it's my great honor to introduce my friend and colleague dr greg jones greg jones served for 14 years as dean of duke divinity school and he still serves there on the faculty he served later after his service as uh dean of the duke divinity school as a vice provost for global engagement for duke university he is also as i announced a couple of days ago and was announced through a press release as a senior advisor in the institute for faith and learning and so he is one of our colleagues here at baylor greg is a well-known and deeply loved person as a teacher and as a scholar his work on forgiveness is really a landmark in theological ethics but among the things that's so good about him he is someone who brings a real sense of what wisdom is a kind of natural way of asking good questions about it and i would say a pastoral presence and that's a rare combination indeed someone who can put those things together so we could not think of anyone better to end our conversation here by having a friend and really a thought leader for us and that's dr greg jones please welcome greg jones thank you i think there was one person who didn't get thanked that we ought to clap our hands for and that's darren davis who's been an extraordinary host it is a great joy to uh be with you and to have this opportunity and to be associated with the institute for faith and learning here at baylor and the important work that it does i'm mindful that i'm putting you all in triple jeopardy uh this evening i'm the final speaker after an intellectual feast of two and a half days of panels and plenaries on a whole lot of things and that probably even if you've just sampled some of them your brain is full and so on a saturday night i'm supposed to as darren said in the conversation i hope at the end of my talk and not sooner but secondly i'm also competing with an alabama lsu football game that i suspect at least a fair number of us are hoping both teams will lose and third i'm the only thing standing between you and dr pepper floats so the challenges are somewhat daunting and i hope that the the talk will be sufficiently interesting and that both teams are playing miserably along the way i'm a lifelong baseball fan and this is my favorite time of year the reason is because i'm a lifelong chicago cubs fan so the off season is when hope is most fervent and optimistic for us i have a good friend who every year on opening day sends me an email message that says wait till next year because you see the last time the chicago cubs won the world series leo tolstoy was still writing a friend of mine wrote a book published in chicago called the cub fans guide to life the subtitle is the ultimate self-help book but there's one team that's even more pathetic than my beloved chicago cubs and it's the one that was managed for many years by charlie brown part of the problem was that charlie brown was also the star pitcher for this team and he also had lucy as his center fielder who seemed regularly to be more interested in butterflies and boys than she was in the actual game in one sunday morning strip it was opening day lucy comes up to charlie brown she says manager this year it's going to be different i am committed to making this year different i will catch all the balls and i will concentrate a big grin comes across charlie brown's face he's excited first batter comes up to the plate charlie brown throws a pitch the batter hits a high fly ball to center field and you see in the frame the ball's coming down lucy's in perfect position as it starts to descend and then it cuts to the next frame the ball hits lucy on the head it falls to the ground the batter circles the bases another home run the beginning of another losing season lucy comes up to charlie brown brings the ball all the way into the pitcher's bound and she starts to hand it to him and she said i'm sorry manager i really am i wanted it to be different she said but then as i saw the ball up in the air i started thinking about all those other times and i lost my concentration in the last scene she says i'm sorry manager i really am i guess you could say the past got in my eyes the past got in my eyes that's what haunts us so much of our time in life and study and christian life we see the possibilities of the future we want things to be different we commit ourselves to doing something different and then we remember all those other times in the past it gets in our eyes i want to suggest this evening that that's part of the predicament that we have when we think about how to connect our christian faith and the world of sports for a whole variety of reasons the past presents more problems for us than real opportunities we have all kinds of complexities that seem to haunt us from the christian tradition from the world of sports from the processes of ancient catechesis from what jamie smith was talking about from augustine and disordered loves and the fabulousness of stadiums and idolatry all kinds of things or sometimes it's the ways in which they all get blurred together and get used for instrumental purposes that become destructive and problematic we have ambivalence about our ambivalence when it comes to faith and sports and when something bad happens on campus or in a pro sports or in a community we then say well maybe this we just need to get rid of it we have these uneasy consciences i know that partly because i lived it as a kid growing up i was an athlete playing sports all the time i learned to read actually by trying to keep track of baseball scores and knew what's how to spell cincinnati before i knew how to spell cat because of cincinnati having a major league baseball team people marveled when we went to the airport and i'd look up at the screen and any city that had an airplane destination with a major league team i said oh cincinnati chicago but if it was a city that didn't have a major league team even if it was waco i didn't know what the word looked like that's how sports obsessed i was as a kid watching it playing it everything about sports i also was a christian active in my youth group and i had these uneasy consciences that this world these two worlds didn't go together i used to worry as a teenager that if i died and my sports friends and my church friends came to my funeral they'd all go you knew him because they lived they occupied different worlds and so i also was in speech and debate and i won a number of awards for a speech that i proudly gave called sportianity the unhealthy mixing of religion and sports it was a way of giving voice to my ambivalence to my bad conscience that somehow this was an unhealthy combination the past was in my eyes every sunday i'd go to church and i'd say oh i gotta get this straight this is bad news because the world i lived over here in sports in the world i lived over here in church they just didn't seem to go together and then i heard about notre dame and touched down jesus and first down moses and i was horrified with all the righteous indignation of an adolescent but it goes deeper than that in the early church christians as they were in the catechumenate and getting ready for baptism on easter were enjoined to stay away from spectacles from staying away from the theater and sports when i started learning about that i thought oh my goodness if we had to do that church attendance would stop because i grew up in denver and i knew that if people had to choose between church and the broncos church was going to lose part of the reason i knew that was because a lot of games kicked off at one o'clock eastern time which was 11 o'clock mountain time and if the broncos were playing on the east coasting nobody was in church at 11 o'clock on sunday morning they had an 8 30 service just for bronco fans so there was all this ambivalence the council of arles in the 4th century actually said if followers of jesus were involved with sports charioteers gladiators you would be excommunicated from the church and yet sports still seemed to be around and in the medieval times there actually was a festival of easter practiced by a pope in which he