Discipline,Sport,and the Religion of Winners: Paul on Running to Win the Prize,1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Abstract

In 1 Cor. 9:25 Paul exhorts the Corinthian believers to strive like athletes for an eternal prize. This paper elucidates the communal horizon of the self-disciplining he enjoins, which overturns popular modern conceptions of individual fitness and performance training. Paul likewise defines the rewards of spiritual labour as aspects of participation in the communion of saints gathered by the gospel, disallowing a wholly post-temporal construal of the eternal reward which motivates Christian discipline. The paper concludes by raising questions about the theological status of modern sport, of theologies of sport, and of competition as a form of social organisation.

Keywords

competition Corinthians prize-winning rewards of labour self-discipline St Paul theology of sport

For millennia, 1 Cor. 9:24-27 has magnetically attracted Christians inclined to both physical and spiritual athleticism:

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.

A close reading of this famous passage will shed light on conceptual issues any Christian theological account of sport must address and will also push into the foreground more fundamental questions about sport as a form of social organization.

Breaking with recent exegetical convention, I will forgo a detailed historical analysis of the social context of this Pauline utterance in its original setting. It is sufficient for our purposes simply to note that Corinth was the site of a famous athletic competition held every two years, the Isthmian Games, which archeologists have established were in full swing during the time of Paul’s visits (49–55 ad).¹ The Corinthian church, like the contemporary church, was thus familiar with sport as spectacle as well as the training regimens of semi-professional highly specialised athletes. Paul takes his audience’s knowledge of the particulars of such sporting spectacles for granted as he urges the Corinthian church to a new seriousness and focus in their Christian life, while avoiding any exacerbation of the Corinthians’ excessive competitive spirit.² My contention is that Paul draws on his audience’s commonsense notions of sport not to extend or apply them to spiritual issues, but to co-opt and invert them. Extended historical analysis would thus distract us from gaining a clear view of his theological message.

The main theme Paul is setting out in this chapter is a sharply articulated account of the appropriate Christian zeal to ‘win’ people for the gospel, that they may be ‘saved’. It is in pursuit of this end that Paul enacts his kenotic apostolate with its willingness to become ‘all things to all people’, a becoming that clearly requires highly disciplined and bodily renunciations. His extended examination of the phenomenon of gospel preaching and the discipline it demands of the believer is the conceptual anchor of the chapter, allowing Paul both to use and to transform Christian accounts of sport.

Paul signals the cast of his argument using several phrases that are, on first glance, logically and grammatically enigmatic. The first appears in verse 23: I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings. A second turn of phrase, in verse 18, is similarly counterintuitive: What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel. On my reading Paul is here indicating that the goal of his apostolic activity is not, in the first instance, winning more converts, but a disciplining of the self aiming solely at preserving the integrity of this mysterious entity, the ‘freedom of the gospel’. Any interpretation of ‘the prize’, of the ‘imperishable wreath’ for which the apostle urges Christians to strive in verse 24 must be articulated in a manner that comprehends the ‘reward’ that Paul says he seeks in his apostolic labours in verses 17-18.

I will suggest that what Paul finds rewarding about preaching is its connection with the amazing privilege of being a first-person witness to the operation of the gospel in all its power. His discipline is oriented by the desire to take away all the stage props that might manipulate people’s reactions in ways that obscure the agency of the gospel, that is, the redemptive activity of the Trinitarian God in specific places and times. For Paul there is nothing intrinsically rewarding about setting a goal and doggedly achieving it. What is really interesting is to prepare the way for something unpredictable to happen in the hope that the gospel will display its own power. The reward that Paul seeks is thus by definition extrinsic to his own activity. Only God can bestow this reward; he cannot achieve it no matter how skilled his preaching or modelling of Christian virtue.

A more detailed examination of these two pivotal passages will allow a more precise delineation of Paul’s account of reward. I will then investigate how this account of the reward that Paul seeks as he preaches the gospel defines and configures his self-discipline. This will lead to an analysis of the discipline and reward depicted in verses 24-27, and some concluding reflections on the challenges this reading of Paul puts to contemporary theological reflection on sport.

The Rewards of Watching the Gospel at Work

9:18 What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel.

This verse marks a shift of focus in chapter 9 from the question that opens the chapter, concerning the freedom of human agents to act or not to act out their legitimate rights (in verses 1-15). The remainder of the chapter is framed by an overriding concern for the freedom of the gospel as the main protagonist in the divine economy. This shift will allow Paul to turn the tables on commonsense (that is non-theological) definitions of reward. The reward for proclaiming the gospel as Paul describes it here is not extracted from, nor subsequent to the proclamation of the gospel, nor is it different in kind as it is in monetary remuneration for physical labour in which there is no correspondence in type of payment for the type of work. The reward of proclaiming the free gospel is itself a function of that gospel—its well functioning—rather than its garnering any type of quantifiable return for its proclaimer. It is thus only rewarding when it is truly ‘free of charge’.

