Desiring the Kingdom (): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Cultural Liturgies Book 1)

by James K. A. Smith

the centrality of their public reading in gathered worship, the letters and documents that came to be the New Testament (in addition to the psalms prayed and sung by the early church) functioned primarily in a liturgical context of worship, not the private context of individual study.[5] And when the Scriptures are heard and read in the context of worship, they function differently. Rather than being approached as a “storehouse of facts” (Charles Hodge), the Scriptures are read and encountered as a site of divine action, as a means of grace, as a conduit of the Spirit’s transformative power, as part of a pedagogy of desire. One could say that in the context of worship, Scripture constitutes a different kind of speech act, and thus is heard/received in a different mode.[6] The point here is that just as worship precedes the formation of the biblical canon (“the Bible”), so too does participation in Christian worship precede the formulation of doctrine and the articulation of worldview. Lived worship is the fount from which a worldview springs, rather than being the expression or application of some cognitive set of beliefs already in place.