We live in what one writer has called the "age of sensation." We think that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops our feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured.

Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p. 54

Education is not as much about the mind as it is about the affections, argues James K. A. Smith. From his book Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation:

What is education for? And more specifically, what is at stake in a distinctly Christian education? What does the qualifier Christian mean when appended to education? It is usually understood that education is about ideas and information (though it is also too often routinely reduced to credentialing for a career and viewed as a ticket to a job). And so distinctively Christian education is understood to be about Christian ideas--which usually requires a defense of the importance of "the life of the mind." On this account, the goal of a Christian education is the development of a Christian perspective, or more commonly now, a Christian worldview, which is taken to be a system of Christian beliefs, ideas, and doctrines.

But what if this line of thinking gets off on the wrong foot? What if education ... is not primarily about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires? What if we began by appreciating how education not only gets into our head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us by the [heart]? What if education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions -- our visions of "the good life" --- and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs to our thinking? What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? ...

What if education wasn't first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?

That is actually the wager of this book: It is an invitation to re-vision Christian education as a formative rather than just an informative project. (pp. 17-18)

A prayer from John Piper's Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ:

O Father of glory, this is the cry of our hearts--to be changed from one degree of glory to another, until, in the resurrection, at the last trumpet, we are completely conformed to the image of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Until then, we long to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord, especially the knowledge of his glory. We want to see it as clearly as we see the sun, and to savor it as deeply as our most desired pleasure. O merciful God, incline our hearts to your Word and the wonders of your glory. Wean us from our obsession with trivial things. Open the eyes of our hearts to see each day what the created universe is telling about your glory. Enlighten our minds to see the glory of your Son in the Gospel. We believe that you are the All-glorious One, and that there is none like you. Help our unbelief. Forgive the wandering of our affections and the undue attention we give to lesser things. Have mercy on us for Christ’s sake, and fulfill in us your great design to display the glory of your grace. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.

James K. A. Smith has recently written "Singing the Story into Our Bones," a thought-provoking article on music. Here's a few excerpts from this article that stood out to me.

"We tend to think of stories as childish things—the stuff of children’s sermons. We romanticize stories, to be sure, and wax nostalgic about them, but we also think of “story” as something to outgrow, like security blankets and Santa Claus. Story is part of the immature, benighted world of myth and fantasy and nursery rhymes—the childish things we put away in order to grow up and face the proverbial “real world” full of cold, hard facts."

"As Christians inhabiting this late-modern world (still so powerfully shaped by the Enlightenment), we have imbibed and absorbed functional stances toward both story and authority that can make us poor hearers of Scripture. Even more problematic, our implicit perceptions of both story and authority might explain why, despite our best intentions, we have a hard time receiving the Bible as authoritative. It’s pretty hard for us to reconcile the flannelgraph depictions of fantastical stories about fish and fiery furnaces when Monday to Friday we’re faced with the urgency and force of the stock reports in The Wall Street Journal. We are unconsciously conditioned in a million different ways to defer to the authority of the facts in Scientific American and be skeptical of the gospel “stories” precisely because they are stories."

"To be human is to be storied."

"If Christian worship is one of the ways that we are sanctified by the Spirit, then we might say worship is a kind of narrative therapy—a reordering of our narrative orientation. Sanctifying our perception requires restor(y)ing the imagination. This transformation requires aesthetic measures that resonate with the imagination and reach us on an affective level. Stories are not just nice little entertainments to jazz up the material; stories are not just some supplementary way of making content “interesting.” No, we learn through stories because we know by stories."

"The formative power of cultural narratives cannot be adequately countered with mere didactics. Counterformation requires countermeasures that capture our imagination, not just convince our intellect. So we need to be regularly immersed in God’s story—“the true story of the whole world,” as Michael Goheen calls it. Our imaginations need to be restored, recalibrated, and realigned by an affective immersion in the story of how God in Christ is reconciling the world to himself. Song seeps into our bones in ways that didactic information never will. To sing the story of God’s gracious acts is not just to recite them. In the embodied, affective rhythm of song, the Spirit plants the story in the epicenter of our being: in our desire, in our imagination. Singing the story is the way it gets into our bones and under our skin, shaping the very way we perceive our world."

We tend to vastly underestimate the importance of our bodies, but they are part of our being. We're not mere spirits who inhabit bodies. We are embodied, incarnated beings who tend not to be driven by our thoughts, but by something more basic — our affections, or even, as James K. A. Smith puts it in Desiring the Kingdom, our gut. I was reminded of this fact as I came across this passage last night in Jerome Jerome's Three Men in a Boat:

How good one feels when one is full — how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal — so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted.  

It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions. After eggs and bacon, it says, "Work!" After beefsteak and porter, it says, "Sleep!" After a cup of tea (two spoonsful for each cup, and don't let it stand more than three minutes), it says to the brain, "Now, rise, and show your strength. Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature and into life; spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god- like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!" 

After hot muffins, it says, "Be dull and soulless, like a beast of the field — a brainless animal, with listless eye, unlit by any ray of fancy, or of hope, or fear, or love, or life." And after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, it says, "Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men may laugh — drivel in folly, and splutter in senseless sounds, and show what a helpless ninny is poor man whose wit and will are drowned, like kittens, side by side, in half an inch of alcohol." 

We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach, and diet it with care and judgment. Then virtue and contentment will come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own; and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father — a noble, pious man.

