Introduction
A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION: ON CHRISTIAN ACTION
Following Calvin, then, Protestants may insist that ecclesial practices have nothing to do with effecting human justification, everything to do with human sanctification, and—most important—everything to do with divine agency and power.[9]
Picturing the End of Worship
As a child he couldn’t wait for church to be over. The beginning of worship was, for Andrew, merely a T-minus-sixty countdown to the end. Indeed, more than once, Walter Mitty–like, he launched into his own reverie as the pastor summoned the congregation with the call to worship. The old, tired formulas of the pastor—“The psalmist reminds us of our purpose, calling us to worship . . .”—would be replaced in Andrew’s imagination with the crackly static of rocket launch transmissions that seemed to be conducted inside tin cans:
Ccccuschk. “Apollo, we are all systems go, over?” Ccccuschk.
Tttschd. “Uh, roger that, Houston. All systems operational. We are go for launch, over.” Tttschd.
Ccccuschk. “T minus three minutes to launch. Firing main engines, over?” Ccccuschk.
“Roger that, Houston. We are all systems go, over.”
“T minus one minute to launch. Stand by for ignition.”
“T minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one . . . we have ignition. We have lift off!”
If he was lucky, Andrew would emerge from his NASA fantasy around the time of the offering. All too often he came back to earth just before the moment of confession—which meant he was still T minus forty-five till the end. Ugh.
The bulletin would then become a checklist, a way to mark the droning passage of time. Confession? Check. Assurance of pardon? Check. Reading of the law? Check. Creed? Check. Pastoral prayer and prayers of the people? Long wait to be able to check that off, as an elder seems to be praying for the entire world. Bible reading? Check. Sermon? Wait for it . . . wait for it . . . still waiting. . . . Finally: check! We’re getting close! Offering? Check! Wait—second offering for benevolence? Ugh, check (finally). Doxology (we’re getting tantalizingly close now): check! Another prayer: check! Andrew can now taste it. A hymn (seven verses!?): finally, check. Here we are, the finish line, T minus thirty seconds, everyone stands, the end of worship is in sight. Benediction: yes! Freedom!
Andrew now smirks to himself as he recognizes that caged eagerness in his own eight-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, who practically catapults over him to reach the cookies and juice downstairs. But he himself sees the end of worship very differently now. Far from seeing it as the bursting moment of release into some unfettered freedom, Andrew now realizes that the end of worship is a sending, that the blessing at the conclusion of worship is also a commissioning, and that the “end” of worship, in terms of its telos and goal, is bound up with what they’ll do next: head out the door into the world. We are not released at the conclusion of worship, Andrew thinks to himself; we are not merely “free to go,” dismissed from some appointment or event. Having been drawn into the life of the triune God through our union with Christ, we are sent. The end of Christian worship comes with a responsibility. Like all those prophetic encounters with the living God, this encounter with the Triune God sends one away with a commission and a charge: “Go and do,” in the power of the Spirit, as a witness to the risen Christ, inviting your neighbors to become citizens of the coming kingdom. What we’ve just done in worship is both a rehearsal of the entire history of the world and a rehearsal for kingdom come. The end of Christian worship brings us back to the beginning of creation, to our commissioning in the Garden and our deputizing as God’s image-bearers, those responsible for tending and tilling God’s good—but now broken—creation.
The end of worship, Andrew now realizes, is the end of worship. The culmination of Christian worship is its s/ending. In this time of already-not yet, the end and goal and telos of worship is being sent from this transformational encounter as God’s witnesses and image-bearers. Christian worship is not some religious silo for our private refueling that replenishes our “inner” life. It is not merely some duty we observe in order to keep our eternal ducks in a row; nor is it some special sequestered “experience” that fills up a “religious” compartment in our souls, unhooked from what we do in the world Monday through Friday. Worship isn’t a weekly retreat from reality into some escapist enclave; it is our induction into “the real world.”[10] Worship is the space in which we learn to take the right things for granted[11] precisely so we can bear witness to the world that is to come and, in the power of the Spirit’s transformation,[12] labor to make and remake God’s world in accord with his desires for creation. We could never hope to entertain such a commission without the empowering work of the Spirit who tangibly meets us in worship.
This is why Andrew sees Elizabeth’s eagerness for worship to end—and remembers his own youthful eagerness for the same—as an understandable naïveté about the burdens of this encounter. In contrast to Elizabeth’s sense of sheer liberation from the doldrums, Andrew now experiences the end of worship with a certain sanctified ambivalence—a sort of holy ambiguity. On the one hand, he hungrily receives the gracious announcement of blessing; on the other hand, he senses the responsibility of the commission. This is no cheap grace. This is a space of Spirit-filled transformation for the sake of being sent: to go and make disciples; to be witnesses to Jerusalem and Samaria and to the ends of the earth; to take up once again our creational mandate to be God’s image-bearers by being culture-makers. When worship ends on Sunday, it spills over into our cultural labor on Monday. And Andrew’s only hope and prayer is that, by the grace of God and the power of the Spirit, everything that has preceded this sending has, over time, empowered him to be the witness he’s sent to be.
