Where are you formed? Assumptions and the gospel


What is it that makes us who we are? The question of nature and nurture is one that has rumbled on for a long time. The literature on character formation is significant and this is no less true in Christian circles. If you are someone who thinks it is all about nature, consider the wrath and organisational power of middle class parents who want to get their children into the best schools: it’s all about location, location, location as the TV programme puts it.


Perhaps without knowing it, parents who pursue such social standing and mobility for their kids are upholding an ancient truth proclaimed both by ancient Greek philosophers and, I would suggest, the Bible. This truth is that every group that we can be part of will have some ‘goal’ towards which it is gently (or not so gently) pushing us. The ‘pushing’ will come through the different practices we are encouraged to participate in and what our eyes are drawn towards. As the theologian James KA Smith has argued, micro-actions have macro-implications for our lives. These micro-actions have a deeply liturgical component if they are done in any regular form.



One famous example is the American dream: living in the USA is to have a particular ‘goal’ of life thrust upon you almost everywhere you go. The consumer dream of having whatever you want is programmed into you whenever you see an advert on TV or walk around a mall. The importance of security and protecting what is rightfully yours comes through watching the news or listening to politicians. This can be observed on a much smaller scale through the practices of a nuclear family. A family who cares about the environment may practice eating less meat, or one that values lavish experiences may exists from foreign holiday to foreign holiday (at least after lockdown). Whether it’s a football team you support, your friends at the pub or an online chat group, each community you are part of will in some sense, and to differing degrees, be forming you.


What Smith and other ‘cultural liturgists’ want to make us aware of is that most of the formation we undergo is, in fact, subconscious. When we watch adverts on TV, we often don’t really pay attention, but somehow what we observe goes deep into our psyches. Smith cites psychology studies which suggest around 95% of what we do on a daily basis is done without conscious, deliberative choice. We just do things because they are so natural to us, like riding a bike, walking or even breathing.


I listened to a podcast recently with Chris Tilling and Lincoln Harvey about the theologian Robert Jenson. Harvey was talking about how Jenson’s theological approach is all about ensuring Jesus and his gospel are the starting point for any metaphysics for Christians. In other words, Jenson wants us to be aware of and attack any assumptions that do not begin with the fact that Jesus is Lord of the universe, the parts of our subconscious that simply go unchallenged because we’re barely aware that they are even there.


This links very closely to the work of Stanley Hauerwas which has impacted me deeply in recent years. Hauerwas wants us to be aware of which communities are the most formative for us. He wants Christians to wake up to the fact that our immediate responses to situations will tell us about which community is most formative for us. Perhaps the best example is that of violently protecting what is rightfully ours. This is such an engrained perspective in Western liberal democracies (probably most obvious in the USA), that it drives so many to own guns as a fundamental right. Hauerwas says anyone exhibiting this response has had their mind and heart more formed by the fact that they are an American than they are a Christian, given everything Jesus says about loving our enemies and not holding tightly to what is rightfully ours.


The question for Christians to consider in all this, is where are you being most formed? It is not a bad thing to be formed in and through the different communities we are part of. Many businesses, families and friendship groups are healthy and well-oriented. I want to suggest, however, that the place Christians should be most formed is in the church, as this is the primary community (or ‘body’) Christians have been called into which should have the God revealed in Jesus Christ as it’s ‘goal’, the person towards which everything is geared. This is not to say that some churches are better than others at facilitating this formation – there are some churches we probably actively do not want to be formed in! Many of the churches in America certainly seem to underpin a racist outlook which forms its people. I would suggest that churches that produce such people are more captured by the vision of patriotism and nationalism than the Lordship of Christ. Discerning the ‘goal’ towards which a particular church is oriented is not simple, and is something that should never be taken for granted.


It is also not to say that the work of the Holy Spirit is confined to the church, far from it. God will often come to the church in the form of the stranger to challenge any sense of smugness the church might develop in this regard.


Corporate and faithful worship is, however, crucial to the task of being a Christian. Without the constant returning time and again to the (hopefully diverse) body of people who explicitly worship the God revealed in Jesus, it is so easy to lose the centrality of the fact that this God’s fullest revelation is in fact in this person who lived in the middle-east around 2,000 years ago who ended up being crucified on a cross. Following Jesus requires training as Paul suggests in 1 Tim. 4.8-16. There is no ultimate ‘point’ to worship, than simply to glorify God, but if it is done right, the inevitable consequence is that when we are sent from gathering as the church into the world, we are so formed that what we learn to do in church simply overflows into the rest of our lives. We are sent like a letter (2 Cor. 3.3) to be ambassadors for Christ in the world (2 Cor. 5.20) – this is not withdrawal to a holy club. When we fix our gaze on the living God it should not leave us unchanged and others should be able to perceive this.


It may often not look particularly impressive, but God’s primary response to evil in the world is to raise up a people who are not governed by the defeated powers and principalities (Col. 2.15), but exist to show what life looks like when God’s rule is unopposed, and whose kingdom this is. As Lesslie Newbigin writes, “The only possible hermeneutic of the gospel is a congregation which believes it." In Hauerwas’ words, without the church, we do not even know we need saving. Another way to put this is that when people say they don’t need to go to church because their primary way of communing with God is on the golf course or walking in the woods, you can be sure they’re talking crap.


Through the simple acts of singing, hearing scripture read out loud, preaching and fellowship, we are being formed through the Spirit, so that our assumptions are, however slowly, being drawn away from the other groups that clamour for our love (like our nation-states), and formed in the image of Christ.


This brief reflection only scratches the surface of the idea of cultural liturgies. This is not an uncontested perspective (see Lauren Winner’s critique here, and Willie James Jennings’ here), but it is one that I believe has much to offer as the world becomes odder by the day and we move further and further from Christendom. Let us be aware of how we are being formed, and strive towards a place where our unconscious assumptions are deeply formed by Christ through his Spirit.

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