From Chadwick's introduction to Augustine's Confessions:

At the end of his life Augustine wrote a review and reappraisal of his output, the Retractationes. . . . When he came to the Confessions he observes that they serve to excite the human mind and affection towards God; the act of writing the book had done that for himself at the time, and "that is the effect when it is read now." 

Jonathan Edwards reminds us that our motivation to serve Christ should not be fear, but our desires, our affections, our loves. The following is from "Advice to Young Converts" (emphasis mine): 

When the exercise of grace is at a low ebb, and corruption prevails, and by that means fear prevails, don't desire to have fear cast out any other way than by the reviving and prevailing of love, for it is not agreeable to the method of God's wise dispensations that it should be cast out any other way. When love is asleep, the saints need fear to restrain them from sin, and therefore it is so ordered that at such times fear comes upon them, and that more or less as love sinks. But when love is in lively exercise, persons don't need fear. The prevailing of love in the heart naturally tends to cast out fear as darkness in a room vanishes away as you let more and more of the perfect beams of the sun into it: "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." (1 John 4:18)

My article Christian Education: The Formation of Desire is up on Teacher Talk today.

Saint Augustine: A Penguin Life by Garry Wills
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the last few months, I noticed that several books I had been enjoying were influenced strongly by Augustine—in particular, C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce and James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom.

Also, Augustine was influential on Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and he has been influential as well on John Piper, a writer whose books have helped me grow spiritually.

One connection to Augustine that each of these writers holds is Augustine’s anthropology. Augustine sees the human being not primarily as a thinker, but as lover—not primarily a thinking being, but a desiring being. In today’s world, dominated by Enlightenment thinking, some Christians see the core of our being as the mind, our thoughts. But Augustine knew better. Augustine saw the core of our being not in the head, but in our desires, our affections. For Augustine, becoming a Christian involves God sovereignly transforming a person’s affections so that the person desires Him above all else. In other words, salvation involves the mind, but it equally involves the changing of a person’s desires so that God is loved for His own sake, and not for any other reason.

So anyway, when I saw Garry Wills’ bio of Augustine at the library last week, I picked it up, and I read the book in about three days. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It’s scholarly and yet readable, and at only 150 pages, it’s short enough that it’s not overwhelming.

A few quick thoughts:

1. I love the story of Augustine’s conversion. As an unconverted man, Augustine had struggled with sexual sins, and was unwilling to repent from them to follow Christ. As he was wrestling with his soul one afternoon in a garden in Milan, he overheard a voice, maybe of a little girl in a nearby house: “Take up and read!” Seeing this as providential, he got up, took a copy of the Scriptures, and opened it up. The verse he opened to was Romans 13:14: “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.” Augustine says, “The very instant I finished that sentence, light was flooding my heart with assurance, and every shadow of doubt evanesced.” Again, it was Augustine’s desires that were changed. He had thought the right things, but that afternoon, his affections were directed to God.

2. I was fascinated by how Augustine’s thought developed over the course of his lifetime. For example, Augustine moved over the course of his ministry from a neo-Platonist disdain of the material realm to a Biblical acceptance and embracing of the material realm as good--because it was created by a good God. Originally, as a new believer, Augustine was an ascetic. But at the end of his life, he was defending the institution of marriage from attacks by Jerome, who had said that marriage caused defilement (because it involved the body). Augustine certainly wasn’t perfect as a man or as a thinker, but he had an amazing capacity to work through intellectual problems and the humility to change his positions as he felt led by God to do so.

3. It was interesting to me that Augustine was so involved in the work of his local ministry. He was a pastor, and he was constantly dealing with situations in his church. I had pictured him as someone sitting in a study all day, writing and thinking lofty thoughts detached from the world. But this isn’t what Augustine’s life was like at all. He was constantly pre-occupied with practical issues in his congregation and with issues in other churches nearby.

4. Wills also gave me a better idea of what the early church was like. He describes leaders like Jerome and Ambrose, as well as church councils, which could get surprisingly rowdy. Wills sees Jerome as a crotchety and argumentative man, highly unlikable, and unable to keep friends. Ambrose, who baptized Augustine, was someone who Augustine respected more and more over the course of his lifetime.

5. Finally, I was struck by the importance of writing in Augustine's life. Augustine wrote for himself, and writing helped him clarify his thoughts. Augustine also did much of his work as a pastor and as a church leader through letters, sermons, and other forms of writing.



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What happens in meditation is that we create the emotional and spiritual space which allows Christ to construct an inner sanctuary in the heart. The wonderful verse "I stand at the door and knock . . ."  was originally penned for believers, not unbelievers (Rev. 3:20). We who have turned our lives over to Christ need to know how very much he longs to eat with us, to commune with us. He desires a perpetual Eucharistic feast in the inner sanctuary of the heart. Mediation opens the door and, although we are engaging in specific meditation exercises at specific times, the aim is to bring this living reality into all of life. It is a portable sanctuary that is brought into all we are and do.

Inward fellowship of this kind transforms the inner personality. We cannot burn the eternal flame of the inner sanctuary and remain the same, for the Divine Fire will consume everything that is impure. Our ever-present Teacher will always be leading us into "righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit" (Rom. 14:17). Everything that is foreign to his way we will have to let go. No, not "have to" but "want to," for our desires and aspirations will be more and more conformed to his way. Increasingly, everything within us will swing like a needle to the polestar of the Spirit.

Richard Foster, The Celebration of Discipline

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:21, ESV

"Love God and do whatever you please: for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved."

St. Augustine