The End of Christian Education and/as the End of Worship
The renewal of the church and the Christian university—a renewal of both Christian worship and Christian education—hinges on an understanding of human beings as “liturgical animals,” creatures who can’t not worship and who are fundamentally formed by worship practices. The reason such liturgies are so formative is precisely because it is these liturgies, whether Christian or “secular,”[13] that shape what we love. And we are what we love.[14]
The reason for articulating this model of the human person is ultimately to provide an adequate account of Christian action. This begins with grinding a new lens for cultural analysis: such a liturgical anthropology recalibrates cultural analysis and critique by recognizing the (de- and trans-)formative power of practices—communal, embodied rhythms, rituals, and routines that over time quietly and unconsciously prime and shape our desires and most fundamental longings. And it is recognition of this formative power of liturgical practices that then drives my constructive concern to encourage intentionality about Christian liturgical formation in two key institutions: the church and the Christian university—not because these are the only institutions that matter but because they are unique sites for intentional Christian formation and because they both exist for sending. Students leave a school via “commencement,” and worshipers leave worship with a blessing and charge, sent into the world for the world. In both cases, we are sent from formation for mission. The focus on the church and the university is strategic, not exclusive: both are crucial institutions in the missio Dei.
A Christian university is a hybrid institution; it is simultaneously embedded in two quite different ecosystems. On the one hand, the Christian university is a university, an institution of higher education that is part of a network of colleges and universities engaged in teaching and research. Much of the shape and life of a Christian university reflects this wider sense of what higher education should look like (and accreditation agencies reinforce this aspect of our ecological situation). On the other hand, a Christian university is a Christian institution, which situates it in the ecosystem of the church and various other institutions of Christian mission. So the Christian university is located at the intersection of (at least) these two ecosystems, and it is precisely this hybridity that generates the unique mission and task of Christian higher education.
This is why, in Desiring the Kingdom, I argued that the mission of the Christian university should be conceived not just in terms of dissemination of information but also, and more fundamentally, as an exercise in formation. The Christian university does not simply deposit ideas into mind-receptacles, thereby providing just enough education to enable credentialing for a job. No, the Christian university offers an education that is formative—a holistic education that not only provides knowledge but also shapes our fundamental orientation to the world. It is what I’ll call, in a slight tweak of Flaubert, a “sentimental education.”
The alumni of Christian universities are sent into God’s good (but broken) world equipped with new intellectual reservoirs and skills for thinking; but ideally they are also sent out from the Christian university with new habits and desires and virtues. They will have been habituated to love God and his kingdom—to love God and desire what he wants for creation—and thus engage the world. Indeed, if we are going to teach students rigorously and critically, we must also form them in what Augustine calls “the right order of love.” In other words, the end (telos) of Christian education is action: the Christian university is a place from which students are sent as ambassadors of the coming kingdom of God. They are commissioned to undertake cultural labor that is redemptive and reconciling, reflecting Christ’s work of reconciliation. It is in this way that Christian colleges are caught up in the missio Dei.[15] The alumni of Christian universities are primed and shaped to take up our task as God’s image-bearers, cultivating God’s good creation, working to renew a fallen world, bearing witness to how the world can be otherwise, bearing fresh olives to a world battered by the floodwaters of injustice.[16] We aren’t just educating spectators or observers; we are educating actors—what Andy Crouch, echoing a long Reformed tradition, describes as “culture-makers.”[17]
This end (telos) of Christian education in action is exactly the same as the end of Christian worship because both are expressions of mission. What happens at the end of historic Christian worship is a benediction—a blessing—which is also a commission: go in peace to love and serve the Lord. The blessing is also a charge, and it echoes the blessings and the commission originally given to humanity in the Garden: to be fruitful and fill the earth, to compassionately rule over creation, and to cultivate the garden of creation (Gen. 1:27–31; 2:15).
The ending of Christian worship, then, is a sending. Having encountered God in Word and sacrament, we are transformed and renewed and empowered by the Spirit to take up once again the original vocation of humanity: to be God’s image-bearers by cultivating all the possibilities latent in God’s creation, now renewing and restoring a broken, fallen world. Drawn into union with Christ, the “end” of Christian worship is bound up with our sending for Christian action, rightly ordered cultural labor, the creational task of making and remaking God’s world.[18] We are (re)made to be makers.[19] This is why I believe the mission and task of the Christian university are bound up with the practices of Christian worship. While the Christian university and the church are different institutions, they have the same end, the same goal: to draw the people of God into union with Christ in order to thereby shape, form, equip, and prime actors—doers of the Word.[20]
So a robust account of Christian education and formation requires an adequate philosophy of action—something little thought about in contemporary discussions that are fixated on “the Christian mind.” We have spent a generation thinking about thinking. But despite our “folk” accounts and (deluded) self-perception, we don’t think our way through to action; much of our action is not the outcome of rational deliberation and conscious choice.[21] Much of our action is not “pushed” by ideas or conclusions; rather, it grows out of our character and is in a sense “pulled” out of us by our attraction to a telos. If we—and if the alumni of Christian universities—are going to be “prime citizens of the kingdom of God”[22] who act in the world as agents of renewal and redemptive culture-making, then it is not enough to equip our intellects to merely think rightly about the world. We also need to recruit our imaginations. Our hearts need to be captured by a vision of a telos that “pulls” out of us action that is directed toward the kingdom of God. That is why in Desiring the Kingdom I argued that providing people with a Christian “worldview” is inadequate for the mission of both the church and the Christian university.[23]
The argument is not that worldview approaches and intellectual reflection are wrong but only that they are inadequate, and this inadequacy stems from the stunted anthropology they assume. Such a picture of education is insufficiently radical because it doesn’t get to the root of our identity. By fixating on the intellectual aspect, such a model of the person—and its corresponding picture of education—undervalues and underestimates the importance of the affective; by focusing on what we think and believe, such a model misses the centrality and primacy of what we love; by focusing on education as the dissemination of information, we have missed the ways in which Christian education is really a project of formation. In other words, at the heart of the argument is an antireductionism and the affirmation of a more holistic understanding of human persons and Christian education (and Christian formation more broadly).
