James K.A. Smith: Tradition For Innovation

"We cannot hope to restore the world if we are constantly reinventing the church, says a Calvin College philosophy professor."

Read the article here.  a couple of snippets:

Evangelicalism in North America today is a vibrant and lively affair, abuzz with innovation and activity. Across the United States and Canada, evangelicals are stepping forward as never before to help restore a broken world.

At the same time, in keeping with their historic entrepreneurial spirit, evangelicals are constantly creating and spinning off new and different ways of doing church.

Often overlapping, these two trends at first glance might seem to emerge from the same innovative spirit, two complementary and intertwined developments, working together for the good of the church.

In fact, however, these are not complementary trends but competing trajectories, at odds with one another. However unintended it might be, the latter works inevitably to undermine the former. In short, we cannot hope to restore the world if we are constantly reinventing the church; the hard work of innovation requires grounding in a tradition. . . .

If the church is going to send out “restorers” who engage culture for the common good, we need to recover and remember the rich imaginative practices of historic Christian worship that carry the unique story of the gospel.

Consider just a few of the many ways in which the liturgical tradition nurtures and replenishes the imagination: 

• Kneeling in confession and voicing “the things we have done and the things we have left undone …” tangibly and viscerally impresses upon us the brokenness of our world and humbles our own pretensions;

• Pledging allegiance in the Creed is a political act -- a reminder that we are citizens of a coming kingdom, curtailing our temptation to overidentify with any configuration of the earthly city;

• The rite of baptism, where the congregation vows to help raise a child alongside the parents, is just the liturgical formation we need to be a people who can support those raising children with intellectual disabilities or other special needs;

• Sitting at the Lord’s Table with the risen King, where all are invited to eat, is a tactile reminder of the just, abundant world that God longs for.

In these and countless other ways, the liturgical tradition orients our imagination to kingdom come, priming us for the innovative, restorative work of culture making. In order to foster a Christian imagination, we don’t need to invent; we need to remember.

Of course, whether or not our culture can be "restored" remains to be seen.  I for one am skeptical, and hold more to the notion that we are to hunker down and await the "New Benedict":

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead -- often not recognizing fully what they were doing -- was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict.  (Alasdair MacIntyre)

A related issue is this:  will Evangelicals ever come to a sense of realism about their overall importance in the big scheme of things, and learn to bow to Tradition?  I expect this sort of response from the "redeem-the-culture" Evangelicals who might agree with Smith's argument:  "Yeah.  Liturgy.  Great idea.  Let's create one."

Comments

[good point]

Well, Evangelicals are too influence by Anabaptist thought which is against a more formal liturgy. Anabaptist are not always the good guys as Evangelicals believed. In their early days they were not only theologically liberal but tried to pushed communists christian societies on others. The most famous one is in 16th century Germany. Yet, politically conservative evangelicals admire Anabaptist, Jim Wallis is a perfect example of the Anabaptists pushing things more to the left politcally and trying to have a separation of Church and State when it comes to school prayer which is a grey issue and Gay Marriage which isn't.