I've started reading James K. A. Smith's Imagining the Kingdom, which is a follow up to his Desiring the Kingdom. He succinctly summarizes his previous book in response to his critics:
The argument of Desiring the Kingdom is not that we need less than worldview, but more: Christian education will only be fully an education to the extent that it is also a formation of our habits. And such formation happens not only, or even primarily, by equipping the intellect but through the repetitive formation of embodied, communal practices. And the "core" of those formative practices is centered in the practices of Christian worship (10).
Smith argues that "the way to the heart is through the body and the way to the body is through story" (14). Smith seems to be arguing against the primacy of the intellect, and for the primacy of the body.
He maintains that we don't merely have a body but we are a body. I think Smith means that we are a body but not merely a body. If we were merely a body we would lose our identity when we die. Death is the unnatural separation of body and soul. We continue in our personal identity after the body is laid down but this unnatural state is remedied by the resurrection.
Smith's emphasis is well taken but we need to remember that when God breathed into us we became a living soul. In other words, God prepared a body to be united to the soul, but the soul itself animates the body. In this way, the soul can continue to preserve the human self separate from the body.
Instead of arguing for the primacy of the mind or the primacy of the body in forming the heart, I think we need to see the mind and body in a democracy. They are united in the image of God and both play an equal role in forming the heart. The intellectual tends to underestimate the body and the hedonist underestimates the mind.