Thus I make three intertwined proposals in Desiring the Kingdom that are at the heart of the Cultural Liturgies project and are all indebted to Saint Augustine, that patron saint of the Reformers: First, I sketch an alternative anthropology that emphasizes the primacy of love and the priority of the imagination in shaping our identity and governing our orientation to the world. Second, I emphasize that education is also about the formation (“aiming”) of our love and desire, and that such formation happens through embodied, communal rituals we might call “liturgies”—including a range of “secular” liturgies that are pedgagogies of desire. Third, given the formative priority of liturgical practices, I argue that the task of Christian education needs to be resituated within the ecclesial practices of Christian worship and liturgical formation. In other words, we need to reconnect worship and worldview, church and college.
To be very clear, this does not constitute a rejection of worldview per se.[24] Think of my argument as “two cheers” for this paradigm. However, I think there remain legitimate concerns with even the best rendition of worldview approaches insofar as these approaches tend to still conceive the task of Christian education as the dissemination of a perspective, a way to see the world. My criticism here is not that worldview is wrong but only that it is inadequate. It is an approach that imagines us (and our students) as primarily spectators of the world rather than as actors in the world. But if one of the goals of Christian education is to form what Neal Plantinga describes as “prime citizens of the kingdom,” then we need to appreciate that our actions as citizens are based, not primarily on cognitive deliberation or even on our “perspectives,” but for the most part on acquired habits, unconscious desires, and pre-intellectual dispositions. And so our education has to be attuned to how those desires and dispositions are formed. We might have a highly developed, articulate “worldview” and yet act in ways that are remarkably inconsistent with such a “perspective.”
Picturing the Limitations of Worldview: Reading Wendell Berry in Costco
Let me try to make sense of this with an example. Over the past several years, through the steady evangelism of my wife, Deanna, I have become more and more convinced about the injustice and unhealthiness of our dominant systems of food production and consumption. For Deanna, this is expressed in a commitment to “good” eating—eating that is both healthy and just, enjoying foods that are the fruit of local gardens and farms, and eating foods that contribute to our flourishing. This finds expression both in her devotion to her gardens and her recruitment of the entire family in a kitchen that is always producing culinary delights (for which I’m incredibly grateful!). And through the influence of authors like Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and especially Wendell Berry, I have become intellectually convinced that they offer the best perspective for thinking about these issues. Indeed, in many ways I’ve tried to own their perspective as my own.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the grocery store: I discovered a significant gap between my thought and my action. This hit home to me one day while I was immersed in reading Wendell Berry’s delightful anthology, Bringing It to the Table. As I paused to reflect on a key point, and thus briefly took my nose out of the book, I was suddenly struck by an ugly irony: here I was reading Wendell Berry in the food court at Costco. There are so many things wrong with that sentence that I don’t even know where to begin. Indeed, “the food court at Costco” might be a kind of shorthand for Berry’s picture of the sixth circle of hell.
So how might one account for this gap between my thought and my action—between my passionate intellectual assent to these ideas and my status quo action? Why do I believe Michael Pollan but still pull into the drive-through at McDonald’s? This is exactly the intuition at the heart of this book. While Pollan and Berry may have successfully recruited my intellect, they have not been successful in converting my habits. Nor could they be, for so much of my action in and orientation to the world is governed by dispositions that are shaped by practice.
Implicit in the anthropology of Desiring the Kingdom is a philosophy of action—a tacit assumption about what drives or causes human behavior and action—and such a philosophy of action is germane to the goal and task of both Christian education and Christian formation more broadly. Such an account of the formative power of both “secular liturgies” and intentional Christian worship has a certain urgency precisely because it assumes that so much of our orientation to—and action in—the world is governed by preconscious habits and patterns of behavior, and those habits are formed by environments of practice. This stands in contrast to what Charles Taylor calls “intellectualist”[25] or “decisionist” models, which tend to overestimate “thinking” as the cause of action. This does not entail a crass determinism; nor does it exclude a role for reflective, deliberative, conscious “choice.” However, such a model—shored up by recent research in cognitive science—does relativize the role of ratiocinative deliberation in action. More positively, it highlights the significant impact of environment (and attendant practices) in shaping our “adaptive unconscious,” which then steers/drives action at a preconscious level. As such, we should be increasingly attentive to the formative role of environment and practice in shaping our desires while also recognizing our habitual orientation to the world that undergirds so much of our action.
The response to such a situation is not simply pressing people to think more about what they’re doing. If I am intellectually convinced by Michael Pollan but still have the default disposition to pull into the drive-through at McDonald’s, the solution is not to be constantly thinking—that approach is unsustainable and thus, ultimately, inadequate. It’s not a matter of thinking trumping dispositions; it’s a matter of acquiring new habits.
