While few will argue that Christendom was a glorious era of gospel proclamation and liberation from pagan superstition, it did have its occasional advantages—most notably the right (or the obligation) to worship without fear of molestation by either man or state. The Christian narrative of redemptive history was generally accepted as a rational position, rather than an opiate for the masses, and membership in a church was a prerequisite for participation in society, not a hindrance to it. The world has changed greatly over the ensuing centuries—for better and for worse—and Christians must now think carefully about what exactly it means to be a disciple of Christ and how they engage this brave new world. Our friend James K. A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin College and editor-in-chief of Comment, has been at the forefront of this discussion with his books Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation (Baker, 2009), Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Baker, 2013), and a popular version of those two titles, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos, 2016). The third book in this set, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology was just published by Baker Academic in November, so editor-in-chief Michael Horton rang up Jamie for a friendly chat about living as a Christian in a post-Christian world—what really happens at a football stadium—and about Rod Dreher’s book, The Benedict Option (see page 62 for a review of this book).
MSH: Even though these are academic-sounding titles, I encourage readers to dig in and start with You Are What You Love.
JKAS: Yes, the first two books were written with a university or seminary conversation in mind, but we found that all kinds of people were reading and wrestling with the ideas discussed in them, so You Are What You Love is kind of the gateway book that sets the groundwork for the more detailed articulation you see in the Desiring the Kingdom trilogy.
MSH: Desiring the Kingdom is actually quite accessible, particularly the way you talk about cultural formation—the idea that, as embodied beings, culture forms us. Is the Christian culture—namely, the church—forming us, or are we being formed more by the culture around us? Is it fair to say that’s one of your great concerns?
JKAS: The way you’ve framed it is absolutely right. We tend to analyze culture as if it is mostly a collection of messages, ideas, and alternative doctrines. Of course, that’s important; but if you’re only doing cultural discernment that way, you’ll miss all of the powerful deformative practices—the rituals of a culture—that are sort of hoodwinking us, covertly capturing our loves, our longings, and our fundamental orientation to the world.
So, on the one hand, we want to use a new mode of cultural critique when engaging with culture; but on the other hand—the positive, constructive hand—we need to ask if the body of Christ, the church, is adequately and faithfully embodying the gospel and inviting us into Christ’s life in ways that can counter the culture’s deformation. I think I cite an earlier book of yours, A Better Way, every time I write on these matters. It’s funny how much even Reformed and Presbyterian people forget what worship is and what it’s supposed to do. We think of it as this expressive endeavor that shows something, when in fact it’s the answer to a call to be a body that encounters God, who’s going to do something to us.
MSH: You start out by challenging the idea of worldview, which I don’t know how you can possibly do in Grand Rapids—the very heart of Christian worldview development! Much good in the evangelical world has come from Christian engagement with movies and literature, but the “worldview” approach puts us as human beings, as you say, as brains on a stick. Can you unpack that?
JKAS: Right. It’s funny how there are certain theological tendencies we mesh with certain modern cultural tendencies that prioritize and privilege thinking, which results in this mistaken notion that we’re just cognitive information processors. I’ve seen in my own tradition the tendency of this notion of worldview to take Christianity and reduce it to a sort of intellectual system or perspectival grid. I’m challenging that. We are always more than thinking things; we are more than brains on a stick; we are holistic persons God has created—body, soul, and spirit—and is redeeming. We need an encounter with Christ and an ongoing life with Christ that honors our embodiment. What also worries me is the way that “worldview-ism” is a slice of the Reformed tradition that gets picked up in broader evangelicalism, without the other distinctives of Reformed Christianity that account for other aspects of our being as image-bearers.
MSH: It’s not just that our minds are being transformed, but that we’re presenting our bodies to the Lord as well.
JKAS: Yes, and there’s a reason why Scripture comes time and again to this language of the heart. I don’t pretend to be a biblical studies scholar, but in some ways, the language of “the heart” is like biblical shorthand for the intersection of mind and body; it’s this visceral core of who we are. It’s one of the reasons why Saint Augustine says that what you love is really what motivates and defines you. What we need is a more nuanced, more holistic, more comprehensive sense of who we are in Christ—to realize that our body is the site of habits that shape and incline us in certain ways, which God also wants to redeem.
