James K. A. Smith's IWU Lecture: Beyond Integration

"What do you get when you cross a Pentecostal with Calvin College," muses Keith Drury. Answer: "A Wesleyan."

James K. A. Smith of Calvin College (originally a Pentecostal) had those in attendance from the IWU religion division purring today as he gave his lecture, "Beyond Integration: Re-Narrating Christian Scholarship in Postmodernity." Several of us were whispering to each other and thinking throughout, "That's what we've been saying at our Friday lunches." I added, "The main difference between him and us is the footnotes."

1. Smith began with some undoing. First, he addressed the rhetoric of worldview that Christians are fond to throw around. The problem--Christians who use this language almost always treat Christianity as if its essence is a set of cognitive beliefs, "brains on a stick," as Smith put it.

By the way, this I gather is perhaps the biggest distinction between Reformed epistemology and Smith's "radical orthodoxy." Reformed epistemology remains, so it seems, a largely cognitive matter. Or to draw on Heidegger as Smith did, it tends to focus on "knowledge" (Wissen) rather than "understanding" (Verstehen).

[A by the way on the "by the way," this distinction is for me a good example of the frustration I have often experienced when reading philosophers. The distinction Heidegger makes with these two words isn't something you would know out of the blue. He used these words in specialized ways that you have to "catch" the meaning of. Philosophers (not all, certainly not Smith today) have a tendency to make up their own language and then call you stupid because you don't understand them.]

Anyway, "understanding" for Heidegger involves more than just the head. It involves a person's being or the heart as Smith talked about today. More on this in a moment.

Smith critiques talk of "worldview" in Christian circles because it tends to reduce the issue of a Christian approach to knowledge to a matter of the head. It treats humans strictly as "thinking-things," as he put it. No doubt Smith is far less fond of Descartes than I am, whom he blames for starting us down this modernist trajectory.

2. Having critiqued talk of worldview, he proceeds to undo talk of integration. Here he found many Amens from the religion division, that has long bemoaned what often passes for integration of faith and learning in Christian circles. Someone with a doctoral level knowledge of, say, sociology, tries to integrate their discipline with a Sunday School level knowledge of theology.

Here he had a number of images similar to those we've observed. Integration is not a matter of how many "jpm's" you have in a lecture (mentions of "Jesus per minute"). Nor is it simply a matter of coming at things from a theistic point of view--we're Christian theists who believe in a Trinity and that's different from a mere theist. You can't slap a Bible reference on something and call it integration.

3. He then proceeds with the postmodern critique of pretenses to knowledge. He notes that God created us finite even before the Fall, and in that respect God did not make us to have a God's eye view of reality even in our perfect state. Further, the Fall has seriously marred our ability to apprehend truth well beyond our mere finitude.

Smith comes to advocate not apologetics, but "unapologetics," a vision for Christian scholarship that does not try to defend itself but begins at its very starting point with the "thick" presuppositions of Christian faith.

4. The final part of Smith's speech was apparently experimental--don't commit him fully to it yet--but we loved it. Here he built off of Charles Taylor's idea of the "social imaginary." The connections I made with this line were with recent intersections between philosophy and cognitive science, something Joel Green has considered seriously of late and that shows up in his Seized by Truth.

One fundamental idea here is that the majority of the things we "know" our way through in life are known on a "preconscious" level. For me, the best example of this is driving. A person can drive for hours on end without having a fully conscious thought about the mechanics of driving.

When people like Richard Hays or Joel Green talk about a "conversion of the imagination," they are really talking about a transformation of this part of our mind, the underlying part that is so much more who were are than the surface level thoughts we have and express.

It is on this "gut level" part of our being that Smith thinks Christian integration is really supposed to take place, and he further suggests that the very center of such integration is in our worship. Repeatedly the Eucharist or communion came out of his conscious/subconscious as he described worship.

Rather than "I believe in order to understand," he suggests "I worship in order to understand." He is aiming at a Christian "understanding" that is embedded in rituals, integration on a tactile level. Christian education is thus about forming love in your gut more than about informing your conscious mind. The purpose is not to do away with the rational but to situate it in the "imaginary."

I'm not sure I fully "understand" the full force of these latter thoughts, although I fully agree that Christian education should be primarily about forming a Christian "imagination" and then only secondarily about information or the learning of skills.

This last thought resonated so strongly with those of us who will likely be designing the specifics of IWU's coming MDiv courses that it will likely permeate the whole program.