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

by James K. A. Smith

second, sometimes Christians fail to articulate adequate strategies of resistance because they misdiagnose the threat. And they misdiagnose the threat because of a flawed, stunted philosophical anthropology.

the church’s response is oddly rationalist. It plunks us down in a “worship” service, the culmination of which is a forty-five-minute didactic sermon, a sort of holy lecture, trying to convince us of the dangers by implanting doctrines and beliefs in our minds. While the mall paradoxically appreciates that we are liturgical, desiring animals, the (Protestant) church still tends to see us as Cartesian minds. While secular liturgies are after our hearts through our bodies, the church thinks it only has to get into our heads. While Victoria’s Secret is fanning a flame in our kardia, the church is trucking water to our minds. While secular liturgies are enticing us with affective images of a good life, the church is trying to convince us otherwise by depositing ideas.

what if we sought to discern not the essence of Christianity as a system of beliefs (or summarized in a worldview) but instead sought to discern the shape of Christian faith as a form of life?

general, we have a tendency to think that doctrine and/or belief comes first—either in a chronological or normative sense—and that this then finds expression or application in worship practices, as if we have a worldview in place and then devise practices that are consistent with that cognitive framework.[3] Such a top-down, ideas-first picture of the relation between practice and knowledge, worldview and worship, is often accompanied by a corresponding picture of the relationship between the Bible and worship. According to this model, we begin with the Bible as the source of our doctrines and beliefs and then “apply” it to come up with worship practices that are consistent with, and expressive of, what the Bible teaches.

The people of God called out (ek-klēsia) to be the church were worshiping long before they got all their doctrines in order or articulated the elements of a Christian worldview; and they were engaged in and developing worship practices long before what we now call our Bible emerged and was solidified, so to speak.

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.

For instance, when our children were quite young, we would sometimes participate in Good Friday services that included a few hymns and an extensive sermon that would focus on the fine points of atonement theory. But sometimes we would have opportunity to participate in Tenebrae, a historic “service of shadows” that revolves around Christ’s seven last words from the cross. In the service we have attended, the congregation enters a sanctuary lit only by seven clusters of candles. Through the service, Christ’s last words from the cross are read—sometimes with a brief meditation, sometimes with a musical interpretation. After each word, one of the clusters of candles is extinguished (in this case by a person methodically doing so as part of a liturgical dance). The darkness of that dark day increasingly envelops the congregation, until after the final word when the last bit of light is extinguished. After a time of darkened silence, the strepitus sounds—a torrent of discordant noise generated by cymbals from a hidden location in the rear of the sanctuary, shuddering through the congregation like a cold wind of desolation. The congregation then departs in somber silence, in darkness, the realities of Good Friday having been enacted in a way that still lingers, almost oppressively. They will not gather again until Easter morn, when the darkened sanctuary will be ablaze with light and lilies in resurrection splendor. But for now they depart in heaviness to endure that dark Saturd...

Doctrines, beliefs, and a Christian worldview emerge from the nexus of Christian worship practices; worship is the matrix of Christian faith, not its “expression” or “illustration.”

And developmentally, our orientation to the world is still more fundamentally shaped by embodied liturgical practices than doctrinal disquisitions (which is precisely why secular liturgies often trump our imaginations). The practices of the church as the gathered people of the coming King precede the formulas and codes that would later emerge from their theoretical reflection. Before Christians had systematic theologies and worldviews, they were singing hymns and psalms, saying prayers, celebrating the Eucharist, sharing their property, and becoming a people marked by a desire for God’s coming kingdom—a desire that constituted them as a peculiar people in the present.

The rhythms and rituals of Christian worship invoke and feed off of our embodiment and traffic in the stuff of a material world: water, bread, and wine, each of which point us to their earthy emergence: the curvature of the riverbed, the shimmering fields that give forth grain, the grapes that hint of a unique terroir. It does not take much imagination for these in turn to evoke an entire environment: The gurgling water in the riverbed calls to mind the reeds and pussy willows along its edge, muskrats slinking quietly from the edge under the water’s surface, as the water wends its way to twist the crank of a gristmill or a hydroelectric turbine, both providing sustenance for a civilization of culture. The bread evokes images of Kansas wheat fields or of parched African expanses that have failed to yield grain for years.[12] The bread has not made it to this table without much labor, without hands (and machines) harvesting, sometimes toiling and despoiling in the process. The wine in the cup has its own rich history of grapes drooping on the ground, rescued from rot by caring hands of husbandry, perhaps also just escaping an early frost that threatened their ripe skins. So right here in Christian worship we have a sort of microcosm of creation—the “world in a wafer.”[13]

implicit understanding that God inhabits all this earthy stuff, that we meet God in the material realities of water and wine, that God embraces our embodiment, embraces us in our embodiment.

That God would meet us in the mundane and earthy is a performance of God’s affirmation of creation and materiality as a good to be enjoyed and as a gift to be received, rather than a regrettable and lamentable condition from which we can hope to escape.

