have always belonged to liturgical churches, and who value the liturgy deeply, may be rather more doubtful that in practice it can achieve what he claims for it apart from small intentional communities like the monasteries, where the liturgy provides the framework for a whole life formation.
There were a number of places where I, as an English reader, struggled with things like “Christian universities” as a concept. In part it illustrates our very different contexts: in some respects, the US has never (structurally, as opposed to culturally) been part of Christendom. It has always been modernity’s nation. The programme Smith advances, as that of people like Hauerwas or Radical Orthodoxy, who one might in this connexion see as fellow-travellers, is in Christendom terms, a sectarian one.
My own view of where we are in England is that we’re somewhere on the cusp of Christendom, and in transition. Before us is the Scylla of a too-tight drawing of the boundaries, which not only excludes the Christendom believer, but also risks losing a chance to shape the hospitality or hostility of the wider culture to the church and the church’s Lord. But before us also is the Charybdis of a too lightly permeable boundary that loses the church’s identity and weakens any possibility of her becoming a counter culture. The path between the rocks may be stormy, but it still seems to me that it’s worth trying to navigate it.
Smith’s idea of cultural liturgies is a powerful and challenging way of looking a great many social practices and seeing their power. His reminder to us that we need to shape our formation and education to take account of our nature as corporeal, desiring and communal beings, who are more affected by habits and practices than nude ideas is a necessary one, His attention to Christian liturgy as a counter-cultural transformative power is a welcome one. I think he may over-romanticise the liturgy and overstate its power, and I don’t want to go the route of separate institutions, even if they were viable here (which I doubt).
This is a good book, and the first of a projected trilogy. I would hope in those to come he might give some more attention to the catechumenate. After all, that offered ways of shaping people in a liturgical context, but with more than liturgy, which allowed them to live counter-cultural lives in their society without withdrawing from it.
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