Category Archives: James K. A. Smith

How Theology of Correlation is Destroying Evangelicalism: A Case Example Found in the SBC and Johnny Mac

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Disruptive Grace presents the Christian with a subversive posture towards all things; it is the very ground of their life. George Hunsinger, when writing a book on Karl Barth’s theology, didn’t just happenstancely entitle it Disruptive Grace; there is a very theological reason. For Barth’s theology, and one of the things that makes it so appealing to me, there is an otherworldly/thisworldly component to it. Meaning, it is thoroughly grounded in the hidden above, while at the same time being revealed in the hidden below in the unbecoming face of a lowly vagrant from the village of Nazareth. God in Christ engaged in, and continues to engage in a disruptive act of given mercy, such that He in-breaks into this fallen world with His Kingdom proclamation of faith, hope, and love for all who will hear. His work, grounded as it is His own inner-triune-life and character, has no correlation with this world’s structures; in other words, it is not contingent upon the creaturely reality, but instead the divine reality. As a result its resources are ineffable and endless; miraculous even. The character of God’s Kingdom, then, is not one that is in correlation or acquiescence with this current world order (or to use biblical language: this current ‘evil age’). This means that there is a genuine sui generis and novum present in God’s act towards the world in Christ; one that cannot be prolongated by our own imitation of it; but only one that we can bear witness to as we participate in and from this One and Three life of God for us.

This is something, it seems, that neither the ‘right’ nor the ‘left’ grasp when continuing on in the tussle of the so called culture wars. Barth’s repudiation of natural theology, and the correlationism inherent to that, is more apropos than ever these days. Just look at what is happening in and among the Southern Baptist Convention, and independents like John MacArthur et al. The impasse neither is recognizing is that they are both iterations of the same sort of natural correlationist theology that funds almost all of the Western evangelical (etc.) trajectory. In other words, they have (typically) uncritically accepted the old German idea that God and cultural/creational patterns can co-exist and in fact are coterminous, at a level, insofar that God’s ratio can be discerned/discovered in the natural order; thus allowing the churches, under this ambit, to come to the belief that they can subvert the culture by assimilating the culture (whether that be on the perceived negative or positive side). For example the SBC has recently adopted the idea that they can use critical theory and intersectionality as a critical aid in helping them engage the culture at large. This has caused no small pushback from folks like JMac, and folks, like Tom Buck in the SBC, against this cultural appropriation. The irony is that the pushback, against the SBC, is coming from folks who have assimilated other forms of cultural norms into the strata of their own ‘Christian’ engagement with the world and other churches. In other words, JMac&company have elevated certain ‘right-wing-conservative’ norms as the standard by which the status quo of the Gospel remains just that: the status quo. The SBC is recognizing that there is a problem with the evangelical church’s engagement with the culture, but they are reaching for tools that are based on the assumption, just as JMac uncritically does, that there is some sort of possible ‘natural’ correlation between God’s order revealed in Christ, and the order latent in fallen creation. They both believe they have the tools, ironically, through revelation, to discover what that ‘order’ entails (the order in nature), and then commandeer it for the purposes of the Kingdom. But this is wrong!

As an alternative, Barth’s theology of culture, offers a way that recognizes the problem of correlationist theology, and then presents the antidote in the overwhelming reality of God’s ‘disruptive’ grace as that is revealed and given as gift over and again in Jesus Christ. Here Jamie Smith describes Barth’s turn:

One of the most significant challenges to the Tübingen empire was voiced from Basel in the work of Karl Barth. If the Tübingen liberal project is correlationist, we might describe the Barthian project as revelationist—eschewing any notion of a neutral or secular “point of contact” between the gospel and public or sociopolitical structures, proclaiming instead a revealed gospel that subverted cultural givens. In his bombshell, which landed on the playground of liberal theology, Barth asserted:

The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths. . . . So new, so unheard of, so unexpected in this world is the power of God unto salvation, that it can appear among us, be received and understood by us, only as a contradiction. The Gospel does not expound or recommend itself. It does not negotiate or plead, threaten, or make promises.

Directly confronting the dominant Tübingen strategies that dominated both theology and preaching in his day, Barth eschewed such correlational, apologetic projects. “Anxiety concering the victory of the Gospel,” he continued, “—that is, Christian Apologetics—is meaningless, because the Gospel is the victory by which the world is overcome.”

