Baseball and the Atonement

Spring is a season for silliness and there may be no sillier sight than that of grown men in nineteenth-century uniforms chasing a ball in front of 50,000 shouting fans. But I am a baseball fan—my wife would say fanatic—and this sight (or rather sound, for I normally listen to the Oakland A’s on the radio) gives me renewed life each spring.

To the nonfan, baseball is boring because nothing is happening 95 percent of the time, which is true if you consider anticipation and remembrance to be nothing. However, to the fan, anticipation and memory are 95 percent of the game. More than any other team sport, baseball can be mentally broken down into a jillion distinct confrontations between man and man, man and ball, man and space. These events can be tracked statistically through the decades (even left-handed relief pitchers’ success during the month of May against left-handed first basemen with two strikes against them). In turn, these events can be analyzed and massaged for meaning.

This mental disassembly also lends itself to storytelling, which by necessity takes events one at a time. Just as in a novel one chance encounter may lead to an unraveling of violence, so in baseball one bad break can turn a game around. A fan thinks back, seeing in his mind’s eye that weak bouncer crippling its way into the hole. Moral: small weaknesses sometimes overcome the efforts of titans. In a fan’s imagination, a whole season can turn on one trifling play.

Strangely Moved

The Atonement is one of the most difficult doctrines of Christianity—which is why I turn to baseball for illumination. The primary problem is how one man’s death could reach across 2,000 years to touch another person’s sin. Exactly how can one person carry another’s sins? How can one person’s righteousness lead to another’s forgiveness?

This question was the main intellectual obstacle to C. S. Lewis’s conversion. A long conversation with J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson helped him out of the dilemma. He described the conversation’s effect to his friend Arthur Greeves:

What has been holding me back … has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant.… My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ “saved” or “opened salvation to” the world.… What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now—except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity.…

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself … I liked it very much and was my steriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.”

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths.…

Not many of us claim to have been mysteriously moved by pagan myths. Balder, Adonis, and Bacchus are not—I speak for myself—soul stirring. So, unfortunately, Lewis’s line of thought leads me nowhere. I have no doubt that Scripture speaks of Christ’s blood shed on my behalf, and that Anselm’s doctrine of the substitutionary atonement reflects Paul’s teaching that “one died for all, therefore all died” (2 Cor. 5:14). Yet it isn’t hard to ask questions about this that stump the teacher. That the Bible teaches vicarious atonement nobody questions. How the Atonement works no one quite understands.

Yet in a sense we do understand it. The Atonement has not receded into the dusty obscurity of some doctrine. It has kept its powerful intuitive appeal. Hymnbooks are full of it: “And can it be, that I should gain an interest in the Savior’s blood?” “O Sacred Head now wounded,” “Alas! and did my Savior bleed?” “There is power, power, wonder working power in the blood.”

At some level (either above or beyond reason), people respond to the idea that Jesus died for their sins. They are strangely moved by Calvary, not merely as an example of righteous suffering, but as an event where they themselves are implicated, washed clean, and given a new start. They may not understand it, but they respond to it.

At first glance this response seems unlike any other part of our lives. It seems like a peculiarly religious experience, surfacing only at revivals and, for a few like Lewis, in response to ancient myths. But that first glance is misleading. Few emotions are more common than the heartfelt hope that someone else’s virtues directly affect you. I experience it vividly every spring, as do millions of Americans who live and die vicariously through baseball.

Living Through Strangers

Vicarious living through baseball is as hard to explain as the Atonement, and raises a similar question: How can something that the Oakland Athletics do affect me? It struck me last summer, when I was on my way to play on my church’s softball team and found myself fretting that I would miss listening to a crucial A’s game on the radio. There I was, about to play in a real (and competitive) game with my friends—and I cared more about another game to be played by people I had never met. If I muffed a grounder and lost our game I would feel bad, but I would undoubtedly feel worse if the A’s Alfredo Griffin (my counterpart at shortstop) booted his grounder and lost his game.

