In this week’s NYTimes Magazine, there is a fascinating article entitled “The No-Stats All-Star”. It centers on how Shane Battier, formerly of Duke, currently of the Houston Rockets, is one of the most valuable players in the NBA even though his statistics are unremarkable, to say the least.
As a life-long UConn fan and Duke-hater, the article was a bit tough to take, but there was one paragraph which caught my eye:
“In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes I’ve come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they tell you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other than where they have been trained to answer questions. It’s pointless, for instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he’s surrounded by the people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had huge influence on their careers. A cleanup hitter lives and dies by a swing he perfected when he was 7; a quarterback has a hitch in his throwing motion because he imitated his father. Here, in the Detroit Country Day School library, a few yards from the gym, Battier was back where he became a basketball player. And he was far less interested in what happened between him and Kobe Bryant four months ago than what happened when he was 12.”
As much as we are tempted to see ourselves and others as “free agents,” capable of making impartial decisions and breaking loose of our past, thoughtful observers of human nature, like the author of this article, know better. Simply put, people are not free, but bound, enslaved to patterns of behavior and emotion that are deeply, perhaps intractably, rooted. I certainly am. Thank God we preach a Gospel of grace for captives, of rescue for prisoners.
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11 responses to “This Weekend in the NYTimes: Basketball and the Bondage of the Will”
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Interesting spin on an otherwise unexceptional athlete given today’s standards of ‘top performance’ (though pulling a +$6m salary for 6ppg makes him totally likable). The thing that strikes me is that despite Battier’s attempts to overcome his timidity and presence on the court, he still fails to measure up to the idol of Webber and Bryant, yet his self-reflection as an outcast Mulatto has allowed him to be himself and laugh in the face of defeat. I suppose this is another blessing of the Gospel, that it allows one to re-apprehend the resurrection in the face of the cross.
I agree empirically that I, and all of us, are subject to forces that make us who we are and shape us beyond what we are conscious of, but kind of, so what?
How does that relate to salvation? To predestination? Are we talking about the same thing here?Does it get me off the hook for my sin?
And how, if this is still true for Christians, does grace really do anything at all, if we are still totally bound? Or are we less bound now? Or does what we do no longer matter? Or did it ever matter?
Lots of questions.
Anon –
Thanks so much for your thoughtful questions, which which we all struggle.
For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts:
First off, it seems that nothing “gets us off the hook for our sin.” We can’t help it, and we’re still guilty, except for the cross. Tough to understand, but true (to life) nonetheless.
Secondly, Luther’s image of a “beast with two riders” comes to mind – the idea that we are always objects, not subjects, in the story, objects of forces that are beyond us.
In the end, it seems to me that, while the bondage of the will sounds, to our minds, like bad news, it feels, to our hearts, like good news, because it means that, in the midst of all our struggles, God loves us and is in control, even of our inner life.
We (Xians) are no “less bound” now, just bound to a different fate.
The following song comes to mind:
I am bound…
I am bound…
I am bound…
…for the promised land.
If you contend that we are never free from our past,what does that say about the Holy Spirit and the gift of healing,surely the story continues.
Anonymous 1 here.
R-J,
Thanks for your response. If we “can’t help it” but to sin after we are Christians, why does Paul talk to Christians in his letters (usu towards the end) as if they could in fact not sin (at least sometimes), that they at least had a choice and could change? How do you read that?
Do you believe being a Christian makes a temporal difference in how you live? I mean, not how you feel about yourself/others but how you act in the world?
To you, what does salvation mean? Is it simply for the next world or does it break into this one changing me, and giving me the ability to begin living a new life? How about that verse about God giving the strength to stand up under temptation, for instance. Or how different paul was after his conversion.
I’m struggling to wrap my brain around the big picture of this.
Anon 1 –
I’m thinking hard about how to answer your questions, wishing that we were talking over a beer and that I was smarter:)
First off, yes, I do believe that people change. However, I also believe that the entire Xian life, from start to finish, is a work of God, that we are unable to change ourselves, and that, usually, our efforts are counter-productive, in that they create pride (self-righteousness) or despair (hiding) or, usually, both. The genuinely Xian life entails living each day in dependance, repentance and thankfulness, trusting God to do as He will, knowing that He is always at work for the good of those who love Him, but that often this “good” looks nothing like we might expect (read:cross).
Being a Christian makes a huge difference to how you act in the world, but it has more to do with “giving up” than with “being good”, although the latter may be a happy consequence of the former. Let me explain what I mean.
Many have observed, and I agree with them, that our supposed “goodness” is, perhaps, the greatest barrier between us and God. We use our goodness to resist His grace, saying that we don’t need it. A big part of God’s work is what Paul called “putting the old man to death,” the part of us that so badly wants to be our own god, even for good. Often we end up fighting against God and what He is doing in our life because we think we know better than He does. I do this all the time.
The kind of life I am talking about entails a radical faith in the Holy Spirit. It means trusting Him, really trusting Him, to do what He will in and through us. This doesn’t mean doing nothing, but rather living our lives in freedom, as children, as creatures, letting each day’s worries be sufficient for that day. Then, when we experience God’s love in tangible ways, when we see that he really does love us and actually supplies our needs, even when we do nothing (or worse) our joy will overflow and pour out onto others in acts of service.
Is this connecting at all?
Anon 2 –
Yes, I agree that there is very often healing.
But there is also very often regression, which may, in fact, be God doing His alien work (as Luther calls it), killing off the part of us that wants to be free of Him, that doesn’t like having to constantly go back, repent and look to the cross for hope.
Think of Paul’s thorn in the flesh. “My grace is sufficient for you,” God said to him,”for in weakness my power is made perfect.” Those must be some very comforting words to Ted Haggard right about now, as they are to me.
Nicely said, RJ. . .
Anon 1, you said:
Do you believe being a Christian makes a temporal difference in how you live? I mean, not how you feel about yourself/others but how you act in the world?
It seems to me that, in light of the two great commandments, when a message can profoundly change the way someone “feels” about herself and others, then that would necessarily make a “temporal” difference.
The Apostle Paul did not change his life in some intentional way; rather, his eternal perspective on who he was and who his neighbor was in light of the cross re-oriented his temporal perspective in a radical way.
If you’ll notice, the indicatives in the Pauline teaching almost all center around staying true to the message of the Cross which, in fact, changed the way he “felt” about himself and others, and the way he approached the relationship between living by works and living by faith. Essentially, Paul’s conversion—which redefined his conception of sin as a state rather than action–simply coincided with what Jesus had lived/taught.
No one is arguing against the plain meaning/voice of Paul in scripture, rather the question is what is the purpose of the exhortations.
The Law, in all of its holiness and glory, will never be silenced until sin is gone–so, in that sense, there is no final “temporal” change until the end. . until then, we affirm the truth and holiness of the Law with all fear and trembling–being sure to heed Paul’s imperative to “endeavor to preach nothing but Christ and Him crucified.”
JDK –
Thank you for that. You are so right about how feeling differently changes everything.
and of course (it should go without saying since people cried when the Beatles got off the plane) we root those changed feelings in the objective work/proclamation of what has been done on the Cross–
mais bien sur…