Three days before I heard Jamin Warren’s insightful presentation at Mockingbird’s NYC conference, I walked out of a bar with my wife following our usual Tuesday night trivia contest. Team Sweet Little Baby Jesus, an ecumenical assemblage of clergy and church workers between 28 and 40, had been trounced by our usual rivals, and I was not happy. It was week one of an eight week tournament spanning twenty or so bars in central Pennsylvania, and this result put us well back of where I felt we should have been.
Rumor has it I was something of a jerk on the trip home. Everyone else had enjoyed splurging on food and drinks as they tried to burn off some of the $400 or so in gift cards our team had won since September. I couldn’t help noticing that the team’s focus, including my own, was not at its usual level. We lost by sixteen (still placing third out of about twenty teams playing that night, and winning $20), and I was convinced that we had left at least that many points on the table through sheer inattention.
Perhaps it was unwise to express this out loud. Wisdom eluding, I got a sharp response from the wife: “Most of the team shows up to have fun.” A glutton for punishment, I pressed on: “I do too, but we still could have done better. Why did we enter the tournament if we don’t want to win?” The trouble, gentle reader, is that my wife was correct in both her explicit and implicit claims–the rest of the team was playing for fun, and to at least some extent I was not.
How can this be? I set out to have fun. I enjoy my friends, beer and trivia. And after a night of all three, I headed home angry and frustrated. But I’m really good at trivia; I’ve had success at it. One night last fall when my wife was out of town I waited for the rest of the team to show up, in vain. I grimly played alone against the whole bar, through it all wanting to leave, but after each round I was still near the top of the standings. I was nervous and focused, and did not enjoy myself–though I did take a secret pleasure in the disbelieving glances my direction whenever scores were read out. I took second, missing victory by a single point. I’m proud of the performance, in a way–as proud as one can be of meaningless bar trivia–but also still irked that I did not win that night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5F6AE_0xCM
It would be nice if I could tell you that I’m a better player when I’m relaxed and happy, but that isn’t true. I’m sharpest when I have butterflies, when I’m wound tight, when I can block out the room and concentrate without having to listen to anyone else. The law, which demands perfection of me in this thing precisely because I’ve had success, because I’m good at it, does push me to a higher level of performance. But the cost is that everything else, not only my fun but the fun of my teammates (and of my wife) is sacrificed to greater performance, which is to say, on the altar of my own ego.
What drives competition for me, and I suspect for many of you who are prone to competitive behavior, is the fear that my failure can define me in a way that no past success can. Success is transient, punctiliar, entirely of the moment; failure is eternal. When this is so, victory is hollow; it is a momentary reprieve from the death of failure. It can never be complete or fulfilling, and it cannot erase the shame of failures past. My greatest “success” in this arena would have appeared to any reasonable observer as a lonely young man spending two hours at a bar not having any fun.
Warren’s talk has me thinking about the place of games in my life. For us under the law, involvement in a game (and are we ever not involved in a game?) means potential for a winner and a loser. The game becomes the field of judgment, an exercise in self-justification. But behind it all lies playfulness, fun, spontaneity–a game should express childlike freedom. So why does it imprison?
There is, of course, no problem with the game. There is no problem with bar trivia, with competition, even with wanting to win. There is a problem with me. The things of creation, including myself and other players, and all games by which we delight in them are good; God has said so. The tragedy comes when I cannot receive these things as good. I must instead prove my goodness, establish it on my own terms and without God. Every Tuesday night the young pastor proves himself the most committed atheist in the bar.
The truth of the matter is that I do not know how to play without putting my life at stake. I could, perhaps, refrain from playing, or play halfheartedly, but this would be no demonstration of freedom. Herman Edwards was quite correct: “You play to win the game.” That’s part of the game–and playing to win should be fun. On occasion it truly is.
I hold out hope for the arrival of this freedom in my life; that it is possible to play to win without attempting thereby to justify myself. It would be a marvellous thing to sit down for an evening, compete hard, enjoy a few beers, joke with friends, and walk back to the car with the one I love, secure and happy. For now, I settle for small intimations of what is to come. I compete, sometimes too hard, I try to enjoy the contest, and though Tasha does not absolve me at the end of every evening (this would not be a bad idea), she takes me by the hand, and kisses me on the cheek, and treats me as if I’ve been much less a jerk than I probably have. Such grace is reason enough to keep playing.
