COVENANT HIGH SCHOOL CONVOCATION

September 8, 2002

These convocation services have, through the years, afforded me the opportunity to speak about the various parts of a high school curriculum from the vantage point of a biblical philosophy of life and education. I have, in the past, for example, considered the study of fine arts, of language and literature, of history, and, last year, I considered the importance, as the Bible teaches us that importance, of the education of young people in the sciences.

Tonight I digress from a consideration of the curriculum itself to consider what has become by far the most consequential co-curricular activity in the American high school, viz. interscholastic athletics. Though the merging of school and sport is relatively rare in other parts of the world, it has become a sacred fixture of American education. So sacred a fixture, indeed, that the few voices raised now and again to question the wisdom of attaching competitive sports to schooling are met more with bewildered disbelief than with active disagreement. If the teachers in a school district decide to strike and so delay the opening of the school year, as we know sometimes happens, the members of the chess club, or the drama club, or Future Farmers or Future Teachers of America, or even the Honor Society wait with the rest of the student body for school to begin so that they may resume their activities. But the football team, which began practice before the school year was scheduled to begin in any case, continues to practice and even plays its games, strike or not, whether or not the members of the team are going to school. Protestant Christian schools, as they have formed in large numbers over the past 30 years, have often made a point of assuring their constituencies that they will be just as committed to sports as any public school. Many who give such an impression do so because they themselves cannot conceive of a high school without a football or basketball team, many others, however, fear abandonment by their constituency if the school fails to open with both a chemistry lab and a football team.

This longstanding tradition of school-based sports has led to many no doubt unforeseen consequences, as it has at the collegiate level. Vast sums of money are diverted from the educational program, a certain low-grade corruption appears now regularly even at the high school level as the pressure to win pollutes the spirit of competition, the number of students participating in athletics remains a small fraction of the student body, and athletic prowess replaces intellectual achievement as the coin in which the student body prefers to trade.

As I mentioned, the connection between school and team sports is a uniquely American phenomenon. American Christian schools, however, have an obligation to be distinctively Christian, not distinctively American. What should Christian schools, seeking not an American but a biblical approach, think about inter-scholastic athletics? Well, I have no intention this evening to answer the question whether schools should have athletic teams. It would, I think, be very difficult to give a definitive answer to that question from the Bible. Such decisions belong to that liberty we are granted to work out a faithful approach to life by the application of biblical teaching to specific questions.

But that is not to say that we cannot fashion a biblical theology of sport and, in particular, competitive sport. From there we can then develop an approach to sports and school that is faithful to that theology. I propose tonight to sketch the beginnings of such a theology of sport. It is, I'm sure you will appreciate, just a sketch and just a beginning.

There is, as you are probably aware, no specific recommendation of sports in the Bible. Nor is there anywhere an instance of God's people engaging in sports. We are never told that Abraham was a great runner, or that David was a champion wrestler, or that the Apostle Paul first made his reputation in chariot racing. Paul told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach, but he never told him to join the local soccer team both for the sake of the exercise and as a way of meeting unbelievers. In the Bible you have nothing of that fascination with athletics that you get in the literature of the Greco-Roman world. What is more, the same may be said of Christian history since biblical times. None of the titans of church history is known to us as having been a fine athlete: not Augustine, not Luther or Calvin, not John Bunyan or Richard Baxter, not Whitefield or Wesley or Jonathan Edwards, not William Carey or John Paton.

On the other hand, the Bible is not unaware of sports. It mentions running and boxing and mentions them in a favorable light. It is interesting, by the way, that most sports in the ancient world, and all those mentioned in the Bible, were individual sports, not team sports. However, the Bible's emphasis on community and the employment of gifts for the greater good, and the body of Christ being greater than the sum of its parts, all provide justification for the assumption that the Bible would have spoken as readily about team sports as individual sports as an illustration of life, were those team sports to have existed in biblical times as they do now. In any case, the Bible obviously is not against athletics. In the text that was read, we heard the Apostle Paul liken a committed Christian to an athlete who, with his eye on the prize, goes into strict training and, again, to a boxer who seeks to land his punches so as to defeat his opponent. In another place Paul appeals to the athlete in training as a picture of the Christian seeking sanctification and the author of Hebrews likens the Christian life to a race run in an arena and watched by a stadium full of spectators who are willing the runners on. No one who lived in the world of the New Testament would have been hard pressed to appreciate these illustrations drawn from the sporting world.

