Pictures, practices... and knowing

Smith begins Desiring The Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, And Cultural Formation by asking, "What if education . . . is not primarily about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires?"1. Beckoning words to one helping others grow in their faith lived out in the mess and joy of the everyday.

The book speaks of there being an order to knowing/being/acting. (It's a little hard to know which is the best umbrella-word.) First comes the twinned role of practices and pictures. Practices or rituals are of course those things we habitually do. Pictures are all the - non-intellectual, affective - ways in which The Good Life is presented us. Smith argues that practices and pictures always, inevitably bear a telos - an imagined future 'kingdom' that draws them forward and, if we are not careful, all of us with them. For an astute example of a modern day 'picture', allow me to quote at some length from his analysis of shopping malls:

If all the icons of the ideal subtly impress upon us what's wrong and where we fail, then the market's liturgies are really an invitation to rectify the problem. Though its stories and images point out to us our blotches and blemishes, they are not pessimistic; to the contrary, they hold out a sort of redemption in the goods and services that the market provides. The mall holds out consumption as redemption in two senses: in one sense, the shopping itself is construed as a kind of therapy, a healing activity, a way of dealing with the sadness and frustrations of our broken world . . . . In another sense, the goal of shopping is the acquisition of goods and the enjoyment of services that try to address the problem, that is, what's wrong with us -- our pear-shaped figure, our pimply face, our drab and outdated wardrobe, our rusting old car, and so forth . . . . 

On the one hand, this practice invests things with redemptive promise, on the other hand, they can never measure up to that and so must be discarded for new things that hold out the same (unsustainable) promise.2

While the advertising-leaden mall captures and charms our imagination, our routine practices create a normalcy to what it is to live in the world. Another lengthy, golden illustration:

The understanding implicit in practice is akin to knowing how to get around your neighbourhood or town. This is a kind of know-how that is embedded in your adaptive unconscious. Often if we've grown up in an area, we've never looked at a map of the neighbourhood. Rather, we have an understanding of our environment and surrounding that has been built up from our absorption in it: we've been biking and walking these streets for years. We could get home from the ball diamond without even thinking about it. If we're longtime residents and have never lived anywhere else, and a stranger stops us on the sidewalk and asks us how to get to Baldwin Street, we might actually be stumped because we've never really even paid attention to street signs.3

And while a sort of knowledge is indeed gained from exposure to and participation in such pictures and practices, Smith is eager to emphasise that it is of a very different type to intellectual knowledge and can never be wholly translated in those terms:

While aspects of the social imaginary can be articulated and expressed -- and even helpfully refined and reflected upon -- in cognitive, propositional terms, this can never function as a substitute for participating in the practices that themselves 'carry' an understanding that eludes articulation in cognitive categories.4

While I heartily appreciate much of Smith's analysis to this point, I do feel there is some inconsistency in his ordering. He speaks as if practices and images land ready-made, whereas I suspect the 'cold intellect' plays an early part. But this doesn't matter too much. Afterall, most of us aren't involved in the creation of society-wide rituals and art - for consumers these things do indeed seem to reach us fully-formed. I do, however, think his imprecision becomes more significant in his analysis of the Christian subculture and community, as this is an area over which we may well have some influence, especially if we find ourselves in some sort of leadership role.

As Smith pulls his analysis of secular culture over to the Christian experience, he argues that the religious rituals or practices we participate in come first and create a type of 'knowing' of our faith (I guess along with the pictures that are cast for us, though, oddly, he doesn't focus on this), before we ever attempt or encounter any sort of intellectual appraisal.

Before we articulate a worldview, we worship. Before we put into words the lineaments of an ontology or an epistemology, we pray for God's healing and illumination. Before we theorize the nature of God, we sing his praises. Before we express moral principles, we receive forgiveness. Before we codify the doctrine of Christ's two natures, we receive the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Before we think, we pray.5

It's not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly 'express' these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship, and articulated beliefs bubble up from there. 'Doctrines' are the cognitive, theoretical articulation of what we 'understand' when we pray.6

