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

by James K. A. Smith

What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? And what if this had as much to do with our bodies as with our minds? What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?

So we can at once appreciate that the mall is a religious institution because it is a liturgical institution, and that it is a pedagogical institution because it is a formative institution.

Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate, it is the rituals and practices of the mall—the liturgies of mall and market—that shape our imaginations and how we orient ourselves to the world.

The core claim of this book is that liturgies[8]—whether “sacred” or “secular”—shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.

Our ultimate love/desire is shaped by practices, not ideas that are merely communicated to

The information that the public schools provided—like Latin and Greek—didn’t really take root. What did get inscribed into the pupils, however, was an entire comportment to the world and society, a training in “snobbishness” that could not be easily overturned or undone by new facts or data or information.

Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly—who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love.

The task of a Christian school, college, or university is not to just provide a “safe” place for the dissemination of information that one can get at the public or state school down the street. Nor is it merely to provide a “Christian perspective” on what the world thinks counts as knowledge in order to become successful and productive citizens of a disordered society. Rather, the Christian college’s mission is more radical than that: in some significant way, it involves the formation of disciples. In short, the Christian college is a formative institution that constitutes part of the teaching mission of the church.

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.

Our primary or default mode of intending the world is not reflective or theoretical; we don’t go around all day thinking about how to get to the classroom or thinking about how to brush our teeth or perceiving our friends. Most of the day, we are simply involved in the world.

Our ultimate love is oriented by and to a picture of what we think it looks like for us to live well, and that picture then governs, shapes, and motivates our decisions and actions.

Instead, because for the most part we are desiring, imaginative, noncognitive animals, our desire for the kingdom is inscribed in our dispositions and habits and functions quite apart from our conscious reflection.

suggest that instead of thinking about worldview as a distinctly Christian “knowledge,” we should talk about a Christian “social imaginary” that constitutes a distinctly Christian understanding of the world that is implicit in the practices of Christian worship.

The distillation of the Christian worldview in terms of creation-fall-redemption-and-consummation can never adequately grasp what is understood when we participate in communion and eat the body of Christ, broken for the renewal of a broken world.

If our cultural critique remains captivated by a cognitivist anthropology, then we’ll fail to even see the role of practices. This constitutes a massive blind spot in much of the Christian cultural critique that takes place under the banner of worldview-thinking. But even if we might be primed to consider practices more centrally, if we mistakenly think that certain habits or practices are neutral, or even thin, when they are actually quite thick and loaded, then we will be unwittingly subjecting ourselves to a formation of our desire that is pointed away from the kingdom of God.

want to distinguish liturgies as rituals of ultimate concern: rituals that are formative for identity, that inculcate particular visions of the good life, and do so in a way that means to trump other ritual formations.

What vision of human flourishing is implicit in this or that practice? What does the good life look like as embedded in cultural rituals? What sort of person will I become after being immersed in this or that cultural liturgy?

What’s implicit in the Creed, if we tease it out, is in significant tension with what’s implicit in the Pledge. And yet, it’s tough for the weekly recital of the Creed to compete with daily utterance of the Pledge.

I think it is important to see that movies don’t just “have” worldviews; rather, film is more like a liturgy. So it’s not just a matter of being critical viewers who are looking for the message in the film; it’s a matter of being awakened to their liturgical, formative nature. And in the case of nationalist entertainments, it requires further considering how the telos implicit in such media is antithetical to the shape of the hoped-for kingdom of God.

this, Calvin does not mean to indicate that all human beings have a feeble, insufficient “knowledge” of God; he says that all human beings exhibit a “sense” of “divinity” (sensus divinitatis), not a “knowledge” of “God” (as if he spoke of a “natural” scientia Dei).[49] This is best understood not as a primarily intellectual disposition to form theistic beliefs but as a passional disposition to worship.

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.

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.”

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 goodness of creation as a belief and even ontological claim makes sense for us because we first experience the blessing, sanctification, and riches of the material world in the joy and pleasure of Christian worship.

Implicit in the materiality of Christian worship is this sense that God meets us in materiality, and that the natural world is always more than just nature—it is charged with the presence and glory of God.

The goodness of creation implicit in the sacramentality of worship could paradoxically lead to a kind of dissemination of the Spirit into the world in such a way that the church is left empty, leveled as just one more site of God’s presence (“nothin’ special”). If all the world is a sacrament, then who needs the church’s liturgy? If the whole world is a sacrament, then what’s so special about the Eucharist?

Jesus takes up particular things from creation and endues them with a sense of special presence, an especially intense presence. In this way Jesus seems to establish particular hot spots of sacramentality within a good creation, while also ordaining particularly packed practices.

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

The congregation gathers in response to a call to worship, which is the fundamental vocation of being human. 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.

Worship is a space of welcome because we are, at root, relational creatures called into relationship with the Creator, in order to flourish as a people who bear his image to and for the world. In response to God’s gracious welcome, we practice hospitality in worship, which is practice for extending hospitality beyond

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.

humanity and all of creation flourish when they are rightly ordered to a telos that is not of their own choosing but rather is stipulated by God. Creation is created for something, for a particular end envisioned by the Creator.

The announcement of the law and the reading of God’s will for our lives represents a significant challenge to the desire for autonomy that is impressed upon us by secular liturgies. The reading of the law is a displacement of our own wants and desires, reminding us that we find ourselves in a world not of our own making—which

become a certain kind of person and a certain kind of people. Over time, when worship confronts us with the canonical range of Scripture,[95] coupled with its proclamation and elucidation in the sermon, we begin to absorb the story as a moral or ethical compass—not because it discloses to us abstract, ahistorical moral axioms, but because it narrates the telos of creation, the shape of the kingdom we’re looking for, thus filling in the telos of our own action. We begin to absorb the plot of the story, begin to see ourselves as characters within it; the habits and practices of its heroes function as exemplars, providing guidance as we are trained in virtue, becoming a people with a disposition to “the good” as it’s envisioned in the story.

be blunt, our Christian colleges and universities generate an army of alumni who look pretty much like all the rest of their suburban neighbors, except that our graduates drive their SUVs, inhabit their executive homes, and pursue the frenetic life of the middle class and the corporate ladder “from a Christian perspective.”

to form radical disciples of Jesus and citizens of the baptismal city who, communally, take up the creational task of being God’s image bearers, unfolding the cultural possibilities latent in creation—but doing so as empowered by the Spirit, following the example of Jesus’s cruciform cultural labor.

the role of the chapel is not to stir our emotions or merely fuel our “spiritual” needs; rather, it is the space in which the ecclesial university community gathers to practice (for) the kingdom by engaging in the liturgical practices that form the imagination.