Abstract
Awaiting the King completes James K. A. Smith's Cultural Liturgies trilogy. The earlier volumes—Desiring the Kingdom (2009) and Imagining the Kingdom (2013)—moved beyond the worldview analysis so prevalent in some Reformed circles, proposing instead that humans are not thinking things in the Cartesian mode so much as loving beings in the Augustinian framework. Consequently, those texts examined the power of worship, practices, and liturgy to form our loves and guide the shape of the Christian life.
In this final book, Smith, like Yoder, Hauerwas, and some thinkers within Radical Orthodoxy, suggests that liberalism has its practices and liturgies, and shapes our dispositions and loves, albeit in idolatrous ways. On this point, Smith is in agreement with contemporaries such as Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, and Gladden Pappin, who see liberalism as a totalizing attempt to control and fashion citizens in the anthropology of liberalism, which is much more than a political system of rights, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. Given liberalism's power, Smith suggests that Christian enthusiasm to transform culture is more likely to assimilate and baptize the status quo than to transform anything. To avoid a church tamed and captive, Smith stresses the “antithesis” rather than the “common grace” aspect of the Kuyperian tradition. (While Smith certainly hopes to speak to Christians of all sorts, the book is very much a contribution to an intra-Kuyperian debate.)
The first three chapters emphasize the religious aspects of politics and the political nature of Christianity, refusing tidy versions of church and state, keys and sword, or the two kingdoms, all of which Smith characterizes as a faulty spatialized vision of distinct jurisdictions. The space of the public square under liberalism is not neutral but proposes a distinct way of life with its own practices, rites, and purposes. These are not simply worldviews or beliefs but cultural liturgies, forming not only our ideas but our loves and allegiances. In a similar way, the body of Christ is more than a community oriented to heaven; the Church is a social imaginary and orients us according to the distinct eschatological vision of the kingdom of God. As a kingdom, it has a ruler, and this ruler invites us to a political vision quite distinct from that of liberalism. Christianity is political, and while liberalism has smuggled in certain of Christianity's political claims, it does so without the full aims of the kingdom.
Smith insists that while he sees an integral relationship of church and politics, with everything in subjection to Christ, he is not denying the necessity or gift of pluralism. “Kuyperians,” he claims, “were pluralists before pluralism was cool” (p. 131). Neocalvinism is no call for Christendom or Christian hegemony but recognizes deep differences of commitment, belief, values, and institutional form. “Principled pluralism” allows and even promotes multiple levels of associations and the interaction of those associations, including those of distinct religious-type commitments. This might look like liberalism in some ways, but is motivated by Christian—as opposed to totalizing liberal—convictions for impartiality and fairness between and among competing visions of life. In addition to Christian reasons for allowing people their own self-determination, the church also aspires to form communities and individuals with virtues such as tolerance and patience. In fact, a test of the coherence of Christian worship is whether it aspires to and actually does form Christians in principled pluralism.
Such pluralism, however, is not and need not be guided by the minimalism of common grace or natural law theories, as Smith argues in Chapter 6. Creational norms, upon which common grace and natural law depend, are not rejected, quite; but inasmuch as they bracket the life of Christ, they are merely nostalgic and devoid of the promise of the kingdom. Natural law cannot speak of forgiveness or mercy, and natural lawyers act as if the resurrection and its politics never happened, or as if it happened but is mostly irrelevant to political theology. Far better to admit that the epistemic grounding of Christian politics requires faith rather than pretensions to universal reason, and to admit that our imaginations have become liberal even as natural lawyers fail to convince liberals in matters such as abortion and marriage. Nature is known only in Christ, and our way of life, even now, should be thoroughgoing in its evangelical mission.
Smith insists that his vision will not sink into mere sectarianism or quietism. Following Oliver O’Donovan, he claims that the particularity of the gospel still remains a knowledge of creation and human nature—a better knowledge, even—and proclaims the common good of all. If the king of the universe has all things subjected to him, and knows everything, the Christian vision articulates what really is true of human flourishing and attempts to reform political life in light of the truth, even if that kingdom is not-yet and cherishes pluralism.
