Abstract
Amid a burgeoning literature on religion and sport, theological assessments of sport have tended to be confined to a passing footnote or speculative paragraph. Among those stepping into this void, Lincoln Harvey’s Brief Theology is, in his words, a most welcome ‘conversation starter’. Appropriately playful at times, Harvey has a knack for the pithy vernacular. His book is elegantly and readably written, with cheeky humour and illuminating insights.
Harvey hopes that his readers need not have much theological background, and much of the fine detail is indeed in the engaging endnotes to each chapter. There are occasions when his non-specialist reader may find it tough going, and amid some very neat one-liners some more advanced readers might think there are occasions when he uses too broad a brush – but generally Harvey serves his broad readership well.
One of the book’s virtues is the very clear focus on its argument. Sport is popular because, uniquely according to Harvey, it allows us to express our creatureliness. It finds parallels in worship, but they ultimately point in opposite directions: in worship we celebrate God, in sport we celebrate our own creatureliness – it is ‘the liturgical celebration of who we are’ (p. 108), ‘the ritual celebration of our contingency’ (p. xvi). His contrast between worship as ‘God-celebrating’ and sport as ‘us-celebrating’ seems perhaps a little too neat, however, and fails to take into account sport’s capacity to evoke awe and engage its players and spectators in remarkable ways. Whereas Harvey considers sport unique might we not instead consider it one cultural space among others within which the dimension of depth may open up for us, and through which we may therefore come to experience God?
At the heart of much of Harvey’s argument is his insistence that sport is, like play, autotelic. This stress on play and sport as autotelic has, since Huizinga, become axiomatic for writers on the subjects, but this accepted wisdom needs some qualification. Sports participants report that while they play for the sheer enjoyment of it, they also have other less obviously intrinsic motivations and that it is difficult and perhaps unwise to subordinate them in a rigid way.
Where Harvey’s insistence on this becomes especially problematic is in his verdict on professional sport. He often seems focused on spectator sport as opposed to our playing sport – even case-studies are more geared to this – which makes his beginning with his devotion to Arsenal jar with his later suggestion that ‘the professional sports person is simply an actor or a prostitute. Either way, they are not a player’ (p. 105). This book has many strengths, and is a recommended read for all interested in making theological sense of our culture, but when its logic leads to such a conclusion perhaps some of its core ideas need reconsideration.
Robert Ellis
Regent’s Park College, Oxford