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

by James K. A. Smith

What if education, including higher education, is not primarily[2] about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires? What if we began by appreciating how education not only gets into our head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us by the gut—what the New Testament refers to as kardia, “the heart”? What if education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions—our visions of “the good life”—and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs to our thinking? 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?

An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices.

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.

Because Christian education is conceived primarily in terms of information, assuming the philosophical anthropology behind that, it should be no surprise to find that Christian faith doesn’t touch our pedagogical commitments. Instead, we adopt the pedagogies of rationalist modernity and drop Christian ideas into the machine. But that’s a bit like taking a pizza crust, putting kidney and mushy peas on top, and then describing it as British cuisine. We need to think further about how a Christian understanding of human persons should also shape how we teach, not just what we teach.

we are embodied, material, fundamentally desiring animals who are, whether we recognize it or not (and perhaps most when we don’t recognize it), every day being formed by the material liturgies of other pedagogies—at the mall, at the stadium, on television, and so forth. As such, Christian education becomes a missed opportunity because it fails to actually counter the cultural liturgies that are forming us every day. An important part of revisioning Christian education is to see it as a mode of counter-formation.

While Hollister and Starbucks have taken hold of our heart with tangible, material liturgies, Christian schools are “fighting back” by giving young people Christian ideas. We hand young people (and old people!) a “Christian worldview” and then tell them, “There, that should fix it.” But such strategies are aimed at the head and thus miss the real target: our hearts, our loves, our desires. Christian education as formation needs to be a pedagogy of desire.

If Christian learning is nourished by a Christian worldview, and if that worldview is first and foremost embedded in the understanding that is implicit in the practices of Christian worship, then the Christian college classroom is parasitic upon the worship of the church—it lives off the capital of Christian worship.

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.

As Hauerwas rightly notes, when Christianity is turned into “a belief system,” it is reduced to something “available without mediation by the church.”

Second, the understanding implicit in practice cannot be simply identified with the sorts of ideas, beliefs, or doctrines that tend to be the currency of contemporary worldview-talk. The understanding—which is primary—can never be distilled into doctrines, ideas, or formulas without remainder.

And because of this, the church has been trying to counter the consumer formation of the heart by focusing on the head and missing the target: it’s as if the church is pouring water on our head to put out a fire in our heart.

Above, we emphasized the importance of seeing what might appear to be thin practices (such as shopping at the mall, attending a football game, or taking part in “frosh week” at university) as thick practices that are identity-forming and telos-laden. We need then to take that recognition one step further and recognize these thick practices as liturgical in order to appreciate their religious nature. Such ritual forces of culture are not satisfied with being merely mundane; embedded in them is a sense of what ultimately matters (compare Phil. 1:10).

I’m suggesting that this constitutes a liturgy because it is a material ritual of ultimate concern: through a multisensory display, the ritual both powerfully and subtly moves us, and in so doing implants within us a certain reverence and awe, a learned deference to an ideal that might some day call for our “sacrifice.” This is true not only of professional sports; the rituals of national identity—and nationalism—have been almost indelibly inscribed into the rituals of athletics from Little League to high school football.[25] “As is well known,” Stanley Hauerwas once quipped, “Friday night high school football is the most significant liturgical event in Texas.”[26] The imagination couples these spectacular displays at professional sporting events with the simplicity of the anthem and color guard at a high school football game, and together they build up a story of national unity forged by battle and sacrifice. Over time, these rituals have a cumulative, albeit covert, effect on our imaginary. And together, I’m arguing, these constitute liturgies of ultimate concern: the ideal of national unity and commitment to its ideals is willing to make room for additional loyalties, but it is not willing to entertain trumping loyalties. (Just try to remain seated at the next playing of the national anthem.) The fact that there seems to be little tension between Christianity and American nationalism is not a function of the generosity (let alone “Christianness”) of the American ideal b...

Implicit in the liturgies of American nationalism is a particular vision of human flourishing as material prosperity and ownership, as well as a particular take on intersubjectivity, beginning from a negative notion of liberty and thus fostering a generally libertarian view of human relationships that stresses noninterference. Related to this is a sense that competition and even violence is basically inscribed into the nature of the world, which thus valorizes competition and even violence, seeing war as the most intense opportunity to demonstrate these ideals. The vision of a kingdom implicit in this liturgy is antithetical to the vision of the kingdom implicit in Christian worship (which we’ll explore in chapter 5). I think the liturgical take on American nationalism can help us to see why so few Christians experience a tension here; it can also help to diagnose the cause of the church’s complacency and complicity: many Christians experience no tension between the gospel according to America and the gospel of Jesus Christ because, subtly and unwittingly, the liturgies of American nationalism have so significantly shaped our imagination that they have, in many ways, trumped other liturgies. Thus we now see and hear and read the gospel through the liturgical lenses of the “American gospel.”[28]

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for all. While God is invoked, it is actually the flag and the republic to which one is pledging allegiance (that is, pledging devotion and loyalty). The republic claims to have an identity and unity about it, and even claims to have achieved the goal of shalom—to already be a nation “with” liberty and justice for all. (That last clause must have stuck in the throat of young black Americans in the Jim Crow South and, indeed, must still.) No hint of eschatological deferral; no sense of a “not yet” failure to measure up; but a confident claim of justice here and now, secured by the republic.

