Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies)

Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

Smith, James K. A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781441211262
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Malls, stadiums, and universities are actually liturgical structures that influence and shape our thoughts and affections. Humans--as Augustine noted--are "desiring agents, " full of longings and passions; in brief, we are what we love. James K. A. Smith focuses on the themes of liturgy and desire in Desiring the Kingdom, the first book in what will be a three-volume set on the theology of culture. He redirects our yearnings to focus on the greatest good: God. Ultimately, Smith seeks to re-vision education through the process and practice of worship. Students of philosophy, theology, worldview, and culture will welcome Desiring the Kingdom, as will those involved in ministry and other interested readers.

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PART 1

Desiring, Imaginative Animals

WE ARE WHAT WE LOVE

In the introduction, I suggested an axiom: Behind every pedagogy is a philosophical anthropology; that is, implicit in every constellation of educational practices there is a set of assumptions about the nature of human persons. In order to articulate a vision of Christian worship as a pedagogy of desire, and a correlate picture of Christian education as a kind of liturgical formation, it’s important first to articulate the understanding of the human person that informs this vision. The overall goal of part 1 is to sketch a formal account of education as the formation of the imagination by affective practices. Chapter 1 articulates a philosophical anthropology that understands human persons as defined by love—as desiring agents and liturgical animals whose primary mode of intending the world is love, which in turn shapes the imagination. Chapter 2 then outlines how our love/desire is shaped and directed by material, embodied practices. In chapter 3, we’ll undertake an exegesis of “secular” liturgies in order to discern why and how they function as liturgies.

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Homo Liturgicus

THE HUMAN PERSON AS LOVER

I am inviting us to rethink the relationship between worship and worldview by thinking about the connection between liturgy, learning, and formation. This task is motivated by two different sorts of questions that represent two different ways of coming to the same issues. On the one hand, we are concerned about the nature and task of Christian higher education: Why are we studying at a Christian college? What are we teaching at a Christian college? Why do we even have Christian colleges? So we’re asking: What is the connection between the task of Christian education and the cadences of the church’s liturgical life? On the other hand, concerned with articulating a theology of culture and an understanding of worship as cultural formation, we’re asking: In what ways do other cultural practices constitute (competing) liturgies that are at the same time pedagogies? And in what way does Christian worship function (or fail to function) as an alternative pedagogy that forms us otherwise? At stake in both of these questions is the matter of pedagogy and formation: in both cases and from both angles we’re interested in discerning how material practices constitute pedagogies for the education of desire that shape our very identity. On this account, education is not something that traffics primarily in abstract, disembodied ideas; rather, education is a holistic endeavor that involves the whole person, including our bodies, in a process of formation that aims our desires, primes our imagination, and orients us to the world—all before we ever start thinking about it. This is why educational strategies that traffic only in ideas often fail to actually educate; that is, they fail to form people. Given this link between formation and embodiment, we might say that education is a “meatier” task than we often assume.

Before we can consider just how this works, we need to consider why this works. Why is it that embodied rituals and material practices are so effective in shaping our identities and forming our desires? So before considering how material practices train us in this way (chapter 2), and before we can give attention to the different ends to which these different liturgies are directed (chapter 3), we first need to follow up on an axiom suggested in the introduction: that behind every pedagogy is a philosophical anthropology, a model or picture of the human person. The focus of this chapter is the elucidation of a philosophical anthropology that recognizes that we are, ultimately, liturgical animals[1] because we are fundamentally desiring creatures. We are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our gut and aim our heart to certain ends. So we are not primarily homo rationale or homo faber or homo economicus; we are not even generically homo religiosis. We are more concretely homo liturgicus; humans are those animals that are religious animals not because we are primarily believing animals but because we are liturgical animals—embodied, practicing creatures whose love/desire is aimed at something ultimate. If a pedagogy presumes a philosophical anthropology, then the articulation of a distinctly Christian education requires that we first unpack the elements of a Christian philosophical anthropology. We’ll do this by first considering some common (but reductionistic) models of the human person and then unpack the alternative understanding of human persons as loving, liturgical animals.

