“All I know most surely about morality and obligation I owe to football”,
Discipline, Sport, and the Religion of Winners
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Paul on Running to Win the Prize, I Corinthians 9:24-27, Brian Brock
The abstract of the paper is as follows: “In I Cor. 9:25 Paul exhorts the Corinthian believers to strive like athletes for an eternal prize. This paper elucidates the communal horizon of the self-disciplining he enjoins, which overturns popular modern conceptions of individual fitness and performance training. Paul likewise defines the rewards of spiritual labour as aspects of participation in the communion of saints gathered by the gospel, disallowing a wholly post-temporal construal of the eternal reward which motivates Christian discipline. The paper concludes by raising questions about the theological status of modern sport of theologies of sport, and of competition as a form of social organisation”.
The author states his approach, one I would endorse, “My contention is that Paul draws on his audience’s commonsense notions of sport not to extend or apply them to spiritual issues, but to co-opt and invert them”.
The paper makes a gratuitous swipe at physical fitness: “the logic of Paul’s theological account of the good news does bring into view the dangers of modern Christians’ obsession with individual health and fitness”. I have no idea what this about.
The author also contends that “the situation of the contemporary church…is largely one of theological inarticulacy about sport”. This is a fair point but the current paper makes no contribution to the debate.
Overall the paper is a very technical exegesis of the passage and not really about sport.