Desiring the Kingdom (Part 2)

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.