The book ends with the so-called “Godfather Problem,” named for the scene at the end of the Godfather where Michael Corleone rejects Satan and all his evil works even as his henchman enacts his murderous directives. Christians are formed by the church, yet many apparently practicing Christians have loves and lives more in keeping with the world than the kingdom. To counter this, pastors should act as ethnographers, identifying the rites of the earthly city and unmasking their influence among congregants, particularly about race, capital, national jingoism, and so on. The kingdom has teeth, in other words.
When the book appeared, members of a certain set thought it quite provocative, even though Smith is mostly translating the insights of other traditions into the idiom of Kuyper and Dooyeweerd. This is not a criticism; Smith is a translator of great talent and a crucial voice in challenging “Kuyperian triumphalism” (p. xii). Further, the text's claims are relevant for those outside the orbit of Dutch Reformed influence. Still, the book has its audience, and this limits his argument. For example, Smith is careful to quote and explain in detail the insights of Reformed thinkers such as Jonathan Chaplin, and provides ample exposition of Oliver O’Donovan, whose thought he is “importing,” as it were. No objections should be raised at this, for these are thinkers worth expositing—but when it comes to natural law or common grace he manifests no interest or serious engagement. He trots out the usual (and tired) tropes about epistemic limits and the Fall, and the usual (and tired) Hauerwasian-type claims about natural law's bracketing of grace. The footnotes include almost no references to natural law thinkers—old or new—other than a footnoted swipe at those failing to persuade Americans to reject same-sex marriage. Other than that, and one brief nod at Francesca Aran Murphy, there is no discussion of natural lawyers or theologians reflecting about natural law and the faith. None. They exist as a caricature. The point is not that Smith needs to be persuaded by natural law; rather, he has created straw men of such undifferentiated vagueness that his proposal cannot but appear preferable. If the option is liberal idolatry, or assimilated and thus idolatrous common grace, or the kingdom of God, then a reader of faith has an easy choice.
Similarly, Smith paints in broad strokes when describing liberalism, pluralism, and the common good, each of which is hotly debated in political theology. By these terms, Smith seems to mean whatever approval or opprobrium he has in mind, but a few years after the book's release we know quite well that the meaning, legacy, and genealogy of liberalism are intensely contested and unresolved. If Smith wishes to guide us through that morass, he’ll need to do more serious intellectual heavy-lifting than he here provides. Like the other texts in the trilogy, this one relies heavily on pop-culture references, which make wonderful and illuminating examples but don't go very far in demonstrating the truth of his intellectual history.
His vagueness matters. In current debates about liberalism and Christianity, some are arguing for a rejection of modernity as fatally flawed, others for something like a confessional state, while still others hold out for a procedural liberalism and a thick Christianity within a post-liberal Church. Certainly, Smith prefers the theological vision of O’Donovan, but whose liberalism are we talking about? If readers aren't already susceptible to the viewpoint of a Hauerwas or a John Milbank, I suspect they will find very little here to persuade them, let alone a reason to choose principled pluralism over integralism.
Finally, the kingdom of God in Smith's telling looks, quite frankly, like whatever political leanings he—or you—might have. What does it mean, concretely, if it is to be a guiding light for politics? We know that Smith is in favor of the common good, and pluralism, and eschatological telos, and pastor-ethnographers, but all those terms are used by—or easily could be used by—traditionalists or progressives, the based or the woke, the orthodox or the moral therapeutic deist. In the end, there is, somewhat paradoxically, a great deal of theory about cultural practices and very little specificity on which practices and which rituals and which commitments are to guide these politics. A politics of abstraction risks co-option, and there is little reason to think that the prescriptions of this book would resist co-option by those of this, that, or the other concrete political viewpoint. The narrative is fascinating, but the politics remain mostly, and frustratingly, unknown—although I suspect it is a politics which will, ironically, mirror the impetus of liberalism in all its ways.