MSH: Transitioning from our discussion of worldview, could you explain some examples of what you refer to as “cultural liturgies”—social habits and customs that shape our bodies as well as our minds?
JKAS: Instead of just discerning culture in terms of the messages and worldviews that are out there—the competing ideas to the gospel—what we have to do is learn to read the rituals of our culture: the places and sites of these rhythms and routines and practices that aren’t just something we do but are themselves things that, in turn, actually do something to us. When you bring that kind of lens to our everyday life, you start to see that there’s more at stake than you would have realized, and things that you might have thought were benign and neutral are really loaded and kind of dangerous.
The example I have often used since I started thinking about this was when my kids were teenagers and they would ask me if I would take them to the mall. They would say, “Dad, will you take us to the temple?” They were sort of mocking me, because we had had this conversation where I tried to get them to see that the mall is actually an intensely religious site. I don’t mean it’s a Christian site; I mean it’s this cathedral of consumerism that’s trying to capture their loves and desires. It’s not that when they walked into the mall, it would say, “This is what you should believe!” or “Here’s what we think!” The last thing the mall wants you to do is think. It’s because it invites you into this very sensible, visceral, visual set of routines and rituals that at their root, in all kinds of covert ways, are trying to tell you that happiness is found in stuff and meaning is found in acquisition. We don’t become consumers because somebody argues us to that conclusion; we become consumers when our hearts are captured by these cultural liturgies that pull us into a rival story of the world.
You can bring that kind of liturgical lens, then, to a stadium. I actually think stadiums are where we learn to be nationalists; there is a very potent, visual display of symbol and narrative about the nation. Because we’re immersed in this over and over again, before you realize it, this whole mythology of “the nation” has seeped into you at an unconscious level and then you act accordingly. I think you could analyze the university, social media, and even our smartphones in this way; but the point is to understand that a more comprehensive method of cultural analysis—reading the rituals of our culture—is necessary.
MSH: This is really the idea that the violation of the first commandment is that we love or trust someone or something other than God.
JKAS: Yes, that’s a great way of putting it. You could run with an entire analysis about how faith, hope, and love are all postures of a relationship in submission to God, that they’re the condition for thinking well about God.
MSH: That helps to explain if somebody comes along and asks, “How important is it that you read the Bible regularly?” I’ll say, “It’s absolutely essential.” It’s easy for us to say, for example, “Scripture is revelation of all that we need for salvation and godliness,” while our bodies more easily take a break in a movie seat than reading the Bible and praying. Do you think that’s something that’s deep in our culture and especially in orthodox Christian culture where we’re trying hard to challenge rival beliefs?
JKAS: I think that’s a helpful analysis. There can be two consequences of that. On one hand, it can turn into a form of antinomianism, where it doesn’t matter what I’m doing because I believe the right things. On the other hand, I think it can turn into a kind of spiritual frustration and even despair, where you’re so passionately devoted to learning more and more and yet you’re not seeing that realized in your daily walk. That’s the consequence that worries me. I think that’s because we haven’t appreciated the power of habit, in the sense that you can’t think your way out of the deformed habits that you’re wrestling with.
MSH: Would you say that a good example is the Lord’s Day? A lot of people would say it’s important to believe the right doctrines, but they aren’t too concerned about attending Sunday worship, and then they are shocked when their children are unchurched by their sophomore year in college?
JKAS: Yes, and it’s so interestingly tied to people having an informational notion of what sanctification is as opposed to a formational one. Someone might say, “I can always listen to a White Horse Inn podcast on Tuesday, so really, why is Sunday morning important?” It completely misses the reason why the people of God are called to gather around word and table—not just so we get another interjection of informational content, but because communally the Spirit is forming us at this deep and embodied level. That’s not the sort of thing you can stream.