In such circumstances, where Caesar cannot distinguish between our proper subjection and our ultimate allegiance, it may be best to say bluntly, “A loyal American? Of course not. I’m a Christian!” (D. Brent Laytham, “Loyalty Oath: A Matter of Ultimate Allegiance,” Christian Century, July 12, 2005)

While university brochures and hopeful (perhaps naive) parents might still think about the university as a place of “higher learning” in which big ideas and marketable skills are implanted in eager receptacle-minds, students and those who otherwise “sell” the university know that the university is much more (and sometimes less) than that. The university is an experience, a rite of passage, a glandular adventure, both a postponement of and a rehearsal for the proverbial real world. A ritual analysis of the university might be inclined to consider the official rites of the learning community: the robed, ceremonial events of convocation and commencement or the more mundane routines of attending lectures, writing papers, and taking exams. While these are certainly important and remain central, my sense is that it is the unofficial liturgies of the university that might be more formative.

And so the university experience ends with a commissioning; not quite a “Great” Commission, but something close. We are launched into career (and careerism) by the holistic formation we’ve received at college. The classroom and laboratory, lecture hall and library have played some role in this. But the information provided there has not been nearly as potent as the formation we’ve received in the dorm and frat house, or the stadium and the dance club. We will look back on these years as “the best years of our lives”—a last hurrah for adolescence and a stern preparation for the rigors of “success.”[43]

Such an oblique affirmation is at the heart of what we described as our “romantic theology” in chapter 2. For instance, in his Outlines of Romantic Theology, Charles Williams makes a similar claim: “He who, not in any sense for himself or to himself, is surrendered to an entire ardour cannot be said to be far from the Kingdom which will manifest Itself at Its chosen time; the sooner if, as has been insisted throughout, this ardour is directed and controlled by the doctrines of the Christian Religion.”[52] This is the intuition that animates some of our best literature, from Dante’s Vita nuova to Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter.[53]

Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins.

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.[58]

Emphasizing the primacy of worship practices to worldview formation both honors the fact that all humans are desiring animals while at the same time making sense of how Christian worship is developmentally significant for those who can participate in rituals but are unable to participate in theoretical reflection. In short, it helps us make sense of the moving testimony of someone like “Judy,” a mentally challenged adult who eagerly confessed: I want to eat Jesus bread. . . . I can’t wait until I can eat Jesus bread and drink Jesus juice. People who love Jesus are the ones who eat Jesus bread. . . . Jesus’ skin and meat turned into bread and Jesus’ blood and guts turned into juice—that’s Jesus’ bread and Jesus’ juice, and I want to eat it and drink with all the other Christians at church ’cause I love him so.[9] Responding to such a testimony with a didactic conversation aimed at theological correction would be a colossal adventure in missing the point.

Just as Taylor emphasized that “humans operated with a social imaginary well before they ever got into the business of theorizing about themselves,”[11] so too did Christians worship before they got around to abstract theologizing or formulating a Christian worldview.

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.

Our essential embodiment will keep interrupting our Platonic desire to do away with the body, will keep insinuating itself into our dualistic discourses to remind us that the triune God of creation traffics in ashes and dust, blood and bodies, fish and bread. And he pronounces all of it “very good” (Gen. 1:31).

Love in the Ruins

the whole world, as Hopkins lyricized, is charged with the grandeur of God;

This intensity is suggested in the very words of institution of the Eucharist: “This is my body.” Jesus didn’t look around the room or out the window and abstractly announce, “Behold, the goodness of all creation. Look, remember, believe. These are the gifts of God for the people of God.” Such a statement would be perfectly true; creation is just such a mediation of God’s presence. But in addition to that truth, we also need to note that 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. This selective intensity suggests that the affirmation that all the world is a sacrament is not meant to thereby level “the sacraments.” In the same way, the affirmation that all of life is worship—that all things can be done to the glory of God—should not level the particular intensity of worship as the “work of the people” that especially praises God and forms us in unique, particularly intense ways.

