Sport: Are We Overdoing It?

Americans are spending approximately $105 billion this year on leisure. That’s almost double the 1965 figure. This financial outlay for leisure, noted U. S. News and World Report, is more than our national defense costs for this year, more than the total of our corporate profits, and more than the overall value of the country’s exports. Despite the burdens of taxes and inflation, experts suggest that providing goods and services for spare-time activities is a growth operation with few parallels.

We get power equipment to do much of our work. Then we must look for other activities to fill up the time we have saved and burn off the energy we have conserved. Often what we turn to are sports activities, either as spectators or as participants. Sport is nudging its way into an ever more dominant role in our culture. Many newspapers devote between 20 and 30 per cent of their hard news space to coverage of athletic events.

As worship on weekends is displaced by worship of weekends, a big loser is the environment. Many of our leisure-time activities require much more of our already scarce power and add to our already abundant pollution.

Sports and recreation of all kinds also raise particular questions for the Christian, who has stewardship obligations. Can we find biblical guidelines to justify our vast leisure-time outlay? Why have we so long avoided the scrutiny the new pattern demands in view of the acute physical and spiritual needs in so many parts of the world? Underdeveloped countries must wonder how a supposedly Christian nation can put so much money into play. Surely such a staggering sum demands more open debate.

“When we think about sport,” Dr. David Wee says, “we often forget to ask the most important question that we should ask about all of our human activities: What is its effect upon the quality of the human experience? Or what is its effect upon the human spirit?” Dr. Wee, a Lutheran clergyman-scholar and all-American runner, was on the right track in his article in Event and the Christian Athlete. But we submit that even more profound questions are involved. How does sport measure up to God’s requirements? How can it affect our relationship with him? It is easy enough to make a case for sport from a human perspective, but to do so in terms of divine demands is something else.

Occasionally sports offer promise on the international scene: most people agree that table tennis was instrumental in bringing a welcome thaw in American-Chinese relations. More often, however, sports arouse tension, hostility, and violence. Hardly an Olympics goes by without some political incident. Hitler used the 1936 games to deceive the world as to what he was up to in Nazi Germany.

Sport today also is being misused to numb our concern for truth and justice. Many persons become engrossed in it as an easy means of evading responsibility, of getting their minds off more important things they know they should be doing. This is true even within churches, thousands of which field softball teams but neglect evangelism and the building up of believers. They assume that having a team is fine so long as they avoid Sunday play.

Evangelicals who love sports like to appeal to the numerous allusions to athletics in the New Testament. Close examination reveals that none of these bestows any kind of divine blessing upon sport. Paul very likely used references to runners and games because they aided communication with Greeks. In his address on Mars Hill he used the Athenians’ altar to the unknown god in a similar way.

Sport was not part of the Hebrew tradition. It was eventually introduced as part of the influence from the Greek lower classes. Roman leaders used sports to pacify people and keep them in line.

Yet there is not adequate reason to condemn sport per se. It does serve to relieve aggression and to occupy the attention of some people who might otherwise be doing things that are a lot worse. Moreover, there is certainly an extent to which athletics are good therapy even for the Christian who thinks himself well-adjusted. Everyone needs and should have relaxation and diversion, and Paul does say that “physical exercise has some value in it,” adding, “spiritual exercise is valuable in every way, for it promises life both for now and for the future” (1 Tim. 4:8, TEV).

What we need to do is to lift the lid of silence that has covered sport, as if this particular human activity were beyond discussion. An adequate apologetic, if there is one, must be brought forth.

To be sure, thorough examination of athletics may pose a threat to our life styles. But the alternative is to rationalize our position simply from experience so that we are little more than puppets of our times.

Part of our preoccupation with sport results from a snowball effect—it is so much with us that it tends to build on itself. Another reason is that for most games a minimum of skill is required to watch or even play, and so vast numbers can readily involve themselves.

But among the various activities we can relax with, athletics are low on the scale of demonstrable religious significance. We need to apply biblical principles more forcefully to our use of leisure.

