Last week we briefly considered the critical side of James K. A. Smith’s thesis in Desiring the Kingdom, and I tried to tease out some of the differences between his view and ones many Christians have. To review, he accuses several versions of Christian education/formation as too “heady” and intellectualist; they treat human beings like brain receptacles that you merely drop information into. In this chapter, Smith fleshes out his alternative: that we are embodied creatures and that we are liturgical creatures. The explanation of those terms will be given in what follows.

Those of you who were fortunate enough to attend the Youth retreat that Hamilton spoke at a couple years back will recognize an example that James K. A. Smith gives. He asks of the reader: “What letter is to the left of F on a keyboard?” What usually happens is that people will reach out their hands (in standard typing position) and press down on their left middle finger. The interesting part is in how we learn/internalize this information, which is implicit in how we recall that information.

This is a knowledge that is located moreso in our fingers than our minds; a knowledge that is drilled into us from countless hours of mindless repetition. But we don’t need to consciously recall that knowledge to finish our emails. We type just fine without having the idea “the letter D is next to F on the keyboard” at the forefront of our minds. This is a kind of know-how that constitutes a small part of our usually unconscious understanding of the world. And this know-how is not taught through textbooks or memorization, but through bodily practices that have become habit to us.

That’s all simple enough; after all, we believe in the formative power of practicing piano scales. That in order to be great at any skill, whether its music or sports, repeated drills are not only helpful, but vitally necessary training for our bodies to perform the relevant actions well.

But if this is so obvious, why do we not apply the same logic to Christianity? Consider the sermon in Protestant churches nowadays. These 45 minute to an hour and a half beasts easily take up more than half of the Sunday worship service in many of the churches I’ve visited. Why the disproportionate emphasis on ideas and doctrines, when forming people to be good at something requires training in the body, as well as the mind?

James K. A. Smith argues that this is the “heady” intellectualism that has seeped into Protestant Christianity from the rationalists of old. Descartes famously thought that we were primarily “thinking things”, able to establish our existence merely by thinking about it. Throughout the years, this distorted way of viewing the human person has taken many forms, settling most recently in Christian circles as that of “believing animals”. We are what we believe, so you better believe its worth spending an hour making sure what we believe is correct via sermon. Small groups and fellowships reflect a similar understanding, where through messages, readings, and discussions only the mind and ideas are given fair treatment, while the body is left untouched.

But there is so much more to us than our minds. God created us as embodied, incarnate creatures that cannot help but to take on habits, and let those habits carve our paths in the world. As Smith says in several of his talks,

It’s not just a matter of how you think through the issues, its much more about how are you habituated to respond to different situations… Where if you are going to do the right thing, it’s not enough to have acquired the knowledge of the relevant moral rules and intellectually process the decisions I ought to make. In fact, a lot of what I do in a given day is not the outcome of rational conscious deliberation. It’s driven by this adapted unconscious, that orients my stance towards the world.

This habituation of our unconscious is hardly neutral. For, as we will talk about next time, there is a story explaining and animating the set of habits we keep. Habits pointing us towards some version of the good life, getting at what we desire as good, true, and beautiful. And since we know that our minds are not the whole picture, we can better attend to the formation the world and the church are putting us through; the stories that seep into our bones whether we are aware of it or not.

Last year, an article about the Pope and the season of Lent managed to make its way onto Time magazine, attracting the attention of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Making its rounds again this year as well, “Pope Francis’ Guide to Lent: What You Should Give Up This Year” is a delightful mix of clickbait and a genuine Christian call to action. The article’s author, Christopher Hale, references and builds off of several of the Pope’s Ash Wednesday messages, concluding that “if we are going to fast from anything this Lent, Francis suggests that even more than candy or alcohol, we fast from indifference to others.”

That Pope Francis focuses on the vice of indifference to others will not be surprising to those who have followed his headlines in the popular media. The care of the poor takes center stage in many of Pope Francis’ messages and sermons, exacerbated by what he observes as an indifference or apathy to the suffering of the poor. Pope Francis groups this indifference with hatred and hardness of heart as sins that Jesus’s death and resurrection have already overcome. Thus, Pope Francis urges us to ask God to form our hearts in the likeness of Jesus’: open and attentive to the needs and sufferings of our neighbors as well as of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

The candy and alcohol, on the other hand, is a reference to the practice of fasting or “giving up for Lent” something that we regularly partake in, as a way of remembering and taking part in Jesus’s forty days in the desert. While American Protestants are used to this practice being up to the individual’s discernment (for example, it’d make more sense in my context to give up candy than alcohol, though both options are suspect), in many older Catholic contexts the fast was primarily a communal one, where entire parishes would go without meat for forty days.