Sir Walter Scott was the patron of the Selkirk football team which played in what has been billed as the "first modern football match" on December 5, 1815. Scott wrote a ballad for his Selkirk team, four lines of which read:

"Then strip lads and to it, though sharp be the weather

And if by mischance you should happen to fall,

There are worse things in life than a tumble on heather

And life is itself but a game of football."

                [Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern, 704]

Well, perhaps it is too much to say that life is a game of football, but it was the Apostle Paul himself who taught us to think of life as like an athletic contest. The Bible, as you know, has a very positive view of the body and the importance of the body, so there is nothing unexpected in biblical writers using sports as metaphors of life. So, it is not all that surprising that the addition of sports to a young man's education in the 19th century should have been thought to be a way of achieving what seemed to be the biblical goal of mens sana in corpore sano - a sound mind in a sound body. The Apostle Paul may have said that physical exercise profits a little, but he did say it profits.

What is more, there seems in Paul's remarks to be something of a celebration of athletic achievement: the swift runner, the boxer with the powerful punch, and so on. If we are taught, as we are at the end of Job, to give glory to God for the speed of an Ostrich, that ungainly bird that is faster than a horse, then, surely, it is only good and necessary inference that leads us to see the hand of God in the achievements of a great athlete.

I remember being struck by this when I saw on television Carl Lewis, the great Olympic runner, run the anchor leg of a 4/100 meter relay. That race produced a world record time and with the running start afforded to Lewis running the anchor leg in that relay, the commentator wondered if 100 meters had ever been run so swiftly in the history of mankind. His part of the race was shown over and over again, in slow motion and in real time, and if anything was clear it was that God had made that man to run. It was a supremely beautiful thing to watch: the power and grace of a great runner leaving the field behind him.

All of that may be said without hesitation. And, I think it is right to conclude that a fair inference from the little bit of data provided in the Bible is that sports could be seen as a means not only of exercising the body but of training the character. If Paul thinks of the process of sanctification as like the training of an athlete or of the competitive drive of a boxer, would it not be fair to say that the training of an athlete could itself teach character and discipline? I do not mean to suggest, of course, that this is what actually happens in most inter-scholastic athletics nowadays. My observation and my experience is that good character is more likely to be deformed than formed by participation in sports.

I knew of a man, a friend of a friend, who coached high school soccer in Pennsylvania. He was an able coach and his teams regularly were outstanding, winning the state title on several occasions. He refused to permit his players to use the sliding tackle - though legal by the rules governing high school soccer - because it too easily led to injury and to inflamed tempers. He also required his players to applaud goals scored against them - partly because his teams had a right to feel than anyone who scored on them had achieved something noteworthy and should be commended, but partly to maintain the spirit of good sportsmanship and that sense of perspective - we are, after all, talking about a game - that is so often lost in athletics. But, after several years, he quit coaching. He felt that, all in all, as the game was played at that level, the experience was harmful to the character of young men, not helpful, and he couldn't be part of it.

And that leads us to consider the dangers associated with sports and, in particular, sports that are brought into the school and made, like it or not, a part of the educational experience of young people.

1. We begin with the temptation to consider the trivial consequential.

It is a fundamental tenet of a Christian world view that life must be lived primarily for the sake of what is genuinely important and that the temptations of the world, flesh, and the devil are frequently designed to distract us with what is, in fact, inconsequential. The rich farmer who, one evening decides to build more barns to store his grain but then dies the same night, is the father of all those who make a life of loving what does not matter, what does not last, and what will not save.

The fact of the matter is that one thing the reader of Holy Scripture can be absolutely sure of is that athletics are inconsequential. They are much more inconsequential even than barns and grain. For barns and grain have their proper use and contribute to the life of human beings. Athletics have a place, but an entirely unimportant place in the order of life's priorities. The problem is that our culture does not believe this and does not practice that studied indifference to sports that is the proper attitude of someone - however athletic - who knows what is really important in life.

