Awaiting the King — Book Review
The central question behind James K. A. Smith’s three-part series of the cultural liturgies project is this:
What if humans aren’t primarily thinking beings, but instead what if we are above all lovers?
What if we are far less rational than we like to believe and instead are driven by our desires, passions, and loves? This doesn’t mean we don’t think, but that often and without fail our heads lose out to our hearts. If this is true, and his two books Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom do a good job persuading me, anyway, that it is, then as Christians, how does this change things? Particularly, how does this affect how we make disciples, proclaim the Gospel, and follow Jesus in the world? The short answer is we need to give more attention to the training of our hearts, the training of what we love, by taking worship seriously.
By taking worship seriously, Smith is talking about both the deep, historical, and classic worship of the church focused on what God has done for us in Christ, as well as the subtle yet powerful ways our culture pulls us into forms of worship that are aimed at other things. Through various rites and practices our cultural impresses upon us what is of ultimate worth. We catch a vision of what matters most in ways that often completely bypass our reasoning and capture our hearts. For example, we aren’t intellectually persuaded into consumerism, but going to the mall becomes a ritual that teaches us, without ever making it explicit, that purchasing products is what we are made for, that the good life is about buying whatever we want, and that ultimate reality is economic reality. In his previous books in the series, Smith analyzes how these rituals and rites of our culture, these liturgies in other words, form us or more accurately deform us. Immersing ourselves in the worship of the church centered on Jesus helps to form us into the true humanity that God had always intended. True worship helps shape us into a virtuous people who love our neighbors, forgives those who sin against us, are more patient, kind, humble, and hopeful. This isn’t to say that we only worship because of what it does for us, but it reminds us that chasing what we love has consequences. If our hearts are captured by Christ and we are participating in a life of worship rooted in him, over time we can’t help but to resemble him, and the same is true for other liturgies, other patterns of worship.
Awaiting the King is about the worship at stake in politics, not so much politics of right versus left, but politics of the Kingdom versus an earthly politics that denies the Kingdom and attempts to make politics itself ultimate. Politics is about our common life together as human beings, which has an underlying goal, an underlying vision of what is good and best. We are either animated by a vision of a common life together with Jesus as our King, or else we are forced to settle for a lesser vision of what a good human society looks like, which becomes its own form of idolatry. Instead of longing for Jesus, we long to create the perfect society which corrupts us, like all false worship does, in the process. The irony is that we’ll never get a good society by trying to get a good society. We’ll only, in Smith’s language, ever so slightly bend our society to the vision of the Kingdom as we worship the King we are waiting for. Smith says, "The kingdom is something we await, not create" (p 220).
It would be a mistake to see the word wait and think that it means we are passive, that we don’t do anything while we wait, to the contrary we wait actively for our King to come. There are things to do in the meantime. This is where the book takes an interesting approach. Smith, following others, shows how the Gospel has impacted western democracy leaving "craters" that last until today. One role then that the church has while awaiting the King, according to Smith, is to remind modern liberal societies of their religious and theological inheritance (p 93). We have the responsibility to be prophets telling the secular state that it still owes ultimate allegiance to God and that it didn’t invent itself. Another task we have while waiting is to train people for mission. Smith says, "we should note that because worship ends with sending, Christian worship is less the rites of an enclave and more like the training ground for a sent people whose mission will take them into the contested space of markets and elections, corporations and council halls" (p 96). Our worship forms us into the salt, light, and leaven that carries Kingdom influence. We do this work in hope because on the one hand, we recognize the impact the Gospel has already had on modern society and on the other, we know that our work in the Lord is not in vain (1 Cor 15:58). Jesus is coming again and while we don’t create the Kingdom, everything done for him will last.
Awaiting the King is full of significant insights and challenges. We need to better understand what is at stake as we participate in the common life of contemporary culture, as well as recognize that how we participate is of monumental importance. The book is a fitting conclusion to the project and a serious challenge Christians need to consider.
