Awaiting the King Quotes

“Our most revolutionary political act is to hope”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“So our political engagement requires not dismissal or permission or celebration but rather the hard, messy work of discernment in order to foster both ad hoc resistance to its ultimate pretensions and ad hoc opportunities to collaborate on penultimate ends.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“So a Christian account of our shared social-economic-political life might be described more properly as a “public” theology—an account of how to live in common with neighbors who don’t believe what we believe, don’t love what we love, don’t hope for what we await.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Theology must be political if it is to be evangelical. Rule out the political questions and you cut short the proclamation of God’s saving power; you leave people enslaved where they ought to be set free from sin—their own sin and others’. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“There is no politics that isn’t ultimately religious.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Too many readers regularly overestimate Augustine’s affirmation here and seem to regularly ignore his persistent affirmation that “justice is found where God, the one supreme God, rules an obedient City according to his grace, forbidding sacrifice to any being save himself alone” (19.23). Because this is de facto ruled out as a possibility in the earthly city (whose very origin is the misdirection of the fall), the earthly city can never be home to “true justice”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“In other words, the public practices of the empire are idolatrous practices because embedded in them is a very different telos, a rival version of the kingdom. The political refuses to remain penultimate.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“But one of the dangers of eagerly diving in to the political sphere is that it tends to underestimate the strength of the currents already swirling around in that “sphere.” In other words, such Pylesque eagerness tends to think of politics just as a matter of strategy (and hence getting the right strategy in place), as something that we do, and underestimates the formative impact of political practices, that they do something to us.16 It is here that I think Augustine’s more nuanced analysis of the politics of the empire has something to teach us in the twenty-first century. Because he defines the political in terms of love, and because the formation of our loves is bound up with worship, Augustine is primed to recognize what we might call the “liturgical” power of political practices, which engenders critical nuance. As we noted in Augustine’s definition of a “people” (City of God 19.24), the earthly city’s different political configurations qualify as “commonwealths,” but they fail to be just because they are aimed at the wrong objects of love (that is, they wrongly constitute objects of love). So Augustine’s revised account of the empire yields a fundamentally critical evaluation, nothing like the rather rosy affirmation of the “earthly city” we tend to hear from those who (mistakenly) invoke Augustine as if he fathered the Holy Roman Empire.17 In this respect, Augustine’s “liturgical” analysis of the political enables him to be attentive to an antithesis that evangelical (Pylesque) enthusiasm for political activism seems to not recognize: that at stake in participation in the political configurations of the earthly city are matters of worship and religious identity. The public practices of the empire are not “merely political” or “merely temporal”; they are “loaded,” formative practices aimed at a telos that is ultimately antithetical to the city of God.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“One of the responsibilities of the pastor as political theologian, then, is to help the people of God “read” the festivals of their own polis, whether the annual militarized Thanksgiving festivals that feature gladiators from Dallas or the rituals of mutual display and haughty purity that suffuse online regions of “social justice.” Our politics is never merely electoral. The polis doesn’t just rear to life on the first Tuesday of November. Elections are not liturgies; they are events. The politics of the earthly city is carried in a web of rituals strung between one occasional ballot box and the next. Good political theology pierces through this, unveils it—not to help the people of God withdraw but to equip them to be sent into the thick of it.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“The call to follow Christ, the call to desire his kingdom, does not simplify our lives by segregating us in some “pure” space; to the contrary, the call to bear Christ’s image complicates our lives because it comes to us in the midst of our environments without releasing us from them.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“If liturgy forms us by conforming us to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29), then why are Christians so often conformed to the world (per Rom. 12:2)?”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“The Godfather amounts to a visual parable of a challenge and critique that dogs the Cultural Liturgies project: while I extol the formative power of historic Christian worship practices, it would seem that there can be—and are—people who have spent entire lifetimes immersed in the rites of historic Christian worship who nonetheless emerge from them not only unformed but perhaps even malformed.2 Or, to put it otherwise: clearly, regular participation in the church’s “orthodox” liturgy is not enough to prevent such “worshipers” from leaving the sanctuary to become (sometimes enthusiastic) participants in all sorts of unjust systems, structures, and behaviors.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Marsh goes on to observe: “The boycott year had renewed the mission of the church. The boycott showed the world a church whose power stemmed from its deliberate discipline, whose moral authority was the hard-earned result of its suffering and willing to love the enemy—religious passions, it should be noted, that Niebuhr’s thin ecclesiology could never embrace”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Through his embedded experience in the Montgomery bus boycotts, Reverend King came to see the limits of Niebuhr’s abstract public theologizing. “Abstractions cannot empower acts of compassion and sacrifice,” Marsh summarizes, “or sustain the courage to speak against the day. Niebuhr’s much-heralded Christian realism was about working out ethical problems within the framework of options provided by Western liberalism. It was not about having a dream.”18 That dream was the kingdom of God, and King learned it at church. But it wasn’t just for the church: it was a vision of what the world was called to be. For King, the realization of this was not some merely evolutionary development but rather a divine gift. “God remains from beginning to end the ultimate agent of human liberation, not only in America but throughout all the nations and in creation.