What comes to mind when you hear the word imagination? I think of adjectives like arbitrary, unrealistic, fabricated, and a-ethical (not necessarily unethical or anti-ethical). So when I first picked up James K.A. Smith’s Imagining the Kingdom, I automatically thought of “what has imagination to do with theology?” To my surprise, Smith engages with two prominent humanities scholars (namely, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu) in order to make a case for imagination as fundamental for our perception of the world. That is, unlike the stereotypical images we come across as we hear the word imagination, Smith counterintuitively proves that imagination is not only necessary for Christian formation, but also preceding what we desire. As a scholar of Christian formation and identity, I would like to share what Smith is unfolding in the following three topics: Imagination as necessary for our value system; our salvation as that of our bodies; discipleship is a process of our allowing the story of the Gospel to reinterpret and reshape our life stories.
Imagination is necessary for forming our value system
Above all, one needs to have a clear idea of what Smith means by imagination here. Throughout the book, Smith goes deep into what he means by imagination. “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” (19). More briefly, Smith quotes Paul Ricoeur in defining imagination, saying “the mediating role of imagination is forever at work in lived reality” (128). To illustrate what these scholars are saying more concretely, I will give you an example.
It comes from Smith’s own experience of spending time at the Food court in Costco. Smith was saying that he had been, thanks to his wife, interested in organic farming and healthy eating, which in his mind is largely represented by Wendell Berry, a well-known farmer and social critic. However, it suddenly dawned upon him that he was mentally in agreement with what Berry was arguing, but he was reading Berry’s arguments in the Costco’s Food Court! This means that while Smith’s conscious understanding was controlled by what he was reading, but his unconscious understanding was enjoying the fast-food, unhealthy eating deeply driven by the market and capitalistic greed. What is going on here? There was a chasm, disparity, inconsistency, or whatever you want to call it, between what he believes consciously and unconsciously. This ought to tell much for our school education. Not only that, this ought to tell much for our church education. While Christian discipleship is a work of forming the unconscious, so that people’s habits are formed and changed, current Church education largely wails upon the cognitive and the conscious. This is why Smith’s title, imagining the kingdom, comes rather urgent to many Christian educators.
Our salvation is always that of our bodies
As I alluded to it, Smith draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu, all in order to convey his point of the importance of imagination in our bodily knowing. More concretely speaking, Smith is convinced that our imagination plays the role of intertwining our bodies and our stories. That is to say, our bodies become the media through which our stories and what we learn from them become part of our value system. For “It is because I imagine the world (and my place in it) in certain ways that I am oriented by the fundamental loves and longings. It is because I “picture” the world as this kind of place, this kind of “environment,” and thus construe my obligations and responsibilities accordingly” (125). In this context Smith delves into Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomonology of Perception is a classic account of how our bodies know and learn something. Likewise, Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice is a philosophical investigation into our bodies become social bodies through what he calls habitus. According to Smith, for Merleau-Ponty the concept of praktognosia is at the center, while for Bourdieu it is that of habitus. Praktognosia is “a practical know-how in which our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object. On the other hand, habitus is “our non-conscious passional orientation to the world. While one could go deeper into how one is different from or similar to the other, I leave it to the readers. More importantly, I encourage the readers to go into Smith’s discussions of these concepts in the context of Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu’s overall oeuvre.
This has taught me that our bodies are the channels through which our value systems are embodied, and our salvation has to be the salvation of our bodies, for our bodies are the true container of who we are, not our souls or spirits. Our stories and all we have learned through them are deeply inscribed in our bodies, and the work of the gospel is to renarrate our value system through renarrating our live stories.
Discipleship is a process of our allowing the Gospel story to renarrate our life stories
If we go back to thinking about the movie the King’s Speech, it is through renarrating George VI’s life, which can tell us the importance of life stories in Christian education and formation. Our value systems become transparent through the ways we relate to our significant others and to ourselves. We have to let the story of the Gospel reinterpret our life stories, which takes enormous amount of self-reflection as well as cultural criticism. While Smith’s work is in many ways greatly helpful, I believe that Smith should have emphasized how the story of the Gospel could be renarrated in each of our lives. Thank you!