The language of well functioning is of course reminiscent of Aristotelian notions of praxis and practices that have come to renewed prominence in moral philosophy and theology in the last 30 years. Contemporary enchantment with this language has suggested to some a reading that conflates the reward which Paul knows can only come from divine agency with the ‘rewarding’ experience that comes with excellent execution of the type of action being undertaken. ‘The act and its “reward”’, writes Anthony Thistleton, ‘are linked by “internal grammar” like the delight of giving a gift to a loved one, not by external cause and effect… To learn to play a Bach organ fugue or a Beethoven piano sonata “brings” a reward in the very joy of playing it.’³ Here the preaching of the gospel is conceived as rewarding precisely in being a humanly (self-)satisfying performance.

Such a reading, precisely because it must be so keenly self-aware, inevitably links a demand to the gospel message; that delivering it be a pleasurable and satisfying activity for the preacher. To take a different example of this dynamic of relevance in discussions of sport, one of the core weaknesses of the late Victorian Christian understanding of sport was the way in which the church sponsored sporting activities for the purpose of something else, namely, moral and spiritual uplift.⁴ From this vantage point the secularity of modern sports culture as a whole can be read as a rejection of the ‘entry charge’ Christians insisted on adding to whatever intrinsic and self-contained pleasures one might find in sport—the demand that its practice in addition be morally and spiritually productive. Paul sees this problematic very clearly and refuses to place a charge on his message by implicitly or explicitly asking for payment different in kind, whether in terms of money, respect, or the pleasure of delivery.

There are several textual clues in 1 Corinthians (1:16-17) which indicate that Paul is relatively unconcerned in this letter with achieving a flawless text, making it clear that he resists any understanding of preaching that takes delight in the aesthetically well-turned sermon that has no exousia (™ξουσ…α) (1 Cor. 2:1-5). Paul aims, rather, to model kenotic communication that is wholly focused on reaching a specific community with a message. His is not the enactment of a performance so perfect or aesthetically pleasing that the very communicative act is itself the only reward that can be expected. For Paul, reward is tied to the hope that a well-functioning gospel will eventually win those who are now far away. As such, the activity in which he invested himself, of proclaiming, is not properly understood within an Aristotelian idea of praxis, which bears its telos in itself. Put bluntly, preaching is only preaching of the gospel if it is a means to an end which is extrinsic to the activity itself.

Paul’s characterisation of his reward as tied to the preservation of the freedom of the gospel might make it seem that he believes it to be absolutely extrinsic to his own person; there is indeed a sense in which Paul is far from claiming something for himself and wishes only that the gospel be successful. But he still speaks of my reward (v. 18), forcing us to acknowledge that there must be a way to understand the person of the apostle as genuinely partaking in the reward, even though this reward is itself defined in terms of the wellbeing of a separate agent, the gospel. Paul’s striving thus aims to move him into the vicinity of this free and active gospel, for which he would endure everything if necessary (12b). As he says in verse 23, I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings. He feels himself rewarded in continuing to find his life illuminated by the progression of the active and living gospel as it claims human lives.

We still need to ask: What is the divine activity Paul hopes to observe happening in conjunction with his preaching? What is this divine power he does not want to block, and around which his discipline is oriented? Put succinctly, it is the divine work of reconciliation and rejuvenation. Paul knows that the processes of human enculturation embed patterns of partial receipt and partial repudiation of the ‘ambient’ presence of God’s good gifts. He is aware that the power of human theological critique does have some power to spot and name sinful configurations of human socialised existence in a manner that no doubt would have resonated with the negative dialectical criticism of Theodor Adorno. The whole thrust of his treatment, however, indicates his belief that human reasoning is incapable of thinking itself into a full account of how human redemption might actually look in any given place and time. This is why he must wait to see redemption, must perceive it in faith, but nevertheless with his senses. He does not assume that his own reasoning is capable of imagining radically different social forms for society before actually seeing ways in which the gospel frees specific people in specific locales by breaking the chains that bind their impulses and aims.⁵

That this giving of freedom is perceptible by humans is the ground of Paul’s culture-critical insight: ‘Ah, this is what the coming of the kingdom means here’, we can imagine him thinking, ‘the hold of this psycho-social-cultural habit is not set in stone. The Spirit is challenging it, revealing it to be a denuding form of life.’ I am not suggesting that the cultural changes Paul hopes to observe are immediately effected wholesale. They grow from real confessions and renunciations which unveil new directions for living that will need to be laboriously followed and worked out (Phil. 2:12) if they are to become fully embedded in a new and settled form of life. But this birth in nuce of new forms of living is clearly visible as a real birth to Paul. He preaches from the edge of his seat in his desire to see what the kingdom will bring about in its emergence, an eschatological kingdom very much of this world. The emergence of this eschatological present is riveting to observe because it can only be birthed through the occurrence of the culturally inexplicable: it can only appear as counter-intuitive to a given age, a wisdom of the foolish (1 Cor. 1:20).