There is a performative sanctioning of embodiment that is implicit in Christian worship, invoking the ultimate performative sanctioning of the body in the incarnation—which itself recalls the love of God that gave birth to the material creation[14]—its reaffirmation in the resurrection of Jesus, and looks forward to the resurrection of the body as an eschatological and eternal affirmation of the goodness of creation.

This liturgical affirmation of materiality is commonly described as a sacramental understanding of the world—that the physical, material stuff of creation and embodiment is the means by which God’s grace meets us and gets hold of us.

destiny.”[21] Aspects of the material world like bread and water are not “made” to be sacramental by some kind of magical divine fiat that transforms their created nature; rather, when they are taken up as sacraments in the context of worship, their “natural sacramentality” is simply intensified and completed. So, too, worship is not some odd, extravagant, extra-human thing we do as an add-on to our earthly, physical, material nature; rather, “worship is the epiphany of the world.”[22] Worship is the ordering and reordering of our material being to the end for which it was meant.

that the natural world is always more than just nature—it is charged with the presence and glory of God.

Worship forms us and aims us because its concrete, material practices catch hold of our imagination. This is why worship is more like art than science, more like literature than logic. Worship is fundamentally aesthetic, not didactic.

And yet there is no Christian worship that is not material, that doesn’t put bodies through motions and routines, that doesn’t at some point evoke the body on the cross in (at the very least) the memory of the bread. Even if the content of our worship is bent on making us modern Platonic despisers of the body who long to become a vapor, the very gathering of a people at a certain time in a certain place to perform together certain acts—to (at the very least) sing with our tongues and lungs, read with our eyes, listen with our ears, pray with our voices, embrace one another in the foyer, nibble on crackers and sip grape juice—the very performance of Christian worship mitigates against such dualism.

degree.”[35] I think we could extend this to understand the enduring and unique significance of the sacraments and the church’s worship life as sites of a special presence of the Spirit that is both revelatory and formative in a unique way. While the whole world is a sacrament, we might say that the sacraments and the liturgy are unique “hot spots” where God’s formative, illuminating presence is particularly “intense.”[36] While the Spirit inhabits all of creation, there is also a sense that the Spirit’s presence is intensified in particular places, things, and actions.

The church’s worship is a uniquely intense site of the Spirit’s transformative presence. We must never lose sight of the charged nature of these practices.[39] These are not just rituals that are unique because they are aimed at a different telos; they are also unique because they are practices that bring us face-to-face with the living God.

it is God who is both the subject and the object of our worship; the whole point of “liturgical lines and rituals” is to create “a powerful environment of God-centeredness.”[40] Worship is not for me—it’s not primarily meant to be an experience that “meets my felt needs,” nor should we merely reduce it to a pedagogy of desire (which would be just a more sophisticated pro me construal of worship); rather, worship is about and for God. To say that God is both subject and object is to emphasize that the triune God is both the audience and the agent[41] of worship: it is to and for God, and God is active in worship in the Word and sacraments.

the Reformers saw the liturgy as God’s action and our faithful reception of that action. The governing idea of the Reformed liturgy is thus twofold: the conviction that to participate in the liturgy is to enter the sphere of God’s acting, not just of God’s presence, plus the conviction that we are to appropriate God’s action in faith and gratitude through the work of the Spirit. . . . The liturgy is a meeting between God and God’s people, a meeting in which both parties act, but in which God initiates and we respond.

These elements are deemed crucial parts of Christian worship precisely because they are essential showings (rather than tellings) of the gospel of Christ and because they are crucial aspects of training-by-doing, opportunities for practicing and rehearsing what it means to be the people of God, who desire the kingdom of God.

The Apostles’ Creed itself locates Jesus in time, in the historical reign of Pontius Pilate. The church is not a people gathered by abstract ideas or teachings or ideals; it is a people gathered to the historical person Jesus Christ. The church is a Messiah-people who worship a God who broke into and inhabited time, who suffered at the hands of historical regimes, and who rose “on the third day.”

Second, as a messianic people, the church is a people who inhabit the present with a certain lightness of being. If we are strangers and pilgrims in a foreign territory (1 Peter 2:11), then we are also pilgrims in a strange time—who will always relate to the present a bit like a time traveler

During Advent each year, the Christian year teaches us to once again become Israel, recognizing our sin and need, thus waiting, longing, hoping, calling, praying for the coming of the Messiah, the advent of justice, and the in-breaking of shalom.

Instead, we are called and formed to be a people of expectancy—looking for the coming (again) of the Messiah.

it gives us enough of a sense of what’s coming that we look around at our broken world and see all the ways that the kingdom has not yet arrived. “Come, Lord Jesus!” and “How long, O Lord?!” are both prayers of a futural people.