incorporated sports into the festival so the pendulum between you can't do anything or let's blur the distinction so much that they become the same thing we're ambivalent about our ambivalence jamie on thursday night suggested that what we need is sanctified ambivalence about sports well that's like i think putting lipstick on a pig they're saying we're going to be ambivalent but let's try to be holy about our ambivalence and i'm going to suggest that that's not the solution that we actually need a whole different way of thinking about faith in sports and i'll come back to that but part of the problem the past gets in our eyes particularly in an american context is because we've gotten some bad theology bound up with our approaches to sports part of our problem is that in america even those of us who are followers of jesus are all too often implicitly gnostic we have separated the spiritual world from the material world in a way that we think that all religion is about is about prayer and spirituality and whatever you do with your body and the material world is unrelated to that harold bloom wrote a book in 1990 the english professor at yale it was called the american religion and he said gnosticism is the american religion bloom thinks that's a great idea he's celebrating it i read it as a word of judgment think about the ways we think about galatians 5 and the contrast between the fruit of the spirit and the works of the flesh which isn't about a spiritual world in a material world in a gnostic kind of approach it's rather two different ways of living in this world one which leads to fragmentation and brokenness the works of the flesh the fruit of the spirit is about how we live in the material world in faithfulness to the god of jesus christ but when we live with a gnostic kind of separation we think that faith is over here that's what we do on sunday morning sports commerce everything else is over here in the material world which leads us either to demonize it or to glorify it both of which are unhealthy kinds of reactions you demonize it particularly if you came out of the kind of pietast tradition that my maternal side of the family comes from my my mother's side of the family are all german methodist pietas from the midwest my grandfather wasn't allowed to play sports or even card games because that was the devil's work to be involved in all that material stuff he rebelled against that so i know more card games than probably everybody in this room put together because my grandfather taught me every one he could think of as an act of rebellion when you take that kind of gnostic tendency and then you pile onto it what unfortunately because it's unfair to the puritans but unfortunately has sometimes been characterized as a puritanical approach which says that anything that is pleasurable must be wrong and so we get this kind of puritanical or prudish approach that says anything that is pleasurable must be suspect and then that leads to a third problem which is we tend to get moralistic about it all and we turn it into a list of do's and don'ts and we get this into these very technical kinds of distinctions and we lose sight of the larger horizon and so what we end up with is a very truncated vision of what christianity looks like that's often spiritualized made at best boring if not genuinely perverse and moralistic and we have then the world of culture which has become more and more tempted not just to appreciate sports but to turn it into a substitute religion we end up with a pendulum swinging back and forth some of you may have visited uh the other campus where i spend time with uh duke there was somebody if you're on duke's campus there's the center of the campus and the tallest building on the campus by by mr duke's indenture is the duke chapel it actually looks like a european cathedral it's in the very geographic center of the campus and the divinity schools right next to it by what mr duke said was that the divinity school was to be central next to the chapel so the faculty are often out in front of the chapel and some people come and they don't really look around very carefully and every now and again we'll ask a faculty member where is the chapel there's this big cathedral standing right in front of them and so i had one faculty colleague who actually concluded that anybody that ignorant didn't deserve an answer that would point them to the entry to the chapel and so he directed them to cameron indoor stadium and being a moral theologian not stanley howard wasp but someone else but being a moral theologian he actually justified that he was truthful because he said cameron indoor stadium was the place where the largest number of people gathered to worship on any given week at duke and it's not without some reason if you subject it to a kind of anthropological account of liturgies the kind of thing jamie was talking about on thursday night it fits a kind of secular liturgy but we have these pendulums going back and forth and we end up trapped the past it gets in our eyes because the categories we use the categories we've received get us all so jumbled up that we don't know quite what to do so either you have a kind of uncritical adoration or you have a hypercritical kind of rejection but they're rooted in bad frames of reference so what should we do well i suggested that i'm not in favor of a sanctified ambivalence as good a friend as jamie is to to me and as much as i respect his work i actually think we need to focus on sanctification and get rid of the ambivalence what does that mean well let me first suggest to you through a sports analogy that we need to take a state back take a step back and reframe how we receive the tradition of our past for the present in a way that will actually enable us to chart a more hopeful future and that's through soccer not a sport i grew up playing it was only when my kids started playing it that i actually learned the game i learned it as i was coaching it was kind of a scary prospect for the team i'm learning the rules as i'm coaching one time i was complaining to the ref until i discovered that actually i didn't understand the rules but i've come to love soccer over time john paul lederock is a person who does conflict resolution work around the world he's a mennonite by background he's taught at notre dame and he wrote a really interesting book called the moral imagination and what he said was when what he's learned in the process of moral conflict resolution is that soccer actually provides a really powerful analogy because sometimes you have to pass the ball backwards if you want to make progress not something that football fans really recognize all too easily but you pass the ball backwards sometimes you pass it to space where nobody is so that everybody can kind of reset and reframe the picture we tend to just think you keep going down the field you just keep marching and what he suggests is sometimes you need to take a step back reframe it's easier to understand that in terms of a basketball kind of analogy where sometimes you bring the ball back out and reset the offense before you start the passes moving around because you get cattywampus with each other and you don't have the right framing if you really want to make the progress that's what i'm suggesting we need to do in terms of thinking about how faith intersects sports and how we're going to engage it going forward or if you shift the sport now to football i want to suggest a different image when the image goes back to my years as a denver bronco fan back in the 1970s when i was a kid rooting for the broncos in denver our arch nemesis was the raiders the oakland raiders back then they were the great team al davis was the owner and they were a dominant really ugly nasty renegade team they represented all that's wrong with the world especially from the perspective of a denver broncos fan and their quarterback was a guy named kenny the snake stabler this is where i learned to hate alabama football he was an alabama grad kenny the steak stabler was amazing he was he he just was he was a