This can be illustrated with a related example from practices associated with food and eating.[26] In his book Mindless Eating, Cornell nutritionist Brian Wansink accounts for the American obesity epidemic in terms of the habits and practices that unconsciously shape our tastes and eating patterns.[27] We are trained to orient ourselves to food and food systems by practices and environments that shape our orientation at a preconscious level—and then we regularly act on the basis of those malformed desires and deep-seated habits. We eat “mindlessly” in the sense that we eat “without thinking about it.” So one might guess that the solution to this problem is to acquire knowledge—to encourage critical thinking so that reason trumps desire and so that critical reflection trumps unreflective habits. But that’s not Wansink’s antidote. In fact, he explicitly argues that the solution is not just a matter of mindful eating. “Thinking about it” will always be inadequate, like reading Wendell Berry in Costco, simply because so much of our action is not the outcome of a conscious, deliberative thought process. Drawing on extensive psychological research, Wansink demonstrates that we simply are not the sorts of animals who can be deliberatively “on” all the time. So the proper response to unhealthy mindless eating is not mindful eating but rather healthy mindless eating, changing environments and practices in order to form different (unconscious) habits. This doesn’t mean there is no role for critical reflection. Indeed, Wansink offers an argument to press people to change their practices, and that approach is only going to work if they are, to some degree, convinced by his argument. But the upshot or consequence is not that they will then think about every meal but rather that they will be propelled to change their environment and practices, thereby absorbing different habits and undoing old ones. As a result, even their “mindless” eating will be healthy; they will eat well (and justly) “without thinking about it”—though if you ask them, they can articulate why. Their new eating habits will have become “second nature.”
A worldview approach would assume that the proper response to disordered mindless eating is mindful eating, as if simply getting the right perspective on eating is sufficient. Similarly, an intellectualist model of education would assume that the proper response to the unconscious formation of “secular liturgies” would be critical reflection: thinking about it more, thinking about what we’re doing. Of course such reflection and thinking are important and helpful; indeed, as Wansink would note, reflection is precisely what might lead us to immerse ourselves in different environments and commit ourselves to different practices, with the goal of ultimately acquiring different habits and dispositions. Similarly, the articulation of a Christian worldview is helpful, just as thinking about practices can be a reflective opportunity to take stock of our routines and rituals. Indeed, the entire Cultural Liturgies project is itself an invitation to reflect on our practices—to gain a Christian “perspective” on our immersion in cultural practices. The argument of Desiring the Kingdom is not that we need less than worldview, but more: Christian education will only be fully an education to the extent that it is also a formation of our habits. And such formation happens not only, or even primarily, by equipping the intellect but through the repetitive formation of embodied, communal practices. And the “core” of those formative practices is centered in the practices of Christian worship.
Situating Intellect: Educating for Action
The liturgical anthropology at the heart of my project entails a critique of worldview because it relativizes “thinking” and re-situates “intellect.” But the critique of worldview-talk is not a critique of worldview per se, nor is it a rejection of thinking per se. The point, rather, is that we have a tendency, in Christian higher education and even in the church, to overestimate the importance of thinking.[28] Now, many of those toiling in the not-so-ivory halls of Christian colleges and universities would be quite surprised to hear that thinking is being overvalued in North American Christianity. Indeed, quite the opposite seems to be true: evangelical piety tends to intensify a general anti-intellectual malaise that besets our culture. The response to such a situation would be to encourage more thinking, not less—to emphasize the importance of the mind rather than fall back into the soppy mushiness of “the heart” and its affections. In short, with its critique of rationalist or intellectualist models of the human person, it would seem that Desiring the Kingdom plays right into the hands of anti-intellectualism.[29] Indeed, some seem to worry that my model would simply have us spending all day in chapel or turning the Christian college into a glorified Sunday school. But such worries stem from a misunderstanding of my emphasis on worship with respect to worldview.[30] In particular, such a worry seems to read my claim that worship is a necessary and important condition for integral Christian education as if I were claiming that it is a sufficient condition for Christian education (and this includes Christian education in the wider sense of discipleship, even though my focus tends to be on Christian higher education). But I’m not suggesting we raze the physics labs and expand the chapel. I’m not suggesting we demolish the literature classroom and just stay in church all week. Nor do I anywhere suggest that a Christian university is not about the business of ideas! Of course it is. The issue is whether it is just trafficking in ideas. It’s the latter that I’m rejecting.
Let’s remember the heart of the argument here: because we are liturgical animals who are defined by what we love, and because our loves and desires are primed and shaped by formative practices, then a holistic model of Christian education—whether in the church, school, or university—needs to involve a pedagogy of desire. Such a pedagogy is not merely a conduit for disseminating information; a pedagogy of desire is a strategy for formation. Christian education, in this model, is not merely about dispensing Christian ideas or providing Christian “perspectives.” It is more invasive than that, precisely because it is not just an education for observers or spectators—it should be an education for actors, for doers. A Christian education cannot be content to produce thinkers; it should aim to produce agents. Such formation not only offers content for minds; it also impinges on the nexus of habits and desires that functions as the activity center of the human person. The driving center of human action and behavior is a nexus of loves, longings, and habits that hums along under the hood, so to speak, without needing to be thought about.[31] These loves, longings, and habits orient and propel our being-in-the-world. The focus on formation is holistic because its end is Christian action: what’s at stake here is not just how we think about the world but how we inhabit the world—how we act. We are what we love precisely because we do what we love.