MSH: If we don’t have the liturgies of the gospel culture in the church, primarily word and sacrament, what other liturgies are going to capture our hearts? You mentioned the mall. How does it work? How do our hearts get captured? Is there a difference between the stoical notion that says cravings are sinful and Augustine’s idea that cravings are good as long as they’re directed to the right object?
JKAS: That’s a great way of framing it. I’m trying to argue that instead of viewing desire and craving as the problem, it’s what we’ve learned to desire and the orientations of our cravings that we have acquired through our immersion in disordered liturgies that have covertly trained us to be a kind of people who want some rival kingdom. A lot of contemporary Protestant Christians in North America are quite allergic to the notion of repetition in their spiritual lives. In my account, there is no formation without repetition. If you’re fixated on novelty in your spiritual experiences, that means all the formative power of repetition will be directed into the cultural liturgies you don’t see as problematic. You’ll always go to the tailgating ritual at the USC game; you’ll always go to Starbucks. What happens, then, is that the counter-formative power of the gospel that can be embodied in the church’s faithful repetition of the story is sort of lost, because it’s not a habit that shapes you—it’s a one-off experience you encounter.
MSH: I think you do a great job of unmasking the assumption that all the things we routinely do in our daily life are not liturgies. Some are better, some are worse, but what we’re doing every day is going through a series of liturgies we often don’t bother to think about. We basically say, “This is the real world,” and then when we go to church, we say somehow, “This is a liturgy.”
JKAS: I’ve been doing a lot more work with Augustine’s City of God over the last few years, and that’s how I think he reads Rome and the empire. On the one hand, what you get is a stinging antithetical criticism of all the ways Rome fails to be the city of God; but on the other hand, you see him have a kind of nuanced, ad hoc, almost relative analysis, where he says, “But if you compare it to the barbarian horde, not all is lost.” It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Sometimes I worry that there’s a certain kind of Anabaptist sympathy within evangelicalism that sets up this stark either-or contrast, and I’m trying to negotiate between those two.
MSH: As my students and I went through the book, it seemed there was this notion of the head always following the heart. Isn’t there more of a two-way highway here—that our hearts inform our heads, and our heads inform our hearts? Does the Bible show more of an integrated picture, rather than the intellect over the will or the will over the intellect?
JKAS: Yes, this has been an ongoing correction to the way I keep trying to articulate it. I think it mostly stems from the fact that the foil that I’m working against is an overwhelmingly intellectualist account, so it’s not surprising if my emphases look like they’re setting up a dichotomy. I really didn’t want to do that. The way I would frame it is that, yes, there is a dialectical relationship—there is a constructive feedback loop that can happen, using our God-given powers of intellect and reflection to discern and name our failures and disorders.
The irony is that I write books about why you can’t think your way to holiness. Obviously, practically, I do think there’s a constructive role for reflection; I just don’t think it’s sustainable on its own, because I don’t actually just think my way through my day. Ideally, I use my God-given powers of knowledge, intellect, and reflection to come to my practices with renewed intentionality.
I’m trying to push back on a tendency in American evangelicalism that still imagines you can be a lone ranger in the Christian life—this kind of rugged individualist who can figure it all out with the intellect and doesn’t need a congregation. What I’m saying is that there is absolutely no way to be a Christian on your own, apart from the body of Christ you worship with in a congregation. The communal aspect of our practice is absolutely necessary.
MSH: How do you respond to someone who says, “In all these projects, you’re basically choosing Aristotle over Paul: faith comes by hearing”? This was the problem with the medieval church—they borrowed Aristotle’s idea that if you just have laws, tradition, and a culture of virtuous practices, you’ll end up with virtuous people.
