Since I’ve had some extra time recently, I picked back up James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, the first volume of "Cultural Liturgies" and finally finished it. It has been a challenge to read, but also an enjoyment. It awakened me to new thoughts and indeed new practices, but it also confirmed certain thoughts on baptism, the Eucharist, and the importance of form and embodiment in worship. He closes out the volume with a chapter on Christian education, particularly that of a Christian university. He critiques the dominant mode and goal of Christian university education (i.e., how to live in the world and the marketplace from a “Christian perspective”) with these words:
What’s the alternative? If Christian education is not merely about acquiring a Christian perspective or a Christian worldview, what is its goal? Its goal, I’m suggesting, is the same as the goal of Christian worship: to form radical disciples of Jesus and citizens of the baptismal city [[fyi, I love that phrase]] who, communally, take up the creational task of being God’s image bearers, unfolding the cultural possibilities latent in creation--but doing so as empowered by the Spirit, following the example of Jesus’s cruciform cultural labor. If the goal of Christian worship and discipleship is the formation of a peculiar people, then the goal of Christian education should be the same. If something like Christian universities are to exist, they should be configured as extensions of the mission of the church—as chapels that extend and amplify what’s happening at the heart of the cathedral, at the altar of Christian worship. In short, the task of Christian education needs to be reconnected to the thick practices of the church.
The creational, trinitarian, and cruciform nature of the cultural shaping that takes place in the baptismal city, I believe are spot on. I found particularly compelling his nuance of cruciformity as "cultural labor." A labor that is formed by the "thick practices of the church."
Looking forward to starting sometime this summer Smith's second volume in "Cultural Liturgies" Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works.
BD
Looking forward to starting sometime this summer Smith's second volume in "Cultural Liturgies" Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works.
BD