Sport is sometimes the path of least resistance. As the distinguished Yale scholar Paul Weiss wrote in his recent book Sport: A Philosophical Inquiry, “Young men find it easier to master their bodies than to be truly noble, monumental, pious, or wise.” Older men gazing for long hours at the tube take an even easier way out. The threat is that we will get carried away with sport and other leisure-time activities. We need to justify the extent of our involvement in the light of eternity’s values.

India And Pakistan At Twenty-Five

On August 15, 1947, the British formally relinquished control of the Indian subcontinent, where they had begun to establish themselves early in the 1600s and which they had formally ruled since 1858. British imperialism created one country, India, out of a multitude of principalities and territories with different languages, cultural heritages, and religions. The end of British rule came before the major source of religious tension, the Muslim fear of domination by the more numerous group, the Hindus, could be resolved. Thus two new nations were born, India and Pakistan. But Pakistan was divided into two wings, separated by hundreds of miles of Indian territory and by major ethnic and cultural differences, although one in their Muslim heritage. In 1971 civil war split Pakistan and resulted in the establishment of the new republic of Bangladesh.

Transition from imperial subjugation to responsible self-rule has thus been difficult and bloody for Pakistan and by no means easy for India. The second most populous nation in the world, India has now struggled for twenty-five years to solve its immense human problems without resorting to tyranny, mass coercion, and one-party thought control. Those who have spent time in India must testify to the depth of the Indian commitment to intellectual and personal freedom and to parliamentary democracy in a situation that could easily have driven a government to the use of compulsion.

As India and Pakistan start their second quarter-century of independence and the new nation of Bangladesh starts its second year, we wish them well in their struggle for human dignity and freedom and economic viability. We wish for them also an increasing appreciation for Jesus Christ, for in him alone is there a sufficient answer to man’s longings.

The Featherbedding Fireman

Most people under thirty missed the thrill of seeing a puffing steam locomotive, so the term “fireman” may need a bit of explanation. The steam engine had two men in the cab, the engineer, who was at the controls, and the fireman, whose job was mainly to shovel coal from the tender so as to keep the boiler producing steam. When diesel and electric locomotives came along, railroad executives said firemen were no longer needed on freight trains and tried to get rid of them. The rail unions objected, contending that the “firemen” acted as valuable lookouts.

The dispute became the longest labor-management conflict in American history; it dragged out over thirty-five years and was not settled until last month. Interestingly enough, the end came not in the midst of one of the many strikes and negotiation crises brought on by the dispute but quietly, calmly, and unexpectedly. Labor agreed to a long-term plan of attrition of firemen, an admission that there had been featherbedding. Management made its big concession in allowing a number of years for the phaseout.

The fact that on both labor and management sides new men got the negotiating responsibility this year suggests that personalities may have played a part in the settlement. This serves to remind us that we never get away from the human element. We congratulate those who found a way out of this impasse, and we echo the hope expressed by Secretary of Labor James D. Hodgson that “this presages a new era of collective bargaining.”

Advertising Pornography

We think pornography, like much advertising, creates or inflames desires that often are contrary to God’s explicit revelation. Obedience to God’s will is, of course, ultimately an inward matter. Moreover, sexual sins are not the only ones that matter. We don’t urge that ads for fine clothes or cars or food be forbidden or even voluntarily refused because they encourage coveting and excessive self-indulgence. But without minimizing the seriousness of these materialistic sins in the sight of God, we do suggest that advertisements for pornographic movies and books be treated separately and be voluntarily refused by our nation’s press.

While the goods and services offered in other ads can serve legitimate needs and offer wholesome pleasures, we see no comparable redeeming values in pornographic materials. Not only is pornography against the law of God; even from a humanistic perspective, it is degrading and exploitative. If people want to debase themselves, God does not stop them. But journalistic media that claim to represent an honorable profession should be willing to pass up the advertising income from pornography. Most people would expect the press to refuse ads for clothing made from furs or hides taken from endangered species and usually acquired by poaching. Similarly, many are calling for rejection of ads for products made by willful violators of pollution laws. The definition of pollution might well be expanded to include the debasing of God-given sex as well as the fouling of God-given nature.

