Episode Details

While keeping an eye on the women’s K1 slalom (“Jess is making a real statement here!”) and occasionally flicking across to see if the tall, lumpy determination of the Olyroos could hold off those nippy Spaniards in the group of dreams, I happened across a very good article by Stephen Liggins about not getting too carried away with the Olympics. ‘The Olympics Games: Good but not God’ was the title, and that pretty much sums up the message that Steve very capably got across. Sport is a good gift. Enjoy it. Glorify God in it. But don’t treat it as a god.

All great stuff, and very much of a piece with the great stuff Steve wrote in his recent book on the subject (The Good Sporting Life: Loving and playing sport as a follower of Jesus). 

However, while not wanting to disagree with Steve, I’d like to push his idea a little further, and fly a theological kite. I wonder if we should think of Sport as a god, or at least as a lordly power that exerts control and authority in the world. 

I’ve been stewing on this and related ideas over the past little while.

What does it mean, for example, for Mammon to be a ‘lord’ that people serve (Matt 6:4; Lk 16:13)? Money is a good gift of God to be received with thanksgiving. It is a creaturely gift that humanity has developed and used in the world, and through which all manner of good things can be done. 

And yet under the name ‘Mammon’ in the Gospels, it is clearly no longer a gift that we can choose to use or misuse. It has become something more. It is a kurios, a lord, a centre of power that people subordinate themselves to.

This good gift, which is ours to utilise, which stems in part from our own powers and abilities, seems now to have an existence of its own outside of us. It is no longer a tool for us to use. It has become a rogue power, exerting influence and authority over us. It snaps its fingers, and we jump. 

In other words, it’s not just that we could mistakenly treat Money as a god or an idol. It’s worse than that. Mammon seems to really be a ‘lord’—a shadowy, non-material, inhuman power that we can’t control, and that in fact controls us. Those who come under its power “fall into a snare”, says Paul (1 Tim 6:9). 

I wonder if Mammon should be identified as being one of the impersonal ‘powers’ (dunameis Rom 8:38; Eph 1:21) or ‘authorities’ (exousiai 1 Cor 15:24; Col 2:10) or ‘lordships’ (kuriotetes Eph 1:21; Col 1:16) or ‘world-powers’ (kosmokratoras Eph 6:12) that exercise dominion in this present evil age. Like the devil himself, Mammon is a created thing that has cut loose from its created place, that has gathered power to itself, and that enslaves people in rebellion against God’s purposes. 

In fact, rebellion against God is the cause of it all. By cutting ourselves loose from God we also lose control of the good gifts and powers that were meant to belong to us; that we were meant to ‘subdue’ and ‘have dominion over’. They get away from us, and master us. Under God’s judgement we are handed into their power. 

In a brilliant and provocative discussion of all this, Karl Barth labels these forces as ‘lordless powers’, and suggests that Mammon is by no means the only one. We still live in a demon-possessed world, he writes, because our world is still …

possessed by the existence of similar or, at times, obviously the same lordless forces which the people of the NT knew and which have plainly not been broken or even affected, but in many ways intensified and strengthened by the fact that our view of world has become a rational and scientific one. Into this clear picture of the world which is ours they thrust themselves,