What matters, what ought to matter to a young Christian man or woman is the formation of his character, of her intellect, of the cultivation of gifts and graces that one's life might be lived to great usefulness before God and man. Fact is, athletics contribute little or nothing to such a life, for all but a very few people. I do not say they are worthless. Of course not. I only say that they are not worth very much.

And that is the simplest thing to prove. I just finished a new biography of Abraham Lincoln. Thinking about this address, I couldn't help but notice that Lincoln was no athlete, which led me to notice that few American presidents were known as fine athletes. I recently finished Ron Chernow's massive history of the Morgan bank, which is really a history of banking in the United States. In that large book the reader is introduced to a number of men who held prominent positions at one or the other of the Morgan institutions, and, from time to time Chernow will note that such and such a man had been an outstanding athlete usually at Harvard or Yale. But, the athletics didn't distinguish them. There were many more powerful bankers who were not athletes and the athletes were no more likely to leave their mark than those who were not. You get this same impression even in Stephen Ambrose's World War II histories. He will sometimes point out that one soldier or another was known as an athlete or was the best athlete in the unit. But that didn't make braver or a better soldier than the others and many of the heroes of Ambrose's studies were not successful athletes at all. One might think that, at least in war, the athlete would rise above the non-athlete; but it is not so and any officer will tell you it is not so. Athletic achievement is no index of bravery, or strength, or competence in fighting. To be entirely frank, athletic prowess is the index of nothing with respect of life achievement, and certainly the index of nothing with respect to a Christian's life achievement. You sometimes hear apologists for athletics claim that competitive athletics is the path to success in life, but it isn't and anyone can see that it isn't. Athletes are no more likely to be successful than anyone else and, in our culture today, it is probably possible to demonstrate that those shaped by the American experience of competitive athletics are less likely to do well in life. Too much of their time, effort, and interest was drawn away by athletics from those pursuits more important to a successful life.

Last night I finished reading Paul Johnson's new little biography of Napoleon. The greatest man of his day, the man who changed the face of Europe and, in some ways, of the modern world, was not an accomplished athlete. Neither were the great figures of 20th century world history, Churchill an outstanding example among them. Having read this summer Tracy Lee Simmons' Climbing Parnassus, which is a defense of the importance of Latin and Greek in the high school curriculum, it would be much easier to argue that classical training is far more an index of future accomplishment in life than athletics.

Athletics may certainly be given a place in life. Just be sure it is a small place and that it does not prevent a young man or woman from attending to things that matter much, much more. Was it not this very keeping of his priorities straight that made Eric Liddel's refusal to run an Olympic 100 meter heat on a Sunday - thereby surrendering his chance for athletic glory - such a magnificent example of a distinctly Christian approach to life. How ironic it was for evangelicals to fawn over that great movie as they did and to celebrate that great story when very, very few of them would have done the same thing themselves or thought it necessary to do the same thing. Sports, for many of them, are too important to give up for the Lord's Day.

The great problem with athletics today and the source of so many associated problems is precisely the importance attached to it. And the great problem with its association with schooling is precisely the way in which in young minds it overwhelms the serious purposes for which one goes to school.

2. A second danger posed by athletics is the temptation to compartmentalization, to treat athletics as a realm not subject to the same obligations of Christian holiness as other dimensions of life.

Every Christian man who is serious about his faith but is, at the same time, an avid athlete or watcher of sports knows this danger all too well. The competitive juices begin to flow and suddenly it is as if the Lord Jesus never preached the sermon on the mount or, if he did, explicitly exempted sportsmen from its commandments. Whether we are talking about the coach or fan who rails at the referee (and so calls him "Raca" in his heart), or the player who throws an elbow in retaliation for an elbow received (and so returns evil for evil), or the man sitting in front of a television whose body language indicates that he wants his team's linebacker to flatten that quarterback (and so does not do that good to others that he wishes to be done to him), we are talking about sin, pure and simple, and nothing but sin. Not competitiveness, not will to win, not even giving 110%, it is sin. Think of that new staple of American sporting culture: the touchdown dance. "Look at me! Look at me! Admire me. Give me all your attention. Don't anyone fail to be impressed with me!" Such is the distance that we have traveled from the old concept of sportsmanship which was, fundamentally, a particular form of the virtues of humility and other-centeredness. The spurning of such virtues, even in sport, is sin. And when it is indulged and made a feature of a man's life, it diminishes the character of that man and it sears his conscience.

