Timothy Stoner

Desiring the Kingdom: Humans are Lovers not Thinkers

Posted on 18. May, 2010 by Tim Stoner in Blog, Book Recommendations, Culture, Life, The Church, Tim Recommends

To paraphrase Marc Antony’s famous eulogy, I have come to praise a momentous book, not (hopefully) to bury it. The book is Desiring the Kingdom. It was authored by James K. A. Smith, a philosophy professor at Calvin College. It makes no pretensions to be a popular book. It is written with the academy and church leadership in mind. Its subtitle gives you advance warning: “Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation.” But, the effort it demands is repaid a hundred-fold by insights that crackle, critiques that startle and illumine with fierce, though charitable intensity. It shines unrelenting light upon the deficits of the traditional perspective on Christian formation (education and discipleship) in the University and in the Church. 

Within 20 pages he had convinced me that, as I suspected, I really had no option but to join the Holy Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church, and then 100 pages later, I was overcome with hope that jettisoning Protestantism might not be unavoidable, after all. I regard this book as one of the 10 most influential books I have read. If its message were received and acted upon it would change the face of Christian schools. It would also fundamentally alter how the Protestant church “does” church and, more importantly, why.

For almost two years I have felt myself walking crookedly, with a decided lean. I was not tipping toward one of the neurological hemispheres but in the direction of one of the points on the compass–East to be exact (metaphorically speaking). I investigated Eastern Orthodoxy but was kept from falling over completely on what were primarily aesthetic rather than theological grounds. There is much that is compelling, perhaps even more so, on an intellectual level, than its Roman sibling.

For example, I found their perspective on married clergy more biblically convincing and psychologically healthy, and their sacramentalism seemed more fully developed. But it was the music that kept me from falling prone. The singing and the orthodox liturgy (with its Greek, or Antiochean flavorings) felt frozen (stuck) in a narrow, cultural/historical moment that seemed to lack any theological, biblical or aesthetic warrant. But Roman Catholicism has not been so easy to dismiss, despite its position on celibacy or on the immaculate conception, for that matter.

I will concede that as a third-culture kid I am ready to pull up stakes—almost–at the drop of a hat. My geographic, cultural, ecclesiastical roots, for good and ill, don’t sink down terribly far. But this attraction East was no whim. It was driven by a sense of desperation. I felt starved and hemmed in by much more than the paucity of color, texture, taste and smell (“smells and bells,” as Protestants are prone to belittle with easy scorn, and less grace). It was the oppressive emptiness of meaning. There was so little weight. So little of substance.

For a good long while, I have felt a soul-hunger gnawing away at me. But I craved more than the mysterium tremendum, though I did that. I hungered for the Real Presence; for what I now know (thanks to Desiring the Kingdom) to call a sacramental imaginary. I underline it because that phrase is so evocative and so pregnant with significance for those like myself who are looking for a justification for continued involvement in the established church. It is also a phrase that point us toward a perspective about the world that gives us grounds to affirm it, to love it, to be for it, while remaining distinct from it.

When I visit a local Catholic congregation, I can almost feel it in the air—it is a heavy weight of solidity and rootedness and ancient significance. I can almost taste it. And, to use a very good Elizabethan word, when I attend, I lust for it. Oddly, despite being a “heady” chap, I am not put off, for a moment, by the homilies that frequently are less than captivating; teachings which are, by Protestant standards, even somewhat flaccid.

This ready willingness to dismiss homiletic deficits (what, as a good Protestant, I have been taught is the raison d’être for the church’s very existence) is a profound affirmation of the argument of Desiring the Kingdom.  This can be summarized simply: For at least 400 years we have been utterly mistaken in how we view human beings. The church, in particular, has fallen into profound error by agreeing with Descartes’ famous phrase: “I think therefore I am”–which being interpreted means (in Smith’s words) that humans are essentially “thinking things that are containers for ideas.” In contrast, Smith contends that “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.” This leads him to ask two revolutionary questions: What would it be like if Christian institutions viewed their vocation as the training up of lovers rather than thinkers? How would the church’s worship change if the emphasis was not on pumping right information into the brain but training the heart to love rightly and fully and well?

Before he gets to those questions Smith exposes the formative power of those activities we all engage in as fully-invested citizens of the Unites States (though the critique applies broadly to all who live in the developed world). In order to shock us into alertness, he refers to these as “liturgical practices”, cultural, material activities that have as their goal and effect the training of our hearts to love the city of man, rather than the City of God.