Christians should make their views on advertising known to the editors of their local newspapers. Possibly a paper’s own editorial stands on pornography and related moral issues can be used to urge a reasonable consistency between the editorial and business sides of the same enterprise.

Pity The Controversial Theologian

Pity the unfortunate former Anglican bishop of Woolwich, now dean of Trinity College, Cambridge (England), John A. T. Robinson. Early in his career he wrote a number of essays and monographs, liberal in perspective, on New Testament subjects. Although these were generally agreed to show a respectable level of scholarly competence, they did not gain him that elusive prize of fame.

National and then international celebrity came quickly, however, when as a modest suffragan bishop Robinson took up the cause of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and said that, far from being considered pornography, the novel ought to be looked on as a description of a form of “holy communion.” Only a Jesuit general or the Pope himself would have reaped a richer reward in notoriety for such an opinion. Honest to God (1963), a little book that enjoyed first-rate pre-publication exposure on BBC television and in a national newspaper, made the suave bishop a kind of swami for falling-away Christians all over the English-speaking world. His subsequent writings were the toast of the intellectual religious cocktail circuit, but they never quite matched Honest to God in sensational value.

Now Robinson’s fertile mind has once again seized upon a subject that will stir up, for the moment at least, some outcry and attention among those not yet cloyed by such antics from ecclesiastics: he now advocates lowering the age of consent for sexual relations to fourteen.

As to the merits of his proposal, made to the Methodist Conference at Nottingham, we can only observe that it is consistent with a modern trend: law should forbid nothing that is not a clear and present danger to our civilized society, such as certain forms of murder and all forms of failure to pay taxes. As to its demerits, we can note that it abandons one of the last vestiges of the ancient (and biblical) conviction that the civil law should encourage good behavior and aid in character formation, not merely punish the most obnoxious crimes.

We know that Robinson is in a difficult situation. To remain in the limelight he must necessarily increase the outrageousness of his proposals with each passing year. Yet there is always the danger that if he strays much further from his supposedly Christian heritage, he will no longer be able to speak as a churchman but only as a late twentieth-century secular man—and where would the sensation be then?

Why Make It Complicated?

Occasionally readers write in to complain about theologians (and Christian magazines) who seem determined to replace the simplicity of the Gospel with the complications of theology. We don’t deny that sometimes we—or some of our writers—may take a paragraph to make badly a point that could have been made well in one sentence. This is an occupational disease of theologians—perhaps rather akin to that of the doctor who, you suspect, gives your ailment a Latin name because you would find his bill too high if he diagnosed you in plain English. We recognize this temptation, fight it, and still occasionally succumb to it.

But even when we successfully resist the temptation, when we haven’t brought in any unnecessary rhetoric or bombast, there are things in theology—as in medicine and in every other discipline—that just cannot be simplified and made easy to swallow but may nevertheless be vitally important for us.

Although the Gospel is simple, attacks on it can be very subtle. They can pose as “refinements,” “clarifications,” “explanations.” Almost every case of heresy, apostasy, or plain loss of faith begins with a plausible clarification or criticism of the Gospel. Since the Gospel is often inadequately presented, plenty of the criticism may in fact be justified. But we know that mere “commitment,” even enthusiastic commitment, is not immune to the constant wearing-down effect of repeated criticisms and questions for which adequate answers are not forthcoming.

Individuals and occasionally whole movements that began full of zeal for the Lord have stagnated or have even been ruined when their zeal was unmatched by knowledge of the Bible and of theology. Every heresy begins plausibly, and if you do not know anything about the old heresies, there is a good chance that you will fall into them.

As Peter Beyerhaus wrote in our July 7 issue, there was a tremendous burst of Christian enthusiasm in Germany immediately after World War II. People were converted, studied the Scriptures, had the joy of the Lord in their hearts. But no one made a serious attempt to refute the skepticism and anti-supernaturalism that underlies modernist theology. Young students went to Bultmann and his disciples and, while listening to his theology, kept on praying and attending Bible studies. After all, Bultmann himself, like many of the theological radicals, comes from a “pietist” background and is emotionally attached to such devotions. But the rationalism and skepticism won out in many cases. Warmth and zeal, unsupported by sound doctrine taught on the same level as the modernists’ skepticism, were not enough.