While it is obvious that Paul therefore expects his share within the workings of the gospel, the NRSV translation obscures another significant feature of his argument. A literal translation of the consecutive construction (so that…) in the second half of verse 23 would be ‘so that I may become a co-partaker with it [the gospel]’. The first syllable of synkoinonos (συγκοινωνóς), syn-(συγ-) (‘together with’), indicates that the reward to which Paul understands himself entitled as a proclaimer of the gospel is not properly understood as an individual eternal reward.⁶ The proclaimer’s share in the gospel is instead envisioned as the sharing in the lives of those ‘won’ by the gospel – now in the church and in the future in the eschatological city. Thus the object of Paul’s hope is to have a share in the gospel, not ‘its blessings’. The pernicious nature of the NRSV mistranslation lies in its reinforcement of the idea that the rewards of gospel proclamation accrue to individuals and is received some time in the future. This rendering completely obscures Paul’s point that what he hopes to share in is the present gathering of a community by a powerful gospel. The community the gospel gathers is of course an eternal one, but he hopes to enjoy it not beyond time, but, more importantly, in his present time and place.

It should come as no surprise that our eschatological presuppositions will easily tint our respective readings at this sensitive point insofar as they provide the horizons (in the Husserlian sense) within which any understanding of reward can be situated. It is in fact not only a difference in eschatological expectation (individualist vs. social, present vs. realised vs. future) that is at stake here. Two wider rationalities are in play which Paul is directly contrasting with each other. Thistleton’s rendering of Paul’s expression in verse 17, I have a reward as ‘I am in the realm of reward’⁷ is an interpretative translation that nicely encapsulates the reading I have proposed. But an important rival language game both grounds and reflects a rival form of life. I have been resisting that form of life that moves from a concern to serve one’s own rights and freedom to choose (vv. 1-15) to an interest in securing individual rewards by way of making sacrifices. This approach places the whole chapter within a horizon of individualised eschatology. Put simply, if one’s life is oriented by hope for the reward of personal heavenly commendation one will eventually be drawn into the embrace of ‘rights-choice-sacrifice’ language. I press this point here because these hermeneutical stances are mutually exclusive: if we inhabit one or the other it will strongly shape our reading of the last sentences of this chapter when Paul combines the summons to exercise self-control with the hope to receive an imperishable wreath (v. 25). This passage would seem almost impossible to extract from the horizon of individualised eschatology if taken on its own instead of being read, as I am proposing, through the lens of Paul’s subversion of individualised reward language in verses 17-18.

Paul’s Formation of the Self

But Paul does not only observe the gospel at work, he tells us in verse 22 that it is changing him: ‘I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.’ On my reading, because Paul’s understanding of the ‘becoming’ being indicated here [γšγονα (gegona)] is an open-ended eschatological one, it must be a process of discovery and exploration,⁸ of coming to terms with what the gospel will reveal about himself and those to whom he preaches as it binds them to each other. What is certainly clear to Paul is that in order to become ‘all things to all people’ there must be renunciation, foregoing, abdications. The lack of specificity of the expression he chooses seems to suggest that it will be only in the midst of the complexities that come with his mission that he will learn precisely what sorts of renunciations will serve the preservation of the freedom of the gospel in any given circumstance.

A brief philosophical excursus on the type of formation being envisioned here will clarify what sort of exercises or disciplines might accompany this account of becoming and formation. We have already noted the Aristotelian performance account of this process: I become something different because the process of becoming a more skilled or virtuous actor is rewarding on its own terms—I receive pleasure from better performances of hitherto unfamiliar routines. The ancient and still dominant reading of Paul’s ‘becoming all things to all people’, in contrast, emphasises the chiselling away of the current self by ascetic habits that remove the accidental and culturally dispensable aspects of the self to reveal the eternal and enduring eschatological self.⁹ Here the reward of the discipline involved in being made new by the gospel is tied up with the glimpse it affords of our perfected state, the ‘I’ purged of all sin and mutability, the God-like eternal image of God within us.

