AMP post: The Sacrement of Mission

"I worship and love, therefore I am."
Photo by Petra via Flickr.

For the past four or five days I've been reading James K.A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. It's about time, too, since I've been reading his blog, watching/listening to his lectures for almost two years now. In some ways I feel like I've already read a lot of it, but I'm still very happy I finally got around to reading it.

It was also my turn on the schedule to contribute to the Anabaptist Missional Project (AMP) blog, so I synthesized as much of Smith's key points into a post about...

The Sacrament of Mission

“I think, therefore I am.” This short dictum from René Descartes may be the best shorthand summary of the entire Enlightenment project. It is a statement about human nature – our “am-ness” – namely that we are primarily rationalanimals. So successful has this view of human nature become – entrenched as it is in our thought and practice patterns of cultural, political, economic, and (yes) religious institutions in the West – it’s nearly impossible to detect, much less argue with. 

But Christian philosopher, James K.A. Smith, has a bone to pick with that view of human nature. In his recent book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Smith has set about to change our minds about this mind-centric view of human beings. Drawing on contemporary philosophy and other disciplines, Smith wants us to shift the understanding of our being from that of homo sapiens to “homo liturgicus,” that is the human being as worshipper and lover. So the dictum here would go, “I worship (and love), therefore I am.”
(Read the rest of the post...)