“We wrestle not,” wrote Paul, “against flesh and blood, but against … spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12). False teaching is one of the effects of the “spiritual wickedness” he had in mind, and wrestling is not an easy sport. When we do our intellectual wrestling clumsily, boringly, or unimaginatively, we owe our readers an apology. But then the best response is not to criticize but to do it better. Learning sound theology is one aspect of spiritual wrestling, and it is not optional. It’s a requirement.

Blessing The Weapons—Of The Other Side

Most Christians admit that a just war can exist, and thus under appropriate circumstances they defend the right and even the obligation of citizens, including Christians, to go to war. This does not mean they support the “bless the weapons” attitude whereby the clergy and other noncombatants have been expected to encourage their own nation’s armed forces in every action and in any war.

In time of armed conflict, outspoken pacifists, even those with the purest of intentions, often have a hard time, for they appear to be aiding the enemy and harming their own country. During the last few decades most Americans—including non-pacifist Christians—have learned to respect the personal integrity of pacifists and war resisters, even when their actions seem to run counter to the “national interest.”

Recently, however, some who parade as apostles of peace have been saying and doing strange things. When North Viet Nam launched its massive military invasion of the South in May and the United States reacted by mining and bombing the North, the statements of some anti-war spokesmen seemed to reveal, not merely a desire for peace, but the wish for total victory for the other side. We find it particularly hard to see what good could have come out of Jane Fonda’s visit last month to Hanoi, where she encouraged the Communists and urged American soldiers to defect. When people like Bob Hope visit American forces in the South, they are criticized for “supporting militarism” and “prolonging the war.”

We can respect pacifism and those with whom we differ on how peace can be achieved; but it is a strange kind of pacifism that wants to silence the weapons on one side—in the case at hand, our own—while blessing and encouraging the fighters on the other. In fact, there is a word for this, and it is not pacifism.

The Forgotten Commandment

When is the last time your congregation disciplined one of its members? If you are of the (we suspect) minority who can remember the practice of formal church discipline, then we ask, What was the procedure? And what was the result? Chances are that many New Testament passages on discipline were violated.

Over the centuries church discipline has so often been done wrongly—in both intention and method—that for the past century there has been increasing neglect of it. This neglect is not only in congregations where the Gospel is no longer regularly proclaimed. To be sure, in almost every denominational family small groups continue to practice discipline, but they serve more as an example of what it should not be like and contribute to the overreaction that avoids it altogether. We also recognize that modern metropolitan anonymity makes discipline more difficult to enforce than it is in traditional “face-to-face” society where everybody knows everybody.

What are we to do, if we would be true to the Scriptures? “The answer to bad church discipline is good church discipline, not no church discipline.” So says Marlin Jeschke, author of perhaps the only book-length treatment to be published in English in the past fifty years. In Discipling the Brother (Herald Press [Scottdale, Pa.], 200 pp., $2.95 pb), Jeschke basically discusses Matthew 18:15–18: “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him.… If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you.… If he refuses to listen to you, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile.…”

This is the forgotten commandment in much of modern evangelicalism. We are embarrassed by the whole penitential development of the Roman system, and by the excesses of our Baptist, Mennonite, Puritan, Wesleyan, and other ancestors. In keeping with the individualism of our society, we more or less expect self-discipline to take the place of corporate responsibility for one another. Because some people delight in finding faults, seemingly for the sheer joy of being able to excommunicate as many people as possible, we go to the other extreme and ignore the positive role that genuine concern for one another was intended to have by our Lord and his apostles. At times we base our passivity on our reluctance to presume to be holier than others. Jeschke discusses all these excuses in the light of Scripture and church history.

There are books galore on being a disciple oneself, and on getting congregations to enlarge as much as possible. They have their place. But try to make room in your reading for Jeschke’s thorough, well-researched, compassionate treatment of the need and the way “to place the doctrine of church discipline once more in the context of gospel proclamation and to liberate Matthew 18:15–18 from the legalistic interpretation it has suffered since medieval times.”

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