Archive for March, 2012

Does God Care About Sports?

Saturday, March 31st, 2012

Timothy Dalrymple, in his blog on Patheos writes about Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin. I commend it to you.

“Isn’t it degrading to suggest that God cares about sports? Isn’t that anthropomorphizing? Are we, like the ancient Greeks with their stories of gods who did all sorts of silly and petty and naughty things, really supposed to imagine that God dons a cheese-wedge upon his head and roots for the Packers?

With war and famine, death and disease, doesn’t God have better things to do? Aren’t sports beneath his dignity, unworthy of his time and station?

In the process of writing Jeremy Lin: The Reason for the Linsanity (official release date is May 8th), I had abundant opportunity to reflect upon these things. Tim Tebow had been congratulated by many in the media for not talking as though “God gave us the victory.” He thanked God less for the outcome of games than for the opportunity to play in them. When Jeremy Lin first came upon the scene, there were some criticisms even when “Linsanity” was at fever pitch. Jeremy seemed to talk as though God were involved in his basketball career in very intimate ways — as though God not only gave him abilities and opportunities, but gave him successful outcomes — hitting a shot, having a great night, getting the win.

Jeremy’s spiritual mentors and teachers have generally been Reformed. The books he cites as favorites are from John Piper and C.J. Mahaney, and Jeremy’s reflections on his life and career consistently refer to a close and careful divine sovereignty. It’s what theologians have called providentia specialissima, God’s most fine-grained care in the minutiae of our lives.

When people protest the notion that God should care about sports, they tend to be (1) atheists or agnostics who doubt God’s existence in the first place and find the notion of God caring about sports particularly ridiculous, (2) de facto Deists who believe that God created the order of things and then sits back to watch it all unwind, (3) people of faith who believe that God guides history (through natural or supernatural means) in the broadest sense but does not get involved in the sordid details, or (4) just people of faith who really haven’t thought it through.

Of course God cares about sports. The Christian God is not a God who refuses to get in the trenches, not a God whose dignity prohibits him from getting involved in the sordid details of human life. The single most distinctive doctrine in all of Christianity is the doctrine of the Incarnation. Not that God drinks and frolics in the heavens, but that God entered into history as a human being, fully God and fully man, sinless but suffering, enduring all the meager indignities of human existence. This was the scandal of Christ in the ancient world — a God who stooped into the muck of our common condition, who entered the world in the blood and detritus of birth, an incarnate God who (not to put too fine a point on it) had runny noses and infections and diarrhea and who got that goop you get in your eyes in the morning. He died naked and mostly abandoned, with spit and blood and grime upon his body, with thorns puncturing the crown of his head and nails piercing his hands and feet, and…well, I could go on.

God cares about the details, if for no other reason, because God cares about us. We should affirm common grace: that just as God ordains the sun to shine upon the righteous and the wicked alike, God ordains victory for believers and unbelievers. God does not simply give the victory to the most righteous individual or team upon the field. We should make clear that we cannot manipulate the outcome, as though the right formula of prayers and genuflections and “aw shucks” humility can compel God to grant victory. But we should also affirm, whether or not we’re Reformed, that God cares about the details and working through sports is not beneath God’s dignity.

Perhaps we can be a bit more precise. God does not care about sports in themselves. God cares about the people who play them. God cares about the people who watch and enjoy sports and whose lives are affected by sports. And God works through sports, as God works through all things, for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Training the body is, or can be, a profound and necessary school for the spirit. And in today’s age, when so many Christians live lives of comfortable complacency, when the rigor and striving of faith have been so terribly deemphasized, sports can serve an important role in reminding us of the importance of discipline and collective sacrifice in the pursuit of a greater goal.

So if sports can help us grow closer to God and more mature in our faith — and they can — then yes, God cares about sports for what can be accomplished through them.

What, then, can be accomplished through them? How do sports help us, as athletes and as spectators, to understand God, to witness God, to love and live with God better? Tune in tomorrow for my thoughts on that question.”

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Unbelieving Preachers and Pluralism

Saturday, March 17th, 2012

Frederick Buechner, the author of more than thirty books, both fiction and non-fiction, and also an ordained Christian minister, writes in his memoir, Telling Secrets, about the time he taught preaching at Harvard Divinity School. He found the students in his class a diverse bunch, including some who were atheists. This is how he described them.

“A number of them were Unitarian Universalists who by their own definition were humanist atheists. One of them, a woman about my age, came to see me in my office one day to say that although many of things I had to teach about preaching she found interesting enough, few of them were of any practical use to people like her who did not believe in God. I asked her what she did believe in, and I remember the air of wistfulness with which she said that whatever it was it was hard to put into words….. I felt somehow floored and depressed by what she said. I think things like peace, kindness, social responsibility, honesty were the things she believed in… it was hard for me to imagine giving sermons about such things. I realized that if ideas were all I had to preach, I would take up some other line of work.

