10.22.09
Smith “Desiring the Kingdom”
If you didn’t download and read the introduction, this short excerpt will give you a clear sense of where Jamie Smith is coming from. The issues around culture and formation have been spelled out by a variety of authors from a number of perspectives, but I think Smith is tracking at the center. The short version of his thought can be found in Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism, and echoed in Cavanaugh’s look at Augustine in Being Consumed. Anyway — Smith. “Culture forms attention,” wrote Simone Weil, but more precisely, “culture forms desire.” Smith describes the marketing of everything with sex, then writes,
“A common churchy response to this cultural situation runs along basically Platonic lines: to quell the raging passion of sexuality that courses its way though culture, our bodies and passions need to be disciplined by our “higher” parts — we need to get the brain to trump other organs and thus bring the passions into submission to the intellect. And the way to do this is to get ideas to trump passions. In other words, the church responds to the overwhelming cultural activation and formation of desire by trying to fill our head with ideas and beliefs.
“I suggest that, on one level, Victoria’s Secret is right just where the church has been wrong. More specifically, I think we should first recognize and admit that the marketing industry — which promotes an erotically charged transcendence through media that connects to our heart and imagination — is operating with a better, more creational, more incarnational, more holistic anthropology than much of the (evangelical) church. In other words, I think we must admit that the marketing industry is able to capture, form, and direct our desires precisely because it has rightly discerned that we are embodied, desiring creatures whose being-in-the-world is governed by the imagination. Marketers have figured out the way to our heart because they “get it”: they rightly understand that, at root, we are erotic creatures — creatures who are oriented primarily by love and passion and desire. In sum, I think Victoria is in on Augustine’s secret. But meanwhile, the church has been duped by modernity and has bought into a kind of Cartesian model of the human person, wrongly assuming that the heady realm of ideas and beliefs is the core of our being. These are certainly part of being human, but I think they come second to embodied desire. And because of this, the church has been trying to counter the consumer formation of the heart by focusing on the head and missing the target: it’s as if the church is pouring water on our head to put out a fire in our heart
“What if we approached this differently? What if we didn’t see passion and desire as such as the problem, but rather sought to redirect it? What if we honored what the marketing industry has got right — that we are creatures primarily of love and desire– and then responded in kind with counter-measures that focus on our passions, not primarily on our thoughts or beliefs? What if the church began with an affirmation of our passional nature and then sought to redirect it?
“The result would be what Charles Williams called a “romantic theology.”.. (76-77)
mick said,
October 26, 2009 at 7:47 am
I like this idea and see a lot of truth in it. I wonder if the church itself must repent of our own “Victorias’s Secret” desires and recover its own heart for Christ and his kingdom before we would be more than marketing a product we are only trying to sell to others but are disconnected from in our own life.
The last line reminded me of a quote of Chesterton that went something like “Romance is the most powerful force in the universe, it is even deeper than reality”.
len said,
October 26, 2009 at 10:25 am
Mick, thanks, great quote. Coincidentally.. or not.. I have run across this theme twice more this past week. It happened that two weeks ago I started reading a Charles Williams novel called “Shadows of Ecstasy”.. it has sat on my shelf twenty years. It also happened that I received a copy of Desiring the Kingdom in the mail… It feels like the LORD has put his finger on this for me right now.. so I’m pulling some thoughts together and will blog more on this..
NextReformation » we are what we love.. romantic theology said,
October 27, 2009 at 12:11 pm
[...] These were some thoughts this morning in an attempt to pull together some threads from the week before. Last week I picked up a novel that has sat on my shelf nearly thirty years – Charles Williams “Shadows of Ecstasy.” A day or two later a copy of Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, arrived. As I browsed through the volume I came across Smith’s argument that the erotic is precisely the lever we must reconsider in spiritual formation, so carefully employed by Hollywood and Madison Avenue. With our incipient dualism we have neglected this area and left the door wide open for more secular aims. Smith notes the romantic theology of Charles Williams. Then on Sunday evening we listened to Steve Bell in concert, telling the stories of his own growing passion for Christ and his kingdom, rooted in people like Francis and in the great liturgical and devotional traditions. [...]
The Congress – Renov8 2009 said,
November 22, 2009 at 7:05 pm
[...] Glenn noted his pleasure with the work Charles Taylor is doing and the significance of his concept of the social imaginary. This is something deeper than worldview, and incorporates an inner dimension of vision that also involves our affections. Glenn closed his plenary session the next day be noting the tendency of evangelicals to live in our heads – a diagnosis and problem also strongly noted by James Smith in Desiring the Kingdom. [...]
NextReformation » IVP Formatio and the Englewood Review said,
January 7, 2010 at 3:40 pm
[...] I was pleased to see Wendell Berry, Enough, and Desiring the Kingdom. I was surprised to see Eve and Empire of Illusion. On the former I shouldn’t comment much, I haven’t read it – I just haven’t heard much good about it. On the latter, I read an interview and then also listened to a couple of interviews, then read the Globe and Mail commentary arguing that his case is overstated. The article is here. [...]