Desiring Animals

Reading James K.A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), I'm struck by how much I've made Christianity a cognitive exercise. I enjoy reading theology. I am grateful for the doctrine of the church, handed down to me from the saints, and ultimately sourced in God's word. I appreciate the reality that I am a thinking creature.

My focus on the didactic nature of discipleship, however, always carries a threat--that of making Christianity a cognitive exercise and something other than a matter of the heart. We are desiring creatures, first and foremost. We love. My love for Julie is not informed by documents, theories, or -ologies. There is something much deeper going on. So it is in my relationship with Jesus Christ.

I feel compelled to qualify this with a hundred-and-one conditions--faith in Christ is more than emotionalism, more than "Jesus-as-my-boyfriend", and more than some kind of subjective, experiential relationship. But it is not less than any of these things. Much as we in Reformed circles sometimes fear going down this path, our relationship with Christ is ultimately grounded not in doctrine or theology, but in love.

More than being an intelligent, well-read, theologically-astute, doctrinally-sound, cognitive, thinking machine, I want to be a man of love. Loving my wife; loving my kids; loving my friends; loving my church; loving my neighbor; and loving my God who loved me first and freed me to love.