Abstract
Academic disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, and kinesiology outpace the discipline of theology when comparing scholarly attention given to, and published reflections on, the everyday activity and embodied practice of sports. Michael Shafer’s book aims to enter this contested, popular discourse by contributing a theological voice to convictions which should norm Christians’ and the Church’s understanding of and participation in sports, and to offer Christian moral reasoning to the expanding field of sports ethics. He focuses on the ethics of performance or biotechnological enhancements and especially on matters related to sport doping. Shafer’s book comes out of his dissertation with an intent to inform and challenge three contexts: the Church, the academy and the wider culture of sports.
Shafer launches his inquiry with a focus on the nature of doping and a few of the standard moral reasons against it: (1) Doping is unfair because it violates a game’s formal rules, making it a species of cheating; (2) Doping unjustly coerces other athletes to dope; and (3) Doping unjustifiably presents health risks to competitors (pp. 2, 18–34). Shafer is sympathetic to these moral arguments against doping, and thus he holds that doping is morally wrong. However, Shafer travels this route not simply to problematize sport doping both for its proponents and opponents, but also to seek to unmask where doping and anti-doping views come up short regarding the meta-ethical dimension. According to Shafer, the real moral concerns are at the level of justification with respect to the nature and purpose of sport. Moreover, for Shafer, the what and why of the practice of sport further presuppose views on philosophical anthropology, since humans are (of course) essential to this cultural activity. Shafer pushes the debate to get beyond questionable and ambiguous distinctions, such as how to determine what are natural and unnatural enhancements, so that it backs up into how doping threatens human identity. He says, ‘Doping is an attempt to circumvent a basic expression of our humanness … [A] Christian view of sport will rely upon certain theological underpinnings that inform our understanding of the purposes and values inherent in sport’ (p. 44). Shafer’s hermeneutical move permits him to re-frame the questions and discussions about why we even play sports, why they exist and matter—about their ends. His method and argument propose an alternative, holistic account that recognizes the weaknesses of and holes in (he refers to the ‘leaky bucket fallacy’) the standard approaches of doping and anti-doping arguments. This enables him to call for a rationality that gets to basement-level matters in order to examine the fundamental dimension of ethics concerning human agency. He believes the only way he can substantively claim doping is morally wrong is to articulate a convincing case for how the purpose of sport and our humanity make better sense in light of God’s story of redemption. This is a tall order, but theological voices are much needed for recovering the goods which abound in this lived (play-full) experience.
Instead of jumping straight to how the Christian tradition historically has engaged sport (chapter 3) or to his theological exposition and conclusion about the morality of doping (chapters 4–7), Shafer winds his way through the deep terrain of moral philosophy and sport. He is indebted to these disciplines and other interlocutors to help set up his moral interpretation of and theological argument for sport. In chapter 2, Shafer singles out Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral framework as the best candidate for preserving the goods and purpose internal to sport, since Shafer’s concern is the meta-ethical and fundamental dimension of ethics. We must, he argues, not only recognize but also justify the deeper moral value of sport and its specific standards of excellence, which is to say its internal logic and virtues, in order to do justice to the nature of this community-based practice and who we are as human beings. Comparing MacIntyre to Richard Rorty, the latter’s view fails to appreciate the goods intrinsic to sport and their objective moral meaning. Rorty’s ‘ethnocentric conception of truth, morality and human nature’ (p. 55) translates into sport being primarily about private self-creation, expression and perfection, and thus sport becomes a vehicle to realize extrinsic goods, undermining the autotelicity and moral dignity of the practices and players themselves (pp. 58–61). However, Shafer does not simply adopt MacIntyre’s moral framework, for he asserts that it too falls short. The merit of Shafer’s project is that he clears a path to connect the moral nature of sports and humans to a theological account. This situates the language and meaning of virtue and human identity squarely within the Christian narrative and its claims concerning Jesus Christ, and so submits those to its telos.
Consequently, the heavy lifting Shafer does in moral philosophy and how it relates to sport as a social practice also implicates the Christian tradition in its own set of problems, when interpreting and engaging sport. In chapter 3, Shafer surveys three historic Christian positions, which have seen sport as, respectively, insignificant, immoral and instrumental. He argues that in all of these the Christian tradition has failed to value the created goods intrinsic to sport as play. In trying to establish the need for a thick theological conceptualization of sports, chapter 3 targets notable figures such as Augustine, Tertullian, Aquinas, the Puritans and Muscular Christianity’s proponents, and demonstrates how Christian texts and traditions have informed many of our current (faulty) assumptions about the nature and human essence of sport. This chapter builds an important bridge to the remainder of his book.
