YOU ARE WHAT YOU LOVE:
The Spiritual Power of Habit
By James K A Smith
Brazos Press. 224 pages. £15.57
ISBN 978 1 587 433 801
Listed as one of 2016’s top ten evangelical books to read, this book has been recommended on various evangelical websites and by renowned evangelical Christian leaders. That is both astonishing and alarming, because this is a dangerous book – one that could even lead people back to pre-Reformation religion.
Smith seems disenchanted with Word-based Christian ministry and discipleship. He longs for the worship of God’s gathered people to be ‘tactile, tangible, incarnate’.
Smells and bells
He argues for a rediscovery, not just of past Christian liturgy, but also of many practices abandoned by those who embraced the Reformation. He believes this to be effective both in discipleship and evangelism. He claims that: ‘It will be “ancient” Christian communities – drawing on wells of historic, “incarnate” Christian worship with its smells and bells and all its Gothic peculiarity, embodying a spirituality that carries whiffs of transcendence – that will be strange and therefore all the more enticing.’ (p.102)
Serious problems
Clearly there are a number of serious problems with this book. First, there’s a strong sense that preaching, teaching, Bible reading, study and memorising are insufficient. His disaffection reveals itself here: ‘The later Reformers emphasised the simple hearing of the Word, the message of the gospel and the arid simplicity of Christian worship…disembodying the Christian faith, turning it into a heady affair that could be boiled down to a message and grasped with the mind … Christianity reduced to something for brains-on-a-stick.’ (p.101)
Unfortunately, this book repeatedly caricatures Word-based ministry as only imparting information. Smith’s constantly negative depiction of Word-based Christian ministry is nowhere alleviated by any example of heart-stirring, imaginative, Spirit-empowered preaching, teaching or writing.
Instead, Smith is attracted to a host of religious ‘extras’: such things as Gothic architecture, candles, images or statues, and ‘enchanted objects’. Smith must have read Hebrews, or Colossians 2.20-23, but there is no sense of the important fact that Old Testament physical, tangible, tactile forms of worship have been superseded in Jesus and the gospel age by the true reality that those physical forms merely foreshadowed. Which is why – other than water used for baptism, and bread and wine used for the Lord’s Supper – there is no mention of these ‘extras’ in the New Testament.
In the church
Smith also has a mystical view of gathered Sunday worship (liturgy) and uses OT language about church buildings that is not reflected in the NT. Despite stating that church buildings don’t hold ‘a superstitious magic’, he refers to ‘sacred sites’ in ‘the sanctuary’ and ‘the mundane yet magical elements that children see at Communion’ (p.141); and uses the OT term ‘priest’ for a church leader. (p.180)
You will find some insights in the book and it is provocative, as some reviews have pointed out. Smith has in his sights a number of failings in contemporary Christian faith and culture that we would do well to be aware of, particularly with regard to the shallowness and cultural compromise of what we may be communicating without words in our meetings together.
Dangerous
However, this book is more than merely provocative: it is also dangerous. A summary of the things he commends and which clearly excite him is illuminating. His examples of those who, in his view, have got Christian worship or thinking right are often Roman Catholic or occasionally Orthodox or mystical (Taizé); none are evangelical.
There is no mention of preaching, though many of the things that Smith seeks – feeling and seeing with our imaginations the truth of God’s Word, biblical visions that captivate us – are given to God’s people in prophetic, Spirit-filled Bible preaching. There is no thought given to the fact that liturgy is not mentioned or described in the NT.
Religion and the sinful heart
Nor does Smith seem to understand how much religiosity is a product of sinful fallen nature. The fact is, it is appealing to people because it chimes with our desire to justify ourselves and confirm ourselves in self-righteousness, as the Pharisees did.
Unfortunately, we have to conclude that this author seems to have serious deficiencies in his understanding of both Scripture and church history. Worse, his valid critiques of some aspects of the contemporary Christian scene overstep the mark by caricaturing evangelicals, and even some of the Reformers, as simplistic and arid.
Away from Scripture
This book is calling us away from: the primacy of Scripture, Spirit-empowered preaching and teaching, Word-based mentoring and discipleship, and confidence in the words of God alone to equip us for every good work. Rather, in gospel-centred church gatherings evangelical Christians seek to exclude all the extravagance, mystification, alienating strangeness, ‘highbrow-ness’, temptation to self-justification, remoteness from everyday life and the compartmentalised tick-box mentality of fallen, Scripture-blind religiosity.
It is a matter of concern that You Are What You Love has been commended by not a few evangelical leaders and organisations and/or indirectly promoted without critique.
