You become what you love, not what you think.
Practice, not belief, is primary - our doings precede our thinkings.
A religion is essentially bound up with the communal form of its practices : the material practices shape the subjectivity of adherents, making it possible to experience and construe the world in certain ways.
After all, Christ did not come to bring us doctrines, but His body, the Church, which enfolds us into its economy of life, shapes how we receive, and think of, the world , scripture, and God.
By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.
Georges Florovsky wrote
“From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a doctrine, but exactly a community. There was not only a Message to be proclaimed and delivered, and Good News to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited."
Florovsky's assessment highlights the priority of the ecclesial body over its own message and doctrine. The goal of early Christian preaching was not to establish and defend doctrine, but to inaugurate and develop a community of disciples.
As Francis Young points out, "religion" was not about doctrines or dogma's, but ritual. You shared a meal with your god, there was a communion, a give and take, perhaps even an exchange of life.
It was about initiation, not information.
Religion is a habitus, a disposition of the soul to be in the world a certain way.
Living liturgically is not optional.
Our present cultural liturgies shape our perception to occlude the presence of wonder and the Divine.
The things of God are not obvious or clear to a darkened heart.
Faith is a means of perception that requires a change in the agent of perception.
By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.
RR Reno remarks,
One of our great temptations in the modern era has been to evade responsibility for the proper formation of our prejudices. We seek fact-based truths, a mode of knowing that we imagine is secure against our vices…
As Newman put it, we hope that knowledge does not require preparation of our hearts.
Thus the quintessential modern presupposition: “Truth is to be approached without homage.”
In this personal engagement with truth, a man’s moral character is as decisive as his native intelligence.”
You must take responsibility for the types of beliefs you wish to hold.
Knowledge requires preparation of the heart, which is just as decisive as intelligence.
The type of person you are, how you live, will determine the kinds of things you will know.
In general, people know what they want to know, hence educating desire is imperative.
Asad, in his Genealogies of Religion writes :
"The formation/transformation of moral dispositions ... required a particular program of disciplinary practices.
The rites that were prescribed by that program did not simply evoke or release universal emotions, they aimed to construct and reorganize distinctive emotions
– desire (cupiditas/carita ), humility (humilitas), remorse (contritio) –on which the central Christian virtue of obedience to God depended.
This point must be stressed, because the emotions mentioned here are not universal human feelings, not ‘powerful drives and emotions associated with human physiology
They are historically speciļ¬c emotions that are structured internally and related to each other in historically determined ways.
And they are the product not of mere readings of symbols but of processes of power."
James KA Smith on the difference between the cold abstraction of ideology and proper religious *living :
“The sacramental imagination begins from the assumption that our discipleship depends not only—not even primarily—on the conveyance of ideas into our minds, but on our immersion in embodied practices and rituals that form us into the kind of people God calls us to be.
…worship stages a recovery of the aesthetic aspects of the Christian tradition as a crucial means for redirecting our imagination in community—a means for reordering our love.
We were created for stories, not propositions; for drama, not bullet points.
…worship resists such reductionism by reclaiming the holistic, full-orbed materiality of liturgical worship that activates all the senses: hearing (not just “messages” but the poetry of the preached Word), sight (with a renewed appreciation for the visual arts, iconicity, and the architectural space of worship), touch (in communal engagement, but also touching the bread that is Christ’s body), taste (the body and blood), and even smell (of wine in the cup of the new covenant but also the fragrance of worship in candles and incense).
…..in the rhythms and cadences of full-orbed Christian worship, we learn something about the gospel that we couldn’t learn in any other way—and might not even be able to put into words.
Carried in the practices of Christian worship is an understanding of God that we “know” on a register deeper than the intellect, an understanding of the gospel on the level of the imagination that changes how we comport ourselves in the world, even if we can never quite articulate it in beliefs or doctrines or a Christian worldview.”
Yes, we are moved more than we are convinced.
Our present cultural liturgies shape our perception to occlude the presence of wonder and the Divine.
The things of God are not obvious or clear to a darkened heart.
Faith is a means of perception that requires a change in the agent of perception.
By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.
RR Reno remarks,
One of our great temptations in the modern era has been to evade responsibility for the proper formation of our prejudices. We seek fact-based truths, a mode of knowing that we imagine is secure against our vices…
As Newman put it, we hope that knowledge does not require preparation of our hearts.
Thus the quintessential modern presupposition: “Truth is to be approached without homage.”
In this personal engagement with truth, a man’s moral character is as decisive as his native intelligence.”
You must take responsibility for the types of beliefs you wish to hold.
Knowledge requires preparation of the heart, which is just as decisive as intelligence.
The type of person you are, how you live, will determine the kinds of things you will know.
In general, people know what they want to know, hence educating desire is imperative.
Asad, in his Genealogies of Religion writes :
"The formation/transformation of moral dispositions ... required a particular program of disciplinary practices.
The rites that were prescribed by that program did not simply evoke or release universal emotions, they aimed to construct and reorganize distinctive emotions
– desire (cupiditas/carita ), humility (humilitas), remorse (contritio) –on which the central Christian virtue of obedience to God depended.
This point must be stressed, because the emotions mentioned here are not universal human feelings, not ‘powerful drives and emotions associated with human physiology
They are historically speciļ¬c emotions that are structured internally and related to each other in historically determined ways.
And they are the product not of mere readings of symbols but of processes of power."
James KA Smith on the difference between the cold abstraction of ideology and proper religious *living :
“The sacramental imagination begins from the assumption that our discipleship depends not only—not even primarily—on the conveyance of ideas into our minds, but on our immersion in embodied practices and rituals that form us into the kind of people God calls us to be.
…worship stages a recovery of the aesthetic aspects of the Christian tradition as a crucial means for redirecting our imagination in community—a means for reordering our love.
We were created for stories, not propositions; for drama, not bullet points.
…worship resists such reductionism by reclaiming the holistic, full-orbed materiality of liturgical worship that activates all the senses: hearing (not just “messages” but the poetry of the preached Word), sight (with a renewed appreciation for the visual arts, iconicity, and the architectural space of worship), touch (in communal engagement, but also touching the bread that is Christ’s body), taste (the body and blood), and even smell (of wine in the cup of the new covenant but also the fragrance of worship in candles and incense).
…..in the rhythms and cadences of full-orbed Christian worship, we learn something about the gospel that we couldn’t learn in any other way—and might not even be able to put into words.
Carried in the practices of Christian worship is an understanding of God that we “know” on a register deeper than the intellect, an understanding of the gospel on the level of the imagination that changes how we comport ourselves in the world, even if we can never quite articulate it in beliefs or doctrines or a Christian worldview.”
Yes, we are moved more than we are convinced.
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