The Christian year itself is an ancient inheritance reminding us that we are part of a people that is older than our present, that we are heirs of tradition. Thus we are constituted as a people who live between times, remembering and hoping at the same time. Each week this between-ness is performed in the Eucharist, which both invites us to “Do this in remembrance of me” and by doing so to “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

We are called to be a people of memory, who are shaped by a tradition that is millennia older than the last Billboard chart. And we are also called to be a people of expectation, praying for and looking forward to a coming kingdom that will break in upon our present as a thief in the night. We are a stretched people, citizens of a kingdom that is both older and newer than anything offered by “the contemporary.”

The practices of Christian worship over the liturgical year form in us something of an “old soul” that is perpetually pointed to a future, longing for a coming kingdom, and seeking to be such a stretched people in the present who are a foretaste of the coming kingdom.

“Whenever we gather for public worship,” Horton declares, “it is because we have been summoned. That is what ‘church’ means: ekklēsia, ‘called out.’

Rather, it is a society of those who have been chosen, redeemed, called, justified, and are being sanctified until one day they will be glorified.”

work.”[13] Our gathering is an act of eschatological hope that amounts to a kind of defiance: while the faces and colors of our gathered congregation might constantly remind us that the kingdom remains to come, the Spirit also invites us to overcome, reminding us that, despite the failures internal to our gatherings, at the same time the worldwide chorus looks miraculously like this kingdom choir—prompting us to become a people that looks more and more like the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb,” who together sing one song: “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev. 7:9–10).

God is calling out and constituting a people who will look “peculiar”[14] in this broken world because they have been called to be renewed image bearers of God (Gen. 1:27–28)—to take up and reembrace our creational vocation, now empowered by the Spirit to do so.

This call to worship is an echo of God’s word that called humanity into being (Gen. 1:26–27); the call of God that brought creation into existence is echoed in God’s call to worship that brings together a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). And our calling as “new creatures” in Christ is a restatement of Adam and Eve’s calling: to be God’s image bearers to and for the world.

As the second Adam, Jesus shows us what it looks like to undertake that creational mission of being God’s image bearer to and for the world.[21] Jesus takes up and completes the vocation of Israel, whose vocation was a recommissioning for the creational task of being God’s image bearers.

Thus God calls us to himself to find renewal, restoration, and reordering. We are called to an encounter with the life-giving God, who imparts transformative grace through the Spirit’s empowerment, making it possible for us to entertain the vocation given to humanity at creation, but now with more than was given to Adam and Eve: with the perfect exemplar of Jesus, who shows us what it means to be human, and the empowerment of the indwelling Spirit, the fruit of the New Covenant (Rom. 8:1–11).

The flourishing of creation—what the Scriptures describe as shalom—requires not only “right harmonious relationships” to other human beings and to nature, but also “right, harmonious relationships to God and delight in his service.”

The practices carry their own understanding that is implicit within them (pace Taylor), and that understanding can be absorbed and imbibed in our imaginations without having to kick into a mode of cerebral reflection.

welcomed.[30] The yearning for God that is implanted in us as creatures is not an instigation to strive after a deity who refuses to be caught; rather, the Creator in whom we find our “rest” is only all too eager to welcome us into communion.

In short, God’s welcome is a gracious way of reminding us of our utter dependence, cutting against the grain of myths of self-sufficiency that we’ve been immersed in all week long.

As recipients of God’s greeting, we become imitators of God by extending welcome to our neighbors and brothers and sisters. We are immediately reminded that worship is not a private affair; we have gathered as a people, as a congregation, and just as together we are dependent on our redeeming Creator, so too are we dependent on one another. All the parts of a body are dependent upon other parts and organs in order for the individual parts (“me”) to function and flourish (1 Cor. 12:12–31).

First, singing is a full-bodied action that activates the whole person—or at least more of the whole person than is affected by merely sitting and passively listening, or even reading and reciting texts.

Second, singing is a mode of expression that seems to reside in our imagination more than other forms of discourse.

worship.”[41] If being a participating member of a society is reflected by one’s ability to speak the language, then one could say that song is one of the primary ways that we learn to speak the language of the kingdom.

what we sing says something significant about who we are—and whose we are. Israel’s challenge is not unlike our challenge: how do we live as the peculiar people of God in a foreign land, given that every land is “foreign” for the people of the city of God? Figuring out how to be faithful in exile is here tied up with learning how to sing in a strange land. And

This is why “naturalizing” Christian worship can sometimes help illumine its aspirations to train us to flourish in all aspects of life: social, political, economic, and so on. Implicit in Christian worship is a vision not just for spiritual flourishing but also for human flourishing; this is not just practice for eternal bliss; it is training for temporal, embodied human community.

assurance.[48] In other traditions, the law is seen as God’s invitation to live a life of obedience out of gratitude; that is, God’s law is not a stern restriction of our will but an invitation to find peace and rest in what Augustine would call the “right ordering” of our will.

the practice of Christian worship calls us to own up to it in open confession, where we are honest with God about our transgressions and agree with God that they are violations of his law.