It is this ultimate goal of shaping actors that creates misunderstandings. Reflecting the “thinking-thing”-ism of modernity, many models of Christian higher education (and many accounts of discipleship) are fixated on epistemic matters. Seeing Christianity as primarily a set of doctrines, beliefs, and ideas, they implicitly and functionally reduce Christian education to the acquisition of knowledge. They also tend to assume a stunted, misguided philosophy of action that mistakenly sees action as the outcome of rational deliberation. Hence most Christian accounts of education and pedagogy end up being covert epistemologies focused on what and how we know. But as I already sketched in Desiring the Kingdom, this is both a dated account of human action and a rationalistic reduction of Christian faith. Because my primary concern is not merely an epistemology but also a philosophy of action, critics react to the decentralization and relativization of knowing in my account as if this entailed a rejection of knowledge. But the goal is not to denigrate the intellect; rather, it is to situate theoretical reflection within the wider purview of our fundamental pretheoretical orientation to the world.[32] On the basis of this, those who are fixated on an epistemic construal of Christian faith too hastily conclude that relativizing the intellect is somehow a rejection of the intellect, but that clearly doesn’t follow. Rather, the project is to consider the significance of our non- and pre-intellectual orientation to the world; to appreciate all of the ways in which this shapes and governs our being in the world; and to therefore expand what we consider as falling within the purview of education. To situate (and relativize) the intellect is not anti-intellectual; it is to emphasize that even rationality needs to be faithful, needs to be disciplined and trained and habituated.[33]
Education operates on this pretheoretical register whether we recognize it or not. Pedagogies of desire form our habits, affections, and imaginations, thus shaping and priming our very orientation to the world. So if a Christian education is going to be holistic and formative, it needs to attend to much more than the intellect—which is why I emphasize that there is a unique “understanding” that is “carried” in Christian practices, particularly the practices of Christian worship. It is in such practices that our love is trained, disciplined, shaped, and formed. And it is, to some extent, only in such practices that this can happen. Attention to intellect is insufficient precisely because there is an irreducible, unique understanding that is only carried in practices and only absorbed through our immersion (over time) in those practices—and it is this nonconscious understanding that drives our action. My focus is on this “nonconscious understanding,” not because I think “conscious” knowledge is unimportant but because I think we’ve spent most of our time focused on the latter and neglected attention to the former.
The focus of this second volume is to home in on these themes, further exploring the shape of a liturgical anthropology in order to articulate a Christian philosophy of action that (1) recognizes the nonconscious, pretheoretical “drivers” of our action and behavior, centered in what I’ll call the imagination; (2) accounts for the bodily formation of our habituated orientation to the world; and thus (3) appreciates the centrality of story as rooted in this “bodily basis of meaning” and as a kind of pretheoretical compass that guides and generates human action. In short, the way to the heart is through the body, and the way into the body is through story.[34] And this is how worship works: Christian formation is a conversion of the imagination effected by the Spirit, who recruits our most fundamental desires by a kind of narrative enchantment—by inviting us narrative animals into a story that seeps into our bones and becomes the orienting background of our being-in-the-world. Our incarnating God continues to meet us where we are: as imaginative creatures of habit. So we are invited into the life of the Triune God by being invited to inhabit concrete rituals and practices that are “habitations of the Spirit.”[35] As the Son is incarnate—the Word made flesh meeting we who are flesh—so the Spirit meets us in tangible, embodied practices that are conduits of the Spirit’s transformative power. The Spirit marshals our embodiment in order to rehabituate us to the kingdom of God. The material practices of Christian worship are not exercises in spiritual self-management but rather the creational means that our gracious God deigns to inhabit for our sanctification. So while liturgical formation sanctifies our perception for Christian action, Christian worship is primarily a site of divine action. As Matthew Boulton observes, commenting on John Calvin’s vision of Christian formation, “the church’s practices are fundamentally divine works of descent and accommodation, not human works of ascent and transcendence.”[36] And yet our incarnating God descends to inhabit these practices precisely in order to lift us up into union with Christ.[37] This is how our hearts are lifted up to the Lord and recalibrated to be aimed at the kingdom of God: through material practices that shape the imaginative core of our being-in-the-world.
But we also need to recognize that this is how secular liturgies work: they, too, recruit our unconscious drives and desires through embodied stories that fuel our imagination and thus ultimately govern our action. And while Christian worship practices are distinguished by the presence of the Spirit and a very different story, not even secular liturgies are merely “natural”; they can be fueled by the “principalities and powers.”[38] Precisely because of the need for counter-formation, it is crucial to see that intentional Christian formation—and hence intentional Christian worship—rests on both a kinaesthetics and a poetics because of the sorts of creatures we are.
It is this intertwining of embodiment, imagination, and story that shapes what follows. Drawing on work in French philosophy (Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu), social psychology, and cognitive science of literature, my goal is to articulate a liturgical anthropology that accounts for the importance of the kinaesthetic and the poetic—that recognizes and explains the intertwinement of the body and story as the nexus of formation that ultimately generates action. To do so, we need to supplement Desiring the Kingdom’s account of desire with an account of the imagination.
