“Knowing Christ is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although winning the US Open was a pretty good second.”
Question of Sport and Incarnational Theology – Graham Ward
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The abstract summarized the paper as follows:
“A Christian theology that is orientated towards understanding incarnation must be interested in the nature of embodiment. As the experience of those involved in sports centres on the body and its attunement to the situation and environment in which it finds itself, so we can compare the states of immersion in the material world in the athlete’s experience and the experience of Christian piety. This essay offers a comparative phenomenology of two forms of embodiment: the athlete’s entry into ‘the zone and the contemplative s centring of the embodied soul in Christ. In doing so it opens up areas of both similarity and difference that are coming to be explored by neuropsychology and neurophysiology, and points to the development of a radical account of incarnation that takes embodiment and affectivity seriously”.
The paper opens with the following questions: “Why should theology be at all interested in sport? Are not some of the goals of sporting activity—competition, triumphing, the idolisation of the one who is victorious, the pursuit of human excellence—actually at odds with the virtues of the Christian kingdom like humility? Is not the recognition of the vulnerability and the fragility of being human like humility? Is not the recognition of the vulnerability and the fragility of being human and theology together are we not setting up Prometheus against Christ?” These are great questions. The problem for me was that the paper did not answer many of them.
The following were among the most interesting observations in the paper: “What I am claiming is that sporting activity, like sexual activity and possibly musical activity, constitute our most intense forms of being embodied. These intense forms of embodiment are forays into the mystery of being human, being a creature amidst all that has been created. As such. Christian theologians, for whom the doctrine of incarnation is central to understanding both the nature of being human and belonging to all that God has created, can gain theological insights from these forays”.
Overall I found the paper disappointing.