Desiring the Kingdom

Book review (James K.A. Smith)

So lately I’ve been reading two books, Desiring the Kingdom, and then You are what you Love. I've mentioned both these books before here, and now I'm ready to write about them a little more expansively. Let me help you understand how these two books relate though, because I'm going to review one after the other. Desiring the Kingdom was published in 2009, as the first of a three volume series (I'll get to the other two later!), whereas You are what you Love was published in 2016, partly because DtK was seen as 'a bit too difficult' for some people, and YawyL was not written to 'dumb it down', but certainly to streamline, update, and make it more accessible.

The core theses of Desiring the Kingdom are these:

(1) As human beings we are far more "loving" beings than "thinking" beings. That is, we are shaped and characterised primarily by our desires, our longings, our vision of the good life, our loves, our affections, than we are simply thinking brains that happen to have bodies attached.

(2) That the way our affections and loves are shaped is much more pre-cognitive or through embodied practices, than it is through information, content, didactic methodologies.

(3) So, if we want to shape Christian formation, we need to shape practices, not just deliver content. This has implications for both church and Christian education. (The latter because Smith is particularly interested in Christian colleges and what they 'do')

Smith is working with a very Augustinian framework in the first thesis, we are what we love, and we are made to love God, and when we don't then our loves are disordered and never properly fulfilled. We are restless until they are. And yet the way he explores this opened my eyes to this in a new way. I think because I operated for a long time on the idea that we reach people's affections through their intellect, and while I think that can be true, the challenge here is that very often things never sink deeper than the mind.

So, DtK walks through six main chapters.

1: The human person as lover

Here's where Smith does his initial work by posing two questions, about what Christian colleges exist for and think they are doing, and a second one about how other cultural practices constitute 'liturgies' which are also pedagogies. Every pedagogy, Smith writes, contains an implicit anthropology - the way we try to 'educate' people reveals our assumptions about what kind of things human beings are and so how we form them and to what end. If you think they are thinking-things, your education will mostly be knowledge. Alongside this, he has a working definition of 'liturgy' which isn't "formal stuff we do in traditional churches", but collective practices that are 'thick' with meaning, and reflect ultimate ascriptions of value. This is important because our loves, the things we ultimately value, are shaped by our practices, our liturgies. We love what we love because we do the things we do. This chapter also does the work of criticizing the idea that humans are primarily 'thinking beings' (a la Descartes), or even 'believing things' (a kind of Reformation retconning of the former). So, Smith's model of human life is this: We have a love that is aimed/intended at our idealised 'good life', "the Kingdom", and this is shaped by habits (on a personal level) and communal practices (aka liturgies) on a collective level. There's also some solid work here on the shift from 'worldview' language (primarily intellectual and explicit) to 'social imaginaries' (a la Charles Taylor), that is the implicit understanding of the world that is embedded in the practices of our lives.

2: Liturgy, formation, and counter-formation

If our loves are shaped fundamentally by practices, more so than ideas (I need to stop and say that Smith is not anti-ideas, anti-intellectual, but he does argue that we need to de-emphasise ideas per se; we are too wont to function in an ideas-only mode, and we need to think through how ideas are embedded in practices and in bodies), then what we need to consider how habit-formation works, both for the good and the worse (virtues and vices). Habits, and practices, are not neutral, but rather they embed values in them.

3: Cultural exegesis of 'secular' liturgies

Here's where Smith takes some of his ideas and applies them to help us see how it works in practice. Namely, what if we looked at different parts of our culture(s) through these lenses. So he gives three examples: the mall, the university, and the military-entertainment complex, and reads them in turn of religious practice. So, the mall is the site of consumerist transcendence, it has its own rituals, its own liturgy, which inculcates in us its vision of its Kingdom. And it shapes us, unconsciously, to its values.

1. I’m broken, therefore I shop. (p96) >> The brokenness of our existence is met by the ads which promise to fix us, and the solution is to buy.

2. I shop with others. (p97) >> Shopping is social, but that sociality is competitive - I evaluate you by your consumption and products.

3. I shop (and shop and shop), therefore I am. (p99) >> consumption is redemption. And the more we buy, well, the more we still have to buy. because every purchase wears old almost as soon as we get it.

4. Don’t ask, don’t tell. (p101) >> All this consumption is built on the unseen realities (deliberately kept unseen) of the places that generate all these goods, the people who make them, and the landfill that will reclaim them.

I won't go through his treatment of the other two, but part of Smith's critique of contemporary Christianity is that very often we accept, adopt, embrace these liturgies, and their social imaginaries, and simply 'Jesufy' them, which in this example sells Jesus as just another product to satisfy our consumerist desires, and ultimately will never satisfy. You can never consume enough religious goods to fill the hole inside of you.

4: The Practiced Shape of the Christian Life

In the second half of the book, Smith wants to move us to consider what (traditional) Christian liturgy says and does to us. But before we get there, he makes the case that Christian worship is 'sacramental', in the sense that it is embodied and enchanted. That is, sacramentality here means that matter exists not in a way that is divorced and naturalistic, but it exists as the very means by which God reveals himself, because we are material beings in a material world. This is anti-naturalism.

the very performance of Christian worship cuts against both dualistic gnosticism, which would construe matter and bodies as inherently evil, and reductionistic naturalism, which would construe the world as “merely” natural." (p143)

Smith does have a useful aside here, a word to keep going with him. Although he is going to talk about 'liturgy' in a traditionalist 'high church' sense, he acknowledges that all churches have liturgy (even if they deny it). And those practices are formative, of course. And, even in very free church traditions, the kinds of patterns he talks about in ch 5 are very often still present.

5: An exegesis of the social imaginary embedded in Christian worship

This chapter ought to make you fall in love with liturgy. The opening call to worship expressed that we are a people constituted by being called out and gathered into one nation. The call to worship is also a call to be truly human, because it is in worship of the Triune God that we are so. Smith walks us through greeting, songs, the reading of the Law, Confession and Assurance, Baptism, Creed, Prayer, Scripture & Sermon, Eucharist, Offering, Sending as Witnesses

There's a whole bunch of things I'd like to pull our and share here. This is a rich exposition of the theo-logic and embedded meanings in the practices of Christian worship. And Smith shows how these things shape us as people and train our desires Godward.

6: The education of desire

The last chapter probably won't be as relevant to most of my readers, and indeed it's part of Smith's particular project and interest - what does this say to the idea of the Christian University? (We Australians don't really have such institutions, for the most part). Still, it is a good question, given what he's said so far. And his answer is that Christian universities ought to be less about giving students 'biblical worldviews' or some such, and more about shaping them into different kinds of persons, by their shared practices.

Okay, so, well that's an overview of the book, and I don't think I've really conveyed it as well as I'd like. One thing that's missing in the above is that Smith regularly interweaves his text with examples and forays into literature and other art forms, because these ideas (like the ideas they are talking about) are more caught than taught, because we need the imagination, not just the intellect, to jump on board.