He exposes the religious underbelly of such “innocuous” practices as regular attendance and consumption at the local shopping mall. He also reveals how our desires are “educated” and intentionally directed by entertainment, media (advertising) and sporting events. These all aim for the “gut” which is the center of our being and defines who we are because they encapsulate what we love, desire, long for; what has captivated our imaginations. It is this much more than what we hold to be true in our heads that determines our actions. In perhaps his most gripping and unforgettable sentence he declares: “While Victoria Secret is fanning a flame in our kardia [gut, groin, heart] the church is trucking water to our minds.” I don’t think that requires any commentary whatsoever. That sentence was worth the price of the book.

You get that and you get the entire book.

Smith then does something incredibly helpful, he exegetes the significance of each element of the liturgy (embraced by those on both sides of the East/West divide). Beginning with the call to worship–“the call to be human” and ending with being sent out as witnesses–“The cultural mandate meets the great commission” he shows how our worship practices were purposefully designed to capture our imaginations and craft a religious “imaginary” that “orients, guides, and shapes our desires and actions” as citizens of the Kingdom of God.

The genius of his argument is his emphasis on the body: “Historic Christian worship is fundamentally formative because it educates our hearts through our bodies (which in turn renews our mind), and does so in a way that is more universally accessible (and I would add, more universally effective) than many of the overly cognitive worship habits we have acquired in modernity.”

It is this section which gave me hope. In it I detected the possibility of being emphatically and intentionally Catholic and Reformed (and Charismatic, for that matter). I glimpsed, though through a dark glass, the dim outlines of worship that was grateful and respectful and submissive to a living tradition much older than 500 years. Worship freed from the restrictive snobbery of chronology and a narrow theological elitism. Worship that drunk deeply at the ancient wells dug by those wise and worthy successors to the apostles: Ambrose, Athanasius, Chrysostom and Augustine, to mention but a few.

Desiring the Kingdom provides a potent rationale for both bridge-building (from West to East), as well as for refusing to heed the siren’s call to jump too hastily out of the Reformational boat—at least it did for me. To my mind, it is a compelling challenge to embrace and to craft “thick,” liturgical practices that have as one of their primary motives, the re-formation of the hearts of the participants; weening us away from yearning after the kingdom of darkness (the earthly city) and lusting after the kingdom of light (the heavenly city). 

As a writer I’ve envied the sacramental worldview of our brothers to the East. I realize only too well how handicapped we Protestants are and why the discerning reader might conclude that Protestant novelists can’t hold a candle to Catholic. I would concur. That is one of many things robbed from us by reactionary, anti-Papal zealotry. We lost so much but, thanks to Desiring the Kingdom, against all hope, I am beginning to believe that, in fact, all is not lost. 

But, the most profound impact was reserved for what was almost an aside. Smith was applying his thesis to the limited capacities of children and the mentally challenged to understand theological abstractions. He argued for practices that engage the whole body, that spark the imagination, and grab a hold of the heart of those with limited cognitive capacities. What he was really pleading for was worship that not only appeals to children but reminds us that we are children. And I realized that Smith’s thesis is just an extended academic commentary on one of Jesus’ simplest but most profound statements: “unless you become like little children you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Smith is showing how embodied liturgical practices are meant to shape the hearts of children of all ages, be they 8 or 80 years of age.

The purpose of the education that goes in within Christian institutions (not the least of which is the church) is that of capturing the imagination (the heart) so that even when we get old and become too-smart-for-our-britches, our whole life remains oriented toward desiring God’s Kingdom. This type of training is not focused primarily on the brain but the body and thereby the heart. Therefore it is accessible to and transformative of even those with limited IQ’s who can make no sense of the elegant sermon with its unassailable logic. The impact of the liturgy on the heart is movingly illustrated in the eager confession of a mentally challenged adult quoted in the book:

“I want to eat Jesus bread. . . .” Judy admitted excitedly, “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.” This comment is no invitation to theological argument and pedantic parsing of terms, but to smile, wipe the tears away and join in whole-hearted worship. For children get in, adults not necessarily. For children get it, we—often—don’t.

Tags: anthropology, catholicism, children, church practices, culture, education, liturgy, lover, malls, mentally-challenged, protestant, sporting events, thinker