From Thinking Things to Liturgical Animals

At stake in how we think about this strange beast, the Christian university—and thus how we think about the relation between church and university—is an even deeper question about what human beings are. For too long we have tried to think of the relationship between the church and the university, as well as the hybrid beast, the Christian college, in terms of ideas. So we tend to think about this as a matter of relating the sacred and the secular, or how to integrate faith and learning, or we tend to organize the discussion around a clash of worldviews—and imagine the difference between the university and the church primarily in terms of thinking and believing. But I think the relation—and the challenge—is deeper than that. And I think this is the case precisely because human persons are not primarily or for the most part thinkers, or even believers. Instead, human persons are—fundamentally and primordially—lovers. I want to make sense of that claim by a brief tour of options in philosophical anthropology. Here the key questions are these: What are human beings? What kinds of creatures are we? And what are we called to be? There are different, competing models of the human person that we can see throughout the history of philosophy and theology.

“I Think, Therefore I Am”: The Human Person as Thinker

A dominant model, as old as Plato but rebirthed by Descartes and cultivated throughout modernity, sees the human person as fundamentally a thinking thing. Recall Descartes’ basic project as outlined in Discourse on Method and his later Meditations. Racked with anxiety because his prior certainties have become shipwrecked on the shores of later doubt, Descartes finds himself in an existential crisis: If things that have seemed so certain to him can later be unveiled as false, then how can he be certain about anything?

Trying to tackle this angst head-on, Descartes retreats to isolation in a room for several days, simply in order to think his way through the problem. (How different would the world be if Descartes could have just gotten a date?!) You probably know the rough-and-ready outline of the story: meditating on the conditions for knowledge, Descartes sets about to discover if anything can be known with certainty. After writing off the senses and the body as sources of deception and doubt, and even the realm of mathematical truths, Descartes despairs whether anything is certain. While I might think that 2 + 2 = 4 is a certain truth, it is at least possible that God is an evil demon, toying with me, and deceiving me into thinking that’s obviously true, when in fact it is not. Almost swallowed by this sea of raging doubt, Descartes catches a glimpse of hope—a sort of intellectual beacon that promises solid ground. For, he reasons, even if I’m being deceived about what seems most certain, it must be the case that, in order for me to be deceived, I must exist. And so, in the Meditations, Descartes’ famous maxim “I think, therefore I am” takes on an even starker form: “I’m deceived, therefore I am”—because even if I am being deceived, I would have to exist in order to be deceived. With this insight, Descartes’ battered vessel in search of certainty finally reaches a shore.[2]

So, with certainty, Descartes concludes that I am. But this raises the next question: What am I? Just what is the nature of this “I” that most certainly exists? Having cast aside the senses and the body already in his meditations, Descartes concludes that “I” am “a thinking thing.” In other words, what I am is an essentially immaterial mind or consciousness—occasionally and temporarily embodied, but not essentially.[3] This bequeaths to us a dominant and powerful picture of the human person as fundamentally a thinking thing—a cognitive machine defined, above all, by thought and rational operations. We might call this a broadly “rationalist” or “intellectualist” picture of the human person, and it has both a long pedigree (back to Plato) and a large progeny (through Kant and into the present). It entails a sense that persons are defined by thinking and is often allied with a sense of functional disembodiment (that is, the person as thinking thing is only contingently related to a body). As such, what nourishes or fuels the “I” is a steady diet of ideas, fed somewhat intravenously into the mind through the lines of propositions and information.

While this model of the person as thinking thing assumed different forms throughout modernity (e.g., in Kant, Hegel), this rationalist picture was absorbed particularly by Protestant Christianity (whether liberal or conservative), which tends to operate with an overly cognitivist picture of the human person and thus tends to foster an overly intellectualist account of what it means to be or become a Christian[4]—which helps explain the rationalist distortions of “worldview” discussed above. It is just this adoption of a rationalist, cognitivist anthropology that accounts for the shape of so much Protestant worship as a heady affair fixated on “messages” that disseminate Christian ideas and abstract values (easily summarized on PowerPoint slides).[5] The result is a talking-head version of Christianity that is fixated on doctrines and ideas, even if it is also paradoxically allied with a certain kind of anti-intellecutalism. We could describe this as “bobble head” Christianity, so fixated on the cognitive that it assumes a picture of human beings that look like bobble heads: mammoth heads that dwarf an almost nonexistent body. In sum, because the church buys into a cognitivist anthropology, it adopts a stunted pedagogy that is fixated on the mind. So rather than calling into question this reductionistic picture of the human person, the church simply tries to feed different ideas through the same intellectual IV.