This Barthian challenge was taken up in its contemporary form in New Haven with the advent of what came to be known as the Yale school of postliberal theology associated with Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. Following Barth, the Yale school sought to revalue the revelational pole of Scripture in theological formulation, emphasizing not the correlation or synthesis of revelation with secular frameworks but rather the antithesis between them and the way in which revelation subverts secular frameworks. The difference between Barth and postliberals, we might say, is that the Yale school made the linguistic turn in a way that Barth had not. The Yale school took part in a certain Wittgensteinian direction (resisted by the Princeton Barthians) that would eventually produce a satellite project in Durham, N.C., embodied in the work of Stanley Hauerwas. Here Barth’s Reformed thought is melded with the Anabaptist theology of John Howard Yoder (Reformed anathemas of the Anabaptist notwithstanding). But this mixture raises a question: What have Basel and Goshen to do with one another? While it remains a curious amalgam, the possibility of the synthesis is found in Barth and Yoder’s shared  emphasis on the antithesis of revelation vis-à-vis given cultural forms. Both deeply resist the correlational and Constantinian projects of modern theology, and both emphasize the practices of being the church, informed by the narrative of Scripture, constituting an alternative community and a peculiar people. Echoing Barth, Yoder emphasizes that the norm for Christian existence—and hence theology and proclamation—must derive from the gospel as modeled by Jesus, not from the supposedly neutral norms of a public social ethics independent of revelation. Arguing against what he called the “mainstream ethical consensus,” rooted in “an epistemology for which the classic label is the theology of the natural,” Yoder criticizes the attempt to discern the shape of Christian theology under the guidance of public norms; the Tübingen consensus claims that “it is by studying the realities around us, not by hearing a proclamation from God, that we discern the right.”[1]

The ‘Tübingen emphasis,’ as Smith describes it, might sound more radical and ‘progressive’ than what we are finding in the internecine squabble between say examples like the SBC and those opposed, symbolized by people like JMac. But I suggest it isn’t! There is a rugged natural theological individualism as the basis that stands behind the whole thing; one that gives the participants the belief that their ‘tribe’ has the spirituality required to engage in the sort of ‘German’ correlating of culture and Christian theology that Barth&company has sought to contradict and correct through the emphasis of the other-worldly Gospel.

This is why, I maintain, my own house of ‘evangelicalism’ is collapsing right before our very eyes. Underneath the whole project is a theological anthropology that gives the fallen, yet redeemed person, too much space between them and God; a space that allows for them to find things in the created or natural disorder that they think helps to amplify the revelation of God in all its analogous force. The only way forward, is for evangelicalism, in the main, to repent of their adherence to this correlationist natural theologizing and actually allow the Gospel to be the disruptive power of God that it is. And yes, JMac and crew believe they are on this ‘repented’ side of things, but in fact as you look at what is informing their anthropology, doctrine of Scripture, doctrine of creation/recreation, it quickly becomes clear that they are just as guilty as the SBC at large in its acquiescence to the ostensibly given social ethics and assumptions present in the culture that surrounds them. Something more radical must occur in the lives of these communions; something like the irruptive Grace of God that has no correlation or analogy save the very inner-life of God itself.

[1] James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2004), 38-9.

The Role of Imagination and Affections in Human Action and Christian Formation

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I am currently reading James K. A. Smith’s new book (the second volume following his first, Desiring the Kingdom) entitled: Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. At first I was leery, I was afraid that what, in reality Smith was imagineoffering is something like a virtue ethics (which is quite intellectualist in orientation). But to my welcoming, he is not; he is offering a kind of modified affective-literary rich liturgical anthropology as the basis for promoting a proper Christian understanding of spiritual formation and even critical cultural engagement. I was first put onto “affective” thinking by Ron Frost’s work, and his promotion of what he calls “Affective theology,” as he has retrieved that primarily from his PhD work on the Puritan Richard Sibbes, and the Augustinian anthropology that funded such an approach. I am happy to see that Smith is taking this kind of affective thinking and developing it even further, and by engagement with contemporary literary theory, neuro-science (which Frost would allude to often in his own work, in an incidental way), and some French theorists.

Now the above might sound somewhat obtrusive, or rather academic (and some of it is!); but Smith is aiming at providing a trajectory that is accessible for thoughtful pastors and lay people alike (he says so in the introduction of his book). With this in mind I wanted to whet your appetite by quoting a good summary of what is going on in Smith’s book, and offer a response to that afterwards. Here is Smith on the reality of affections and emotion (different from feeling, as he qualifies), and the role it plays in formation; whether that formation be actually into the image of Christ, or deformation into the tacit narratives and thus emotion-laden planes of reality:

Having fallen prey to the intellectualism of modernity, both Christian worship and Christian pedagogy have underestimated the importance of this body/story nexus—this inextricable link between imagination, narrative, and embodiment—thereby forgetting the ancient Christian sacramental wisdom carried in the historic practices of Christian worship and the embodied legacies of spiritual and monastic disciplines. Failing to appreciate this, we have neglected formational resources that are indigenous to the Christian tradition, as it were; as a result, we have too often pursued flawed models of discipleship and Christian formation that have focused on convincing the intellect rather than recruiting the imagination. Moreover, because of this neglect and our stunted anthropology, we have failed to recognize the degree and extent to which secular liturgies do implicitly capitalize on our embodied penchant for storied formation. This becomes a way to account for Christian assimilation to consumerism, nationalism, and various stripes of egoisms. These isms have had all the best embodied stories. The devil has had all the best liturgies.

