Reviews
Imagining the Kingdom: How worship works
Paul Bickley
James
K. A. Smith
Baker Academic
198pp
Christianity's most effective critics are those who
take it seriously. Dawkins et al., make for great copy but only by
way of knocking down risible straw men. The hardest punches are
landed by those who accept Christianity at face value, and then
point out the contradiction in the lives of its adherents. 'The
cars in the churchyard are shiny and German / Distinctly at odds
with the theme of the sermon / And during communion I study the
people / Threading themselves through the eye of the needle' ('Eye
of the Needle', The Divine Comedy).
This is more than the simple uncovering of individual
dishonesty and hypocrisy, of which there is no shortage anywhere.
It is also to reveal that Christian practice often lacks any
formative power. In the words of theologian John Witvliet, 'If
liturgical participation shapes us, why in the world are lifelong
participants in worship not better people?'
The question is one which Canadian philosopher James
K. A. Smith raises in the closing pages of Imagining the
Kingdom. And it is the most obvious question to be asked both
of this book and its impressive predecessor, Desiring the
Kingdom, part of a three-volume series on 'cultural
liturgies'. The core argument is simple, and important: we are not
primarily thinking but feeling animals, yet Christian education and
formation (in churches and in Christian education institutions)
focuses almost exclusively on the head and not the heart, on
'worldviews' rather than loves.
Meanwhile, culture is littered with 'liturgies' into
which we are constantly being conscripted, and which orient our
desires towards alternative kingdoms. Smith cites William
Cavanaugh's vivid question: 'How does a provincial farm boy become
persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the
world to kill people he knows nothing about?' We might ask, without
suggesting moral equivalence, how do two Londoners become persuaded
to hack a soldier to death on a London street, or how do thousands
of people become convinced that it is necessary to queue for hours
to obtain a new Apple device on the first day of its release? These
are decisions, but they are not in the main part rational - they
emerge from the affective nature. The farm boy does not 'enlist for
an idea, though he certainly signs up for an ideal - but the ideal
to which he is devoted (the nation, freedom, a god) is not
something he knows; it is something he loves ... he identifies
himself with a story that has seeped into his bones at levels he is
not even aware of ... the product of a sentimental education.'
That education, offers Smith, is better thought of as
worship than the transmission of information. For him, worship is
not merely expression, the upward act of the gathered people of
God, or whoever. Worship is formative, where something happens to
us.
The author focuses on the precise nature of the
relationship between liturgy and desire, relying heavily on two
Frenchmen, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu. From the former Smith draws out that 'knowing' or
perceiving is not a matter of mind but of our whole corporeal
selves (I think of the way I often can't remember passwords or
phone numbers until I get to the point of dialling them in). From
the latter, Smith establishes that any teaching is a matter of
establishing a 'habitus' - dispositions to see and construct the
world in a certain way. We are physically trained by insignificant
rituals or acts ('which means, of course, that nothing is banal,
nothing is insignificant'). Remember The Karate Kid? Wax
on, wax off. Smith thinks something like the swipe of an iPhone
screen could be such a ritual, one that inclines us to think that
'the world is "available" to me and at my disposal - to constitute
the world as "at-hand" for me, to be selected, scaled, scanned,
tapped, and enjoyed'.
How, then, should Christian worship work? Physical
engagement should define our habitus, which would enable us to
imagine, desire and act for the Kingdom. Repetition is important.
Story is important. Form is important. What is essential is not
just the intellectual 'content' of a liturgical act, but the actual
physical mode of engagement (evoking for me Paul's words to the
Corinthian church on abuses of the Lord's Supper). It is primarily
through immersion in regular worship that we are properly educated,
though intellectual work retains a place. How does it fail? Because
we insist that we can change people by changing their ideas alone;
because we are addicted to novelty and self-expression; because we
engage in worship to symbolically mark ourselves out as members of
the Christian crowd, rather than approaching it as a formative
practice.
So what? First, 'reading' culture means understanding
that it is an environment rich with liturgical practice. The
processes of Muslim 'radicalisation' are again in the spotlight,
but if Smith is right then we are all being recruited for some
kingdom or another. We ought to pay attention to how people are
being trained to live and what they are being trained to worship.
This is not a moral crusade, but a question of politics and
citizenship. Second, the Church - and churches - matters. Not just
as institutions or carriers of ideas, but places of practice.
Christianity is not simply a deposit of more or less coherent or
more or less persuasive ideas, but also summoning people to a
particular set of practices in which the Christian story is encoded
and the Kingdom breaks in: confession, breaking of bread, prayer,
song.
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