Imagining the Kingdom
“How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world to kill people he knows nothing about?”[39] He is not merely convinced. He does not enlist for an idea, though he certainly signs up for an ideal—but the ideal to which he is devoted (the nation, freedom, a god) is not something he knows; it is something he loves. It is not a matter of having acquired some new bit of knowledge that tips the scale and makes it seem “rational” to become a soldier. No, the provincial farm boy is primed to be a soldier—fighting unknown enemies in distant lands for interests that are not his—because he has been conscripted into a mythology: he identifies himself within a story that has seeped into his bones at levels not even he is aware of. His being “persuaded” is not so much a conclusion he has reached as a sensibility he has imbibed.[40] He is the product of a sentimental education.[41]
William Cavanaugh raises this jarring question to get at something that is the focus of this book: the provincial farm boy is “persuaded,” not in the regions of the intellect, but rather on the register of the imagination.[42] The dynamics of conscription—of our identities, our desires, our loves, our longings—operate more on the imagination than the intellect. By “imagination” here I don’t mean something merely inventive or fantastic—the stuff of make-believe creativity—nor do I have in mind some romantic sense of Creator-like “invention”[43] or merely an act of “pretense,”[44] whereby we imagine something that is a fiction, something “pretend,” as when we tell children, “Use your imagination!” I mean it more as a quasi-faculty whereby we construe the world on a precognitive level, on a register that is fundamentally aesthetic precisely because it is so closely tied to the body.[45] As embodied creatures, our orientation to the world begins from, and lives off of, the fuel of our bodies, including the “images” of the world that are absorbed by our bodies.[46] On this picture, the imagination is a kind of midlevel organizing or synthesizing faculty that constitutes the world for us in a primarily affective mode—what Gaston Bachelard calls, in his “phenomenology of the imagination,” “the poetic register.”[47] There is a kind of precognitive perception that is to be distinguished from perception proper—that is, from perception as being cognizant of and attentive to an “object” in front of me. So if we are in a classroom and I direct your attention to the chair you are sitting in as an example of an aesthetic object, you’re now perceiving the chair as an object. But up to that point, you had nonetheless construed this thing as a chair because you’d been sitting on it this whole time. As soon as you entered the room there was an automatic construal of the space that simply “happened” without your thinking about it, and at a level that was preconscious. Likewise, there is a difference between being in your bedroom and being conscious of your bedroom when you are having trouble falling asleep. In the latter instance, the room has sort of kicked into your conscious awareness in ways that it usually doesn’t. Most of the time, it is “there,” but in the background; your orientation to it is functioning at a different level. I’m suggesting that “the imagination” is a way to name this everyday capacity for such unconscious “understanding” of the world.[48]
In a similar way, John Kaag has tried to unhook the narrow association of imagination with the arts by defining the imagination more broadly as “the dynamic process by which organisms (and more particularly humans) negotiate their ever-changing circumstances by way of the creative powers of mind” and as “the creative and embodied processes of mind that are common to human beings on the whole and that are necessary to ‘get on with our business’ in our social and natural surroundings.”[49]
So we’ll heuristically employ “imagination” to name a kind of faculty by which we navigate and make sense of our world, but in ways and on a register that flies below the radar of conscious reflection, and specifically in ways that are fundamentally aesthetic in nature. As Phil Kenneson has described it, the imagination is “productive” rather than merely inventive: it is “that complex human social capacity to receive and construct an intelligible ‘whole.’”[50] For the provincial farm boy, dying in a far-flung trench for the nation or freedom or the flag “makes sense,” not because this is a valid conclusion to reach on the basis of the evidence, but rather because he has absorbed a fundamental orientation to the world that has a more visceral “logic” to it: he “knows” this is what he should do in the same way one “knows” that tears indicate sadness, or in the way one “knows” how to “make sense” of a poem or a painting.
We could say that the provincial farm boy’s imagination has been conscripted by a secular liturgy.[51] Becoming a soldier—like being a Christian—takes practice. The formation of the imagination is a liturgical effect. The focus of this volume is to consider more carefully and deeply the dynamics of how that happens—to appreciate the dynamics of “persuasion” as an operation that works on the body by means of story, thereby affecting the whole person—including thinking and reflection. Any adequate account of liturgical formation—whether Christian or secular—will need to attend to the centrality of the imagination. That, I will show, requires attending to complex features of our embodiment. And it is precisely this embodiment, in turn, that makes us narrative animals.[52] So accounting for the dynamics of liturgical formation—the dynamics implicit in Cavanaugh’s account of the “theopolitical imagination”—requires recognizing and understanding this intertwinement of embodiment and story, of kinaesthetics and poetics.
We might formulate this as something of an axiom: an adequate liturgics must assume a kinaesthetics and a poetics, precisely because liturgies are compressed, performed narratives that recruit the imagination through the body. So if we are going to account for how the provincial farm boy is “persuaded,” or how the martyr is “convinced,” or how so many of us are quietly conscripted into the armies of consumerism and nationalism and narcissism—or how Christians are “made” by the banal, even boring, practices of being the body of Christ—then we need an account of how worship works. Such an account will need to appreciate the force and dynamics of the aesthetic and the narratival in shaping our imagination, which will require drilling down to the bodily basis of our narrativity. So a liturgical anthropology requires a Christian[53] phenomenology of our embodiment (a kinaesthetics), which will then be the platform for a Christian phenomenology of our aesthetic nature (a poetics).