I speak primarily here of men. The competitive drive has not yet corrupted women to the same degree, but time alone will tell if as women become more and more like men in our culture, they will take this defect to their hearts as they have begun to take others.

Godly men have known for a long time the power of competition in sports to unman a Christian heart. Augustine's close friend, Alypius, loved the games; but he knew that he shouldn't attend. Friends continued to press him, however, and finally he relented, making this concession to his conscience: he would go, but he would keep his eyes closed. His resolve lasted until the first great shout and then his eyes popped open and he was cheering as wildly as the next man.

We tend to think that early Christianity's criticism of the sports and games of the Greco-Roman world was due to the intrusion of idolatrous practices in those games. However, while that did happen, the real problem in the Christian mind was rather the emotions that sporting contests tended to excite and the difficulty Christian men had in controlling them. There never was a time when sports occupied the place that they occupy now in public life besides those centuries of the classical world. Here is Gibbon in his famous The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

"The impatient crowd rushed at the dawn of day to secure their places, and there were many who passed a sleepless and anxious night in the adjacent porticos. From the morning to the evening, careless of the sun or of the rain, the spectators, who sometimes amounted to the number of four hundred thousand, remained in eager attention; their eyes fixed on the horses and charioteers, their minds agitated with hope and fear for the success of the colors which they espoused; and the happiness of Rome appeared to hang on the event of a race." [In Schaff, Church History, ii, 339-340]

It makes you wonder if they handed out bobble-head dolls at the Coliseum. And concerning all of this passion Christian writers reminded their brethren that while such sports "excite all sorts of wild and impure passions, anger, fury, and lust; the spirit of Christianity is a spirit of meekness, peace, and purity." [Schaff, 342] Perhaps one reason we are short on meekness, peace, and purity in the church today is that so many of the church's men have far too long thrown those things away and trampled them underfoot in their pursuit of sports and its entertainment. I refereed a high school soccer game a while back and, there in the midst of the action, as I was, able to hear what was being said, able to see the elbows and listen to the angry protests, I was reminded that sports are, in a way, a concentration of life. They bring to the surface faster and more obviously what is present in the heart. That can be a good thing if the effulgence of sinful hearts is immediately identified for what it is and squelched. It can be a very bad thing if it is allowed to become the atmosphere in which sports are played. If you don't want you child to soak in the radioactively sinful atmosphere of the public high school hallway, you won't want him or her to soak in the same atmosphere, perhaps more concentrated and lethal, on the field or the court.

No one can deny that it is a fundamental of the Christian worldview that God is everywhere in our lives, that all dimensions of life are to be offered to him, that he may be worshipped and served in every area of life, that, as Abraham Kuyper once electrifyingly put it: "there exists in all the universe not the breadth of a thumb, but Christ says, 'It is mine!'" Well, we can be sure of this, as much as we can be sure of anything, that if we acknowledge Christ's lordship in sports, if we seek to serve Him in competitive sports, if we seek to do sports in a distinctively Christ-honoring way, the face of athletics would change dramatically in any school, anywhere.

The Presbyter Salvian, describing the fall of Trier in the last days of the Roman Empire, tells us that men did not defend the city because they were too interested in the games at the arena. After the rape, looting, and burning of the city, the survivors petitioned the emperor to rebuild their arena so that the games could go on and their morale improved! Salvian said of Rome, "it is dying, but continues to laugh." Well, much the same may be said of our own culture. Its corruptions which must at last be its undoing are drowned out by the entertainment. Sports are a large part of that entertainment. It is not a small thing that they have become such a large part of the schooling, the training of the minds and hearts of our young people.

The biblical response to this is not, of course, to ban sports from life. "Men can go wrong with wine or women," said Luther. "Should we, therefore, abolish wine and do away with women?" But the biblical response is surely for Christians to think long and hard about how to fit athletics into life and, in particular, to fit them into the training of that relatively small number of young people who play sports competitively and into the experience of the other young people at school.

There is much that is positive to be said about sports. There is much less positive to be said about the American way of doing sports in our day. Christians must make their own way, and Christian schools as well.