worse human being but a better quarterback than anybody playing today and stabler i think he actually was an alcoholic even then he had difficulties with with alcohol dependency later in life died not too long ago but in those days stabler he had scraggly beard scraggly hair and you you'd see him in the first couple quarters of a game and you'd think the guy was hungover and the broncos would take the lead and then we'd get into the fourth quarter and stabler would be like he's coming to life it's kind of like a wake-up call and he'd say okay game time and he had two wide receivers one a speedster named cliff branch for you cowboy fans he was kind of like bullet bob hayes you know one of those guys who you just sent on a fly route and threw the ball as hard as you could and he could run under it and they had another guy named fred belitnikov who had stick em all over his entire body and jersey and shoes so if the ball got anywhere within like a magnetic orbit it just stuck to it and stabler when he finally woke up in the fourth quarter we could be up by three or four touchdowns and with only six minutes left and every fan in denver is going we're going to lose we just knew that was because stabler he just dropped back he was a lefty and he'd just throw it to bulitnikov and branch touchdown boom another touchdown boom and he'd just break he'd rip our hearts out and mondays were miserable in denver after a loss to the raiders what was reported by sports illustrated that one year stabler the raiders were training at thousand oaks california jack london the writer from the early decades of the 20th century's boyhood home was in thousand oaks now being a reporter at training camp isn't a lot of fun because there's just a lot of well training that goes on at training camp so this sports illustrated reporter decided he was going to go tour jack london's home and he was touring the home and he found this plaque that had a saying of jack london something jack london had written so he wrote it down and he went back and after practice that day he asked stabler for an interview and stable said sure so the writer said i'd like to read you some words that jack london wrote and get your impression stable said that's fine so the writer began by reading these words from jack london would rather be ashes than dust i would rather be a brilliant blaze going out with a spark than to be stifled by dry rot i would rather be a superb meteor every atom of me in magnificent glow than a sleepy and permanent planet the purpose of man is to live not merely to exist i will use my time writer turned to stable and said kenny what does that mean to you statewide just kind of looked at him with a blank stare then he said throw deep i want to suggest to you that what we need to do when we think about the relationship between faith and sports is to throw deep to not settle for an ambivalence not settle for an equivalence not settle for a pendulum swinging back and forth but to throw deep by going to the deepest reservoirs of our christian tradition our understanding of who god is and how god is at work in the world in creation and redemption and the promise of bringing that to new creation in its fullness and that's how we'll be able to appreciate and engage sports in its fullness i learned from my friend darren davis the part of that step is to reframe our language most of the time i'm somebody who's in favor of the word and because we have way too much either or oppositional thinking that breaks apart and pushes apart things and we keep things in tidy little compartments that's part of the problem we have and why the past keeps getting in our eyes so when we think about faith and it's a good step but it's only a half step and it actually leaves things still in problem states because it still suggests there's something over here called faith that's in its own container and there are other things over here whether that be learning or scholarship or work or sports or anything else and we then say okay we've got this over here and that over there now how do we connect them and that's a mistake because it still leaves everything untreated rather than going to the deeper understanding and so i was saying to darren you know i really like that baylor has an institute for faith and learning but i really think it's it's about how faith engages learning in different ways and i talked for a long time rambling around fuzzy and he said yeah it's kind of like faith animating i went bingo and since he said that in a conversation it's just begun to stir my imagination because it gets faith in the appropriate place how is it that faith is the underlying the fundamental reality that then animates animate to give life to all of our reality it then takes it to a new framing a new question so that then it's got the possibility to bring it to life you could still have the critique you can still have the engagement but the faith is what's being articulated requires you got to know the faith in its relationship to all of these activities so i want to suggest that at the heart of what we need to do by throwing deep is rediscover a christian vision for sports both playing it watching it engaging it coaching it in all of its fullness and by doing it in a faith animating way it'll also compel us to think about sports as a part of the whole of our life about its relation to education and forming people for human flourishing for business for health at the intersections but it's not about and it's about faith animating well what might that look like i want to suggest that if we begin at the beginning of some of the discussion on thursday night and some friday and some of our conversations we need to focus first about what it means to think about god's good creation of us as embodied souls and souled bodies about the goodness of the material world we protestants have gotten so good at focusing on the fall that we don't think about the goodness of creation the goodness of our embodied life my wife said most the sermons she heard growing up were bad news good news bad news it was bad news there's sin the good news is jesus and the bad news is the rest of the world is pretty wicked she said it was only when she began to discover that there's a deeper story of scripture that's good news bad news good news that she actually could embrace it as an adult the good news is god created not because god had to not because god knew that there was going to be all this awful sin god creates in the first place out of love for the sake of love and delights in the joy of creatures the brokenness the sin it's real it's pervasive i'm going to get to that in just a minute but we need to pause for a little while and just think about the goodness the goodness of our world the goodness of created life the goodness of relationships the goodness of play the goodness of doing things for no other reason than the praise of god which paradigmatically is worship and yet it's also found in the arts in painting and music and literature and it's found in sports in playfulness for no other reason than just to delight in the goodness of created life that's the heart of why we enjoy playing think about children and how much they can enjoy just the sheer joy of it even before they know whether winning or losing matters or sometimes in some of the most profound examples people who are cognitively challenged who nonetheless have a delight in the playfulness of sport or the playfulness of artistic creation there are lessons to be learned just in the goodness of that the delight of created love that's the heart of what we think about when we think about sport and play the arts more generally is they don't need to have an ulterior motive they don't even have to end in a victory or a defeat it's an expression of our character as embodied souls as in soul bodies as people who are engaging in life they're analogies for all sorts of other realms of the material world but it's because we got too quickly to the brokenness and the sinfulness that we started this gnostic temptation of wanting to flee the material