“Knowing Christ is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although winning the US Open was a pretty good second.”
Christmanship
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A theology of competition and sport, Greg Linville, Canton, Ohio, Oliver House, 2014. ISBN: 978-0-9869250-9-9
The concept which gives the book its title is Greg Linville’s great contribution to thinking about sport and Christianity. Christmanship is beyond sportsmanship. It is looking at sport and competition through a “what would Jesus do” lens.
The essence is this: “Christian athletes must emulate Jesus Christ in everything they do, including how they compete. They must step out of the humanistic-based ethic of Sportsmanship and the pragmatic based ethic of Gamesmanship to follow the principles of Christmanship”
Yet of the 230 pages in the book, only 28 directly address what should be the heart of the book.
Greg Linville is a strict Lord’s Day observance advocate and the book’s chapter on Sports and Lord’s Day Issues is longer than the key chapter on Christmanship. While Linville believes that Lord’s Day observance is fundamental to Christianity and therefore to Christmanship, my fear is that his rigidity on a subject on which Christians disagree – for theological, cultural and geographical reasons – detracts from the main argument of the book.
The book begins by setting the scene with two chapters of competition and an interesting consideration of what sports might be deemed to be Biblically (in)defensible. Chapters on historical models of sport and Christianity, Athletics in the First Century and FAQs while not uninteresting do not obviously belong in a book Christmanship and suggest that the book is partly a compendium of previously published papers.
This is not something I normally comment on in reviews but the book lacks rigorous editing resulting is a plethora of typographical and spelling errors.