“I Believe in order to Understand”: The Human Person as Believer

Now, this rationalist or cognitivist picture of the human person as a “thinking thing” has been contested, especially within the Reformed tradition, as a reductionistic account that fails to honor the richness and complexity of the human person and also naively imagines that thinking constitutes a neutral or objective base. Instead, the criticism goes, we need to recognize the degree to which thinking operates on the basis of faith, that thought is not a neutral, objective activity but rather a particular way of seeing the world that is itself based on prior faith or trust. So before we are thinkers, we are believers; before we can offer our rational explanations of the world, we have already assumed a whole constellation of beliefs—a worldview—that governs and conditions our perception of the world. Our primordial orientation or comportment to the world is not as thinkers but as believers. Beliefs, we might say, are more “basic” than ideas.[6] In this alternative anthropology, human persons are understood not as fundamentally thinking machines but rather as believing animals, or essentially religious creatures, defined by a worldview that is pre-rational or supra-rational.[7] What defines us is not what we think—not the set of ideas we assent to—but rather what we believe, the commitments and trusts that orient our being-in-the-world. This moves the essence of the human person from the more abstract, disembodied world of ideas to a prerational level of commitments that are more ingrained in the human person. Before we are thinkers, we are believers. Thus this line of worldview-thinking generated by the Reformed tradition developed precisely as a critique of more rationalistic construals of Christianity that have now hijacked worldview-talk to rationalistic ends.

This critique of rationalism—and especially Christianized rationalism—is laudable and important. The Reformed emphasis on a more holistic sense of our identity as believers contests the reductionistic rationalisms that continue to dominate both the academy and public consciousness.[8] It also contests an important feature that attends such rationalist accounts of the human person, namely, claims regarding the “objectivity” of reason that engender a secularization of the “public” sphere, including the public sphere of the university—just the sort of boundary marking that makes the “Christian university” sound like an oxymoron.[9] By contesting this, the Reformed emphasis on humans as fundamentally and inescapably believing animals pushes back on the logic of secularity and thus carves out a space to articulate a rationale for distinctly Christian education.[10] However, while I affirm much of this critique, I have two reservations about this faith-based (rather than rationalist) anthropology:

1. While it contests a narrow, naive focus on ideas, this model of the human person seems just to move the clash of ideas down a level to a clash of beliefs. Those beliefs often still look like the propositions and ideas of the rationalist model; they’ve just been given the status of Ur-ideas—the originary beliefs that undergird all ideas. Such beliefs still feel like the sort of thing that can be formulated as P or Pʹ on a register that is not qualitatively different from the rationalist register on which we would map ideas. Does such a (merely semantic?) shift really honor the richness of the human person? Again, I think this manifests itself in how this model shapes our thinking about the relationship between faith and the university. While we might not reduce it to a matter of ideas, the worldview model still tends to think about the difference and relation primarily in terms of beliefs. Once that step down is made—from ideas to the worldview commitments that undergird those ideas—the discussion looks a lot like the discussion in the person-as-thinker model.
2. I find that the person-as-believer model still tends to operate with a very disembodied, individualistic picture of the human person. The beliefs that orient me still seem quite disconnected from my body, and with little or no attachment to the things I do as a body, and so with little attachment to the others that my body bumps into, embraces, hugs, and touches. While this model tries to articulate a more integral relationship between faith and reason, believing and knowing, it tends to do so in ways that imagine the individual Christian as a believer who knows on the basis of this individual belief. Hence, discussions of how to relate faith and learning are usually articulated in terms of connecting Christianity or Christian faith to the disciplines or to the college. One will find little if any discussion of the church. Instead, given this disembodied, individualist picture of the person-as-believer, such a model fosters a focus on developing “Christian perspectives” on X, Y, and Z. Both the materiality of the body (along with attendant bodily practices) and the specificity of the church drop out of this picture. As Hauerwas rightly notes, when Christianity is turned into “a belief system,” it is reduced to something “available without mediation by the church.”[11] So while in the...