world because we forget the created goodness let me give you just one window into that apart from the reality of sports we talk an awful lot these days about conflict management we talk about it in the church now trust me my wife is a pastor we were sent to a church where the governing board had thrown chairs at each other during a meeting they'd had a fight that erupted and they threw chairs at each other bobby knight like real chairs when you got stuff like that happening conflict management that just says let's try not to kill each other let's rein it in and keep it within some bounce that's a good thing it's an improvement but at the heart of the christian narrative is not that conflict is the underlying reality the heart of the christian narrative is that created goodness is the first word and the promise of the new creation in all of its fullness is the final word so we're a people of forgiveness and reconciliation not of conflict management and so if we're really going to embrace a christian vision of sports it isn't about faith and sports and trying to somehow manage the conflict in some form of sanctified ambivalence we need a deeper understanding that's about how our faith animates that vision a sanctified vision that points toward the holiness of what will sport look like in the kingdom so i love the way this conference was framed as the spirit of sport as a way to focus us on the capital s spirit the holy spirit who is making all things new so the first thing to say is about the created goodness and the playful purposelessness of sport and yet then we do need to acknowledge the reality that we live in a fallen and broken world and we need to confront the ways in which all kinds of activities of our lives personally institutionally economically socially is marked by that sinful brokenness we need to be clear-eyed about that but if we recognize that that's the second word we won't overly demonize it we don't start with critique we start with affirmation of the goodness there are internal goods to sports to the realm of play to the arts more generally that are manifest just in the past process of doing it i'm going to return to that when we talk about what a sanctified or redeemed version vision of sports might might look like the internal goods but as alistair mcintyre and after virtue suggest there are goods internal to practices there are goods external to practices and if the external goods get out of whack they can overwhelm the internal goods yesterday afternoon we had a panel discussion about higher education and sports we didn't even get to scratch the surface of some of the really deep challenging issues one of which is the external good of money in many ways is overwhelming sports at every level it's not only in intercollegiate athletics and not only at the pro level it's infecting what happens in the youngest ages because now no longer is it so much a team sport i do some work with coach k at the bass at duke around leadership development one of the things he said that's marked him as he's coached for four decades is the transformation from kids who knew how to play team basketball by the time they got to college to now an aau culture where the best players don't have a team they're free agents who just play for different groups different weeks all over the country and how it's changed the goods internal to what it means to play as a part of a team he said when he first started coaching high school coaches were a key part of the recruitment process he said they're largely irrelevant most of the time now because the external good overwhelms the internal goods i grew up as a cub fan just following ernie banks billy williams and ron santo glenn becker don kissinger ferguson jenkins why they were lifers with the cubs that i could count on them every year when i lived in baltimore for nine years i still had the benefit of cal ripken who i knew was going to be there every year but even cal ripken there was talk in his later years as to whether the orioles were going to resign him now in the world of fantasy football and baseball you're rooting for individual players rather than teams you don't know who's going to be on a team from one year to the next i just saw on the news today that david price is likely to sign with the cubs i was in one sense thrilled and then i thought but he was just with the blue jays for a couple months and before that he was with the tigers and before that he was with the tampa bay rays the external goods are overwhelming and so we've got to take seriously the ways in which some of the internal goods we care about with sports are getting distorted that's an ongoing challenge to be vigilant paying attention to the created goods and what we really want to be cultivating as a vision of kingdom sports it's also true that sports becomes idolatrous jamie talked about that others throughout the panels this weekend talked about the ways in which we can turn sports into idols i have a relative who i actually think believes in the denver broncos as a religion in a very idolatrous sort of way there's a shrine in their house that beats any christian shrine i've ever seen in a house you don't call any time there's a bronco gamer the idolatry and it can overwhelm in really dangerous ways and can lead to disordering of loves and to people defining themselves more by what they hate than who they love remember my descriptions about the oakland raiders it can become pernicious when i was dean of duke divinity school we appointed to our faculty a distinguished south african practitioner who'd been very active in the resistance to apartheid he chaired the truth and reconciliation nominating commission he was one of those kind of prophetic christian pastor leaders who had just done such extraordinary work you really felt kind of small when you were around him because he was such a holy person and susan and i took them to a duke basketball game because he'd never been to a basketball game so we're sitting in a duke basketball game and the students are pretty well known for their chance which aren't exactly shall we say the most charitable chance in the world and so they were engaged in a really um pretty nasty chant at the other team and the other team's coach i was just chuckling because it was pretty creative i was admiring their ingenuity and peter turned to me and he said you know this is really awful and i said excuse me he said he said there's it's one thing to cheer for your team it's another thing to tear down the other team i thought prophetic judgment being issued to me i thought oh yeah disordered loves defined by hate i ran through all my augustinian principles and i just note to self don't invite peter to any more games the next spring susan and i went to south africa to set up a partnership between duke and the church in south africa and we got there and we were going around and seeing all sorts of sites and everything and then peter told us that he wasn't going to be able to take us to the airport for our flight back and i said why not he said well i've just gotten a ticket to go see the springboks play the all blacks in rugby i said oh okay and we were out on a safari and we actually ended up on a safari who knew with the all blacks team and when we saw the all blacks peter said oh those are the most despicable wretched human beings ever to walk the planet earth i remember that basketball game i said peter you were a really noble christian prophet in cameron indoor state what about charity toward the all blacks he said oh that was basketball this matters self-deception's a funny thing there's a reason why it's the heart of how we understand sin right that it's easy to point the finger at other people's idolatries it's a lot harder to detect our own but it requires an ongoing vigil it's not only about the gap between the internal goods and the external goods it's also important to be able to critique idolatry and to recognize the importance of having ordered loves we also have to be able to pay attention to the ways in which people can use sports instrumentally the