My reading finds Paul to be closer to a counter-Enlightenment philosophical tradition in which the disciplines associated with becoming are oriented not by a known teleological outcome or the pleasure of performance, but by fidelity to a reality that has dawned on us and questioned our certainties about ourselves and our future. Highly attuned to the human tendency to plan and project its designs onto others, Freidrich Nietzsche insists that philosophy begins when we admit that we in fact know precious little about ourselves and others.¹⁰ Later interpreters have criticised the solipsistic obsession with the subject’s self-overcoming implicit in this opening. Martin Heidegger, for instance, refocused Nietzsche’s account of philosophy by stressing that humans come into truth only as their false schemas of perception are punctured by the impingement of external reality on the subject. He insisted that our only hope to become truthful beings who escape the undertow of our will to dominate and our projections about how we would like the world to be is to devote ourselves to being faithful to an otherness that breaks in on us, forcing us to more closely attend and become responsive, to conform to what has been revealed.¹¹ In this tradition, discipline, as Alain Badiou puts it, names the effort we invest in incorporating an externally appearing truth into our current habits of life. In the process of this becoming the intellectual and volitional task is to learn to link what I think I currently know and live to that not-previously-known which has come to command my attention rather than simply ignoring it.¹² The antitheses of discipline, then, are inattentiveness and forgetfulness.

The eschatological openness of this account of discipline is positioned to resist the ancient and Enlightenment moral axiom that the task of ethics is to ‘know thyself’, as well as its post-Nietzschean reformulation as ‘take care of yourself’ (most visible in the work of Michel Foucault¹³). What Paul is resisting with his account of Christian mission and ministry is the emphasis of both formulations on the cultivation of a ‘self’. My ‘self’ is an eschatological entity that is not entirely known to me and can only be discovered in caring for Christ’s own. Paul’s eschatological perspective thus determines his ethical perception, both being understood as the primary entailments of faithfulness to the Christ who has appeared to him.¹⁴ This Christ has revealed to him a church and a missiological task which has claimed his whole being.¹⁵ The divine claim has stripped him of any ideal pictures he might have had of himself in some form of pristine isolation, an imaginary form towards which he might strive in exercises of body or soul.

Given this Christological structure of Paul’s account of Christian discipline the patristic reading of only one receives the prize (v. 24b) has much to commend it.¹⁶ Given the account of reward he has just set out, he can hardly mean: ‘each of you must run for your own prize’. Rather, he indicates that Christ’s victory is the one victory over the powers and principalities of the world within which the individual believer’s striving is comprehended. The aim of Christian self-discipline, therefore, is to be conformed to ‘Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:2). An important effect of this move is to de-emphasise winning in his account of discipline in favour of increasing his hearers’ understanding of the danger of running the wrong race.¹⁷ The problem of the Christian life is letting one’s self be directed towards competing in the right race; not any race will do, only the race that has been set before each one if one does not wish to run aimlessly (v. 26a). If only one wins, the believer’s discipline is only spiritually viable as it serves and effects Christ’s victory. Because it is Christ’s race it is first and definitively a race to win others, and also, second, the one race that must be set before sinful beings, who must confess their infatuation with other competitions and willingly embrace this one. This suggests the following gloss of verse 24, ‘Run in such a way that you may win it by participating in Christ’s victory.’

Paul’s discipline is to let himself be shaped by the persons before him, to whom and through whom he understands Christ to come. This discipline consists in a self-chosen stripping of his self-designated identity, a process he understands in terms of the cross, and which he actively embraces. His discipline is thus rightly called kenotic. It consists in an active process of fighting those self-images and cultural habits, however ingrained and unconscious, which bar him from remaining faithful to the Christ who has appeared to him. His discipline is therefore wholly configured by its attention to the persons Christ has revealed to claim his apostolic attention. Paul’s response to those who misdirect their disciplinary efforts (by competing for spiritual gifts, or as today, to achieve the ‘perfect’ body, whether muscular or emaciated) is not to urge any relaxation of Christian self-discipline, but its redirection. Living that is conformed to Christ through commitment to those he loves requires supreme effort; and for this the body must be subdued, but only by aligning it with its proper object.

On the basis of this account of formation Paul proposes that christoform preaching must not take a configuration designed to attract and seduce and draw in the other, nor to overwhelm the other with virile activity, but operates by serving Jesus Christ’s own rendering of both the preacher and hearer more defined and beautiful as individuals. The point is evident from Paul’s formulation in verse 20a: To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. Notice that Paul first uses the definite article ‘the Jews’ at the beginning of the statement, but then omits the article for the final noun. Paul’s insistence that he did not come to win the Jews, but individual Jews makes perfect sense in light of the ‘free’, that is, the uncoercive character of gospel proclamation he has outlined, which can always only hope to win individual human beings, not groups as a block. A pneumatological point underlies this clarity: the Holy Spirit’s work is not to collectivise, but to individuate, to give and guide each person in the particular way that will honour and so bring to fruition their irreducible Christ-likeness. The disciplining associated with Paul’s sharing of the gospel with others thus makes him more the person he was created to be, pushing him to a ‘better performance’ both of his preaching and his ecclesial vocation as the apostle.

