Gods & Games: Toward a Theology of Play

GODS AND GAMES

toward a theology of play

David L. Miller

Stillpoint/Thought

Stillpoint Digital Press

Mill Valley, California

Gods and Games

Copyright © 1970, 1973, 2013 by David L. Miller

except as noted on the permissions page.

All rights reserved

Published on Smashwords

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For information address Stillpoint Digital Press at rights@stillpointdigital.com

This book was originally published in 1970 by The World Publishing Company.

Harper Colophon edition (ISBN 06-090306-6) published 1973.

2013 Digital Edition 

Designed by David Kudler and Stillpoint Digital Press

ISBN 978-1-938808-08-1

Stillpoint Digital Press

StillpointDigital.com

Acknowledgments

I very much wish to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to the Joseph Campbell Foundation for supporting the republication of this book as an eBook, and especially to Robert Walter and David Kudler for their attention to and hard work on the project.

David L. Miller

Introduction to the Ebook Edition (2013)

It has been more than forty years since the first edition of Gods and Games appeared in print. Not surprisingly, some of the theory contained in the book has become dated and has been superseded by later critical studies. It would be impossible in short compass to make the arguments in this book relevant to the contemporary literature. Instead of making a pretence at such an effort, I will simply list some of the literature of the intervening years. It is surely various and marks a plurality of perspectives. For example:

Shirl J. Hoffman, ed., Sport and Religion (Champaign: Human Kinetic Books, 1992)

Diane Ackerman, Deep Play (New York: Random House, 1999)

Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006)

Shirl J. Hoffman, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010)

This list is typical, but it only scratches the surface of a large and burgeoning literature, which continues to grow. For example, Philip P. Arnold of Syracuse University has published a book with Cognella Academic Publishers on sports and religion. And doubtless there will be much more.

Also, there has recently been a lively conversation concerning the notion of play in the theoretical and critical writings of Jacques Derrida, even after the author’s death in 2004. This stems mainly from Derrida’s 1966 essay:

Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Writing and Difference, tr. A. Bass and R. Macksey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 278-294

A small sampling of the relevant discussion includes:

James Hans, The Play of the World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981)

Robert Wilson, In Palamedes’ Shadow: Game and Play Concepts Today, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 12 (June, 1985), 190-196.

Mark C. Taylor, Tears (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 203-234

John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), pp. 181-188.

Simona Livescu, From Plato to Derrida and Theories of Play, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 5.4 (2003). http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol5/iss4/5, accessed May 19, 2011

Along with the important Derridean discussions, there have been other conversations of a philosophical and critical theoretical nature, indicating the depth as well as of the breadth of contemporary interest in the notion of play. This is indicated in the following works:

Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978)

James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987)

Mihai Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)

Mihai Spariosu, God of Many Names: Play, Poetry and Power in Hellenic Thought from Homer to Aristotle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)

Tilman Küchler, Postmodern Gaming: Heidegger, Duchamp, Derrida (New York: Peter Lang, 1994)

Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)

Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. (New York: Penguin, 2011)

Finally, since the first publication of the hardback edition of Gods and Games in 1970, my own writing has included the following essays on the topic of play.

The Kingdom of Play: Some Old Theological Light from Recent Literature, Union Seminary Quarterly Review, XXV, 3 (Spring, 1970), 343-360

Theology and Play Studies: An Overview, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XXIX, 3 (September, 1971), 349-354

Playing the Mock Game (Luke 22:63-64), Journal of Biblical Literature, XC, 3 (1971), 309-313

More on Play, Christianity and Crisis, XXXII, 3 (March 6, 1972), 47-48

Playing the Game to Lose, in: Jurgen Moltmann, et al., The Theology of Play (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1972), pp.99-110

Alienation, Liberation, and Sport, in: Fernand Landry and William Orban, eds., Études philosophiques, théologiques et historiques du sport et de l’activité physique (Québec: Éditeur official, 1978), pp. 153-159

From Leviathan to Lear: Shades of Play in Language and Literature, Eranos 51-1982 (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1983), pp.59-110

Play Not, In Good Company, ed. David Jasper and Mark Ledbetter (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), pp. 33-46.

The Bricoleur in the Tennis Court http://web.utk.edu/~unistudy/ethics96/dlm1.html Accessed May 19, 2011.

