Ben Witherington

In his new book, The Rest of Life, Ben Witherington includes a chapter on sports and recreation (chapter 2: “Play On”). Play is a category that fits somewhere in the Christian life between work and rest, and it’s a category worthy of our theological attention. Witherington largely builds off Moltmann’s theology of play published in the early 1970s, a book that argues that honest play carries with it an inner proleptic hope of something to come.

In his book, Witherington picks up Moltmann’s connection between play and eschatological expectation, and builds on it, and applies this worldview to his golf game, his running, and the ups and downs of cheering on the Boston Red Sox as a fan. He focuses mostly on amateur team sports and backyard sports done “just for fun” (Witherington argues that pro athletes are not playing per se, but really working).

So how are sports tied to the eschaton? This is how Witherington words it (pages 42–43, 57):

… in playing we anticipate our liberation, a time when we study war no more, a time when we shed all those things that inhibited us and alienated us from real life. Play foreshadows the joy of the eschaton where all matter of drudgery and disease and decay and death will be left behind. Play is quite rightly seen as a celebration of life lived to its fullest, its fastest, its highest, its limits. … Games, played well and fairly, fuel a theology of hope for the future. Playing is not a useless activity. It anticipates the joy of the eschaton. …

Play foreshadows an eschatological better day when things go right, and this is worth celebrating now. The foreshadowing of better times is itself a foretaste of better times, and this is in part the theological function of play. It is not enough to say that play provides relaxation, elevation of the spirits, escape from reality, or pleasure, but serves no utilitarian purpose.

While play does do those things, play is also teleological. It performs no immediate service or utilitarian purpose, but it points to a future goal, a future state, a future time when the harmony and joy of play become the harmony and joy and play of all life, free from disease, decay, and death, free from suffering, sin, and sorrow. Free to be all that we were intended to be. …

Play was meant to point us forward toward a better day, a better time, a more harmonious world where all manner of things are well. Play suggests to us the full possibilities of what we can be, the hint of what it means to really live, to be fully human, to have real brothers and sisters in arms, all on the same team playing together toward the same end. This goes beyond camaraderie to koinonia.

Galatians 6:14–15:

But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.

Ben Witherington III, Grace in Galatia, 450:

Paul is saying his conversion to a belief in a crucified messiah entailed an enormous transvaluation of values, and an adoption of a new paradigm of what God was really doing in the world, how he was doing it, and therefore what the believer’s life meant. But notice Paul is not simply talking about an experience that happened to him. He also says that the world was crucified to him, by which he means that he believes that the death of Christ on the cross changed the world, it had cosmic effects. Paul has partially addressed this subject when he spoke about what the Galatians had been freed from — the elementary principles of the universe which enslave fallen human beings, and it is attended to even more fully in the later Paulines (cf. especially Col. 2:15 to Eph. 4:7–10). Here Martyn is quite right to stress the importance of this phrase and the mention of the new creation [v. 15] and connect them both with Gal. 1:4.

In Paul’s view the present evil age exists, but has been dealt a deathblow by the crucifixion of Jesus. All of the world’s basic values and assumptions and operating procedures have been put on notice that they are passing away (cf. 1 Cor. 7:31). What really matters are the new eschatological realities brought about because of the death of Christ. In Paul’s view, even the Law, as well as other good things about the material world, are part of the things that are passing away or are fading in glory (cf. 2 Cor. 3). Having lost their controlling grip on a human life when Christ came and died, one must not submit to such forces again, but rather live on the basis of the new eschatological realities. The new age has already dawned and Christians should live by its light and follow the path it illuminates.