Paul is happy to use the active language of enslaving himself when discussing his devotion to the gospel, so emphasising his determination to conform his patterns of living to the demands of the gospel. But when he speaks about the addressees of his proclamation, such as Jews and gentiles, he switches into the language of becoming. He does not ‘enslave’ others as he does himself, but ‘becomes like’ them. On one hand this is another example the pneumatological sensitivity displayed in his refusal to address ‘the Jews’ as a single or homogenous block. Here it is crucial that Paul’s Greek verb ™γϵνóμην (egenomen) translated as ‘become like’ is in the Aorist tense that stands between active and passive voice, which is possible in Greek but not English. He is suggesting that ‘to become’ is to be one’s self engaged in a process (which is ‘active’) but in the mode of responding to larger forces driving the process as a whole (and so ‘passive’). The implication of this language shift is that Christians must not think that they can ‘make themselves’, whether in the sense of driving their own biographical project nor even in the sense of making themselves ‘as’ others. Rather, Christians understand the making of their lives to be a divine prerogative experienced precisely in being remade under and within the operation of the gospel.

It is not only deference to the prerogative of the divine poesis (making) that should warn Christians against speaking as if they could ‘make themselves as’ someone else. Paul’s shift to the language of ‘becoming’ points to the fact that missional empathy can never be conceived as a unilateral supply-side activity driven by the evangelist. Language of making is always tied up with the application of force to change something or someone’s form. In contrast, the language of becoming helps us to understand Paul’s theological interest in saying that he hopes his action will ‘win’ others (v. 20). It is one of the crucial lessons of missionary work up to the present that this ‘divine making’ and ‘human becoming’ must never be confused. There are many ways to short circuit the patient and perseverant process of ‘becoming as’ the other one hopes to win in order to make a quick entry into their territory and eventually hearts by relying on manipulative means. An opposite short circuiting of the gospel’s freedom is the undertaking of mission as a sort of head-hunting expedition. Here the linguistic complex rights-sacrifice-reward must picture the gospel as the offer of a pre-packaged product offered by those imagined to be standing above and unaffected by the ‘recipients’ it might attract.

If the enculturation of the gospel is to be genuine, it demands a transformation of the preacher who takes on the cultural forms and perspectives of those to whom the free gospel is being offered. This enculturation is not to be conflated with some act of cultural erasure that is imagined as preceding the taking on of traits of another culture, an empty plasticity. Nor is Paul offering a license to jettison Christian morality. Empathetic evangelism does have its proper limits—Paul would not join the Corinthians’ brothel excursions which he censures in chapter six, for example. Exploring the construction of the positive discipline Paul felt was demanded by his pursuit of the gospel is more relevant for our purposes here than building a catalogue of the immoral activities he felt disciplined Christians needed to avoid.

In following the liberating gospel Paul is freed to be blissfully unconcerned about preserving some stable cultural configuration of his identity. He is freed from identity politics not out of some facile claim that he is ‘beyond culture’, but because he knows his true identity is solely grounded in Christ, the same Christ that he knows he will discover if he attends to the faces he encounters. Because his identity is firmly grounded in Christ alone, who, as the eschatological future of humanity is never absent in any face he meets, he does not have to ‘make’ Christians through powerful techniques of persuasion in the missionary endeavour. Instead, for Paul, the missionary endeavour is one in which the evangelist seeks to discover the presence of Christ in those that do not yet know it. Only on this basis can the business of ‘becoming’ as those others be freed from the fear that breeds coercion—the fear of losing one’s own identity.

Reading Paul in this way also allows a reclamation of a locus classicus in the Christianity of bodily discipline, the famous ‘body a temple’ passage in 1 Cor. 6:19-20:

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

In the context of a discussion of Christians going to brothels on the assumption that this had no effect on the rest of the ecclesia, Paul’s ethical point rests on his theological insight that Christians are those who do not even claim self-possession of their own bodies. To be claimed by Christ is to renounce any rights to self-determination of the body. To receive the body as a gift from God, as a temple of the Holy Spirit, is precisely to characterise the Christian ethos as one constituted by the renunciation of the right to claim the body as something that can be put to what and whoever’s service the individual sees fit. Sex is a sort of body-language that has a grammar of its own that cannot simply be overridden by some arbitrarily composed private language. Sexuality is emblematic of the wider communicative scope that belongs to our bodily existence. Christians are to live in any setting not as those who definitively know and possess themselves, but as members of Christ who always meet the world through the continually communicative surfaces of our bodies. Paul condemns any communicative encounter that expresses self-chosen agendas or attempts to capture purely individual benefits (demanding ‘what I am due’). In short, if Christians are to glorify God in your body, this glorification can only occur when Christians configure their discipline in a manner that holds together the political, personal and interpersonal. The ‘temple’ is a space for public worship of the one God, and when the idea of the temple is re-interpreted in individualist terms it can only designate a shrine which the gods of this world will soon inhabit, whether of sexual pleasure, fame or physical athletic prowess.

Fitness for the Gospel

The foregoing makes it clear that it is impossible to see verses 24-27 of chapter nine as opening a new train of thought in which Paul, after having completed his apology for his kenotic apostolate, concludes by stressing the individual Christian’s training in spiritual exercises as a means to receiving the crown of eternal glory. It is true that Paul draws the argument to its pinnacle by bringing the vision before his readers’ eyes of the ultimate goal or telos of the Christian life, the imperishable wreath, contrasting it with all innerworldly gains and aims. We should be wary, however, of separating this concluding exhortation from the vision Paul has developed in the previous verses with its focus on the proclamation of the gospel and the specific relinquishments necessary to keep it free. As we have seen, this account of apostolic exousia (™ξουσ…α) was precisely configured by the extrinsic character of the gospel and its reconfiguring power in the apostle’s life. As he now carefully sets his understanding of the freedom of the gospel before the Corinthians, Paul simultaneously ‘exhibits the superlative discipline of his own life’,¹⁸ which, he has already affirmed, is oriented by a hope for present reward. Far from prescribing an individualised and methodical recipe for spiritual fitness, characterised by self-control directed at exercises in the way our contemporary ideas of ‘fitness training’ immediately suggest, Paul actually uses a telling term in verse 27, adokimos (¢δóκιμoς) that can be translated to reveal a very different constellation of meaning.

Verse 27, but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified (adokimos (¢δóκιμoς)), is both difficult to understand and the key to this entire concluding section. The NRSV translation points in the wrong direction on two counts. First, by rendering the aorist participle keruxas (κηρÚξας) as indicating a temporal sequence, it suggests that preaching is a stand-alone act that will only be subsequently assessed. It follows that we will then need to conceive this disqualification as occurring by means of a forensic judgment. This tendency is even stronger in other translations such as that of Luther or the German Einheits Ubersetzung that render adokimos (¢δóκιμος) as ‘Verwerflich’ (‘condemnable’) or ‘Verworfen’ (‘condemned’). The widespread tendency to read Paul as drawing this chapter together with a concluding treatise on the conditions for passing the bar at the final judgment sits, however, very uneasily with the train of thought he has developed so far in the chapter. What sort of climax would we have here if the apostle, who opened by explaining the almost shocking scope of his willingness to renounce what should be coming to him as the result of his concern for others (and their eschatological fate), now ends by commending a renunciation aimed at securing his own individual place in the heavenly pantheon? Furthermore, what has happened to Paul’s finely tuned sense of his activity being always set within a more fundamentally passive relationship to the sphere of the gospel’s ongoing operation?

It seems far more plausible to read this last paragraph in close conjunction with Paul’s extended defense and explanation of his kenotic apostolate, which he believed would be disqualified only by his not disciplining himself to conform to the task given by the gospel. The Greek term adokimos (¢δóκιμoς) indeed does denote a lack of fitness, but not in the abstract sense, as an overall characterisation of a person (as flabby, for instance), but in direct relation to a specific task requiring a specific set of skills if it is to be completed. A ‘flabby’ person may be just the right and fitting person to be one’s defense lawyer, for example. It is totally in keeping with Paul’s understanding of gospel proclamation as entailing the witness of the proclaimer’s entire existence that he concludes his apologia by reemphasising the purposefulness of the Christian mission as the antithesis of a boxer beating the air. Paul would be disqualified as an apostle if he abandoned the church to whom Christ had bound him.¹⁹

The point of this language of disqualification is especially clear if verse 18, that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, is literally rendered ‘that in my evangelising I will set out the gospel free of charge’. The purpose of Christian witness does express a hope to receive an imperishable wreath, but as we have seen, this reward is not construed as an individual prize merited on the basis of individual spiritual fitness, but rather as an inheriting of the communal place that comes to all who have been made fit to be a co-partaker of the gospel. The reward that Paul seeks that ‘will never fade away’ (as Thistleton translates it²⁰) is not one which must be awaited in the distant future, but one which must continually be sought and to which he must conform in each present moment: the creation of that community before his very eyes which is everlasting and in which he has a rightful place, by the power of the gospel. What we have here then, in the reference to imperishability, is a preparatory foreshadowing of the great resurrection chapter to come, chapter 15, with its emphasis on the rising of all the saints and the consummation of their union with the one who wears the crown (esp vv. 22-24).