In chapters 4 to 6, Shafer provides his theological framework and a solution to the major moral obstacles which can beset Christians in sports. He argues for three steps that are necessary to repair the axiological problems pertaining to sport, so that Christians are on solid theological ground for why sport as play matters and ‘what values should govern our participation in it’ (p. 90). The three involve, respectively, reconciling Christian theological ethics and sport (chapter 4), recognizing the human essence of sport (chapter 5), and recovering the spirit of play in sport (chapter 6).
In chapter 4, Shafer specifically considers, on one hand, the misvaluing of competition and the human body and, on the other hand, the sinful behaviors of individuals and institutions, both of which are parasitic on and corruptive of the basic goods of sports. However, Shafer’s focus on the nature of competition opens him up to a possible criticism, which will be my main point of contention.
Shafer’s analysis of competition rightly identifies pitfalls such as gamesmanship, egoism, winning at all costs, and fear of losing. Moreover he shows how a pagan, heroic model of competition names and invests in virtues in sport in ways that are antithetical to a Christian sportsperson’s vocation and good life interpreted ‘within the broader context of a God glorifying narrative’ (p. 130). However, Shafer’s implicit theological anthropology gives scant attention to our theological situation in terms of Christ and the Trinity. His emphasis on human flourishing in sports in light of purposiveness and vision of the good seems to imply that God expects something from our strivings toward excellence in terms of our human vocation, rather than a relationship that the Triune God wants to share with us, even in our sports. Shafer at points tiptoes in this direction as he develops the second and third steps in his theological account of sport—when, for example, he focuses on the communal nature of and place of friendship in the practice of sport competition, on talents and abilities as gifts of God employed with thanksgiving and worship, and on the autotelicity of play itself—but he does not fully connect the nature of play or games to Christ and the Trinity. Except for a few intimations in his final chapter, Shafer is thin on how sport and the games we play fit into God’s relationship with us, or what divine presence means in sport. A perspective that is missing, for instance, is that the Triune God freely gifts humanity with powers and capacities to play, because God is a God who plays, and therefore human play is a non-divine analogue of a God who plays. Recently, Lincoln Harvey (A Brief Theology of Sport, Cascade Books, 2014, pp. 83–84) has argued that there is a correlation between the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing and the nature of play, for both are unnecessary yet deeply meaningful activities. Rob Ellis complements this emphasis on creation and play by linking play (as depicted in wisdom literature) with the life of the Triune God and the act of creation (The Games People Play, Wipf & Stock, 2014, pp. 140–47).
Such theological perspectives raise further issues regarding the nature of competition, in that the divine life is not based on a competitive relationship whether intra-Trinitarian or with God’s creatures. According to Kathryn Tanner, since God’s nature is gift-giving God’s gifts do not come at either the donor’s or the recipients’ expense. What the doctrine of God implies for humans in our community practices of sport is that Christian athletes do not play to pay God or others back, and their play with fellow image-bearers is dedicated to a similar gift-giving for mutual development and fulfillment (see Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, Fortress Press, 2001, pp. 3–4, 90–94). Shafer, in some contrast, sticks to the human qualities of play and our identity, in his capable conceptualization of competition between humans. But, when sport is interpreted according to God’s own play and gift-giving, a theological structure organizes it. Play is a basic good, as Shafer argues, but it is an expression of our humanity because of who God is. If play is assumed within our relationship with God in Christ, games have a dual witness: human and divine. What is given to us in play can be shared with others and reflect divine generosity. Gift-giving exposes exchanges in sports that exclusively aim at winning or satisfying certain conditions and efforts, for example, regarding our duty to perform with excellence. Gift-giving means that humans should not envy the gifts of others, for they indicate God’s bountiful blessings which we all can share. Nor is any pattern of play good when gifts are the exclusive right of a player, since this violates what he or she was given freely in the first place. Our sports can become an imitation of God’s gratuity as communicated in the human form of Christ, for in the sharing of our skills and abilities with others we give from what God, as source, means and goal, has abundantly blessed us with. Consequently, sport can become liturgy of sorts in which humans participate in and signify God.
I see this theological framework filling out Shafer’s, especially where he offers the Special Olympics as a new paradigm for appreciating and valuing the essence of humans at play (pp. 168, 178–85). People with disabilities exist as gifts who share joyfully and freely of themselves with other contestants, in a manner that strikingly recognizes and dignifies the priority of mutual participation over outcome-based sport. The Special Olympics is consonant with a gift-giving model as seen in the divine life; moreover, how the disabled do sports is radically inclusive, which is appropriate to an interdependent human community.
Shafer’s account invites other Christian ethicists and theologians to advance from his solid beginning. By pushing and pulling at Shafer’s claims, other themes such as eschatology, pneumatology, and Christology can be incorporated so that ethics is a response to God’s action. God stands over and confronts our games as Lord, while also delighting when the fullness of our humanity witnesses to God’s gifts and graces which interpenetrate the joy humans freely experience as they jump, set, block, dribble, pass and flip.