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Christendom, then, is a missional endeavor that refuses to let political society remain protected from the lordship of Christ while also recognizing the eschatological distance between the now and the not-yet.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“So we don’t shuttle between the jurisdictions of two kingdoms; we live in the seasons of contested rule, where the principalities and powers continue to grasp after an authority that has been taken from them.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin makes this point with a Tocquevillian accent: in many ways the ideal of a pluralistic liberal society has lived off the borrowed (formative) capital of “illiberal” (mostly religious) communities—including the family—as incubators for the dispositions of good citizenship. But insofar as both liberalism and capitalism54 tend to devour and erode just these institutions and communities, they end up being a parasite that, starved by its own hunger, consumes the host and thus engenders its own demise. This raises serious questions about the viability of pluralism from the left, which has of late exhibited neither patience nor tolerance nor humility.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“As James Davison Hunter has commented, “There have never been ‘generic’ values.”52 The issue is a kind of “sources of the self”53 concern: Does a secularized, post-Christian, increasingly antireligious society have the sources (formative communities) to engender the dispositions/virtues needed for “a modest unity” and a tolerant pluralism?”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“But it is a principled pluralism because it simultaneously argues that all confessions and directional orientations should have the same opportunity and access. And so it ends up making a meta-argument for what I’m calling a kind of macroliberalism wherein a “just” society is one in which different confessional communities are free to pursue their visions of the good.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“So we have a twofold challenge to the social task of forging life in common: the deep, confessional diversity that shapes how we think about a life well lived and the norms for a good society; and the corrosive, antisocial forces—often fostered by the pseudo-community of the market and the state—that incline us toward Randian self-interest and self-preservation. Atlas shrugs while the ties that bind fray to breaking.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Radner rightly presses us to recognize that pursuing the common good with gospel integrity requires both a healthy state and an ecclesial anchor. For some of us, that will mean rethinking our tendency to vilify “the state” and its procedures. For others of us, it will mean revaluing the centrality of the church as our political center—a body politic whose worship includes the regular confession of her sins while at the same time laboring for kingdom come, concerned about our country while at the same time desiring a better one (Heb. 11:16).”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Worship again and again interrupts the course of the world. Through worship the Christian community testifies that the world is not on its own. And this also means that it is not kept alive by politics, as the business of politics, which knows no Sabbath, would have us believe.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Worship isn’t political only to the extent that it can be marshaled and invoked in contemporary partisan debates; it is always already political insofar as liturgy is the rite of citizens of the heavenly city.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Unlike sermon-centric congregations that profess “high views of Scripture” but leave the reading of the Bible to the preacher’s whim and circumscribe it within “sermon time,” in catholic Christian worship the Bible isn’t just the focus of preaching; it is the lexicon of the entire service of worship.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“One of the functions of Revelation [or of worship] was to purge and to refurbish the Christian imagination. It tackles people’s imaginative response to the world, which is at least as deep and influential as their intellectual convictions. It recognizes the way a dominant culture, with its images and ideals, constructs the world for us, so that we perceive and respond to the world in its terms. Moreover, it unmasks this dominant construction of the world as an ideology of the powerful which serves to maintain their power. In its place, Revelation offers a different way of perceiving the world which leads people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“The state isn’t just the guardian of rights; it is also a nexus of rites that are bent on shaping what is most fundamental: my loves. The state doesn’t just ask me to make a decision; it asks me to pledge allegiance.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“A biblical passion for justice as shalom might be precisely what pushes us to refuse this merely procedural standard of justice. That is not license to confuse the state with kingdom come, but it is an impetus to bear witness to—and lobby for—substantive visions of the good for the sake of our neighbors.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“We (allegedly) haven’t “imposed” a normative vision of human social arrangements except the maxim “Be autonomous.” The result? Erosion of family stability (especially for the poor) and widening inequality, exposing the most vulnerable to even more social threats, eviscerating the working class, and amplifying inequality—none of which looks very just, even if it is the result of observing a kind of procedural justice.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Mark Hamilton is surely right when he points out that we “allow athletics to dictate to us what school districts we will live in, what jobs to hold, how to spend our leisure time, whom we marry, what activities we place our children in, how we will spend large sums of money, or with whom to socialize. It reaches into every nook and cranny of life. We give it a power over us.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology

“Focusing on the intellectual artifacts of the earthly polis, we miss the formative power of its rituals. This is the inconvenient truth that is pressed upon us by the new black theology of Willie Jennings, J. Kameron Carter, and Brian Bantum, for example.38 The church’s capitulation to ideologies of race will be a case study of our assimilation by earthly-city liturgies despite our best arguments and convictions.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology