James K.A. Smith on Awaiting the King

It will come as no surprise to some visitors to this blog that I have greatly appreciated the work of James K.A. Smith over the years (see here, here, here, here, here, and here), nor that I am looking forward to the imminent release of the third volume in his ‘Cultural Liturgies’ project – Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017) – looking at how worship shapes us as citizens of the King.

There’s more information about the book here, and a series of 10 short videos here in which he talks about the book, its emphases, and its relationship with other parts of his work.

He describes the book as a remix of Augustine and Oliver O’Donovan, nourished by his location in the Reformed (especially Kuyperian) tradition, but also pushing back on that tradition by making the church more central in how we think about our political witness.

In line with the earlier volumes in this series, and with Smith’s work elsewhere, he describes citizens as ‘lovers’, not just rational information processors. Our public and political life is caught up in dynamics of desire and formation. If we want to judge the character of a people, we have to discern what they love. The book is a liturgical analysis of what we worship politically, and what we are being trained to love when we step into those places as Christians.

We are, he says, to be a people whose political vision is animated by a vision of the King who is coming. For Smith, this means learning to walk a line between quietism and activism. We’re not just sitting around, not caring our shared public life; we’re waiting for the King. But nor are we activists in the sense that we think we’re going to bring the end about. We wait actively. We are caught up in what God is doing in the world, and the formative practices of the church shape us as a people who then shape the world.

In this sense, Smith hopes the book will recalibrate our posture towards public life, and he makes some helpful comments in this respect on steering between what he sees as the dangers of the ‘court evangelicals’ (those cosying up to power) and the Benedict Option.

James K.A. Smith on Rethinking the Secular

Having posted about Jamie Smith’s short piece on public theology last week – which effectively provides a taster of his work in progress for the third volume of his ‘Cultural Liturgies’ project – I thought I’d link to part 2, ‘Rethinking the Secular, Redeeming Christendom’. As with last time, he’s reworking Oliver O’Donovan here.

Here’s an early paragraph:

‘Our political institutions, habits, and practices are contingent cultural configurations that are included in the “all” that Christ redeems (Col. 1:16-17). The political is not insulated from the impact of the Christ-event and the specific witness of the church in history – including the political habits learned in the polis that is the church.’

Smith helpfully summarises what is known as the saeculum, the significance of which I think is often overlooked in discussions of pubic theology and cultural engagement more generally (for instance, in ongoing debates between two-kingdoms protagonists and so-called advocates of cultural transformation).

‘Everything is now in subjection to Christ (Heb. 2:5-8); he has already disarmed the principalities and powers (Col. 2:15). But we live in the “not-yet” where this victory is not universally recognized. It is this time – between cross and kingdom come, between ascension and second coming, between the universal scope of his lordship and its universal recognition – it is this time or season that is “the secular,” the saeculum, the age in which we find ourselves... It’s not that “secular” authorities have full authority over a limited jurisdiction; they have also only been delegated their authority for a time (the saeculum).

‘So we don't shuttle between the jurisdictions of two kingdoms; we live in the seasons of contested rule, where the principalities and powers continue to grasp after an authority that has been taken from them. The church is now the site for seeing what Christ’s kingly rule looks like – and it will be from the church that the authorities (the “stewards”) of this world might come to recognize their own penultimacy.

‘On the one hand that means relativizing the “secular” authorities. But on the other hand it also means the church’s mission can make a dent there, too. In the church’s proclamation and her embodiment of a polis in which Christ reigns... It is the very mission of the church that takes it into the imperial palace, into the executive mansion, into halls of the capitol.’

So, controversially, as Smith says...

‘This, O’Donovan points out, was the Christendom project: a fundamentally missional endeavor in which the regnant authorities recognized the lordship of Christ, recognized they were simply stewards for a coming King.

‘[A]s O’Donovan points out, most of the examples of Christendom held up for critique are, in fact, examples of something else – a church that has lost its missional, evangelical center and has forgotten how to pray “Thy kingdom come.” Once the church forgot this was still the saeculum – once it fell into the trap of thinking the kingdom had arrived in their configuration of society – the result was a “negative collusion”: “the pretence that there was now no further challenge to be issued to the rules in the name of the ruling Christ” (citing O’Donovan).

‘Christendom, then, is a missional endeavor that refuses to let political society remain protected from the lordship of Christ while it also recognizes the eschatological distance between the now and the not-yet.’

James K.A. Smith on an Evangelical Public Theology

There’s a nice piece here on Comment from Jamie Smith, effectively providing a look at his work in progress for the third volume of his ‘Cultural Liturgies’ project.

He begins:

‘A lot that traffics under the banner of “Christian” public theology has little to do with the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our imaginations have been sufficiently disciplined by the assumptions of liberalism to be uncomfortable and embarrassed by forthrightly Christian hopes for temporal government.’

