Over at the John Jay Institute, there’s a symposium happening on the topic of “Christian imagination.” One of the papers submitted was a guest post by our own Will McDavid. The entire thing is available at their site, here, but an excerpt below:
“James K.A. Smith, a recent lynchpin of smart Evangelicalism in America, has embedded a myth in the conversation about imagination and desire: “compelling visions, over time, seep into and shape our desire and thus fuel dispositions toward them” (Desiring the Kingdom). This idea lay behind Smith’s defense of Christian schools in the wake of a Christianity Today blogger making an apology for sending her kids to public schools. Smith:
That’s why, based on the evidence, we keep pointing out that a Christian education is a ‘public’ education and serves the common good—more, in fact, than so-called ‘public’ (i.e., state-run) schools do. If we want to change the social architecture for future generations, we need to seriously consider educating them in Christian schools… The vision of Christian education is rooted in a conviction that learning is always informed by some worldview or faith commitments, which is why we should be intentional about teaching and learning from an explicitly Christian starting point.
The idea flows naturally out of Smith’s linear, accretive view of desire-shaping. Master Koolhaas’s Academy for Kuyperian Youth can feed children the “right” images, appeal to right desires, and shape their imaginations accordingly. The public-school child’s Christian imagination lags just a bit behind; on average, he is less interested in the common good.
Obviously, if this linearity were true, it would be problematic for public school children. But we needn’t worry, because the Spirit works often through counter-formation. That is, our imaginations are sometimes repulsed by what they consume or envision, and this movement – the biblical shorthand would be ‘repentance’ – is perhaps even stronger than Smith’s accretive mechanism. Sometimes we rebel against the good: Thomas Mann, a Nobel Laureate, wrote a famous story, Death in Venice, about an acclaimed author enamored of the true, good, and beautiful, who, after a long life of austere discipline, becomes equally enamored with a ten-year-old Polish boy on the beach, and dies as a result. William Inge wrote a play, with echoes of the Prodigal Son, in which a man tells his wife, truly, that her vision of domestic order makes him want to go out and raise hell all over again, just to prove to himself that he’s free. And in personal experience, we all know of people who went to Christian schools and are now in the most fervent rebellion…
There is much to commend in the Christian ideal of setting our minds on what is good, but if spiritual formation becomes yet another technique, yet another results-driven process, yet another thing to be controlled and carefully manicured, we risk glossing over the recognition of our frailty which lies near the heart of the Christian message.”
COMMENTS
6 responses to “Riding (Too) High on Christian Imagination”
Leave a Reply
Yes. Often the brightest trophies of grace come from the dirtiest spots. The blood of Christ, not Christian education, has the power to change us.
Will, I recognize much gospel wisdom in your remarks but have to ask: if your counter-proposal be true, why bother with liturgy?
For the “active” part of liturgy, I’d refer to Andre Dubus (https://mbird.mystagingwebsite.com/2011/05/tongue-tied-and-dancing-with-andre-dubus/). For the formative element, I only meant to say that counter-formation ” is perhaps even stronger than Smith’s accretive mechanism”. But it all turns on the mode of formation (liturgy and sacrament have special status), the purpose (liturgy can sometimes be used as a technique (https://mbird.mystagingwebsite.com/2013/09/engineering-worship-and-liturgies-of-control/)), and whether by “liturgy” we mean the word’s proper definition or its broader, currently popular sense as a metonym for any given formative, Christian practice.
But wouldn’t Christian education teach this too?
What a weird little ditty to run into while on a break from reading Jamie Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom. I see no resemblance to the Jamie Smith I am reading in DTK. No guy who wants to direct people into techniques and results-oriented processes. Strange. Strange. Strange. Good to have the links to his response to CT Slate’s article. I still didn’t find the guy you were characterizing. Even reading the comments, which he’s actively responding to, you find a guy with a much larger view in mind. I feel disappointed by this post and wonder, what presuppositions did you come to the writing of it with?
Of course anything can be used as a faithless, graceless control tool. Hell, that could even apply to sending your child to a posh boarding school, or scratching to pull yourself up to the level of buying a house in the best aka richest and whitest area of town for public school access.