I had never understood so clearly before what preaching is to me. Basically, it is to proclaim a Mystery before which, before whom, even our most exalted ideas turn to straw. It is also to proclaim this Mystery with a passion that ideas alone have little to do with. It is to try to put the Gospel into words not the way you would compose an essay but the way you would write a poem or a love letter – putting your heart into it, your own excitement, most of all your own life. It is to speak words that you hope may, by grace, be bearers not simply of new understanding but of new life both for the ones you are speaking to and also for you. Out of that life, who knows what ideas about peace and honesty and social responsibility may come, but they are the fruits of the preaching, not the roots of it. Another Unitarian Universalist student said once that what he believed in was faith, and when I asked him faith in what, his answer was faith in faith. I don’t mean to disparage him – he was doing the best he could – but it struck me that having faith in faith was as barren as being in love with love or having money that you spend only on the accumulation of more money. It struck me too that to attend a divinity school when you did not believe in divinity involved a peculiarly depressing form of bankruptcy, and there were times as I wandered through those corridors that I felt a little like Alice on the far side of the looking glass.

Harvard Divinity School was proud, and justly so, of what it called its pluralism – feminists, humanists, theists, liberation theologians all pursuing truth together – but the price that pluralism can cost was dramatized one day in a way that I have never forgot. I had been speaking as candidly and personally as I knew how about my own faith and how I had tried over the years to express it in language. At the same time I had been trying to get the class to respond in kind. For the most part none of them were responding at all but just sitting there taking it in without saying a word. Finally I had to tell them what I thought. I said they reminded me of a lot of dead fish lying on cracked ice in a fish store window with their round blank eyes. There I was, making a fool of myself spilling out to them the secrets of my heart, and there they were, not telling me what they believed about anything beneath the level of their various causes. It was at that point that a black African got up and spoke. ‘The reason I do not say anything about what I believe,’ he said in his stately African English, ‘is that I’m afraid it will be shot down.’

At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost.”

These are important words for us to ponder on as we engage one another in argument and debate about what we believe or do not believe.

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The Moral Sense

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

James Q. Wilson died last week at the age of 80. He was eulogized in the Wall Street Journal by Harvey C. Mansfield (“A Truly American Scholar”) and by Arthur C. Brooks (“Social Science with a Soul”).  The WSJ also ran an editorial about him, and a half page of excerpts from his Journal writing over the years on March 3-4, 2012. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush and advised five decades of American presidents. Pat Moynihan once reportedly told Richard Nixon, “Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States.”

I came across him in 1993 when his book The Moral Sense was published. My copy is well marked and contains reviews by George Will, Christopher Manion, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Arthur Brooks argues that this book established “that man is, at his core, a moral creature. Some may say this is the product of evolutionary biology; others may chalk it up to God or natural law. But whatever the origin, Wilson believed that our moral sense was a central fact of humanity and an utter refutation of modern relativism.”

Wilson wrote in his preface: “Why have people lost the confidence with which they once spoke publically about morality? Why has moral discourse become unfashionable or merely partisan? I believe it is because we have learned either firsthand from intellectuals or secondhand from the pronouncements of people influenced by intellectuals, that morality has no basis in science or logic. To defend morality is to defend the indefensible.” He then goes on to describe how the writings of Darwin, Freud and Marx have contributed to this problem. Theorists have tried to talk us out of believing that we have a moral sense.

“Our reluctance to speak of morality and our suspicion, nurtured by our best minds, that we cannot ‘prove’ our moral principles has amputated our public discourse at our knees. We have cut off the legs on which any serious discussion of marriage, schools, or mass entertainment must stand.”

“The argument of this book is that people have a natural moral sense, a sense that is formed out of the interaction of their innate dispositions with their earliest familial experiences.” He addresses the criticism of being judgmental or imposing your views of other people. “The moral relativism of the modern age has probably contributed to the increase in crime rates…It has done so by replacing the belief in personal responsibility with the notion of social causation and by supplying to those marginal persons at risk for crime a justification for doing what they might have done anyway.”

By contrast Wilson argues that everyone makes moral judgments at a very young age, and we distinguish between actions on the grounds that some are right and others wrong. Also, we acquire a set of social habits that we find pleasing in others and satisfying when we practice them ourselves. He goes on to discuss sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.

St. Paul knew all this when he wrote, “When the Gentiles who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them. This will take place on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.” (Romans 2:14-16)

“The Moral Sense” is worth reading, nearly twenty years later. I am glad that such a political scientist who taught at Harvard, UCLA, Boston College and Pepperdine received such appreciation at and before his death.

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