I’ve been slowing making my way through NT Wright’s two massive volumes on the Apostle Paul. His thesis is that Paul offers to the early church a theology (and a pretty amazing one at that). The problem of course is that Paul doesn’t write a systematic theology, he writes letters to churches in order to address the issues they are facing in a particular place at a particular time. Whatever we can say about “Paul’s theology” is gleaned from the way he speaks pastorally to the life of a congregation.
It has often been my experience in academe that there exists a great divide between practical and biblical or systematic (or suppose philosophical) theologians. Not only is there a divide but I would also say there is often a pecking order that places the “pure” theologians well above their “practical” colleagues. I remember once asking a “pure theologian” how what they were talking about might applied to the local church context or might effect the average lay-person. They responded back quickly and harshly, “Don’t make me turn this into a Sunday school lesson!”
I have usually tried to invert that hierarchy. There is no doubt that those who devote themselves to systematic, biblical and philosophical theology are doing a great service to the church. But any nerd can do that. What takes not only brains but some moral fortitude and spirit-led intuition is applying the best of theology into the real life circumstances people face.
That’s why I really enjoyed reading James K.A. (Jamie) Smith’s little book of “reflections on faith and culture” entitled Discipleship in the Present Tense. It is a collect of book reviews, letters, speeches, and blogs addressed to a variety of issues.
If you are not familiar with Jamie’s more theological (and theoretical works) you should be. (You should especially pour yourself into Desiring the Kingdom). Jamie’s writing has been incredibly formative for me in two areas. First, Jamie has helped me understand more clearly the mandate humans have (as beings formed in God’s image) to be co-creational with God – especially in the formation of culture. The way he applies that to the role of art and aesthetics is especially important for those of us raised in very pietistic settings that were (or are) either suspicious of the arts or only know how to use them instrumentally.
Second, Jamie’s work on humans as homo liturgicus (humankind the worshipers or lovers) has completely reframed my understanding of worship as counter-formation and has given me better lenses to interpret all the ways various “cultural liturgies” mis-form our hearts and desires.
But that’s all his scholarly stuff… And it’s all worth reading. But the truly gifted theologian is able to bring that work to bear on the issues of life and that’s what made Discipleship in the Present Tense fun to read. It is delightful to read such a gifted theologian taking on everything from a high school graduation to worship bands.
Here are some of my favorite insights:
On Redemption and Everyday Life…
But what does redemption look like? For the most part, you’ll know it when you see it, because it looks like flourishing. It looks like a life well lived. It looks like the way things are supposed to be… It looks like abundance for all (p. 7).
For the most part, Spirit-empowered redemption looks like our everyday work done well, out of love, in resonance with God’s desire for his creation – so long as our on-the-ground labor is nested as part of a contribution to systems and structures of flourishing… It should not surprise us that redemption will not always look triumphant. If Jesus comes as the second Adam, who models redemptive culture-making, then in our broken world such cultural labor will look cruciform. But it will also look like hope that is hungry for joy and delight (p. 9).
On Rituals
Because we are embodied creatures of habit – and were created that way by God – we are profoundly shaped by ritual. That’s why ritual can de-form us, too (p. 36).
We need not be afraid of ritual. If we appreciate that God created us as incarnate, embodied creatures, then we will see that his grace is lovingly extended to us in ways that meet us where we are: in the tangible, embodied practice of Spirit-charged rituals (p. 40).
On Christian Schools
Christian education is not meant to be merely a “safe” education… Rather, Christian schools are called to be like Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia: not safe, but good (p. 43).
Christian education is not a merely “private” education. Christian schools are not meant to be elite enclaves for the wealthy. To the extent that Christian schools have become merely pious renditions of prep schools, they have failed to appreciate the radical, biblical calling of Christian education (p. 44).
The center of gravity of the human person isn’t located in the head, it’s located in the gut. So the most formative education is a pedagogy of desire (p. 50).
We need to realize that the competitor for Christian education is not the public schools – it is all the pedagogies of desire that are operative across our culture, in all of the secular liturgies we’re immersed in that covertly form our loves… If an education is going to be Christian, it has to be a re-training of our hearts, a counterformation to these secular liturgies (p. 52).
Christian education is a holistic vision for the formation of the whole person, equipping minds and forming hearts, educating our love by aiming our desire toward God and his kingdom. What should distinguish Christian education is just this holism precisely because a biblical picture of the person helps us appreciate both theory and practice, both cognition and affect, both knowledge and desire (pp. 53-54).
To receive a Christian education is to learn this story, not just as a bit of information stored in our heads, but as an entire imagination that seeps into our bones (p. 56).