standard example hitler and nazi germany the 1936 olympics but it's tempting for us in churches and higher education to have the same kind of instrumental value and to look past all the challenges in a way to use it if it'll help us in evangelism or help us in fundraising rather than having an integrated and integrative approach well what would it look like to have a kingdom vision for sports to rediscover a christian vision for sports going forward in philosophy when i was studying aristotle i realized that there was an argument about the shaping of the virtues in terms of whether happiness or eudaimonia human flourishing was it a dominant end or an inclusive end i became pretty clear that i thought it was an inclusive end probably because i'm a christian and i think that's the vision maybe it was reading aquinas who knows exactly what shaped that understanding but what i want to suggest is that a christian vision of kingdom sports is about an inclusive end which if we're focused on the end of the reign of god then we focus on the ordering of our loves that can be included within that vision of a comprehensive end why because we have a faith that's animating that vision doesn't mean we aren't engaged in critique but the critique is in service of the end and so then we're always adapting and improvising to approximate the most faithful vision of the end that we can in that sense what it calls for is an improvisational spirit think of miles davis's quintet they had to know the past in all of its warts and beauty in a way that could make beautiful music why because they were captured by a vision so it's about an improvisational spirit i want to suggest very briefly four things that would be characteristic of a christian vision of sports it's going to spell the word perk p-e-r-c the first is playful purposelessness we need to rediscover what it means to play not just to watch sports but to just play to engage in a sense of the joy of it for its own sake it has a broader artistic aesthetic vision in terms of painting and music and arts generally and games with kids but just that sense of play it's part of what the lord's day sabbath keeping which my wife continually reminds me in a nauseating way is not just a suggestion in scripture it's one of the big ten but part of that isn't just to rest at the end of an exhausted week it's actually for christians the first day of the week it's the first thing that happens after creation of male and female is sabbath which is to say it's about that redeeming sense of play if we treat it just as a day off at the end of the week we're just exhausted but the lord's day is to be the paradigm of that playful purposelessness and as we discover that it'll also recover some of the joy of amateur sports of engaging in activities in creative and life-giving ways my favorite years of coaching my kids were when they were at their youngest in parks and rec and we had kids who were really good in kids who barely knew what the score was or if there was anything for them to do and yet a community formed playful purposefulness purposelessness the second is an e it's embodied excellence not all my words are going to have alliteration just the first two but embodied excellence is part of what happens in sports it's about the shaping and forming of our bodies through habits and christians ought to recognize that but somewhere in the reformation i don't know why christians protestants decided to throw habits out with the bath water and so we've made it seem as if you can learn how to be a christian in one hour a week of sunday school on sunday morning you can't teach a kid to twirl a baton in that amount of time but that embodied excellence that happens especially through sports is about an integrative way because you're learning not only about your body but you're also thinking and feeling and perceiving in an integrated way you got to learn to deal with your emotions if you're going to be involved in sports because every game as a spectator or as a player is a roller coaster that embodied excellence is also about the shaping of the habits that paul talks about is running the race with perseverance that excellence that is about discerning the gifts remember in chariots of fire when eric liddell says god made me fast and when i run it gives god pleasure there's something beautiful about embodied excellence my son was a track runner a miler he had a guy on his high school team who was a 400 runner not quite at baylor level of 400 but but he got a really good college division one scholarship as a 400 and ben came home his junior year in high school and he said dad you got to come to practice tomorrow i said why practice he said i just want you to watch antonio run i said why he said it's beautiful there is something in the way he runs that you realize the world is good embodied excellence when the highest standard whether it's in sports or think about it in the arts you know if you're watching yo-yo ma play the instrument becomes a part of him same thing with a great athlete a basketball player football player golfer tennis whatever the sport there's an embodied excellence that is the result of years of habits and training and formation and practice the r is about relationships oh we could talk about the perverse dynamics of how teamwork can become a clique that's defined over against it can become corrupting there was just a story about a a a terrible scandal in canyon city colorado that that involves passing nude photos all across the school and it seems to have centered in the football team you just go oh it could go in perverse directions but at its best sports teaches about relationships and teamwork there's a study done about 10 years ago of the most influential women ceos in the world and it discovered that of the 50 top women ceos a disproportionate number of them had played team sports in high school because there's something about learning relationships about navigating the challenges of when somebody else rises and another person falls and also how much you depend on each other it's especially important in those sports where you can't rely on one person where it depends on everybody coming together that kind of teamwork those relationships matter in a book called humans are underrated that came out just a few weeks ago by jeff colvin he argues that in the 21st century because of advances in technology and robotics the most fundamental skill that's going to be needed in the 21st century is a skill of empathy teamwork storytelling what he calls relationship workers the most important leadership skill are going to be people who are good at relationships and sports at its best helps us see the significance of what it means to learn and live i sometimes say that the best teachers i know at duke or our sports coaches because they teach teamwork in a way that the faculty doesn't we teach individuals rather than the teamwork that'll help people navigate life and finally the sea perhaps unsurprisingly is character it's been talked about throughout the weekend but at its best sports is about learning certain kinds of traits of character that are absolutely essential to human flourishing whether you think of them as aristotelian virtues you talk about them in other kinds of language courage perseverance grit the ability to respond to failure but learning that character did you hear how jaime ended his speech on thursday night by invoking coach yates about the formation of his character calvin hill once said to me that as much as coach k taught grant about being a great basketball player and i thought that's pretty good he said he taught him more about what it means to be a good human being i thought wow that's really high praise and i thought i wish that he would have said that about a professor of english or of sociology or divinity but that's what happens at its best it's a story in jeffrey marx's book season of life about a team in baltimore coached by joe irman and biff pogie joe ehrman was an all pro player for the baltimore colts and when he finished playing for the baltimore colts