Discipline and the Subversion of Christianity

Taking a step back, Paul’s message is clear enough. The letter as a whole conveys Paul’s response to a Gnostic reading of Christianity, which saw in it a set of spiritual gifts or powers to be acquired by individual Christians. Christians were thus set against one another in competition for the ‘better’ gifts. Rebutting this spiritual individualism with its quest for the perfection of the spiritual powers and the immaterial soul, Paul re-emphasised the nature of the church as an ecclesial body. He met the Gnostic predilection for individualist definitions of the spiritual by stressing that all spiritual gifts and perfections of the inner person find their orientation in attention to precisely specified interpersonal relations. That the Corinthians are lining up in factions behind teachers they consider superior (1:12), striving to possess the greatest gifts (ch. 14) and are clambering for the place of honour at the celebration of the Eucharist (11:21) is both the logical outcome of the Christianity of acquisitive, elitist individualism, and the absolute antithesis of the gospel Paul wishes to promote.

It is probably fair to say that this precise form of spiritual acquisitiveness is no longer so tempting for the majority of Christians in the developed world. But the logic of Paul’s theological account of the good news does bring into view the dangers of modern Christians’ obsession with individual health and fitness, which so easily translates becoming ‘all things to all people’ into the sanctification of sporty lifestyle enclaves and sports ministries heavy on sport and light on ministry.²¹ If physical fitness is in any way made an independent value, especially if it is then made a visible index of spiritual fitness, the ecclesial focus of Paul’s gospel has clearly been lost. For Paul fitness is always construed in terms of what it is for. When concern with the spiritual duty to maintain one’s own physical fitness is set up in a competitive relation with the claims of other people upon one’s time and energy, a clear but somaticised analogue of the Corinthians’ individualist Gnosticism is clearly operating.

I conclude with four theological observations. First, a comment on the burdens a misreading of this chapter has laid on Christians. Christianity understood as training to achieve an eternal prize has demanded individuals shoulder the psychologically insufferable burden of keeping watch over whether they have done enough to deserve a reward, fuelling and fostering a culture of introspection. It has deformed Christian mission by setting up evangelists as somehow in a competition marked by how many souls they have won, a culture of competitive preaching.²² This culture is parallelled by missiological deformations tied up with an impulse to ‘make’ effective converts through education and discipline, taken to be necessary precursors to fellowship and discipleship; a culture of prophylactic evaluation.²³ These theological deformations have fed problematic extra-ecclesial trends in the West by valorising rather than questioning competitive and pedagogical accounts of society. Despite the many warranted criticisms that have been levelled at Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, his insight remains valid that versions of Christianity which have emphasised the problem of the assurance of salvation and combined it with disciplined abstemious labour as a means of achieving such assurance have entrenched a spirit of enlightened self-interest which is the basic matrix of capitalist culture, the culture of individualised economic competition.

Second, these theological confusions about Christian discipline have rendered modern Christianity defenseless against the rise of sport as a means of disciplining modern industrial populations by de-politicising them, and has even accelerated this process by offering theological reasons why Christians ought to escape from the messiness of public life into sport.²⁴ As one sociologist aptly summarised the resulting configuration of contemporary north Atlantic sporting piety, ‘[there is] a persisting individualistic moral orientation towards sport—root out individual selfishness and cheating, perhaps, but do not confront the more structural dimensions of racism, sexism and corporate irresponsibility in education or politics or big business’.²⁵ This apolitical cast of modern evangelicalism is visible in its evident engrossment in the details of sports contests: the exactitude with which sports-talk investigates the campaigns of the pseudo-states on display in stadium and locker room²⁶ begins to look suspiciously like an ersatz political discourse absorbing the energy needed for the finding of consensus that sustains both the state-house and the Word-house.

The situation of the contemporary church, third, is largely one of theological inarticulacy about sport. It seems obvious that sport is an easily recognisable contemporary social phenomenon. But it is not at all clear what this cultural form is socialising and channelling, theologically speaking. Are the cultural forms of sport as they are practised today developing the ludic powers of humanity (play)? The agonic (competition)? The aesthetic? What aspects of the boundaries of the human are being constructed and explored in contemporary sport? Without conceptual, and more importantly, theological clarity on this most basic of points Christians will not be able to generate criticisms of sporting activities, which are in their essence social forms. Social forms can always drift into expressing and even fostering basically bodily drives, functions or values which Christians ought rather to resist. On the basis of their clarity about bodily and erotic drives and their proper socialisation in the cultural institution of marriage, for instance, Christians have long been able to name the social institution of the brothel as fostering and sustaining self-destructive human impulses, whether such institutions come in the guise of the massage parlour, bordellos, street prostitution, or the single’s bar. But it does not appear that the same clarity of critique is currently possible regarding sport, leaving me, for one, uncertain whether Christians today even have the conceptual apparatus to spot when sport has become an institution socialising bodily drives (like aggression) and spiritual ends (such as self-aggrandisement) that are anti-Christ, as our fore-mothers and fore-fathers in faith so clearly could.