The article ends with this rousing quote on the relative unimportance of these bodily fasts:

“What are you giving up for Lent?” It’s a question a lot of people will get these next few days. If you want to change your body, perhaps alcohol and candy is the way to go. But if you want to change your heart, a harder fast is needed. This narrow road is gritty, but it isn’t sterile. It will make room in ourselves to experience a love that can make us whole and set us free.

Now that’s something worth fasting for.

This and other recent pushbacks against Lenten fasting have been mostly confusing to me. I get that there have been cringeworthy instances of people sacrificing some trivial aspect of their lives, and feeling self righteous as a result. There have even been some instances of “secular” Lenten fasting, made in the name of health or psychological benefits. Maybe it’s for those reasons that there is a felt need to move fasting out of the realm of the physical and into the spiritual. Perhaps we no longer trust that Lenten fasting will do the work that we have traditionally assigned it to.

But nowhere does Pope Francis “recommend” that you fast from something that isn’t bodily. He warns against overly formal fasts that serve only to leave us self satisfied, while our selfishness and ignorance of the poor grow. He argues that fasting only makes sense if it “chips away at our security and, as a consequence, benefits someone else”. That is, our fasting must change us in a way that wears down the barriers that prevent us from doing good to others. But from scouring his recent Lenten messages, I found precious little to make anything close to a “guide” for what to fast from.

What the article’s author seems to miss is that Lenten fasting has never been about the thing your fasting from. Rather it is about the deprivation of its enjoyment, feeling its hunger pangs, and using that to help Christians better order their desires. “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Pleasures like eating meat and watching Netflix, which are good in their own respects, are delayed to help us see what we are normally blind to: the plight of the poor, our indifference to God and to others, and, particularly for Lent, Christ’s sufferings on his journey to the cross.

So when I hear someone mention that they are fasting from road rage or judging others, I fear that they’ve gotten some things backwards. Fasting from pleasures and repenting of sins (like the sin of indifference) are related, but something is lost if we conflate the two. Hence the particular format of Lenten fasting: we fast during the week, and on Sundays we “feast”, acknowledging that at the table we catch a glimpse of the Bridegroom’s feast, where fasting is made irrelevant (Mark 4:4). Sin that we are turning from, on the other hand, is not “picked up” again on Sundays or at Easter, like we do with fasting. To sum it all up, we might fast from alcohol, but we repent of alcoholism.

Let us not shy away from the important ways that disciplining our bodies has on the formation of our hearts this Lenten season. As Christ was not above the bodily practice of fasting and abstinence, may we too look to him for encouragement, trusting that our need for daily renewal and repentance will be supplied with grace by our Father in heaven.

Preface

Desiring the Kingdom is a book that managed to transcend its intended purpose to a fairly significant degree. Originally a plea to Christian universities and instructors to re-evaluate their approach to education and formation, Smith’s book has since become a source book for pastors, musicians, and Christian laypeople alike. The reason: it affirms the primacy of worship as the site of Christian formation, it reorients ideas and beliefs under how and what one loves, and it rediscovers the significance of desire in the Christian life. It is an approachable, readable book, but in that “college lecturer that occasionally makes slightly out of date cultural references” kind of way. The average reader will probably lose patience with Smith at the sections on phenomenology and Heidegger, and reading long portions in one sitting results in hearing many of the same phrases repeated again and again.

These “features” are part of the process; pedagogical as Ken put it. The beautiful and insightful breakdown of the parts of the worship service near the end of Desiring the Kingdom must be “earned” by going through the more dense sections, or so the reasoning goes.

So in a way I am here to suffer on your behalf. I will write to you, dear reader, assuming you have never read the book, and summarize what I take to be Smith’s main points and examples chapter by chapter. It would not be a Jojo blog if there were no criticisms, but I will try to keep them brief and to include them only when they are relevant to the purpose of this read-through. The purpose being: answering the question, “How are Christians to rightly view formation?”. At the time of writing this, we in the church plant (the name has not been solidified yet) are going through a series called Getting your Feet Wet, dealing with formation; the writers of which clearly have been influenced by Desiring the Kingdom. When there are interesting intersections between the two, I will try to bring them out. But hopefully it is not necessary to have read through that piece to understand what I write here.