JKAS: I don’t agree with that, so I intentionally try to resist any kind of liturgical determinism. However, I don’t want to think of Paul and Aristotle as non-overlapping Venn diagrams. I think there are ways in which Aristotle gives us common-grace insight into the human that I see confirmed in Paul. In Colossians 3, Paul pays close attention to the virtues. There’s a great book on Paul’s epistemology by Ian W. Scott called Paul’s Way of Knowing, where he argues that even Paul’s epistemology has a kind of narrative structure behind it. We not only see positive descriptions of both vice and virtue, but we also see an instruction that invites Christians to find themselves in the story of God in Christ redeeming the world. I don’t want to turn this into a spiritual self-management program; I’m saying that these are the means of grace from a God who knows we are creatures of habit. Probably a lot of this also is a methodological starting point. I’m a philosopher by training, and my conversation partners come out of that philosophical canon; it can get a bit tricky when I look for the points of contact within Scripture. I’m hoping to give insight into the nature of the human as we can know it through Scripture and attentiveness to nature.
MSH: Can you give some examples that illustrate this point about our being creatures of story and habit? Maybe some examples from Christian worship?
JKAS: I was a late convert to Christian faith and then came through dispensational, nondenominational evangelicalism and from there to the Reformed tradition. Later, I realized that being Reformed comes with this whole ecclesiology, and that the Reformers had this incredibly rich theology of worship—of what being called into God’s presence looks like. What has made this meaningful to me is my own experience of Christian worship now, where I see that from the moment God calls us to worship, we are called into this encounter that has a narrative arc and logic to what we do, when we do it, and why.
The logic of that script is formative even on the days I don’t feel it, even on the days I’m not thinking about it—I know that God is doing something to me in the midst of it. My experience is often starkest around the liturgical rehearsal of confession and assurance of pardon. When you’re on the road, you have opportunities to worship in different kinds of Christian contexts; and I have to say, whenever I’m in churches where they don’t do confession, which is surprisingly common, it’s almost like I don’t know what we’re doing there. I feel like there’s a different story that’s being enacted, and I lose my orientation—I don’t know where I am in this encounter. In my experience of Reformed worship, in this narrative rehearsal of my relationship with God, I’m called by a gracious, forgiving, electing, creating God into his presence; and when I’m in that presence, exposed for who I am, how I have failed, and what I’ve done and left undone, I am then assured with the mercy and grace and forgiveness of God. In some contexts, we will have confessed our sins on our knees, and then we are raised by Christ to hear his forgiveness—that’s when I feel like I’m learning that story in my body. It’s almost like my knees get something about humility before God, and my feet learn something about standing in Christ. To do that week in and week out is to participate in that story—to let it seep into you and become absorbed in the visceral core of who you are so that it becomes the story you are sent out with.
MSH: You mentioned the importance of this habit in worship for those times when you don’t experience it or don’t feel it. Doesn’t that bring up an important point about habits? From my observations, it appears that evangelical circles generally believe that rote habit is intrinsically bad because it contradicts the deep conviction that in order for something to be real, it has be spontaneous or immediate; and that if we don’t get that sense of reality on the first go, then it “doesn’t work.” It’s not a practice you submit yourself to in faith and trust where, possibly, you don’t feel anything eight out of ten times; but every time, you are being shaped right down to your toes by what God is doing in that divine service—speaking to you, rebuking you, forgiving you, and blessing you. It has to be an immediate experience.
JKAS: Yes, exactly. In some sense, it’s also realizing that God is a participant in worship, and it’s not just us showing up to show God something. This is crucial in thinking about the formation of young people in the faith. The cult of novelty and spontaneity has made us think that the most important thing we can do for young people is make sure that they’re not bored and that they’re entertained in church. I think this has been a colossal failure for deep formation in the Christian faith. One of the best things we can do for our children is commit ourselves to congregations where this story of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself is told and enacted over and over again in such a way that it seeps into them, even on the days they’re slouched in the pew and not at all excited to be there. Even on those days, they’re learning the creed and being rooted at a level deeper than they feel.
As parents, my wife and I are absolutely committed to that. When you start to appreciate the formative power of virtue and habit, it engenders a profound patience in God’s work. You’re not going to get quarterly reports on the re-formation of your habits. This is a lifetime adventure. There has to be a deep trust and patience about that.