A proper response to this situation is to change our practice—to reactivate and renew those liturgies, rituals, and disciplines that intentionally embody the story of the gospel and enact a vision of the coming kingdom of God in such a way that they’ll seep into our bones and become the background for our perceptions, the baseline for our dispositions, and the basis for our (often unthought) action in the world. While the goal is renewed practice, we cannot simply return to a fabled past, nor can we simply impose foreign practices. In order to generate a desire to renew and reorient our practices, we do well to engage in reflection to help understand why this is needed. So while the goal is practical, the way there is theoretical…. The kinaesthetic link between story, the body, and the imagination is implicit in historic Christian wisdom about spiritual formation and liturgical practice. However, rather than merely excavate that from historical sources, in this chapter I will engage Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment as a catalyst for us to remember the incarnational, sacramental wisdom that is ours. No one has better mapped the interplay between the imagination, perception, the body, and narrative.[1]

This resonates, a little, with Thomas Torrance’s idea of tacit knowledge, which he appropriated from Michael Polyani. But as I was transcribing this quote from Smith, it dawned on me, a bit; what I think Smith is proposing in his liturgical anthropology is a mode of spirituality that becomes heavily bedded down in ecclesiology, and thus not primarily, Christology.

I think Smith might be onto something; I think the affections (or his “emotions”V. “feelings”) have something very important to say to us about how we process and engage with reality as embodied persons. But my concern, in the end is that this is not going to have the kind of Christ concentration — anthropologically — that Thomas Torrance and Karl Barth, for example, provide for us. My concern is that with all of the good intention, the focus will end up being on how we are able to manage and manipulate our surroundings, our liturgies, such that we have to master our domain through habitus (habiting or habituating) practices that are self derived or abstract from the vicarious humanity of Christ himself; i.e. which is apocalyptic, and breaks in on our lives moment by moment by the Spirit, afresh and anew unhampered by our intentionality.

Obviously the key here, once again, is to try and travel a path that does not so objectify human action, in God’s action in the Incarnation in Christ for us, that we lose any sense of responsibility and subjectivity that moves from us, ourselves. The key, I think, is to have a proper understanding of the relation between nature and grace; the latter being the reality that predicates a proper concursus between God and man — and that proper concurrence must be understood, by way of order and grounding, by happening first in Jesus Christ’s humanity with us. And we, by the same Holy Spirit, and grace, act and become from Christ and not just toward him.

Anyway, more to come …

[1] James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 39-41.

Jamie Smith on Calvinism as Christianity

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Is Calvinism synonymous with Christianity? Or maybe Augustinian is actually what encapsulates what ‘Christianity’ actuall is? I think the language of ‘Calvinism’ helps to identify a particular tradition within Christianity, but I am not willing to go so far as to say that ‘Calvinism’ constitutes what Christianity is. It appears that Jamie Smith demurs here as well, at least with ‘Calvinism’; he though seems to make the same error by believing that we can reduce Christianity to the language of ‘Augustinian’ in lieu of ‘Calvinist’. Here’s what he says (he is commenting on how Kuyper approached this, and then Smith nods his head at Kuyper, in general):

I came to appreciate this rich, comprehensive understanding of Calvinism from its Dutch stream, and from Abraham Kuyper in particular. Indeed, Kuyper’s 1898 Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary — published simply under the title Calvinism — should be an essential part of your library. In his opening lecture, on Calvinism as a “life-system,” Kuyper cautions against reducing Calvinism to a specifically doctrinal matter, and to a specific doctrine in particular. “In this sense,” he notes, “a Calvinist is represented exclusively as the outspoken subscriber to the dogma of fore-ordination” (13). But as he points out, even ardent defenders of predestination such as Charles Hodge resisted the reduction of Calvinism to this one point, and thus preferred to describe themselves as “Augustinians” (as do I). In contrast, throughout these lectures Kuyper articulates Calvinism as, variously, a “complex,” a “life-system,” a “general tendency,” a “general system of life,” and, finally, a “world- and life-view.” As such, he doesn’t think Calvinism’s competitor is something like Arminianism, but radically different, comprehensive life-systems like Islam, Buddhism, and modernism. Every life-system, according to Kuyper, not only spells out how “I” can be saved but spells out an entire vision of and for the totality of human life, ultimately articulating an understanding of three “fundamental relations of all human life”: our relation to God, our relation to other persons (and human flourishing in general), and humanity’s relation to the natural world. And Calvinism, Kuyper claims, is nothing less than such a “complex,” such a “life-system.” Indeed, he thinks Calvinism was, in its own sense, revolutionary . . . . (James K. A. Smith, “Letters To A Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition,” 97-98)