The very fact that we gather says something, implicitly trains our imagination in a way. “Gathering indicates that Christians are called from the world, from their homes, from their families, to be constituted into a community capable of praising God. . . . The church is constituted as a new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people. Gathering, therefore, is an eschatological act as it is the foretaste of the unity of the communion of the saints.”[11]

“image of God” (imago Dei) is not some de facto property of Homo sapiens (whether will or reason or language or what have you); rather, the image of God is a task, a mission. As Richard Middleton comments, “The imago Dei designates the royal office or calling of human beings as God’s representatives and agents in the world, granted authorized power to share in God’s rule or administration of the earth’s resources and creatures.”[15] We are commissioned as God’s image bearers, his vice-regents, charged with the task of “ruling”[16] and caring for creation, which includes the task of cultivating it, unfolding and unfurling its latent possibilities through human making—in short, through culture.

God’s greeting and welcome speaks to our fundamental dependence: that “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and that this “him” is not a generic deity but the triune God, for it is in the Son that “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). 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.

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). It is not only sin that makes us dependent upon others; our very finitude, as creatures, impels us to relationality because we need the gifts, talents, and resources of others. And such dependence is part of the very fiber of God’s good creation. 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 it.[34]

Since its early beginnings, Charles Taylor notes, modernity has been marked by a rejection of teleology, a rejection of the notion that there is a specified, normative end (telos) to which humanity ought to be directed in order to enjoy the good life. And this rejection was driven by a new notion of “libertarian” freedom, which identified freedom with freedom of choice. “Indeed, one of the reasons for the vigorous rejection of Aristotelian teleology was that it was seen, then as now, as potentially circumscribing our freedom to determine our own lives and build our own societies.”[49] Such a conception of autonomous freedom as freedom of choice—freedom to construct our own ends and to invent our own visions of the good life—chafes against the very notion of a law outside of ourselves.[50] The announcement of “the law” is a scandal to those who are primarily formed by modern secular liturgies. In contrast, right here in Christian worship we see a very different understanding of the good: 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. “You have made us for yourself,” Augustine confessed, which is precisely why “our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.”

Indeed, the biblical vision of human flourishing implicit in worship means that we are only properly free when our desires are rightly ordered, when they are bounded and directed to the end that constitutes our good.

[52] That is why the law, though it comes as a scandalous challenge to the modern desire for autonomy, is actually an invitation to be freed from a-teleological wandering.

There are many times we think we love you well, O God. But upon hearing your call to love you with all our heart, and all our mind, and all our strength, we confess that our love for you is a diluted love, made insipid and flat by lesser loyalties and a divided heart.

Hear the good news: Christ died for us while we were yet sinners; that proves God’s love toward us. In the name of Jesus Christ, we are forgiven! In the name of Jesus Christ, we are forgiven. Glory to God. Amen.

On the other hand, many of the secular liturgies of marketing play off of our deep knowledge of our faults and failures, but transform them into phenomena that yield shame but not guilt. In response, they promise not forgiveness or pardon, but opportunities to correct the problem via various goods and services. In this sense, they seem to require confession but make no promise of pardon or peace. In contrast to both, the rite of confession and assurance in Christian worship counters such secular liturgies by immersing us in a weekly practice that reminds us of a fundamental fracture that we find in ourselves and our world—and of the consequences of our choices. It forces us to be honest with God and ourselves about our complicity in injustice as well as to face up to the ways that we’ve failed to be good husbands or wives, daughters or sons, sisters or brothers, neighbors or ministers—and perhaps more importantly, how we as a people, the ekklēsia, have failed to be the foretaste of the kingdom to which we’re called to be living witness. Yet the practice does not leave us in despair, but rather gives us hope, assuring us of forgiveness and reminding us that the curse is being rolled back. A reordering of creation has already broken into creation in the person of Jesus Christ, and we are gathering as a people in order to practice for the arrival of the kingdom in its fullness—and thus in order to be trained to be a kingdom-kind-of-people in the meantime, as witnesses to that...

The promises in baptism indicate a very different theology of the family, which recognizes that “families work well when we do not expect them to give us all we need.” Instead, the social role of the family that is configured by baptism is to be a family “dependent upon a larger social body. . . . In theological terms, family is called to be part of the social adventure we call the church.”[76]

First, the Apostles’ Creed functions like the church’s pledge of allegiance.[85] Recited weekly, in unison, the Creed is a declaration—the positive affirmation that is the correlate of the renunciations we made in baptism. In it we confess our allegiance to a “foreign” king, the triune God. In that sense, if worship is like a renewal-of-vows ceremony, each week is also a citizenship-renewal ceremony. When we pledge that Jesus is Lord—not Caesar, not the emperor, not the president or prime minister, not the chairman of the Federal Reserve—we are engaged in a political act (recalling that our baptism constitutes us as a new polis and that the Creed was a baptismal document).[86] This is the pledge of those whose “citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20)—which is not citizenship in some otherworldly, ethereal kingdom but rather citizenship in an earthly kingdom that is coming.

can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

“As a Christian interpreter living in a pagan world, Origen was able to see clearly that Gentile converts to the faith needed to have their minds re-made, and that instruction in how to read Scripture was at the heart of Paul’s pastoral practice: Gentiles needed to be initiated into reading practices that enabled them to receive Israel’s Scripture as their own.”[100] This “conversion of the imagination” by reading Scripture happens primarily and affectively when Scripture is encountered liturgically (communally in worship). When we encounter Scripture in worship, we are invited into its performance and thus initiated into a way of reading the world.