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8 responses to “No Fun at All: Trivia and Self-Justification”
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Good stuff Adam – I play weekly bar trivia also with a good group of friends, and we’re ALWAYS in the money (top 3).
It’s always tough for me on a hard question when the team consensus is that my answer is the right one. I actually hate that pressure, because I feel like I’ve let them down if I’m wrong. They don’t make me feel that way. I do it to myself. It definitely affects my level of fun. Life’s too judgmental already to sit under additional self imposed judgement….especially when I’m in community having drinks with friends.
Thanks! Same here–always in the money, which is its own kind of pressure. Third place is a bad week. The worst feeling is when somebody offers a tentative guess, everyone decides mine is better, and I’m wrong and the original speaker is right. At that point I have to remember that I might be the only one who cares.
Hi, I live up here in Ephrata. I heard you at the Good Friday in Lancaster, and listened to a couple of your Friday podcasts.
Only if God sovereignly causes us to submit to His righteousness, will our need to compete with rvials find its end.
Even Nadia the Lutheran universalist draws the line between the people who draw lines between themselves and others and the people who don’t draw lines between themselves and others
Nadia draws the line between those who believe in God’s election and those like herself who have objective gospel, by which she means universal gospel (everyone is forgiven, but some people don’t know it)
Mark,
I’m not terribly interested in discussing Nadia’s theology. She can speak for herself. For the record, I don’t think she’d quite agree with your summation of her thinking, but I haven’t asked her.
As for me, I’m no opponent of divine sovereignty or election. As Luther put it, “All things happen by necessity.” The difference comes in the Lutheran view that the word of the preacher actually is the electing word from all eternity, the categorical proclamation of pardon which bestows faith. And from there you can probably infer a good part of the difference between Lutheran and Reformed views on the sacraments, Christology, the office of ministry, ecclesiology, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and so on.
So yes, I’m aware we disagree on these matters, and pretty well aware of the shape of that disagreement. I’m not sure there’s much to gain by repeatedly stating it, since we both know it’s so. But chalking it up to universalism or some such would simply be incorrect. Hope you get something out of my preaching and writing anyway.
I don’t have much interest either in talking to you about Nadia, and I agree that she would not characterize her comment the way I did. People who think of themselves as more free and liberal than others don’t tend to think too much about being intolerant toward the intolerant.
I have read enough Lutheran theology that I would hesitate to speak of “the Lutheran view”. I certainly would agree that there is no effectual call apart from the gospel (some Calvinists have dismissed the need for gospel by dismissing it as “gospel regeneration”.) The power of the Holy Spirit using the gospel brings hearer to the sinner, the sinner does not bring hearing to the gospel.
I don’t think there is much to be gained by assuming we already know the nature of the difference between making the atonement happen in the proclamation and saying that the atonement already happened in the death of Christ. As I suggested, not all Lutherans sound like Karl Barth when it comes to how the Word performs, and not many Reformed talk anymore about election having decided already for whom Christ would die so that the sins of the elect were already imputed by God to Christ.
If we stay with safe words like “sacrament” and “covenant”, and keep away from the doctrine of election not conditioned on what God is doing in the sinner, Lutheran and Reformed can safely live in the ambiguity. I mean— how helpful could it really be to know that the Lutheran (or Reformed) “other” is not thinking about it in the way we know they should….
Even though I get called “Lutheran” all the time by some “Reformed”, because of my law-gospel antithesis, I do not keep my distance from Lutherans by thinking of you all as “universalists”. An universal objective justification would actually make sense if Christ also died for those sinners who do not continue to believe the gospel. The problem is that you have sinners in control now of what did or did not happen at the cross—thus making penal substitution an impossibility.
By “Lutheran” here I actually mean, more or less, “Luther.” But then, I’m contending for a specific view there, and more often than not against other “Lutherans.”
I’m actually not over-fond of the language of “universal objective justification”, though I would insist that yes indeed, Christ died for those who do not believe. But I would simply call it odd to use the word justification for something that isn’t concrete and specific. Interesting worries about what is or isn’t in the hands of sinners –after a fashion not unlike scruples about the manducatio indignorum. Seems to me that this, as well as the matter of penal substitution, very much still come down to how we’re conceiving the relation between law and gospel. Thanks for chatting.
Thanks for the article. As a frequent bar-trivia-player who has also played solo due to a lack of teammates, I saw myself in much of this.