Focusing on the practices of the church is all the rage these days. James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation an excellent and thought provoking book is only the latest volley in a long list of theologians attempting to reorient the center of Christianity away from its doctrinal content.
Standing against the tide is Nicholas Healy, who offers some interesting cautions in his article, “Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?” Healy’s article is older—first published in 2003—but he does a nice job of highlighting some of the troubles that arise through viewing Christianity as constituted by its practices.
Healy’s leading critique is that the language of practices obscures the central role intentions play in both individual and communal actions. His central thrust is that the emphasis on practices fails to account for why they fail to shape us in the ways proponents claim they should. In other words, the Mainline Protestantism problem.
But his more trenchant critique is the theological one: most accounts of practices (and specifically Stanley Hauerwas) fail to locate the practices of the church beneath the doctrine of God. He writes:
In order that church practices and the theory that supports them may be properly modified for Christian theological use, they need to be brought within a broader theological context. Put another way, we need to recover the traditional notion that, while theology is indeed a thoroughly practical form of inquiry, it must proceed on the basis of contemplation. We need, in short, as we need from Hütter, a more robust account of the doctrine of God – the triune God – as the starting-point for ecclesiological reflection.
And:
Without such an account, the new ecclesiology may seem too reliant upon an overly abstract and thus flawed philosophical and sociological apparatus. As a consequence, it becomes rather too easy to interpret the emphasis upon the church and its practices as if it reflects the view that Christianity is all about being Christian, and the gospel is broadly identifiable with the church’s practices and doctrines. A Christian is one who is disciplined by the church’s practices so as to be transformed into the visible communal embodiment of the Gospel. The objective component of witness, that to which one witnesses, is thereby confused with the subjective component, the form of witness. It may then seem to those less than charitably disposed to the new ecclesiology that it has made a turn to a communal subject constituted by its particular set of abstract practices. Like the earlier turn to the experience of the individual subject, which it is intended to counter, this turn also threatens to collapse the object of faith into ourselves. Our proclamation becomes rather too much about us and what we over-optimistically think we do. The message becomes rather too easily identified with an ideal account of the medium.
Healy wants to account for embodied practices within the working of the Holy Spirit, but not tie the Holy Spirit’s working to those practices, lest we be unable to account for Mainline Protestantism.
While I think Professor Smith escapes the first critique by focusing on liturgies and not practices, and on what’s done in the practices and not what’s meant by them, I think the second has some force for his project. Or it at least I think it provides a more promising solution to the Mainline Protestantism problem than the one he hints at in a footnote. From page 208:
At this point, I suggest that my account of secular liturgies might be able to provide a framework for explaining why the practices of Christian worship don’t seem to transform those who participate in them. For instance, I can think of a congregation gathering week in and week out for historic, intentional Christian worship that includes all the elements discussed here; and yet, from the perspective of shalom, some of its parishoners are unapologetic and public participants in some of the most egregious systemic injustices. Does that falsify my claims here? I don’t think so, at least not necessarily. Rather, we will need a more nuanced account of how some liturgies trump others; in this case, we could suggest that though these parishoners participate in Christian worship, their participation in other secular liturgies effectively trumps the practices of Christian worship. Such a line of investigation might also require that we attend to empirical realities, drawing on a theologically informed psychology, sociology, and ethnography.”
I honestly don’t know what to make of the suggestion that some liturgies could possibly trump a liturgy where we encounter God in Himself, given to us. But more significantly, Smith’s solution strikes me as a horizontal one—we need to identify and eradicate those liturgies that are stifling the working of the Triune God—when, in fact, it seems that our problems start at the top. If our practices are not changing us, we might do best to look at the way we are performing them and our understanding of God that undergirds them.
March 8th, 2010 | 10:41 am
Will Willimon, in the latest issue of Christian Century, has an article in which he backs away from his own previously enthusiastic endorsement of “practices” as central to the Christian life (particularly in the book that he co-authored with Hauerwas, _Resident Aliens_). In fact, Willimon’s article goes further and offers a critique of centralizing “practices” not dissimilar to Smith’s.
That said, Huetter’s book _Suffering Divine Things_ is still an excellent and important read.
March 8th, 2010 | 12:32 pm
Rob took the words out of my mouth. Here’s the link to the Willimon article: http://christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=8270
March 8th, 2010 | 1:38 pm
Thanks for pointing that out, guys. I hadn’t seen it, but wish I had incorporated it.
It’s interesting to read Smith’s book in light of these reservations, as I really think his move toward liturgies represents a significant advancement over ‘practices’ per se, in so far as it introduces an explicitly theological component (worship!) that the language of practices doesn’t have.
There’s a danger, though, in doing theological anthropology that we conflate the theos and the anthropos too readily. I am still trying to sort through Smith’s book, but that might get close to some of my worries about it.
Best,
Matt
March 8th, 2010 | 11:04 pm
Thanks for your continued reflection on these matters, Matthew. As I continue to work out these issues (for volumes 2 and 3), this sort of feedback (and push-back) is very helpful.
