One of the most misused words in our culture has to be hypocrisy, especially when it is bandied about as a pejorative concerning Christians in particular or the church in general. You hear all of the time that the church is full of hypocrites, by which people generally mean "people in the church are still sinners." Indisputably, unquestionably, indelibly true. But hypocrisy doesn't mean that you are bad at living out your ideals. Hypocrisy is lying, not actually believing what you say you believe. We get the word from the ancient Greek word for "actor." You are playing a part, and while that is certainly true of some within the church, for the most part the church is full of fallible people trying to live up to a pretty high standard: holiness. That they fail does not make them hypocrites, nor would it come as a surprise to any Christians throughout history, least of all the Apostle Paul. It simply means they are still fallen, still waiting for their Lord to return and make all things new.
In my review of James K.A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom, the first in his cultural liturgies series, I want to think about why it is that we struggle the way we do with sin. While this struggle doesn't make us hypocrites, it is not desirable and we are not ultimately to accept defeat. What I am trying to get at in this thought experiment isn't a better definition of our fallenness but, as Smith would have it, a better definition, not to mention a better understanding, of our affections. Smith's central argument in the book is that Christian education (whether formal or informal) ought to be oriented towards shaping more than our minds, but our desires and our love as well. To put it another way, we are not primarily disembodied minds wandering through the world that need to be filled with the correct information, but bodies, affections, and minds that need to be formed (or conformed) to Christ. Any form of education that disregards this central fact of existence is going to have a hard time in a visceral world.
So while hypocrisy might not mean what we think it means, one of the most intractable parts of the Christian life is that we all fail to measure up to the standard we assent to with our intellect and believe with our hearts. Smith asserts that this is the case because we are worldly and our affections are shaped by the competing liturgies and pedagogies of the world. What's more is that we rarely recognize innocuous places like the mall or bits of a culture like a favorite television show as shaping us in profound ways. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but we spend an hour and a half at church on Sunday, read our Bibles devotionally for 15-30 minutes per day, and pray for a few minutes when we wake up and before meals, yet we spend way more time consuming the world's liturgies and practices. Weighed in that balance, we too often are shaped more by the world than by our faith, without even necessarily recognizing the shaping influence of the competing pedagogies of the world..
In a sense this book is Smith's clearing of his throat as he begins what is to be a trilogy on cultural liturgies (both within the church and without) [the second book, Imagining the Kingdom was published last year; I am, alas, behind the times]. There is much to commend in Smith's style, theology, and conviction about his subject. And for the most part I agree with him. After a lengthy first chapter in which he draws out his thesis--that we are feeling and emoting beings more than intellectual beings--he takes a look at three different cultural institutions that, while not necessarily pernicious on the surface, are competing kingdoms to the kingdom of God. The first is the mall, or consumer capitalism writ large. The second is the power of the state and the way we can often be tempted to see ourselves as Americans before we see ourselves as Christians. The third is the university.
The mall was the most humorous of these reflections. With its sanctuary (even with a nave in the middle of many malls), relics (stuff for sale), saints (models), and anthropology (not only the store that sells $42 dish towels, but also the notion that stuff makes us better and happier, stuff like $42 dish towels), the mall (and capitalism more generally) is an obvious competitor for our desires. One that often wins. His observation of many Christian schools pledging allegiance to the flag before pledging superior allegiance to Jesus (if that is done at all) through the recitation of an historic creed or confession is convicting. The university is also a proving ground for his central idea of the power of the affections over the mind. His example of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, a book about a college freshman desiring the "life of the mind" who is chewed up and spit out by the sexual culture of an elite college, makes his point nicely (and is a brutal book in many ways). All of these institutions understand that we are desiring creatures and the way to our affection is not through our mind but through our gut.
My one major criticism of the book is that it often seems as if Smith protests too much. He seeks to deconstruct the mind-body duality of Platonic thought, but seems to do so by constructing a body-mind duality in its place. What I mean is that where earlier thinkers argue for the primacy of the mind to the exclusion of the body, Smith argues (or seems often to be arguing) for the primacy of the body over the mind.
What is perhaps more confusing is the tension he puts between theology and worship, as if worship does not flow from theology. Indeed he sets up an odd juxtaposition between theology and worship and foists it onto the life of the early church, arguing that before any explicitly theological reflections were made the church was primarily worshiping (drawing on the Acts 2 passages about the early church). This line of thought is patently wrong in any number of respects. For one, the oft-quoted passage in Acts 2 includes the early church sitting under the apostles' teaching which just might have had some developing theology in its message. They weren't just breaking bread together. Further, when the Apostle Peter preached to the crowds at Pentecost the message he delivered was strictly theological: he quotes the prophet Joel and King David and runs through Jewish history to show that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah. Three-thousand people weren't saved at Pentecost by an interpretive dance. Or by their guts for that matter.
To bolster his point, Smith cites the early hymns of the church (Philippians 2:5-11) and the early creeds (1 Corinthians 15:3-7) as further evidence of the slow development of theology and the emphasis on worship. Again, this dumbfounds me. What is more explicitly theological than the Trinitarian poem of Philippians or the story of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15? For this bifurcation to work, Smith has to strip theology of any actual meaning. In this universe the word "theology" is used like the word "religion" is by people who want to emphasize that Jesus is all about relationships, man, and not religion. Theology, in this context, is reduced to academic hairsplitting like Dr. Causabon in Middlemarch, allowing it to be nicely contrasted to the embodied and fervent worship Smith prefers. For as astute a thinker as Smith, I found this reduction altogether crude.
My reservations about some of Smith's claims aside, his ideas are nonetheless important and in a more muted form his arguments bear great weight. Clara and I went on a talking date the other night and our conversation kept circling around to some of Smith's assertions. I find him a hard thinker to get out of my mind (or my gut, maybe). This book is provocative, intentionally so, and I understand why Smith can be totalizing in his claims. We humans are, ultimately, worshipers (I mean, no less a theologian than Bob Dylan was on to this years ago!). The question we must answer is what we will worship. True Christian worship, by the work of the indwelling Spirit, channels our innate affections to God, driving us to more and deeper worship of him. Smith, by highlighting both the importance of the body and the folly of thinking we can or ought to escape desire while we still stalk the earth in this mortal coil is highlighting in bright pink the importance of considering not just what we believe but also what we love.
Since reading this book I have been eager to seek out ways in which my affections can be molded more by Scripture and Christian worship than by the competing liturgies of the world. To come back around to where I started, it strikes me in no way outlandish to think that it is in fact our (unwitting?) devotion to the competing liturgies of capitalism, the State, entertainment, and even to a certain degree the family that prevent us from living out our sanctification to its full, God-glorifying extent. I once heard a preacher tell a group of college students that if they read their Bible for 15 minutes and play video games for six hours that he had a way to save them 15 minutes. I think in our media-saturated, hedonistic culture this can be all too true.
Our Lord tells us that where our treasure is, there will our heart be also. This book has driven me to reexamine this question. Where is my treasure? Is it where I think it is? This can be an uncomfortable question to ask, because it can unsettle our routines and habits and drive us to confront other words of Christ: that we are to seek his kingdom first. That is the kingdom we ought to desire. In word and deed. In spirit and body.
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