as a defensive end he became a pastor by vocational pastor and he also coaches the gilman school football team jeffrey marks went up because he'd heard weird things about this football team so he wanted to go up and fly down he ended up writing a book about it he had heard weird things because when he got there to practice joe ehrman at the end of practice said all right guys what's our job as coaches and all the players said in unison to love us and what's your job as players and they all say in unison to love each other you know football come on marx was perplexed because this wasn't just the bad news bears who were so hopeless that you just said well let's focus on love because we're going to lose they're one of the top teams year in and year out in the mid-atlantic region maybe even good enough to beat darren's high school team in amarillo marx reports about one of the mothers coming up at the end of pre-season and saying to joe erman how do you think the boys are going to do and the mom obviously wants to know are they going to go undefeated this year here's what ehrman said well you know we probably won't know for at least 10 years the mom was thinking about wins and losses joe ehrman was thinking about the shaping of character at its best sports is a laboratory an incubator that helps our material bodies be formed in ways that prepare us to worship the god of jesus christ what i'm really suggesting with the p and the e and the r and the c is about a christian vision of sports that involves a christologically shaped beauty because it has to take into account the goodness of creation that john 1 and colossians 1 tells us was created through christ as well as the sinful brokenness and the disorder and the corruption and the brokenness that marks amateur and professional and collegiate and informal games among kids out on the playground and yet it's beautiful because it's redeemed by christ and pointing to the sanctification of lives and of our world we can't afford to let the past get in our eyes nor can we settle to be ambivalent about our ambivalences the challenge is for us to be willing to throw deep by recapturing and rediscovering a christian vision of sports in the ecology of god's grace thank you very much that was thought you all ask questions or make comments or things thank you dr jones for your talk you talked a little bit about his purposeless playfulness you talked about purposeless playfulness yeah and i've noticed that many young athletes in today's culture get easily burnt out by over exerting themselves especially in middle school high school many of them will be all out for one sport and then just decide to quit either give up sports altogether or change to a different sport you talked about exterior goods and interior goods and it seems like often the exterior goods of scholarship possibilities and glory on the field can disrupt the joy that we feel in engaging in sports i've seen this in my brother he's a senior in high school catcher looking to play in college but because our family decided to limit him to about 40 games a season instead of the typical 80 or 100 that most of his club friends are playing he's kind of right on the cusp of being competitive enough for the schools he wants to play at so how do we as christians balance this vision of sports in the kingdom of god with a desire to truly be competitive and display excellence on the field thanks that's a great uh great question and a great big question and it says a lot about culture and parenting so part of it is is holding intention the playful purposelessness and the embodied excellence because there is tension there so let me say a couple of things one that um a lot has to do particularly in raising children with uh parents becoming disengaged and disinterested so there's way too much parental hopes that the kid will live into the glory years that i may never have had or wish i had or want to replicate and so there's a lot of pressure put on that parents and grandparents so this is a true story i was i was coaching seven and eight-year-old girls basketball parks and rec you know this is the kind of game where you hope that one team scores somewhere along the way and maybe maybe not but we had a game and it was six to six and it was going into overtime in the fourth quarter i had one little girl who's a friend of my daughter my daughter was probably the best player on the team but um this other girl was a good friend of her she was a diabetic who had a pump and in the fourth quarter you know i used to always have to go to the referees and say don't ask her to tuck her shirt in because she's embarrassed about the pump and so we always had to navigate all these things she um came to me in the fourth quarter and she was just white as a sheet and she said um coach i don't think i can play i don't feel good i said go sit on the bench tell me if you start to feel better but do whatever you need to do to monitor your insulin get some water and i kept looking over at her and she just looked awful well so the game goes to overtime so she and my daughter tended to rotate in and out as the two cards so my daughter's playing each of the overtimes right so it's a one minute overtime well nobody ever scores in a one minute overtime so we went to five overtimes you know you're beginning to think you're going to be there forever i was hoping the other team might score just so we could go home but all five overtimes finally my daughter actually scores on one of those shots that just accidentally goes in everybody's thrilled everybody's excited everybody's mobbing sarah because we won and she made the winning shot and i go over and i just say tess you're doing okay she says fine her grandmother comes up to me gets in my face and i start backing up and she keeps getting in my face and she said you selfish jerk you want your daughter to go to college and get a scholarship so you kept playing her in the overtime and you're preventing tests from getting a scholarship i was like whoa how'd that happen seven and eight year old tess is a diabetic the chances of her being an athlete getting a college scholarship chances sarah getting a scholarship it was just wacky but the grandparent was obsessed in a disordered way this family didn't need it it wasn't an economic kind of all or not so part of it is parents and grandparents second thing i'd say is that what we do want to honor on the embodied excellence site is a way to not let kids bail too quickly just because they're frustrated burned out or whatever i let my oldest son quit playing the piano because he got burned out in middle school he hates me as an adult because he's now an opera singer and he wishes he knew how to play the piano but you know there's a lot of what goes into embodied excellence that isn't fun and so some of the burnout happens that way but then the third point is that i think christians have to be willing to say we're not sacrificing everything and that may mean the loss of a college scholarship because club team stuff and all those other things you can get completely absorbed in a in a world that can become idolatrous and in those kinds of times you just have to say we're not going to do it and parents need support systems and churches that help encourage that partly because my wife and i were busy and partly we had an intuition but we decided that when our kids were in middle school and people were playing two sports simultaneously and two instruments and you know they were over programmed and over scheduled we just said we're not gonna do it and i felt like a really bad parent because i felt like my kids were probably going to fall behind and never amount to anything in life and it was because i was just lazy so you could get into a kind of keep up with the joneses but i'm a jones and i didn't keep up so we need to have some vehicles where we teach that playfulness again um and you know the statistics are such that not many people are really going to get to make a living even a college scholarship off of athletics or the arts or whatever it is and so having that