Of course, I realize that I am exceptionally involved in baseball, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the number of people who feel as I do. The A’s, who have not had a great season in years, routinely draw at least 15,000 fans to each of their 81 home games, as do the Giants across the bay. For six months of the year, there is a ball game nearly every day in the Bay Area (a weak baseball market); and if attendance dips to 10,000, owners rumble about moving the team to Denver.

Sports fans live through their team. They study the sports section each morning. They buy clothes with their team’s emblem. Most of all, they experience incredible elation when their team wins five straight, and stupefying depression when their team loses five straight. Woe to the manager, who must win to please this ominously fickle mob. Fans adore him one day, revile him the next. It’s only natural. They feel their lives are in his hands.

This capacity to give hearts, lives, and emotions to a team or a particular player depends on several factors. Just any old team won’t do. It must have certain qualities, and we must encounter it under certain circumstances.

First, those we give our lives to must be good—remarkably good at what they do. It would not be possible to transfer my affections to a local softball team. Those players through whom I live must be able to do what I cannot do. They must demonstrate grace, power, skill, and sagacity every time they put on cleats. Ideally, they should also be good in a moral sense. True, ballplayers of late have been associated with drugs, alcohol, and greed; but the most-loved players are those you think you would like to introduce to your kids.

A second ingredient is proximity. As a rule, people give their hearts to the team they live closest to. People in my town like either the Giants or the A’s, and if they like the Dodgers you can bet they once lived in Southern California.

Some of proximity’s importance derives from the amount of daily information you can gain. (Just try to find out how the A’s did when you’re in Chicago.) Cut me off from my sports page and my radio, and I stop caring whether the A’s live or die. When I lived in Kenya I was without any but the most rudimentary sports information, and baseball didn’t matter. Even if someone brought a newspaper from home, I couldn’t bring myself to care. I had to live and breathe my team daily in order to live and breathe it at all.

More of proximity’s significance rests, though, in the fragile sense of commonality that comes from living and working in the same town. (“You’re from Fresno? No kidding, that’s where I grew up.”) The smallest patch of common ground is big enough to build a vicarious relationship on: I favor players who went to my college, who grew up in my county, who even once played for the team I have chosen as my own. The more common ground, the easier the vicarious relationship.

Third, vicarious living requires that something important be at stake. I don’t worry how my team does in spring training (except that it indicates how they might do during the regular season). When the games begin to matter,

I begin to care; and my caring is directly proportional to the possibility of success. Should the A’s reach the playoffs and, God willing, the World Series, I will care so hugely that I certainly will not be tolerable company.

Vicarious living is firmly grounded in hope of victory. And by some miracle, hope springs eternal. Every spring even the lowliest team says with conviction, “Don’t count us out.” If they did not, it would not be possible for their fans to live through them. I care because I hope. I care because this year, believe me, the A’s might win it all.

To Our Credit

These same qualities make it possible for Christians to live through Jesus—to believe, much as baseball fans believe that they gain from their team’s success, that Jesus’ death and resurrection are in fact to our credit.

First, Jesus is, of course, very, very good. He did what we wish we could do, but cannot. He constantly demonstrated grace, power, skill, and sagacity. He was also good in the moral sense. Unlike baseball, where doing good and being good at what you do are unrelated, these two qualities were indistinguishable in Jesus. He did what we cannot because he was good as we are not.

Proximity is more difficult to relate. Jesus lacks proximity in the normal sense—he lived on the other side of the globe 2,000 years ago—and who can doubt this makes it difficult for us to believe that his life can be our life? But Jesus does have proximity in another, more essential, sense: he took “the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” He was tempted as we are tempted. Compared to Balder, Adonis, and Bacchus, at least, he is a god we can relate to. And he is a real human being. We share common ground.

The other aspect of proximity, information, is a given of Christian practice. Christians need to pray and read the Bible just as often as baseball fans read the sports page. Fortunately, we need never lose touch with Christ as I did with baseball while in Kenya.

