In an age when over one billion people are expected to engage with the World Cup tournament, there is a shocking lack of significant monograph-length theological reflection on the sporting phenomenon. Lincoln Harvey’s book A Brief Theology of Sport fits into just such a gap.

Harvey begins his book with a section on “Historical Surroundings,” providing a context for connecting sport and religion, and more or less relying on major historical studies such as Allen Guttman’s Sports: The First Five Millennia (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004) and William Baker’s Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Left out of this beginning discussion is mention of Johan Huizinga’s foundational text Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1955). This omission is significant because Harvey offers three grounding propositions, propositions which were evident in Huizinga’s work: “sport [play for Huizinga] is universal,” “religion is universal,” and “historically, sport and religion are intertwined” (pp. 5–8).

Having established the historical basis for the linkage of sport to religion, Harvey moves on to give a brief but lucid overview of the sport/religion relationship. This understandably begins in chapter two with a brief consideration of sport in classical Graeco-Roman culture. He then narrows the field of observation to a particularly Christian history of sport, and devotes chapters to sport within the contexts of the Early Church, the Medieval Catholic Church, the Puritan movement, and modern “Muscular Christianity.”

More serious students of the history and philosophy of sport may find these early chapters a rehash of other works, a fact which Harvey himself acknowledges. Still, this should not be seen as a drawback as the first section provides an excellent introduction to the church’s tenuous relationship with sport.

The second portion of the book is a series of “Analytical Soundings” which use the doctrine of creation as a springboard for inquiring about the nature of human existence and the play phenomenon found in sport. Our existence, says Harvey, is “unnecessary but meaningful”—a fact which he draws out of our creaturely contingency (p. 83). Likewise, Harvey finds the autotelic nature of sport, as a subset of the broader play phenomenon, as its essential characteristic. These parallel fundamental characteristics lead Harvey to declare sport as “a liturgy of the creature’s contingency” (p. 101).

Following the logic of autotelicity, Harvey reflects back on the historical attitudes towards sport in the first part of the book and suggests that the reason why the church has not handled sport well is that it has denied the fundamental nature of sport as an autotelic activity. To deny the fundamentally free nature of sport is to instrumentalize it, to force it to adopt a telos that is extrinsic to itself. When we do this, says Harvey, we violate the very essence of play and sport ceases to be sport. This has a broad range of implications for how the church engages sport. According to Harvey, sports ministries and missions are questionable instrumentalizations of sport.

While likely to resonate with the nature of sportspersons, Harvey’s “analytical” notes make certain assumptions about the nature of sport and its place in society, which are contestable in the broader sports studies context.

Harvey’s conception of “pure” sport seems to be both idealistic and isolationist. And though he does briefly acknowledge this, he maintains that sport is at its best when it is unsullied and entirely separated from the rest of life. But this definition of autotelicity is idealistically rigid; it doesn’t leave room for negotiating the complexity of human motivation, and it isolates sport from the rich social contexts in which it arises. Sport, like theology, isn’t done in a vacuum.

Additionally, more of a discussion about the underlying metaphysic of sport is warranted, especially since Harvey’s thesis rests so heavily on connecting sport to play—a connection which, though strong enough to make his case, at times lapses into ambiguity with his somewhat interchangeable use of the terms. It seems it would have been less of a leap to advance play as that celebration of radical contingency, rather than sport specifically.

Finally, the necessity of divorcing sport from worship is unclear especially in light of our creaturely status. Harvey’s picture of sport as a liturgy of human life is a beautiful one, but it loses liturgical force when it is understood only as a sort of celebration. It seems to fall back into a dualism, which while recognizing and celebrating the bodied activity of sport, fails to understand that same bodied activity as kinesthetic and embodied and thus as a means of knowing. We don’t engage in sport in order to gain knowledge, but as Jaco Hamman has pointed out, play nonetheless is a way of knowing and expressing knowledge (“Play,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology [ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011], 47), and sport—much like the liturgy of the church—is a structure with a logic and moral force of its own that shapes and forms the fullness of what Gabriel Marcel has called our incarnated beings. As such, it must be placed in the category of worship, in as much as we bodied creatures are called to constitute our contingent, reliant selves as living sacrifices (Rom 12:1).

This does not fall prey to instrumentalization as Harvey fears. Harvey advocates a radical contingency, the complete subsistence of our very being in the person of Jesus Christ, but this is precisely the reason sport can’t be bracketed off from the rest of our liturgical selves. Harvey is right that we shouldn’t try to use sport—as Robert Johnson and Hugo Rahner have suggested—to get closer to God (pp. 91–93). Rather, sport becomes worship as we comport ourselves with the help of the Spirit as “living sacrifices” in light of the ongoing “mercies of God.” In this way sport is very much a part of the greater litany of life.

Sport fans of all kinds will benefit from Harvey’s deep insights about the nature of sport and its place in human life. His liturgical understanding of sport, though titled as “brief” is theologically rich. And while his proposal to de-instrumentalize sport is not a new one in the philosophy of sport conversation, it is a unique and original contribution in its specifically theological orientation that seems likely to fulfill Harvey’s goal of inviting other theological scholars onto the “field of play” with him.

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