A Brief Theology of Sport

Lincoln Harvey

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780334044185
• eBook ISBN: 9780334052104
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Sport is extremely popular. This ground-breaking book explains why. It shows that sport has everything to do with our deepest identity. It is where we resonate with the most-basic nature of reality. A Brief Theology of Sport sweeps across the fields of church history, philosophy and Christian doctrine, drawing the reader into a creative vision of sport.

Part 1 Historical Soundings

1 Ancient Sports and Religion

A question for the first part of the book: how has the Church engaged with sports?

If we take the meandering course of history as a whole, we discover that the Church has – thus far – struggled to celebrate sport. In fact, the opposite is more often the case. Though particular sports are from time to time used as part of the evangelistic strategy of local churches, sport has seldom been celebrated in and of itself. Instead, sport has been viewed with suspicion. This is because the Church thinks sport is inextricably caught up in the idolatrous worship of false gods. It is linked to the pagan celebration of the power of nature simply in and of itself. Therefore ecclesial history – again, thus far – confronts the Christian with a challenge. Is it possible to reconcile the gospel with a love for sport or must Christians recognize that sport has no place in the Christian life?

This stark choice will strike many people as odd today. That is because we will know – or ourselves be – the type of Christian who embraces the life of faith while fully participating in the world of sport. It is therefore quite hard for modern Christians to imagine how playing ice hockey could undermine their love for Jesus, or an enjoyment of baseball be opposed to a lively faith. Of course, we will all know there are times when the Christian’s love for sport will clash with the life of discipleship, with Sundays often proving a crunch point. Sports fans regularly have to choose between going to church and attending a game; loyalties can be torn. But in this day and age, Christians are pretty good at getting the two worlds to run in parallel. As a result, a lot of Christians will find it difficult to imagine how an afternoon on the golf course can impact their devotion to Jesus Christ. Kept far enough apart, sport and faith can live happily together.

This is not to say that Christians will not have doubts niggling away at the back of their minds. They will have questions to do with brutal competition and the radical call to forgiving charity. How can someone love their neighbour while at the same time pursue victory over them? But this tricky ­question – important though it is – is a million miles from the stark question raised by history. Is sport fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith?

To understand where this question comes from – and its pressing nature – we need to recognize that religion has always been woven into sport, and vice versa. If we dig down a little, we soon discover that ancient sporting tournaments were held in temples and plenty of altars have been placed in stands, with the rules and regulations of sporting contests often being determined by cultic myths about the super­natural ordering of the universe. This will also sound strange to some Christians today. It is hard to imagine what football – for example – has to do with the harmonious ordering of the universe (even if we do sense the quasi-religious nature of contemporary fandom). For many, the religious life finds its expression away from the sports field and is not expressed through it. In fact, religion is often over-spiritualized today, with the body becoming an obstacle to the pursuit of mystical experience. Think only of the popular flight through the navel, achieved through the stilling and transcending of the body and entry into the abstracted stillness of a Zen-like state. These contemporary forms of Gnosticism – an ancient esoteric sect, distrustful of matter – seek to escape embodiment by accessing a superior spiritual realm. Whatever cosmic force the practitioner dissolves into, it is rarely celebrated for its dynamic physicality.

That said, the compartmentalization of the Christian life – where trips to watch Arsenal are irrelevant to life at the ­altar! – is often this Gnostic mistake moved only a notch. But history teaches us something quite different. Usually, sport and religion are not separated. History instead muddies the two. The burden of this chapter is to justify this claim.

II

A proposition with which to begin: neither local nor new, sport is universal.

In many respects, our first proposition is not true. Sports can be local. Americans enjoy baseball, the Irish enjoy hurling, and the game of cricket piggybacked on the sprawling British Empire. Likewise, sports can be new. Skateboarding, snowboarding and synchronized swimming – to name but obvious examples – have only recently emerged, while sports such as Indy Car racing, speedway and waterskiing have relied on technological developments in motorized transport. Nevertheless, it remains true to say that sport is neither local nor new. This is because sport has been played always and everywhere.1