Desiring the Kingdom: An Introduction

James K. A. Smith introduces his 2009 book with a set of claims. The first is that the generally accepted Christian view of education and learning is mistaken, to the detriment of Christians everywhere. The story goes a little like this: with the world’s help, Christians came to see the role of education as primarily providing the right information, and then teaching students to retain that information. In the context of church, the hope is that they will come to believe these things to be true (e.g. “that God loves you”, “that Christ died for your sins”; ideas and propositions). Some go so far as to hope for a Christian perspective or worldview to develop; that maybe after 4 years of Sunday School little Billy will go off to college and still be able to see things from a Christian point of view. In other words, to let his Christian upbringing inform his thinking and decision making, and thus give him a better chance of doing and saying the right things.

What about this story feels “off” to us? Trying to identify what we think this account gets wrong or leaves out reveals a lot about our assumptions regarding formation. For example, you may rightly point out that the above paragraph says nothing about developing a relationship with God, and that we should instead focus on teaching Christians how to get closer to God, and how to depend on Him more and more fully.

Others might take offense at how shallow it makes Christian teaching sound, and whose first step would be to add a more robust knowledge and love for scripture and biblical doctrine, and maybe even training in articulating the gospel truth to non-believers.

Others still might scoff and think that they’ve got it all backwards. It’s not about what you know, or even your perspective. Its about loving, caring for, and helping people, and that’s not something you teach in Sunday school. Its something you learn from experience “out in the field”, either from the people themselves or from research into their contexts and needs.

There are strands of truth to each of the possible alternatives I just described. But each carry within them the assumption that formation is merely about absorbing ideas and information. Smith rejects this assumption, and on his view Christian formation is primarily about how we are “shaped, formed, and molded into a certain kind of people whose hearts and passions and desires are aimed at the Kingdom of God.” Feel free to reread that sentence a couple times. Hopefully it will begin to sink in just how strange that statement sounds, and how unlikely for it to be uttered in most American Christian contexts. Wherein lies the difference? Is his statement generally right, but emphasizes different things than most Christians might have? Does it go too far with this talk of passions and desires, when we should be worried about morality and character instead? And what in the world does he mean by “aiming”?

Agree or disagree, it is good to recognize the particularity of such statements. And as we get to later chapters, hopefully the dynamics of this view will come into clearer focus. To reiterate: many Christians have been co-opted into a view of formation as acquiring information, which doesn’t fully get at our hearts and desires. In later chapters he will argue that the world has got our hearts and desires (our “guts”) in mind, and thus are doing a better job at forming Christians than many churches. By recovering a sense of the human animal as embodied and liturgical, the church will be better equipped with practices that resist the world’s seductions, and be more fully and deeply formed into the image of Christ’s likeness.

I realize that last bit was dense, perhaps unintelligible. But as an introduction to the book, I need to get it in your subconscious, to prime you for the discussions that will come afterwards. Later posts will be lighter, since I will not be trying to motivate and encapsulate the the overarching argument of a 200 page book. I appreciate your patience, and pray that our small congregation would be blessed as we attend to the how of formation, our humble attempts at becoming holy as our heavenly father is holy.

This blog is a collaborative effort to help bring some coherence to the (sometimes perplexing) task of living the Christian life well. That last word (“well”) is significant. On one level, it is not too hard a thing to live the life of a Christian. Because we believe in a wonderful thing called grace we gladly attest with many a bumper that, “I’m not perfect, just forgiven.”

Sweet and simple.

Except Jesus seems to have this little expectation that grace aims to work perfection in us. That’s when things get a bit more complicated. To live the Christian life well moves us from “just forgiven” toward “perfection.” That may sound odd, but perfection is simply a shorthand way of saying what the Apostle Paul calls “conformed to the image of Christ.”

From the perspective of this blog, living the Christian life well also has to do with getting a better grasp on what we believe and do as Christians. Why do we believe and do the things we believe and do? Of the things we do, what’s the most faithful and fruitful way to do them? And how does all this stuff help us become more and more like the one in whom we believe? These are some of the major questions this blog hopes to flesh out.

A Note on the Blogging Team

First, pretty much all the writers for this blog grew up in the wonderful world of conservative evangelicalism. In particular, the Southern California, Immigrant Chinese, Orange County brand of conservative evangelicalism. For sure, there are things we appreciate within this context. But there’s also things we have found wanting. For better or for worse, we may tend to emphasize the latter. Our aim (though we might not always hit the mark) is “to uproot and tear down,” in order “to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10).*

Second, as of this writing, many of us are in the early stages of planning a church plant, so many of the posts will be reflections on specific things we are working through as a community.

*It’s the conservative evangelical part in me that has to include a Bible reference.