broader perspective um in those sorts of ways there are far more academic scholarships than there are athletic scholarships around the country so we need to be sure we have our priorities uh in order and that's gonna it's gonna take being intentional and really thinking through what we what we need to be about um it's a huge question and it's a really challenging one and what i would say is what it really requires is uh what the philosophical tradition is called practical wisdom knowing when to push when to pull back what's too much what's appropriate what aristotle calls the mean we need a lot more of that and we don't have much of it particularly when it comes to parents and kids it's a great question others you talked about how we need to be careful when people use sports instrumentally particularly in reference to churches so do you think it is possible uh for churches to use sports instrumentally and if so what would that look like uh instrumentally in a bad sense or in a good sense in a good sense oh yes well i'd say it's not instrumental in a good sense that is to say um well yeah it's a great question part of it is we've gotten too caught up in a celebrity culture generically and so we've gotten uh we've been willing to attach ourselves in problematic ways sometimes um in a good sense it's it's about recognizing how that playful purposelessness is integral when i i injured my knees in high school playing basketball so my senior year my doctor told me i couldn't play competitively anymore that is to say high school basketball i could only play intramurals so i joined a church league it was far nastier than high school basketball was and far more fights far more ugliness and it did it represented the worst and i thought we're gathering in a church gym and it's it's a hobby and war wall against all i mean it was the state of nature and that's not the real state of nature but it was hobbs image of the state of nature i mean it was awful now church softball leagues are similar often um what is what would it be like to actually have those sorts of activities where you actually were focused on notions of honor where there was actually friendship i mean it sounds counterintuitive but there's nothing to prevent that from being part of the dynamic i like playing in co-ed softball leagues because it's just less cutthroat even though i could play in the more intense church leagues but i just can't i would i noticed i came home a not very healthy person emotionally in some of those kinds of environments now we ought to be thinking about what is it to run a race in in faithful ways you know uh and what does it mean to cultivate team spirit in baseball football basketball soccer whatever the the course the course may be there are lots of integrative ways and there are ways to share our faith in really powerful ways so i was really taken with lisa's videos yesterday and what other ones i've seen her show where deep faith commitments are embodied in sports often subtly you know part of it's this kind of god told me to to beat the other person up i'm just not quite sure that god's taking sides in quite that sort of way or you know god ordained it that we would win the super bowl um what about the christians on the other side did god not like them you know i just don't want to co-opt god to my purposes i want my purposes to be aligned with god's purposes and i think there are really beautiful ways to do that and i'm all for sharing faith athletes in action all those kinds of dynamics let's just do it in a way that's focused on the kingdom which again requires practical wisdom from a participant perspective or as a player do you think that our sports culture tips too heavily spectator participant and is how can spectators still benefit from those goods that you were discussing thanks that's a great question um so your first part of the question yes i think we are too oriented toward spectator sports rather than participation and we need to be paying more attention to that on college campuses and all sorts of other kinds of things because among other things it makes us healthier physically emotionally um i've discovered and i'm this is like physician heal thyself but just uh i write better and think deeper thoughts after i've exercised than when i've just been sitting around and so sometimes i have to coerce myself to remember that but it's it's important it's the same kind of principle about observing the lord's day and sabbath you can't do it in order to be more productive but if you do it you discover you will be but there's something about that playful purposelessness um but i do think that that each of the goods i was describing there's also a component that's a spectator as well as a participant uh dimension so that um let's just take the embodied excellence which is the one you'd think would be most oriented toward being a participant right and yet there's something in what my son saw in antonio right where he just said that's beautiful that's inspirational um now sometimes it can also be paralyzing right if you see somebody who does something that you just think that's superhuman i sometimes like i prefer sometimes to go to women's basketball games because they play a game i was familiar with in high school you know when i watch these six nine guys who can play point guard and leap tall buildings in a single bound i think they are a creature i don't have any familiarity with so it's kind of paralyzing i just think i quit um but there's something inspirational about the beauty that says i want to try to get better at that in in that sort of way and and how to nurture that i've learned as a spectator uh to pay attention to relationships it's actually interesting high school uh scouts and and pro scouts increasingly are paying attention to little things in determining what somebody's going to be like uh whether they're successful as a college or pro player by paying attention to relationships so you can learn a lot about relationships and how to manage emotions by watching what goes well and what doesn't go well um so all of these character the playful all of them have a dimension to it but it's way better if you're also engaged there ought to be far more of a of an intersection whereas now what we tend to have is too much of a gap of just emphasizing the spectator uh role and and and that's also disordered because it's often fueled more by hatred of the other than affirmation and the cultivation of those of those goods if you think of david foster wallers wallace's essay on roger federer there's something that just if you don't read that and think i want to go hit a tennis ball you've somehow missed the magic and the and the beauty of that or a runner or a golfer there was a little bit of schadenfreude for me when i went to the memorial tournament i took my kids we one day we followed tiger woods around when he was playing really well back in this was 1999 and we watched and i was inspired and a little bit paralyzed i just went he hits a four iron heart farther than i hit a a driver and his goes where he wants it to um but then we had the schadenfreude of getting to go and i sat on the 12th hole at uh the memorial where it's over it's a par 3 over water and just got to watch the pros hit it into the water and i just thought yes but there's some joy in that as well but we need to be more balanced focused on active engagement and i think colleges would do well to devote more attention to intramural sports and the kinds of activities not only the kinds of revenue generating sports as well i love the ncaa commercials you've seen the ones where uh where the non-revenue sports people are talking about um the jobs they're gonna have post college um it turns out they were a fencer or they were a tennis player those sorts of things i think we need to lift up that and not just the celebrity sports my question is about the r of relationships because you talk a lot about specifically that kind of applies to teamwork and so my question was how is that different and what kind of goods do we get from relationally wise