But why is this important? How might it be helpful? What is the upshot of such an account of “how worship works”? Is this just an academic exercise, an attempt to explain what is a mystery? Or worse: Does such an account end up naturalizing the work of the Spirit and effectively marginalizing God? Does such a project really have implications for discipleship and the nitty-gritty realities of Christian formation? What do kinaesthetics and poetics have to do with the on-the-ground challenges of Christian education and spiritual formation?
There are very important practical implications of such philosophical reflection. Carefully thinking about how worship works has two concrete effects that constructively help the body of Christ. First, by displacing our naive “intellectualism” (whereby we mistakenly assume that we think our way into action) and recognizing how secular liturgies work, we will be able to appreciate the dynamics of de-formation and the subterranean mechanics of temptation—and thereby be better equipped to resist assimilation. Second, appreciating the bodily basis of worship and its entwinement with the aesthetic or narratival aspect of worship should foster a new intentionality about the shape of Christian worship. We should reappreciate the implicit (narrative) wisdom in historic Christian worship practices and approach the renewal of worship with an appreciation for the bodily basis of meaning and the fundamental aesthetics of human understanding. A significant implication of my argument is the importance of the arts for the witness of the church, the announcement of the gospel, and the formation of the body of Christ. While I will employ the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu as resources for articulating this phenomenology of embodiment, we shouldn’t be surprised to find it even more vividly “pictured” for us in literature, given the intertwinement of embodiment and story. So before turning to an exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s account of “erotic comprehension,” let me provocatively prime the pump of our imaginations with a reflection on these themes in the work of novelist David Foster Wallace.[54]
Picturing Love and Worship in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace, author of the sprawling Infinite Jest, is usually lumped with “postmodern” novelists such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. The world of Wallace’s fiction is remorselessly disenchanted: a drug-addled world of addiction and suicide backgrounded by the banality of American entertainment and consumer culture. And yet the author had this to say to a graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already—it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.[55]
The “world” according to Wallace’s novels is no sacramental universe; Infinite Jest is a long way from the enchanted, haunted worlds of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Indeed, the “immanentism” of Wallace’s world is almost suffocating. And yet he suggests that not even our radical immanence escapes worship. Rather, we are immersed in rituals that shape us and determine, unconsciously, what we value. In Infinite Jest, this is constantly illustrated by the sort of formation that is effected at Enfield Tennis Academy, through intense bodily regimens that shape adolescents into veritable tennis machines. Elite tennis players are made, not born, and they’re created through ritual that automates a “feel for the game” that is nothing short of a sense of the world. Key to this is “repetition,” as one of the upperclassmen, Troeltsch (!), tells the younger players:
First last always. It’s hearing the same motivational stuff over and over till sheer repetitive weight makes it sink down into the gut. It’s making the same pivots and lunges and strokes over and over and over again. . . . It’s repetitive movements and motions for their own sake, over and over until the accretive weight of the reps sinks the movements themselves down under your like consciousness into the more nether regions, through repetition they sink and soak into the hardware, the C.P.S. The machine-language. The autonomical part that makes you breathe and sweat. . . . Until you can do it without thinking about it, play.[56]
In fact Troeltsch compares this ritual, bodily automation to “age-of-manhood rituals in various cultures” (IJ 118). And Schtitt, one of the drill sergeant instructors, indicates that there’s more than just tennis involved: “athletics was basically just training for citizenship” (IJ 82). This will be an important observation: tennis is not just about tennis.
The “secret” of this bodily formation is unveiled in a soliloquy given by an inebriated James Incandenza Sr. to his ten-year-old son, Jim Jr.:
Son, you’re ten, and this is hard news for somebody ten, even if you’re almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak. Son, you’re a body, son. That quick little scientific-prodigy’s mind she’s so proud of and won’t quit twittering about: son, it’s just neural spasms, those thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head is still just body, Jim. Commit this to memory. Head is body. (IJ 167)
After recounting his own failed attempts to inhabit his body well, his inability to bring it under the discipline of a tennis regimen, he recounts a final scene of failure on the court and can’t refrain from invoking the religious:
A rude whip-lashing shove square in the back and my promising body with all its webs of nerves pulsing and firing was in full airborne flight and came down on my knees . . . right down on my knees with all my weight and inertia on that scabrous hot sandpaper surface forced into what was an exact parody of an imitation of contemplative prayer, sliding forward. . . . My racquet had gone pinwheeling off Jim and my racquetless arms out before me sliding Jim in the attitude of a mortified monk in total prayer. . . . It was a religious moment. I learned what it means to be a body, Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking. (IJ 168–69)
One might be tempted to think that this is the antithesis of the religious—a thoroughly disenchanted materialism without any hint of a “soul.” And yet this picture of bodily discipline is, as James hints, almost monastic.[57] The liturgical formation of lived religion is not, generally, the sort of intellectualist gnosticism we associate with Enlightenment Protestantism (and its progeny, evangelical Protestantism): it exhibits none of the allergy to embodiment and materiality, nor does it reduce religion to the cognitive realm of beliefs and propositions. Indeed, the implicit wisdom of historic religious liturgies resonates with James Sr.’s “religious” epiphany that we are our bodies (even if we are also more than bodies).
