There are plenty of athletes who are public about their religious beliefs – whether in the form of some show of appeal to divine intervention in their favor during a game, or writing books and doing interviews in which they take advantage of their celebrity status to talk about their faith.
But I have yet to see such a person advocate playing Christian sports. What might it mean to take a distinctively Christian approach to baseball, for instance? Perhaps some might suggest rewriting the rules so that players run around the bases in the sign of a cross rather than a diamond. Others might leave the rules as they are, but suggest that Christians who play baseball should seek to allow the other team to win, humbling themselves so that others are exalted, that they may be rewarded in heaven.
I doubt anyone would take such suggestions seriously. Baseball is baseball, and while an athlete may find inspiration in their personal faith if they have one, no one seriously expects them either to rewrite the rules or to undermine the game from within through the application of some set or other of “Christian principles”.
I mention this because we are about to being a new semester, and whether in my introductory course on the Bible or my upper-level course on the historical figure of Jesus, there are bound to be some students who will not simply find inspiration in their personal faith to engage in academic historical study to the best of their ability, but who will either try to change the rules of historical study or direct the enterprise towards some specific predetermined results, justifying the attempt to do so in terms of their personal faith committments.
I don’t think history or science should be any different than sports in this respect. If you find inspiration to play or work seriously in a given field (whether a baseball field or the academic fields of history or biology), that is wonderful. But if you try to rewrite the rules as you go or undermine the enterprise from within, that isn’t a sign of being a good Christian, but of being a bad sport.
As the start of classes approaches, I’d welcome discussion of the ways other professors address these sorts of issues. I used to approach the classroom as though I was the referee, there to be impartial. Of late, I’ve tried to view myself even when in the classroom more as a practitioner of my academic discipline, someone who has personal views and convictions that cannot simply be set aside. In the coming semester, I’m inclined to move back in the direction of the former rather than the latter approach, but I’m still somewhat in two minds about this.
How do you see the role of a professor? Ought we to attempt to get our students to be the players while we take on the role of referee? Or should we simply show them our own selves as examples of people who inevitably have personal beliefs and convictions, and nevertheless “play by the rules” in our own academic arena?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In