Anywhere and always, we can pray. Those who do lose touch out of laziness, however, will stop caring. They will not live and breathe his life and his death because they do not live and breathe him every day.

The last factor, the importance of the event, makes vicarious living through Christ far stronger than vicarious living through baseball. A baseball fan with a sense of perspective is perennially reminded that he cares more about baseball than he reasonably should; a follower of Jesus with a sense of perspective is perennially reminded that he cares less about Jesus than he should. If there is truth in what Jesus taught, following him is certainly worth the sacrifice of career, family, and security.

A Fan’s Torment

My exegesis of baseball leaves one question unanswered. Baseball’s followers are moved by the hope of victory. Why do Christ’s followers live vicariously through his death? Why is there power in the blood?

Granted that Christ’s death leads to the resurrection, that still does not explain why we (and the gospel narratives) linger over the Passion. Christians have certainly painted far more pictures of Calvary than of the Ascension or of Pentecost. Our hero is no spiritual Rambo. He is the Suffering Servant.

But this is not so unlike baseball. Those who are not fans think, no doubt, that baseball’s appeal is strictly as fun. Not so. Just as much, and more, baseball appeals as suffering. A true baseball fan lives in a daily torment. Losses are agony; and wins give only temporary relief, for you know that defeat is only a trivial mistake away. I almost dread the baseball season, because while over the winter I bask in the joys of anticipation and memory, during the summertime conflict I know I must be miserable much of the time.

My favorite baseball writer, Roger Angell, described the conflict between our wishes and the reality of the game: “What I wish for, almost every day of the summer, is for things to go well—to go perfectly—for the teams and the players I most care about.… We wish for this seriously, every day of the season, but at the same time I think we don’t want it at all. We want our teams to be losers as well as winners; we must have bad luck as well as good, terrible defeats and disappointments as well as victories and thrilling surprises. We must have them, for if it were otherwise, if we could control more of the game or all of the game and make it do our bidding, we would have been granted a wish—no more losing!—that we would badly want to give back within a week. We would have lost baseball, in fact, and then we would have to look around, without much hope, for something else to care about in such a particular and difficult fashion.”

The fan lives by hope, but it is the struggle that captures his heart. The purest fan is the Chicago Cubs fan, who has known much adversity and little else. We love the game most when there is but a paper-thin margin between losing and winning—when each meeting of ball and bat, ball and glove, batter and pitcher, is loaded with significance.

Baseball fans struggle and suffer as their team struggles and suffers, and this, ultimately, is the mythic attraction of baseball. It touches something deeply etched into us. We are not very interested in bliss from beginning to end. The important victories are pulled from the jaws of defeat. Humans care about redemption and salvation, which presuppose degradation and despair. Then, oh, the exhilaration of victory, for which we always hope but so rarely see.

In an age without epic poets, we make such myth with balls and bats. Such myth tells us about our own nature, stuff that biology could not explain. It tells us about the universe we live in, and hints at some of its laws: “Unless the seed dies, it cannot live.” “Blessed are you when men persecute you.” “At just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.”

I am not pretending to have said anything very helpful about how the Atonement works—about the mechanism by which Christ’s righteousness can be transferred to us, and our sins to him. (I think there are some hints here, in that baseball fans are actually affected by their team’s performance only to the extent that they truly identify with the team. They experience the thrill of victory to the extent that they have “given themselves” to the team all season, suffering through everything. Is this identification like what Paul had in mind when he wrote: “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” [Rom. 6:3–4, NIV]?)

Trust in vicarious benefits is a fundamental part of our make-up. It is an ineradicable belief of the heart that speaks of something more than we understand. We believe, though we cannot I explain, that our heroes’ victories are our own. Myth shapes itself around these things. So does baseball, as a kind of myth. The shape itself, the true myth made from eternal deeds, is the death and resurrection of Jesus.

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