There are nevertheless some promising theological distinctions available many warranted criticisms that have been levelled which a more robust theology might be built. Close theological investigation of the metastases of Christians’ understandings of discipline might offer us disclosures about precisely how sport, holding out the promise of liberation, yields bondage.²⁷ Recovery of conceptual distinctions present in the Christian tradition will greatly aid this criticism. Perhaps the most important for our age is the patristic and medieval commonplace that there are obvious distinctions to be made between the basic creaturely good of exercise and the elaborated cultures of spectator sports.²⁸ This distinction was supported by a range of subsidiary distinctions: between emotional engagement in play and abandonment to the spirit of play,²⁹ between violence/aggression/warfare and games,³⁰ and between games and the fetish for winning or leadership.³¹ The sensibility of the Greek philosophers that sport expressed the ludic, agonic and aesthetic aspects of humanity might be theologically revisited, but none of these aspects of human existence are extolled by Paul in the Corinthian correspondence. It appears then that Scriptural and doctrinal starting places for substantive discussion of this topic remain to be hammered out for our age.

Some have found Paul’s use of athletic metaphors to suggest, if not exactly warrant, a theology of competition, but I have shown that such a reading runs in a diametrically opposite direction to his stated intention. Thus, to find in this chapter a valorisation of competition is equivalent to reading his drawing on farming metaphors as a justification of modern agribusiness. By saying that one (Christ) wins, Paul here (and in the rest of the Corinthian correspondence) renders himself unusable for any Christian claim that competitive social organisation is the most productive or even interesting way to draw the best out of individual humans or communities. Paul’s whole thrust in this chapter is to stress that any aspiration to perform in a way that ‘wins’ against others is not only intrinsically prideful, but destroys the gospel. In the Corinthian correspondence, we might even go so far as to say, competition appears only as an alternative to the community of gifts in which no agonism is necessary to bring each person to their fullest flourishing.³² The agon motif is sharply formulated to emphasise discipline, especially bodily self-discipline, not competition itself³³ as the vast majority of the Christian tradition clearly grasped.³⁴

We must ask ourselves, not only in the realm of sport but in wider spheres of human endeavour: What makes it seem to us that collaborative social forms are less productive of human flourishing than competitive ones? The last decade has certainly seen increasing sympathy among politicians in the UK for the idea that better academics or health care providers will be produced if individual practitioners are pitted against one another.³⁵ In opposition to this trend, the recent rise of community organising represents one of many possible counter-organisations that seek institutional forms that will allow communities to foster and grow people’s abilities to speak for and from the community. These social structures are built on the presumption that if one member of the group ‘wins’, it is a win for the whole community, not against some of its members.³⁶ Perhaps we can even understand the oft-noted hollowness that athletes feel after winning a big event as a negative echo of a more fulfilling ecclesial ‘winning’, in which every observer and participant experiences a successful performance as for them and so given to them.

The implications of this point for a theological hermeneutic of political structures are far reaching. Competition is clearly one way groups can be organised to enhance individual performance, but it stands at some distance from the politics of the ecclesia in having no internal mechanisms and no imagination for how the winner’s enhanced performance benefits the losers, even if the losers were also pushed to a higher level of performance. It is clear that historical reasons explain in part why Anglo-Americans find it particularly difficult to imagine that cultures and configurations of group action might yield greater individual performance and in more satisfying ways than by forcing people into competitive relationships. It is not transparently the case that a human can run a mile fastest by striving to beat competitors, even if we grant that the main rationale for competition is the enhancement of physical performances. A paced event in which both the pacers and the eventual ‘winner’ run far faster times over a set distance than either would have run on their own would produce a ‘winning’ performance that reflected well on the efforts of each pacer. The arbitrary nature of a social configuration designed to see how fast a human can run by herself is made no arbitrary, or less individualistic, by noting that losing runners might run faster as individuals when they are trying to beat others.³⁷

These few starting points will have to be pursued in much more detail if our age is to regain some conceptual and theological clarity about the true spiritual value being purchased by the vast resources it pours into sports, exercise and leisure.