There is much to be commended in what Smith (through briefly sketching Kuyper) has to say; especially in regards to reducing “Calvinism” to the ‘competitor’ of Arminianism as its sole offering to the theological world. Indeed, Smith even states that he can be critical of Kuyper in certain details; yet relative to Kuyper’s general thesis — about Calvinism (or Augustinianism) as “life-system” — Jamie Smith is in full agreement. I would want to demur at this point. While I believe that Evangelical Calvinism, for example, has something very significant and substantial to offer to Christendom; at the same time, I do not think that ‘EC’ is Christianity. Which for all intents and purposes, it does appear that Smith believes that ‘Calvinism’ is in fact Christianity (or that Christianity in its best form can be reduced to ‘Calvinism’); something in line with sentiment that Charles Spurgeon preached:

I have my own opinion that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and him crucified, unless we preach what nowadays is called Calvinism. It is a nickname to call it Calvinism; Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else. (HT: TCC)

I agree with the idea of “life-system,” but I think we shouldn’t use ‘Calvinist’ or ‘Augustinian’ to capture this; instead we should replace that, in contradistinction from Smith’s accounting, with Christianity. In other words, ‘Christianity’ and ‘Calvinism’ are not synonymous, in my estimation. Yet, this seems to be the implication of what Smith is getting at. This kind of thought, in the end, only has the potential to bottom out in that ugly ditch called Sectarianism.

I think Smith’s devotion is laudable, for sure; I just think that in his zeal he overstates on the reach that ‘Calvinism’ provides relative to its ‘role’ (maybe as a corrective in its ‘Evangelical Calvinist’ form 😉 ) in the broader river known as Christendom!

'Letters To A Young Calvinist': God as 'Father', the Heidelberg Catechism

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I am sitting here reading James K. A. Smith’s new little book: Letters To A Young Calvinist — in the book he is corresponding with a former member of a college group that he led at his church back in Hawthorne (go L.A. county 😉 ); this student has just been turned on to “Calvinism.” The correspondence is a series of “letters” between Smith and the college aged guy, Jesse. In one of the letters, Smith is glossing on how much that he values the ‘confessional’ nature of the ‘Reformed faith’; he is trying to encourage younger, Jesse, to see the value that the Reformed confessions and catechisms can offer someone interested in growing in the Reformed tradition. But, more, growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. What I find insightful, from Smith, is his point on the differences in orientation and ‘feel’ that he sensed between the ‘Westminster Standards’ (WCF and WLC & WSC) and the Heidelberg Catechism; he says:

But I have to confess that when I discovered the Heidelberg Catechism, it was like discovering a nourishing oasis compared to the arid desert of Westminster’s cool scholasticism. The God of the Heidelberg Catechism is not just a Sovereign Lord of the Universe, nor merely the impartial Judge at the trial of justification; the God of the Heidelberg Catechism keeps showing up as a Father. For example, when expounding the first article of the Apostles’ Creed (“I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth”), the Heidelberg Catechism discusses all the ways that God upholds the universe by his hand, but also affirms that this sovereign Creator attends to me, a speck in that universe. And it concludes the answer to question 26 by summarizing: “He is able to do this because he is almighty God; he desires to do this because he is a faithful Father.” (James K. A. Smith, “Letters To A Young Calvinist,” 55)

Of the ‘Reformed’ Confessions & Catechisms, two of them are very central to ‘Evangelical Calvinism’; the (1) being ‘The Scots Confession, 1560’ and then (2) ‘The Heidelberg Catechism’, for the very reason that Smith just highlights. It is the all important ‘Doctrine of God’ embedded within these statements that ‘EC’ believes is very important. In other words, as Smith notes, it is the language of ‘Father’ that should be emphasized; the Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit — or the ‘Trinitarian nature of God’ we have become so accustomed to by looking at Jesus through reading Scripture. This is a central reality to ‘EC’, that God is ‘Father/Son’ (by the Holy Spirit) — constituently — before He ever becomes Creator (‘Law-giver’ etc.). He becomes ‘Creator’ by a free act of gracious love for the other, and out of this free un-restrained act (except for the restraint that obtains within the onto-relating of the person’s of God’s one being) He ‘graciously’ creates because He is a lover first; which shapes His creating (and saving and re-creating) activity in grace.

This is a significant point, and Smith makes it readily!