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James K.A. Smith
Imagining the Kingdom: How WorshipWorks (Grand Rapids, mi: Baker Academic,
2013). xx + 198 pp. $22.99 paperback.
This is the second volume of Smith’s trilogy on “cultural liturgies.” Volume 1 Desiring the Kingdom(Baker, 2009) deals with liturgical practices that train the desires. Volume 2 seeks to do the same for the imagination, which is defined as “a faculty that constitutes the world for us in a primarily affective mode” (18).
Smith begins by laying the philosophical foundation for understanding how worship works using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of knowing: we know the world not primarily by thinking about it but by bodily engagement. This means that, we know more by using the faculty of the imagination than by using the intellect, more by acting out a drama or indwelling a story than by thinking about concepts (32). This embodied engagement is further clarified using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Practice is an irreducible, precogni- tive form of knowing, not just a consequence of prior thought. Practice forms habits by which we make sense of our world. These acquired habits are formed unconsciously in cooperation with others in community. Humans are liturgi- cal animals; what Smith provides in the first part of the book is an account of liturgical anthropology. But Smith wants to do more: he offers us a “Christian philosophy of action” (33).
Much of what Smith said about the nature of the liturgy is not new: his ref- erence to practice as “nonconscious understanding” (13) is widely recognized in liturgical theology. As Schememann puts it poignantly, the liturgy is the “epiphany of the church’s faith” which carries a primary theology which is not exhausted by attempts to explain it rationally. The Christian liturgy is the pri- mary way of forming worshippers into “a community of character” (Hauerwas). WhatisnewinSmithisthatbyexplaininghowliturgyworksphilosophically,he has sharpened our understanding of the nature of Christian ecclesial formation through its practice, and given us compelling reasons to take the traditional liturgy more seriously. For example, he explainswhyrituals are critically impor- tant in worship and why the gospel story is so central. The whole liturgy of word and sacrament is precisely to engage worshippers in the “between” world of intellect (Word) and instinct (sacrament), without which we fall either into intellectualism or ritualism.
In the second part of the book, Smith uses the tools provided by Merleau- Ponty and Bourdieu to help us have a better handle on how worship works by offering us what could be called a phenomenology of liturgy. He warns of the subtle but highly attractive and powerful ways in which secular liturgies are at work all around us. But they are ultimately deforming. The seemingly innocent
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smartphone, for example, may be training us ritualistically to “a heretofore- unimagined level of intimacy with machines” (142). It unconsciously inducts users into the secular story that says “I am in charge,” and in the end they become “more like Milton’s Satan” (143). That’s a serious indictment!
The answer to the challenge posed by the deforming liturgies of this world is a more compelling story—the Christian Story which the Christian liturgy enacts and into which worshippers are habituated through regular practice. At this point, Smith alerts us to some problems in Christian worship. Some forms of worship, especially the evangelical kind, are too intellectualist. The “contents” are all-important and the “forms” regarded as dispensable contain- ers (168). But, Smith argues, worship is like a poem whose form and content are inseparable. Kneeling is not an extraneous form detachable from its meaning but an inextricable part of what it means to confess our sins.
In the course of explicating the Christian liturgy, Smith advances a number of critical “need to” proposals: “We need to learn the true Story ‘by heart,’ at a gut level, and let it seep into our background in order to then shape our perception of the world” (163). Against the “cult of novelty” which reflects the consumerist mentality, we need the repetition of the liturgy to habituate us into the biblical imaginary. At the same time, liturgical formation is not a mindless process; we need to know why we do what we do (this is why we need “a theory of practice as practice”) if we are to intentionally choose one liturgy and not another. Thus there is an important place for liturgical catechesis (the ancient mystagogy) as preparation to becoming better worshippers (186–187). These are well and good. But I could not help raising a follow-up question: but how? How could the Christian liturgy form a community of character when for most churchgoers worship is a one-hour, once-a-week affair compared with the far more persuasive and subtle secular liturgies that Christians are unconsciously performing almost everywhere and every moment? How could the Christian liturgy be transforming when the modern Roman missal is only a skeleton of its predecessor, the Tridentine mass (there is good reason why Pope Benedict xvi reintroduced the Latin mass); when mainline Protestant liturgies are constantly changing to accommodate the spirit of the age; and when evangelical worship is still trapped in its intellectualist mold? Perhaps the Christian university could do a little better, but I’m skeptical, precisely for the same reason that “smart” technology has eroded much of the church’s liturgical competence.
But there is a dimension of the Christian liturgy which a phenomenological approach does not quite capture: the unique role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian liturgy. Orthodox theologians in particular have argued that the Spirit does not only work in the liturgy but also comes from “beyond history” to
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transfigure ordinary things into “charismatic-pentecostal events” (Zizioulas, Being as Communion). The Christian liturgy for the most part is predictable and functions, as practice, very much like any other liturgies, secular or otherwise, but as Christian liturgy it is also open to the Spirit’s surprises. Herein lies our hope!
Simon Chan
Earnest Lau Professor of Systematic Theology Trinity Theological College, Singapore
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