MSH: Deep trust and patience is exactly what’s difficult for us as Americans in general, but especially for the younger generations who are addicted to immediate gratification, clicking their way to happiness.
JKAS: We older generations as parents get suckered into that, because we get fearful if we don’t immediately see the kind of moral conformity we want to see. This is a tougher conversation, but I think it’s important that Christian parents not confuse moral conformity with formation of Christ-like virtues. I’ve taught enough eighteen- to twenty-year-olds who come from good Christian homes to realize that while some kids are good at playing the game you want them to play, as soon as they’re out, they play a different one. Sometimes it’s actually the kids who are kind of resistant who more deeply appreciate what’s at stake. When you meet them later at twenty-seven, they’re the ones pursuing Christ in the ways you had hoped. Whereas the kids who looked like they were doing everything exactly what you wanted them to do, at nineteen are in a completely different story.
MSH: It’s come to the attention of a number of us that you’ve been critical of The Benedict Option. First of all, can you explain what it is, and second, can you give us a bit of insight on how you approach this question of how we should be faithful disciples in our day?
JKAS: Every time I think I understand what the Benedict Option is, Rod Dreher tells us it’s wrong, so it feels a bit like a moving target. Essentially, it’s a strategy by which Christians can continue to live faithfully in this contemporary cultural moment. Dreher says that Christians should bring their energies back into creating alternative communities of formation and schooling and so on, sort of focusing on tending the household of God while they wait for a cultural opportunity in some not-clear future in which we will be able to come out of the ark again, to use his metaphor.
I’m sympathetic to the Benedict Option in the sense that it reprioritizes ecclesiology and encourages Christians to be intentional about Christian formation. There has to be something countercultural about that, so I’m completely on board. My reservations about it are, first, that its cultural analysis is fairly ham-fisted and fearful in ways that aren’t constructive from a Christian standpoint; and, second, I’m a bit worried about it replaying tropes that will sound familiar to those of us who know anything about Protestant fundamentalism. Despite all the protests to the contrary, there’s almost a quasi-dispensationalist carving up of the world here that concerns me.
In the third book of my trilogy, Awaiting the King, I sketch out what I hope is a biblical and Augustinian account of our citizenship being centered in the city of God, and what it looks like for us to lean out and work alongside other citizens of the earthly city in ways that are rooted in the faithfulness of God, and not determined by the vagaries of a particular cultural moment.
MSH: I think of the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century and how the first generation of leaders were actually violent, wanting to create the city of God then and there in a couple of German cities. When that failed, they pulled back and basically said, “Okay, why don’t we separate completely from the world.” Do you think there’s that pendulum tendency in American religious history, where we keep trying to take over (or take back) America, and when that fails, we retreat into our self-imposed enclaves? It seems to indicate a kind of Manichaean relationship of the church to the culture.
JKAS: I think you’ve nailed it, and I would add a certain Pelagian kind of cultural strategy. Effectively, we imagine that we are the ones who will bring about the kingdom. To me, the Benedict Option sounds exactly like the strategy you would come up with if you were a failed culture warrior. It’s almost like an ecclesial strategy of Dunkirk—we need to retreat so we can fight another day. What I want to refute is the entire culture war agenda; I think it is so misbegotten, partly because it lacks an adequate, biblical, and Augustinian eschatology. My book is called Awaiting the King because we don’t bring it about; Jesus ushers it in. This is not a license for Christian activism, but it’s not quietism either. How we actively wait for the coming kingdom, which is God’s initiative and prerogative, is something I talk about at length in that book.
Another significant part of my project is to engage the work of Oliver O’Donovan, the British ethicist and theologian, who has written a remarkable history of democracy in the West and all of the ways that it bears what he calls the “crater marks” of the gospel. I suppose that’s another point of disagreement with Dreher. I don’t think we can just antithetically write off liberal democracy. I think that the institutions of democracy and political liberalism are, in some sense, the fruit of the gospel’s impact on Western political institutions. I want to articulate a much more nuanced account of that.