The other site of ritual formation and transformation in the novel is the rehab center, Ennet House, home to various “Anonymous” programs: AA, NA, CA, and so on. Granted, this is also the place where an explicit spirituality emerges in the world of the novel.[58] As the narrator notes from experience: “In none of these Anonymous fellowships anywhere is it possible to avoid confronting the God stuff, eventually” (IJ 998n69). But what’s of interest here is not just that “God” shows up, but how. The “religious impulse”[59] that Wallace is naming here is the fact that “we’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something.” In the world of the novel, that can either take the form of giving ourselves up to various addictions and diversions (drugs and various entertainments), or it can take the form of giving ourselves over to various disciplines (tennis, AA).[60]
It is in the disciplines of AA that God emerges in the story—which signals a kind of implicit liturgical anthropology at work in AA’s practices and indirectly at work in Infinite Jest insofar as the “religious” appears in the novel in conjunction with embodied, incarnate practices. For instance, the narrator notes several times that “AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you” (IJ 201).[61] The quasi spirituality of AA, then, is not an intellectualist project; it’s not so much a matter of knowledge (what one believes) as it is a matter of practice (what one does). In fact, it is precisely the non-intellectualist shape of the regimen that is a scandal to those addicts who think salvation is a matter of the right information. This scandal is exemplified by Geoffrey Day, an intellectual poser (reminiscent of Daniel Harding in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) who is contemptuous about the rituals of AA. “So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by clichés,” he whines. “To turn my will and life over to the care of clichés. Easy does it. First things first,” etc. (IJ 270). What’s most maddening for him is that his supposedly superior intellect is not prized in this environment, because the intellect isn’t the primary site of (trans)formation. Day wants this to be something he has to figure out, something he just needs to comprehend; he wants to be liberated from the addiction by knowledge. Just tell me what I need to know, he basically says. Let’s drop the monotony of meetings and the daily regimen; just give me the information, the knowledge I need. “As if, I mean, what’s supposedly going to be communicated at these future meetings I’m exhorted to trudge to that cannot simply be communicated now, at this meeting, instead of the glazed recitation of exhortations to attend these vague future revelatory meetings?” (IJ 1001). Day thinks the meetings are a means of dispensing the requisite information, a site of some propositional revelation; he misses the fact that what’s redemptive is the going, not what he gets.
But when he goes, his intellectualism is further scandalized by the litany of clichés, and he protests that he just can’t believe it, even if he wants to. However, this concern about the inability to believe still has a lingering intellectualism about it. Thus Don Gately, an Ennet House mentor, warns Day that the AA regimen eludes conceptual articulation:
“The slogan I’ve heard that might work here is the slogan, Analysis-Paralysis,” [Gately responds].
“Oh lovely. Oh very nice. By all means don’t think about the validity of what they’re claiming your life hinges on. Oh do not ask what is it. Do not ask not whether it’s not insane. Simply open wide for the spoon.”
“For me, the slogan means there’s no set way to argue intellectual-type stuff about the Program. Surrender To Win, Give It Away to Keep It. God As You Understand Him. You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing. Trust me because I been there, man. You can analyze it til you’re breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best you can.” (IJ 1002)
The narrator even sympathizes with Day on this point, but has been through the ringer just enough to know otherwise:
Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of clichés—Day’s right about how it seems. Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering by the way things seem to him then he’s a dead man for sure. Gately’s already watched dozens come through here and leave early and go back Out There and then go to jail or die. If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the front office at night to scream that he can’t take it anymore and clutch at Gately’s pantcuff and blubber and beg for help at any cost, Gately’ll get to tell Day the thing is that the clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say” (IJ 273, emphasis original).[62]
Analysis does not effect a transformation in the person because the intellect is not the “driver” of human desire and action. Wallace’s philosophical anthropology is much more affective than that. As noted in his Kenyon College address, it’s not so much what we think as what we worship. And in Infinite Jest, worship is linked to love. In an early, surreal exchange between Steeply, a government agent, and Marathe, a member of the Wheelchair Assassins of southern Quebec, the two are wrangling about whether love—particularly love for a woman—was the source of recent warfare. In the course of the conversation, Steeply refers to the “fanatically patriotic Wheelchair Assassins.” After a pause, Marathe responds to this remark:
“Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, ‘fanatic,’ do they teach you it comes from the Latin for ‘temple’? It is meaning, literally, ‘worshipper at the temple.’”
“Oh Jesus now here we go again,” Steeply said.
“As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Are we not all of us fanatics? . . . Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.” (IJ 106–7)
On Marathe’s accounting, it is not a question of whether we worship, but what; this is precisely because worship is bound up with love. The two terms are basically convertible. “You are what you love,” he continues. And so this raises the question of formation, of the pedagogy of desire: “Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times? . . . For this choice determines all else. No? All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is your temple?” (IJ 107).
Wallace’s Infinite Jest affectively portrays several intuitions that resonate with my proposal: an anthropology that displaces “intellectualism,” an attention to the formative power of embodied rituals, and the centrality of worship—particularly as linked to love. “We are what we love” amounts to “we are what we worship”—a thesis that has a long Augustinian pedigree.[63] And that love/worship shapes our so-called free choices; our “temple” determines all else. It is that intuition that I’m after when I claim that we are liturgical animals: in some fundamental way, we construct our world and act within it on the basis of what we worship.