from sports that don't have that capacity for teamwork like individual sports and also more generally there's any other big distinctions between individual and team sports um thanks that's a great question i think that actually the every sport i can think of except maybe chess and i'm not sure whether that's a sport i have two boys and a girl and the boys are close enough in age that i know that cain enables an empirically verifiable story and one day we were on a trip where they spent too much time close to each other and got into it what started as just a gentle discussion about what constitutes a sport and it degenerated into an all-out war verbally that i thought was going to get physical so i don't know exactly what counts as a sport or what the where the people draw the line i'm pretty sure it wasn't where my two boys were drawing it but let's just take for example most definitions would include golfer tennis as individual sports those are still dependent on relationships and teamwork even individually because they have coaches that are crucial and you watch uh for example golf tennis is trickier because the coach isn't actually supposed to interact in any way with the player on the court and so it's only between matches that you see that kind of work uh work happening although you know there are lots of subtle ways in which that happens but in golf you you watch the difference a caddy makes one of my heroes now is jordan spieth a good texan who's just had a magical year and he's got a relationship with his caddy that's so deep and it's really important and you know tiger woods dysfunction is part he hadn't been able to maintain a relationship with a caddy um i think that might have something to do with the problems he has with relationships outside of the sport as well um but there's there's those are those are important and even if it's off stage there's something profoundly important about the role that coaches play even in individual sports now i do think that there's something to the more focused teamwork that you know on a spectrum i'm particularly taken with those sports where the success depends fundamentally on the team basketball actually is farther this way on the spectrum because if you have one superstar particularly at lower levels they can go a lot i mean the chris paul story was him scoring 61 points in a high school game it didn't much matter who else he had on the team but if you're playing baseball you only get to come up once every nine batters at best you aren't gonna win much if you have only one player or if you're a pitcher you're only gonna pitch once every four days so there's there's a spectrum um i'm taking the the the head of the world bank for a while i think she still is christine lagarde i was a synchronized swimmer now that doesn't seem like a team sport in one sense and yet there is a fundamental synchronization with another person's body and and spirit so there's there's a spectrum along the way um and uh i i focus on the coach relationship uh in sports we tend to say as individuals when i got to chess was i don't actually know if gary kasparov had a coach in the same way that tiger woods or anybody it's striking to me that even the professionals at the highest levels the venus or serena williams or roger federer they still depend on their coaches in a fundamental way thank you for a wonderful lecture um i really liked your emphasis on the goodness of creation and starting there my question is that over the years i've noticed that catholic theologians tend to be more optimistic about the human condition and protestant theologians tend to be more pessimistic i'm wondering just in terms of theological education if you could help me get over my obsession with the fall um well i'm uh i'm both by family inheritance and conviction a wesleyan and uh what i described that to be is that we are uh smally evangelical and small c catholic so i'm going to tell you is that it's a both and um and that um the way i characterize john wesley is there's nobody who was more pessimistic about uh human nature apart from god's grace than wesley and nobody more optimistic about the capacity of human potential through god's grace and what i would say is that we we have to have both and that's why i tried to do it from creation and created goodness then fall and then a redeemed vision one of my best friends uh in the world is a is a new testament scholar who's a died in the wool calvinist and and he said he said you know why we need each other and i said why and he said because you always remind me there really is hope and i'm going to remind you that it's pretty bleak and so you know and there are different temperaments as well as theological convictions but i mean i could have given a talk tonight um that was all about the brokenness of sports i mean there is tons of stuff that goes awry um regularly you know you just pick up the the the the newspaper or what uh i guess you don't pick up newspapers anymore just go online you know you see the absolutely horrific pictures of the woman that greg hardy uh was accused of assaulting you know the scars and everything and then he's getting millions of dollars to play for the cowboys you just come on you know all the kinds of stuff uh that that happens there was a story about nba players and how many uh of them have children that they've fathered out of wedlock and are delinquent on child support payments and and you just go really uh um calvin hill was on my board when i was doing the defending school and i asked him one time well when the high school kids this was 2003 i think that the high school kids went one three and four in the draft it was kwame brown tyson chandler and eddie curry and i said it was the night before the draft and i said calvin what do you think are these kids going to be all right he said he said well let me tell you grant was the only child in a two-parent white-collar family in northern virginia went to one of the best high schools in the country had four years at duke playing under coach k and a father who'd been a professional athlete and he wasn't prepared for the corruption that he saw his first year it's like yikes they said now think about a kid who comes out of an under-resourced community a single parent and been around a lot of drugs how are they going gonna do 50 of nba players are declared bankruptcy within five years of making gazillions of dollars so i could have given a whole talk just about the fallenness and the brokenness that's there that seems to be obvious and depressing what we need is to remember that there's a better beginning and there's a greater hope and if we focus on the hope it'll actually it should lead us to be even more vigilant about attending to the brokenness because we won't just go what can we expect i mean one of my pet peeves is the phrase well after all they're only human that's forgetting creation why is it when we see somebody fall because of sexual misconduct or financial misconduct or something you know we say well after all they're only human why don't we say it when we see father greg boyle rescuing kids out of gangs in la through homeboy industries and say why are we surprised to see him doing that saintly work well after all he's only human god created us for redeemed purposes so we ought to be lifting up and telling the stories of the really faithful and faith-filled people who are living in quiet ways that george eliot i'll conclude with this darin you don't have to worry george eliot in middlemarch has this wonderful uh phrase where she says that things are not so ill between thee and me is half owing to those who lived faithful lives and rest in unvisited tombs i suspect all of us have coaches teachers friends who played that role the tragedy is they rest in unvisited tombs we're not telling the stories that ought to give us hope about that kind of vision and that kind of life i don't want to ignore the brokenness i just want to lift up the hopeful stories because i think that'll point us toward the vision of what i call christologically shaped beauty [Applause]