Consider North America. Today, Americans love sport. American football, baseball and basketball are the most popular, drawing in their legions of fans from across the land. But sport stretches not only across American terrain; it also stretches back in American time. When the first European settlers arrived at the end of the fifteenth century, they discovered that the indigenous peoples were already playing sport. The local people were enjoying competitive archery, javelin and racing contests, as well as more exotic-sounding games like ‘snow snake’ (in which darts were glided across a frozen lake) and ‘stickball’ (a forerunner to the modern sport of lacrosse).2 Stickball was known by many names, among which stand out ‘little war’ (da-nah-wah’uwsdi), ‘little brother of war’ (Tewaarathon), ‘bump hips’ (baaga’adowe), and ‘men hit rounded object’ (dehuntshigwa’es). As these descriptive names suggest, stickball was a war-like game involving a stick-like instrument. It was played with two teams – often neighbouring tribes – with the number of players ranging anywhere from a dozen through into the hundreds. The duration of the game was also variable, sometimes hours, sometimes days, with the playing area ranging from 100 feet to several miles in length. The basic game, however, was consistent in shape. Two goals were set up, using either a natural object (perhaps a rock or a tree) or something tailored for the job (a long pole, up to eight metres in height, tipped with intricate carvings of fishes, birds or animals). Players would then hit a ball towards the target, with points being awarded for a direct strike. Beyond this, however, little was ruled out and little ruled in. Tackling therefore featured strongly – bump hips! – with the resulting free-for-all involving violent off-the-ball wrestling. The game was often reduced to little more than a sprawling melee of writhing bodies. As one of its names suggests, this ancient sport really did look like a ‘little brother of war’.

Africa’s story is similar to America’s.3 Sport has been played everywhere, always. In the Sudan, for example, before Western colonists arrived, entire villages would gather for community wrestling tournaments. The Nuba tribe – to take a well-studied example – would begin their tournaments with dramatic rituals, first covering the wrestlers in ghostly ash to prepare their entrance into the borderlands of death. Once ashed in this way, the wrestlers were adorned with long woven tails (thought to symbolize the cattle on which the tribe depended, a connection further emphasized by the bellowing roars and stamping of feet that dominated proceedings). Thus prepared, the contestants would adopt a sumo-like pose, roaring wildly and then suddenly striking, pulling, grappling and drawing their opponent down into the dust.4

Likewise in India:5 ancient texts such as the Ramayana (composed between 500 and 300 bc) and the Mahabharata (authored between 400 bc and ad 400) show that sporting tournaments were held over 3,000 years ago, with the same being true in China. Cuju – now recognized to be the distant ancestor of football – can be traced back to the sixth century bc. It is mentioned in the Shiji (an ancient Chinese text), as well as becoming the subject of an instruction book during the Han dynasty. This game – over 2,000 years old – was linked to the Chinese Zodiac, with the pitch representing the earth, the ball a heavenly body, and the various players different Zodiac signs.6

Our basic point is therefore made: both past and present, people across the world have played sport. Sport, we might say, is a cultural universal. This is our first proposition.7

III

A second proposition: religion is also a universal.

Just like sport, religion is woven into the fabric of human life.8 People invariably understand themselves in relation to the divine.9 Of course – just like sport – there are regional dialects. Some people speak of faraway gods looking down from on high. Others speak of local gods inhabiting crops and herds. Others will worship the sun, moon and stars. There seems to be no limit to the religious imagination. The stories of the gods are kaleidoscopic.

Though limits are few, family resemblances exist. Whatever theological story is told, the narrative will shape how the people live. It is an understanding of the divine that helps humans make sense of the world. By it we describe the nature of reality and interpret events, but we also determine our rights from our wrongs, with the entire complexity of the moral universe being formed in the telling of the story. What we say about the gods – both positively and negatively – provides the co-ordinates by which a course is plotted through life. Simply put, religion underwrites the meaning humans find in the world.

Religion – to speak again in the most general of terms – is the organized form of behaviour that enables a people to tell their story of th...

Table of contents

• A Brief Theology of Sport
• Contents
• Introduction A Question of Sport
• Part 1 Historical Soundings
• 1 Ancient Sports and Religion
• 2 Classical Sports and Religion
• 3 The Early Church’s View of Sport
• 4 Case Study (I): Sport and the Medieval Catholic Church
• 5 Case Study (II): Sport, Puritans and Muscular Christians
• Part 2 Analytic Soundings
• 6 Notes on Sport: A Working Definition
• 7 Towards a Christian Theology of Sport
• 8 The Liturgical Celebration of Contingency: A Brief Theology of Sport
• 9 Exploration and Explanation: Seven Avenues for Further Thought
• 10 Concluding Comments: Christians and Sport Today
• Bibliography