A kingdom-shaped community cannot be satisfied with private, isolated individuals only reconciled “vertically” to God, for the manifest witness of such reconciliation will be love of neighbor. This is one of the central themes of the First Epistle of John: “We love because he first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:19–20).

Hence, the Eucharist—the heart of the church’s worship—is also the liturgical practice that requires and effects reconciliation. A table forces us to face up to reality, making the discomfort of fractured relationships starkly bubble up to the surface (think of those awkward dinner scenes in The Gilmore Girls where the family is silent and seething!). Marshaling the mundane and universal human practice of eating, and thus also taking up the common connection between food and fellowship, the table of the Lord is a catalyst for reconciliation on the “horizontal” level as well. This normal, everyday human activity of eating will be the occasion for undoing the abnormal but all-too-common reality of human enmity and discord.[106] Just as Jesus admonished us to be reconciled before leaving our gifts at the altar (Matt. 5:23–24), so too Paul admonishes the Corinthians to examine themselves before partaking of the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:27–34). From the earliest practices of the church, the discipline of reconciliation has been tethered to the Eucharist. Thus in the Didache, the author warns, “Let no one who has a quarrel with a companion join you until they have been reconciled, so that your sacrifice may not be defiled.”[107] The gracious invitation to the table is also a call to reconciliation, which is a reminder that the task of humanity is ineluctably social; we cannot image God in isolation (“in the image of God he created them”).

often tell my children that one of the reasons we go to church is to learn to love people we don’t really like that much—people we find irritating, odd, and who grate on our nerves (the feeling’s certainly mutual, I’m sure!).

Christian worship is an affective school, a pedagogy of desire in which we learn not how to be spiritual or religious, but how to be human, how to take up the vocation given to us at creation. And now we are sent from this practice arena—which is the real world—into the world to be witnesses by being God’s image bearers, who cultivate the world in a way that exemplifies Jesus’s perfect “cultural” labor. That now includes our cultural labor of being the church, the body of Christ, in a way that is hospitable and inviting—in a way that invites others to find their identity and vocation in Christ, to become “new creations” and thus become the humans they were called to be.

Who says that the shape of worship we’ve described above only has to happen on Sunday? A rich legacy in the history of the church suggests that this could be otherwise—that not just monks but also families and students, laborers and lawyers, could find ways to gather daily for worship that is nourishing and formative. For instance, many urban churches offer daily noontime communion, which makes it possible for those engaged in nonmonastic vocations to nonetheless gather with others for full-bodied worship.

“practices beyond Sunday”

Idea

For example, for several years now, my wife and I have gathered once a week with our best friends for a ritual we describe as “Wednesday Night Wine” (even if we sometimes have to push it to a Tuesday or a Thursday). After their little ones are in bed (our teenagers are left to fend for themselves), we make our way over to their place with a different bottle of wine each week, enjoyed with some cheese, crackers, and usually a little (Swiss) chocolate. We keep a journal of the wines, noting our tasting comments, rating them (rank amateurs that we are), and in the journal we also keep a little record of our topics of conversation, what’s been happening with our kids, and significant events in the past week. We commiserate with one another about the burdens of parenting and share the joys of the same. We’ve mourned together, been frustrated together, worked through tensions with each other, confided in one another. When we were going through struggles “at church,” in our community of gathered worship, this Wednesday night table was a refreshing and welcome “table in the wilderness.” It has been nothing short of a shadow Eucharist, a veritable extension of the Lord’s Supper.

The practices of Christian worship function as the altar of Christian formation, the heart and soul, the center of gravity of the task of discipleship. But the energy and formative power of gathered worship is extended and amplified in the “chapels” around the cathedral—in the different gatherings and practices of Christian communities and friends who together intentionally pursue a life formed by the Spirit, engaged in formative practices that are bent on making us the kind of people who desire the kingdom. If, in a certain sense, the altar is not enough—a sense in which just liturgical practices are insufficient counter-measures to secular liturgies—there is also a sense in which extraliturgical practices will have diminished formative power (or worse, could themselves become practices aimed at quite a distorted picture of the kingdom) if they are not tethered to and nourished by the practices of Christian worship.