On Christian Attempts to “Change the World”
No matter how many Jesus action figures or Hipster Study Bibles we might sell, the battle’s already been lost as soon as such phenomena exist. All we’ve done is carve out a new market sector that extends dominant cultural forces. This is a long way from “changing the world,” despite our rhetoric to the contrary. The world has changed us (p. 68).
Faithful presence, then, is not simply a kind of baptism of Nietzche’s will-to-power in Jesus’s name, bent on seeing Christianity triumph in the culture war. Indeed, faithful presence will often run counter to the strategies of religious politics as currently played. Instead, faithful presence is the church carrying out the creational mandate to make culture (Gen. 1:26-31) in a way that is faithful to God’s desires for creation (p. 70).
On the Criticism of “Hipster Christianity”
[Brett McCracken’s] analysis doesn’t even touch the students I know who, from Christian convictions, have intentionally pursued a lifestyle that rejects the bourgeois consumerism of mass, commercialized culture. They shop at Goodwill and Salvation Army because they have concerns about the injustice of the mass-market clothing industry, because they believe recycling is good stewardship of God’s creation, and frankly, because they’re relatively poor. They’re relatively poor because they’re pursuing work that is meaningful and just and creative and won’t eat them alive, and such work, although not lucrative, gives them time to spend on things that really matter: community, friendship, service, and creative collaboration… The Christian hipsters I know are actually willing to sacrifice the American sacred cow of privacy and independence, living in intentional communities as families and singles, working through all the difficulties and blessings of “life together” as Bonhoeffer describes it… They live the way they do because they are pursuing the good life characterized by well-ordered culture making that is just and conducive to flourishing – and this requires resisting the mass-produced, mass-marketed, and mass-consumed banalities of the corporate ladder, the suburban veneer of so-called success, as well as the irresponsibility of perpetual adolescence that characterizes so many twenty-somethings who imagine life as one big frat house (p. 90-91).
On Art
Instead of asking artists to show us God, we should want them to reveal the world – to expand the world, to make worlds that expand creation with their gifts of co - and subcreative power (p. 99).
Unhooking the arts from a theological instrumentalism also grants space for the arts to reveal the brokenness of creation without being supervised by a banal moralism. A painting or a poem reveals the world with a harrowing attention that will sometimes bring us face-to-face with what we’ve managed to willfully ignore up to that point… Like the book of Esther, God might never show up. Nonetheless, the Creator might best be honored when we face up to the puzzling, mysterious nuances of his creation (p. 100).
On Graduating with “Big Dreams”
Dreaming big is easy. The bigger challenge is to dream small – to draw on the gift of your education to deepen your embeddedness in the gritty realities of everyday life. 137
On the Good and Bad of the Prosperity Gospel
The rhythm of fasting and feasting calls the people of God to bear witness to both of these realities at different times and in different seasons: we rightly celebrate and enjoy God’s abundance, but we also rightly lament and resist injustice and poverty. During days or seasons of fasting – which, in a way, should be the default habit of the church’s sojourn – we say not to abundance as a witness to the fact that so many lack not only abundance but what’s needed just to survive. But during days and seasons of feasting, we enjoy a foretaste of the abundance of the coming kingdom (p. 146).
On Parenting
So baptism is a sign that our homes are open, interdependent households, not closed, nuclear units. Baptism signals that all of us – married or single, parent or child – are part of a larger household that is the church of God, and together, that household has pledged to be one big community of godparents. When you run up against the challenges of parenting, don't be scared to remind the church of the promise it made to you (p. 150).
To become a parent is to promise you’ll love prodigals. Indeed, some days parenting is exactly how God is going to teach you to love your enemies (p. 151)
On Praise Bands
My concern is that we, the church, have unwittingly encouraged you to simply import musical practices into Christian worship that – while they might be appropriate elsewhere – are detrimental to congregational worship. More pointedly… I sometimes worry that we’ve unwittingly encouraged you to import certain forms of performance that are, in effect, secular liturgies and not just neutral methods. Without us realizing it, the dominant practices of performance train us to relate to music (and musicians) in a certain way: as something for our pleasure, as entertainment, as a largely passive experience. The function and goal of music in these secular liturgies is quite different from the function and goal of music in Christian worship (p. 154)
On the Role of Doubt
It seems that those who think permission to doubt is some radically new possibility for Christians are the same people who think that a concern for justice is some secret message of Jesus heretofore hidden from Christianity, when in fact it just means that it was hidden from them in the pietistic enclaves of their early formation. In a similar way, doubt is as old as faith (p. 171).
James K.A. Smith, Discipleship in the Present Tense: Reflections on Faith and Culture (Grand Rapids: The Calvin College Press, 2013).
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