I would go in hard here, but for a helpful interview Smith did with the good folk of The Gospel Coalition where he was challenged on this point and replied "[O]f course, it was the disciples 'belief' in the resurrection that gave rise to worship. But what sort of a 'belief' was that? It wasn't yet a dogma in the sense of a theological article of faith. It was a confrontation with the Risen Lord -- it was an 'affective' belief." So he does allow room for knowledge to inform practice (remember also his description of secular practices as carrying a meaningful telos), but it is always an affective knowledge (eg the encounter with Christ), never an intellectual (eg the doctrine of Christ's two natures). Smith develops this idea a little further when talking about worship, saying that the people of God "were worshiping long before they got all their doctrines in order . . . . when the Scriptures are heard and read in the context of worship, they function differently. Rather than being approached as a 'storehouse of facts' (Charles Hodge), the Scriptures are read and encountered as a site of divine action".7 So the sort of early knowledge he has in mind is knowledge that has to do with the commencement and cultivation of a relationship, not a knowledge that has its interest in the aquisition or ordering of facts.

It is helpful to note that part of what informs Smith's analysis is a desire to validate the experience of children and of adults with intellectual disabilities -- "because we are more fundamentally creatures of love and desire than knowledge and beliefs, our discipleship -- our formation in Christ -- is more fundamentally a matter of precognitive education of the heart."8 

He also wishes to commend a more realistic, workable way forward. In accounting for a much-lived Christian experience, he observes -- "when I fail to act in ways that are consistent with Jesus' call to holiness, is it because I don't know what to do? Really? Isn't it often the case that, in fact, I have the knowledge but lack the desire? Or that some other desire has trumped what I know?"9 As such, rather than looking to an increase in (intellectual) knowledge to address such gaps in holiness, he advocates "developing a Christian know-how that intuitively 'understands' the world in the light of the fullness of the gospel."10 

I appreciate what Smith is doing, I really do. But it leaves me feeling a little squirmy. I think that may not be his fault, but rather a result of seeing how some friends of mine run with a similar sort of anti-intellectualism. What of course ends up happening is that any sort of biblical study - or even perhaps reading - is gently belittled while experience and worship are so praised as to seem the superior path. I don't like it because I figure that if God put these words in a Bible for us and if he used human literary forms and logic, then he intended for us to read intelligently and learn. And I figure that if relationship with God is our ultimate goal, or worship for who he is, then (just as in any human relationship) we have to get to know him - dare I say it, we have to learn things about him - for that relationship to flourish and praise to flow. So I'm unsettled by the breaking of thinking into affective vs cognitive beliefs. And not only that - it also seems a little naive. I'm not sure it is actually possible to force a clean break between the 'two thinkings'.

I wonder if what Smith's actually reaching for has rather to do with a more basic cognitive knowledge (which can account for the real faith of children and adults with intellectual disability) plus a manner of receiving and interacting with knowledge that shows you know it has to do with a personal God, rather than some collection of facts.

So while I love what he has taught us about the part that practice and picture play, I would love to keep a whole lot more thought kicking around in the bilgy bathwater. And I would of course like to see myself and my brothers and sisters grow -- and absolutely in part by recognising the imagined kingdom implicit in those secular practices and pictures surrounding us: "We should be asking: What vision of human flourishing is implicit in this or that practice? . . . . What sort of person will I become after being immersed in this or that cultural liturgy?" 11. And, what's more:

seeing these cultural practices for what they are -- formative liturgies bent on shaping and aiming our desire -- can effect a limited deactivation of them. Since their affective power thrives on bypassing our critical discernment, there is a sense in which, by rightly discerning them for what they are, we can, at least to some extent, minimize their effect.12

May we rid ourselves of silly, stunted visions and replace them with one of our very own, a Kingdom that is good and coming. And may our daily actions, our Sunday rituals, the sights and sounds that gladden our hearts, and all we learn of our great God be the catalyst for our formation into the image of that Kingdom's King.


1 JKA Smith, Desiring The Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, And Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 17-18.
2 Ibid, 99, 100.
3 Ibid, 67.
4 Ibid, 70.
5 Ibid, 33-34.
6 Ibid, 70.
7 Ibid, 135.
8 Ibid, 136.
9 http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevinwax/2010/01/12/spiritual-formation-through-desire-an-interview-with-james-k-a-smith/
10 Smith, Desiring, 68.
11 Ibid, 89.
12 Ibid, 208-09.