My good friend and former colleague at Queen’s Chaplaincy, Father Gary Toman, often speaks about having a grá for something. It is the Irish word for love but it takes on a guttural description for that passion for something that drives you and your life. It is that grá that Jamie Smith is talking about in his incredibly insightful book Desiring The Kingdom. The general premise is that we are not what we think but by what we love. What we have a grá for will be what shapes our lives.
So, I asked early on, is Jamie right? It dragged up an old memory of preaching one evening maybe twenty years ago about what the Bible had to say about a Northern Ireland Protestant’s attitude and relationship with their Catholic neighbours. Whatever I said that evening, it struck a chord with a few young guys who afterwards asked me if I was a Protestant. I suggested that that depended what they meant by Protestant. What did they think a Protestant was I asked? Someone loyal to the Queen they replied? They were surprised when I told them that there were Protestants all over the world who had absolutely no allegiance to the Queen of the United Kingdom. When did Protestantism start I went on? The battle of the Boyne in 1690 they confidently responded. Again, people like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and Knox were completely unknown to them.
These guys had absolutely no cognitive understanding of Protestantism but in every part of their being they were very clearly defined as Protestant in their own parochial form. They were wearing Glasgow Rangers football tops, they were in “kick the Pope” flute bands and were probably some of the guys who painted the pavements in their town red, white and blue. They were not what they had clearly thought through but what they had a chest thumping grá for; though as Northern Ireland Protestants they would have hated the utterance of an Irish word to describe it! There is a “peace” wall in Belfast between the divided communities of the Protestant Shankill and Catholic Falls roads and very few of the people on either side have come to hate their close neighbours on the other side by a well thought through in depth historical, religious or political analysis. They are divided not by what they think but what they have been shaped to love.
So, next question, was how Smith’s theories connect with the Scriptures. It happened that as I was reading the book I was reaching, in my preaching series, Mark 12 where Jesus declares the greatest commandments and speaks of love for God as the Jews would have been familiar with in the Shema from Deuteronomy 6 and then adds from Leviticus 19, an amazing chapter that spells out the love for neighbour. It is these two commandments that would define Jesus followers and he actually never mentions cognitive understanding of God but always emphasises love. Jesus is encouraging the grá that will transform his followers. In John 14 he tells the disciples that if they love him they will obey his commandments. The grá is what drives the Jesus community.
This is what Smith is onto. Being a Professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Smith has engaged with the post modern “emergers” without the tabloid sensational dismissal of a Don Carson et al and brought to bear on the very serious and authentic questions of the time a “sustainable theology”, as my good mate Doug Gay so skilfully coined it at Greenbelt a few years back. Smith is a balanced and sensible voice in what sometimes seems like schoolyard stone throwing. This particular book is aimed at the Christian education sector of North America and I think that is a mistake as I think the lessons of this book have something to say for individual discipleship and every Sunday Church worship.
Smith is convincing in his argument as to what grabs our gut and owns our grá. He uses the Shopping Mall, the religious nature of which he paints provocatively over a few poetically crafted pages, and the sport’s stadium. He argues very compellingly how even the Christian who thinks he/she has his/her brain switched on and is what he/she think cognitively can be subtly caught in allegiances that would quite simply have been described is idols in the Old Testament. The powerful gut stirring symbolism the American national anthem at sporting events leading to a belief that God is American and dying for the flag is a belief worth holding receives his ire! That we could be doctrinally well thought through but miss the hold that consumerism has on our well being is also well pointed out.
Once we are shaped, Smith goes on, we then aim our loves at what we believe to be human flourishing. This end result will again not be so much decided on by cognitive doctrinal statements but the social imaginary of what we are steeped in at mall, sports stadium and wherever else we inhabit. Christian thinking over the past decades has targeted the mind with great books and lectures and conferences. Smith is not saying that we replace these, or the book itself would be dropped from the publisher’s catalogue, but he is saying we have missed the more potent spiritual formatives; the stories, movies, songs and worship that are pedagogies of the kardia. Smith is suggesting that the liturgy of worship takes on an enormously important role in challenging the social imaginary of the mall and sports stadium in order that we recognise the Kingdom of God as what human flourishing is really about and our hearts get aimed at the right loves to bring that kingdom around.
Smith has articulated what I have been thinking for years that this generation in particular are more subjective than objective. Modernity had us lost in a phase where that might not have been so but the “word becoming flesh” was God’s best revelation of truth and that was aimed at the subjective gut not the intellectual mind. Desiring The Kingdom has opened up all kinds of leads for me in how to pastor a Church, lead worship, form the Christian core of the young, develop the spiritual maturity of the older, how to evangelise and teach. Before all that I am reassessing the habits of my own life to reconsider what feeds my social imaginary and where the idols of our time might be subtly having their way.