Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually 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 J.C. 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. And so on. David Foster Wallace, This is Water.
When James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom first came out, I had just finished my M.Div at Gordon-Conwell, applied for a Th.M. studies at Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry. It was about then I began to pursue Tim Keller’s theological vision. The reason I was so much fascinated by Keller was that he was the first person to embody as concretely as possible the answers to the question of human transformation in light of the huge theological insights into the human person drawn out from Jonathan Edwards and C.S. Lewis. According to Keller, how we change is not by means of appealing to our emotions, nor to our rational faculty, nor to our will power, but only by means of appealing to our hearts, which the Hebrew Bible calls Leib, and the New Testament calls kardia, for that’s where each of our central motivational structure is located. For this reason, our desires, which are our motivations to sustain our lives, are what persuade our thinking, what make us feel good about what we desire, and what lead us to invest our time and effort into possessing the objects of our desires. This is why David Foster Wallace’s speech which I excerpted in the beginning of this review makes a great sense.
It is in this regard that James Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom becomes a monumental work. Personally speaking, I found this book deeply meaningful because it shed light on the philosophical side of what I was studying about Tim Keller’s understanding of the human person. Thus, I believe this book will be meaningful in terms of deepening the readers’ understanding of who we are and how we change, whether they have religions or not.
The outline of the book is rather simple, which is divided by two parts. From chapters 1 to 3 is the first part, and the second constitutes the fourth through the sixth chapters. In chapter one, Smith takes us in the journey of inquiring into the nature of the human persons. There are two dominating perspectives on the nature of the human persons. One is spearheaded by Descartes and the Enlightenment, which says that we are thinking animals. However, Smith harshly criticizes this view because it does not take into consideration the bodily nature of our existence, leading us to misunderstand our inherently biased existence. The second perspective is that of the Christian faith, which says that we are believing animals. However, because of its individualist overtones, especially in the matrix of Western culture, Smith also dismisses this view as lacking in communal aspects of our formation.
Finally, Smith lays out his vision for the human persons, which is deeply influenced by Augustine’s, who says that we are loving animals. Drawing upon some of the most contemporary philosophical insights such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s, Smith contends that we are affective animals whose existence is driven more by what we desire to be good rather than what we judge or believe to be good. Jonathan Edwards once employed this notion of human affect (or affection) to make his case for how we change before God. This is why the book’s title is Desiring the Kingdom. While the Kingdom here initially refers to God’s Kingdom, it might also mean whatever we deem to be our ultimate good, that is, what we desire most from our lives, whether it be money, reputation, power, and what not. That is why David Foster Wallace’s excerpt in the beginning makes perfect sense.
Part two is more straightforward than part one. In chapter 4, Smith approaches his points about the liturgical character of secular institutions and the world at large in terms of what Christianity has been seeing as the sacramentality of the world. This functions as a sort of buffer as Smith transitions to chapter 5, where he goes deeper into each of the concrete practices of Christian worship, such as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, offering, the Creed, etc. In chapter 6, building on the foregoing discussions, Smith envisions the model of Christian college education not biased toward providing Christian perspectives, but more toward forming a particular kind of people through Christian worship.
Overall, the book is clear in its arguments, so adroitly avoids what could end up being a speculative, theoretical philosophical discourse. When I first grabbed this book back in 2009, I was benefited from this book so much because I was simultaneously studying Tim Keller’s theology of the heart. Even so, there are two possible loopholes this book might fall into. So in the remainder of this review I will briefly mention what each of them is.
First, Smith mistakenly treats Christian doctrines as belonging to our cognitive faculty only. However, that is not necessarily the case. Rather, Christian doctrines could be construed as what Charles Taylor calls social imaginary, which Smith aptly employs all throughout the book to get across his points. Taylor defines the social imaginary as follows.
“There are important differences between social imaginaries and social theories. There are a number of reasons as to why I employ “imaginary” here. First, my focus is on how ordinary folks imagine their social environments, which are not often rendered into theoretical terms. They are composed of images, stories, and myths.” –Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 43-
According to Taylor, social imaginary is a practical foundation of which people’s stories are expressed and performed through images, myths, and narratives. My dissertation project hinges on particularly this point, which is that Christian doctrines have been functioning as a kind of social imaginary in the lives of Christians historically, whose advocates include includes, but are not limited to, scholars such as Kevin Vanhoozer. In fact, the main culprit of seeing Christian doctrines as mainly concerned with the cognitive has been the Enlightenment, before which Christians have been centering their lives around the imaginaries that doctrines provided for them, let alone they made input into the construction of doctrines. What I see as flawed in Smith’s treatment of doctrines is this, especially his assumption that doctrines are all about the cognitive.
Apart from these two, I believe that Smith’s book is a worthwhile read for any reader, regardless of whether she is religious or not. I highly benefited from the book myself, and I am convinced that anyone picking up to read this book will experience the same benefits.