He looks at Oliver O’Donovan and helpfully summarises some of his key contributions – the significance of Jesus’ resurrection as ‘the confirmation of the world-order which God has made’, and the importance for evangelical public theology to be ‘nourished by the specificity of God’s revelation in Christ, which is bound up in the canonical story unfolded in the Scriptures – the story of Israel’.

Some other excerpts:

‘Because creation is reaffirmed in Christ’s resurrection, and because “nature” is only known “in Christ,” then any Christian account of even “this-worldly” life has to be unapologetically evangelical, rooted in what we know in – and because of – the Gospel.’

‘[P]olitical theology is unashamedly rooted in the specificity and particularity of God’s self-revelation in Christ and the equally particular history of his covenant with his people Israel and the new covenant people that are the church. The body of Christ is that polis in which we participate in Christ, in which our perception is sanctified by the Spirit so that we might be able to discern the reign of God and thus be equipped for public proclamation of good but disconcerting news that submission to Yhwh’s reign is the way humanity is liberated.’

Craig Bartholomew et al. on Oliver O’Donovan

The following review was first published in Anvil in 2003 or 2004...

Craig Bartholomew, Jonathan Chaplin, Robert Song, and Al Wolters (eds.), A Royal Priesthood? The Use of the Bible Ethically and Politically: A Dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan, The Scripture and Hermeneutics Series Vol. 3 (Carlise: Paternoster, 2002), xxiv + 445pp., 0842270672.

How do we move from Scripture to Sudan, from Abraham to Afghanistan, from Jesus to jihad? The use of the Bible in ethics and political theology is the burden of the third volume in the now well-established ‘Scripture and Hermeneutics’ series, grown out of consultations nurtured by Craig Bartholomew. Mercifully not yet in a rut, this is different from the previous volumes in that it provides a sustained dialogue with an individual author, Oliver O’Donovan, and particularly his The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), a work of political theology which devotes significant space to biblical interpretation. Individual contributors interact with O’Donovan from their own disciplinary perspectives, all of them respecting his work even while questioning and disagreeing with it here and there. O’Donovan responds to each of the essays, which allows readers to eavesdrop on the discussion that went on in the original symposium.

O’Donovan is a significant figure for such a dialogue given his commitment to the Bible as Christian Scripture and the possibility of a unified biblical ethic, and the place he gives to theology in formulating ethics: notably, for example, the resurrection as a starting point because of what it says about God’s vindication of creation and so of created life. O’Donovan shows how theological constructs mediate between Scripture and ethical issues, but in such a way that moorings with Scripture are not lost. His 1996 work called for a biblical and theological ethic which can find appropriate political expression. All this and more is outlined by Craig Bartholomew in his excellent introduction to the volume, looking at how the Bible has been used in Christian ethics, before summarising O’Donovan’s work and the papers that follow.

The first ten chapters consider O’Donovan’s use of the Bible in his political theology, with the following contributions: Walter Moberly on the history of Israel and the relationship between the OT and the NT; Gordon McConville on law and monarchy in the OT, with particular reference to Deuteronomy; Craig Bartholomew on the centrality of the creation order in wisdom literature; M. Daniel Carroll R. on eschatology related to Latin American liberation theology and in dialogue with Amos and Isaiah; Andrew Lincoln on the overlooked contribution of John’s gospel to political theology; Tom Wright on a political reading of Romans; Bernd Wannenwetsch on the relationship between politics and ecclesiology in the light of Romans 12; Gerrit de Kruijf on Romans 13; Christopher Rowland on the message of the Apocalypse for politics.

There follows a brief reflection by Gilbert Meilaender on the difference exegesis makes to political theology; this was written after the consultation and is the only piece not followed with a reply by O’Donovan. The remaining chapters then look at different aspects of O’Donovan’s political theology and ethics, with contributions from Jonathan Chaplin on Christian liberalism, Colin Greene on the kingdom and the history of Christendom, Peter Scott on the theology of authority in the context of liberation theology, Joan Lockwood O’Donovan on the idea of the nation-state, and James Skillen on political action in the sphere of public justice.

There can be no doubt that some chapters are demanding, especially for those unfamiliar with O’Donovan’s work. And with a volume of this breadth and depth, no-one will agree with every detail. More significant, however, is the larger vision offered, and the model of dialogue between peers, seeking to strike creative and faithful ways forward in Christian engagement with the contemporary world. The volume as a whole commends the need to read the Scriptures with eyes tuned to politics, the need to move beyond exegesis of individual passages to the shape of the Scriptures in their entirety, the need to read the Scriptures in such a way to yield theological concepts that are authorised by the Scriptures, and the need to read together and in open and respectful conversation with each other – as biblical scholars, theologians, and ethicists. All in all then, a crucial volume for all those committed to wrestling with the significance of biblical interpretation for today’s world.