I have long appreciated Healy’s concerns about these matters. You can hear something similar articulated by Christian Scharen (e.g., in his book, Public Worship and Public Work. It’s an important point, and you’re right that the footnote you cite from DTK is meant to flag the problem. I think there I also indicate this will be taken up in more detail in volume 3.
But I think we need quite a bit more philosophical (and psychological) sophistication to really address these matters. For instance, I think Healy’s invocation of “intention” vs. practice (or more specifically, “contemplation”) is problematic on a couple of levels: (1) it fails to appreciate the phenomenological point (pace Merleau-Ponty) that practices are already loaded with intentions, and that our bodies “intend” the world in ways that operate distinctly from “intellectual” intentions; and (2) it is working with a theory of action that is “intellectualist” and simply doesn’t stand up to contemporary research in social psychology and cognitive science. I completely agree with Healy and Scharen that our grandiose ecclesiological claims need to be “disciplined” by on-the-ground realities. But then the issue is how we attend to those ‘empirical’ questions.
Second, I’ve never quite figured out what the alternative is. Usually it turns out to be a rather mystical appeal to “the Spirit,” which seems to functionally invoke the Spirit as a kind of magic. I think the Spirit operates the same as the Son: incarnationally, grabbing hold of us through embodied practices. That’s not to say the Spirit can’t surprise us, but for the most part I think the Spirit is best encountered in those practices which are sacramental “hot spots.” It is precisely the presence of the Spirit’s power that distinguishes Christian worship from “secular liturgies;” but on the other hand, Christian liturgy is not so utterly foreign to other “practices.” So you’re right: we can’t merely “naturalize” Christian formation on a horizontal level; but neither can we retreat into some kind of quietism.
Finally, I find it a little ironic that you think this is somehow quintessentially a problem for “Mainline Protestantism.” I think evangelical “liturgies” have shown themselves equally ineffectual, also producing a people largely assimilated to wider American culture rather that being the “peculiar people” we’re called to be. This is why I hope my model might help us make some headway on the problem Healy and Scharen diagnose: if we begin to appreciate that all sorts of cultural practices function liturigcally (i.e., forming our ultimate loves), then we can begin to see why an hour and a half on Sunday is so easily “trumped” by other secular liturgies. This is why the task of formation requires a panoply of Christian practices across a community, throughout the week, across a lifetime.
FWIW.
March 9th, 2010 | 9:54 pm
Professor Smith,
It’s worth a lot. Seriously. Thank you for the gentle rejoinder, as always.
I am not surprised by your worries with Healy, and I appreciate you voicing them. Two thoughts in response:
(1) From what I understand of M-P, doesn’t his understanding of ‘intentions’ take on more a character of responses, or subconscious movements toward the world? In that sense, it seems Healy could easily develop his theory of action to include them, as there seems to be a lot of overlap between them and the ‘habitus’ of Aquinas. (BTW, on an unrelated note, if you haven’t seen Kevin Aho’s Heidegger’s Neglect of the Body, you might be interested in it. It’s a sensitive defense of H. and he does a great job of putting him in dialog with M-P.)
(2) I’m not quite sure what you mean by “intellectualist,” but I would argue that some of the latest brain research actually lends support to a more intellectualist position. There’s a growing body of evidence that suggests that the brain can be changed simply by thinking, and that some minor motor practices (like playing scales on a piano) can be performed just as well by people who spend their time imagining and not ‘practicing.’ Healy may need a more robust notion of the ‘intellect’ that’s doing the work, but again it seems like there’s room in Thomas for that.
But I REALLY like your second central point, and agree with you quite a bit. What was unclear even in my own thoughts above was whether the problem is a doctrinal one, or an experiential one…or some combination thereof. While I agree that mystical appeals to the Spirit are (probably) unsatisfactory, I still feel personally inclined toward them at this stage in my life and thinking.
But I guess I want to say that there is a phenomenological difference in the way the embodied practices handed down to us through tradition are done when the Spirit is present. I grant that the Spirit can be working through the tacit dimensions of the practices, but it seems like if it stays tacit for too long, we end up neglecting his action within the Church (the mystery behind the sacraments, as it were). What we need, to modify Webster’s phrase, are *spiritual*practices (where not only are the actual practices different than the worlds, but the way they are performed is different).
These three we need, practices, doctrine, and the Spirit. Keeping them in proper dogmatic order seems to be the trick, and I certainly haven’t mastered it. But it seems any “solution” needs to involve all three.
As for your final point, it’s only surprising if we agree on the cause of the evangelical malaise. : )
But you’re right to tweak me for my comment. I should have picked on evangelicals, if only because I am (happily) one. But then, I try to be one of the few evangelicals who reminds us what we do well, as there are plenty of folks who are happy to remind us of where we’ve gone wrong. I hope that doesn’t lead to blindness, but it might.
Thanks again, and apologies (per usual) for my ramblings. I am clearly still thinking through the issues, and tend to work them out as I write, a vice brought on by many years of blogging.
Best regards,
matt
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