There is much more to this up-grade than can be presented briefly here. But let me add one anecdote in an attempt to help to correct the dated nature of a portion of the original argument.

Gods and Games includes a brief commentary on the philosophical analysis of the notion of play in the work of the Heidelberg philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer (see Part One, section two, under Philosophy). Not long after the book’s publication, in the Spring of 1972, Professor Gadamer was appointed a visiting professor at Syracuse University where I was teaching. Every Thursday afternoon after his seminar on Aristotle, he and I would go to a local country club bar to drink German beer and to talk. I had been told by my department chairman that Professor Gadamer had read my book, and it is not difficult to imagine my growing anxiety when week after week went by without his saying a word to me about it.

Finally, after many weeks — what seemed an eternity to a young professor in the thrall of a wise mentor — he turned to the topic of my book. I was full of fear and trepidation, as it turned out that well I should have been. He said: Professor Miller, you almost got the point! I was crushed! What was wrong? It did little good for him to say that it was not entirely my fault. English, he explained, "has a doublet for the idea: play, the verb, and game, the noun, are different words in English, whereas German says it with one and the same word, ein Spiel spielen, as does French, jouer un jeu. So, he explained to me that part of the book’s argument wrongly implied that play has something to do with fun and games. Very American!" he said in a way that was not at all reassuring.

So what was the point of play? Professor Gadamer attempted to explain. He asked me if I rode a bicycle. I said that I did. Then he asked me about the front wheel, the axle, and the nuts. He remarked that I probably knew that it was impossible to tighten the nuts all the way down, because the metal frame was in the way. But if one could tighten them all the way, he asked me, what would happen? I said that it was obvious that the wheel would not turn. Exactly! It has to have some play! he announced in teacherly fashion and a little exultantly, I thought. And then he added, ... and not too much play or the wheel will fall off. You know, he said, "there has to be Spielraum." Play room!

So that was it. It is not a matter of games. It is rather a matter of what we, in English, call leeway, some play, as in a bicycle wheel, a little space, some distance, in relationships, in ideas, in our psychology, in life … so that the wheel will turn. Professor Gadamer was right. This is finally what this book was all about forty years ago. And it is what it is still all about forty years later.

Introduction to the 1973 Edition

The psychologist C. G. Jung called it synchronicity when two or more similar events occurred coincidentally without any causal connection warranting the uncanny correspondence. When the original publication of this book coincided, in a space of less than six months, with the publication of three other works on the same theme, one can imagine the effect such synchronicity had on the author! It was not that the subject-matter of play has proved to have been of archetypal significance for contemporary American theology; it was rather that four men, some of whom were personally acquainted, all published books within half a year’s time on theology and play, and they did this without the others’ prior knowledge or collusion! I am personally glad that play theology or theology of play (one hardly even knows what to call it!) has never gained the press and popularity of so many other recent theological movements. Theology is not faddish, or should not be, and it is far better that the remarkable conjunction of a psychological, a philosophical, a sociological, and a cultural approach to theology and play should remain something of an underground current, nurturing where possible a too-often dried-up religious hermeneutic. How play studies may have such a fructifying function can be seen in noting the relationship between theology and play studies, on the one hand, and the death of God theology, on the other. An archimedean point-of-leverage can be obtained on this relationship by observing the American theological scene through the eyes of a European.

Fritz Buri, the noted theologian from Basel, Switzerland, told a Syracuse University audience how it all looked to him as of Spring 1971. He observed that four years earlier when he had been in the United States there had been much talk about, as he called it, the so-called theology of the death of God. But on this visit not only did it seem that God was once again alive and well; indeed, he seemed to be dancing and playing in festival and fantasy. ‘The God of whom not long ago it was said that he had died, said Buri, seems to have resurrected in a God who is celebrated in a theology of play. Professor Buri warned the audience not to be misled by this apparently miraculous death and rebirth act, not, that is, to mistake it for sound Christian theology. Death and resurrection in the Bible mean something other, he affirmed, than the change of the dead God of Altizer into the dancing God of Sam Keen. Buri held on firmly to a traditional distinction: The death and resurrection with which we are dealing in our understanding of Paul and in our theology of responsibility is much more than a dying of idols or an iconoclasm and it is quite different from a dancing in ecstasy. Sin is death, and resurrection consists in the striving for justice, in the crucifixion of the old Adam and in walking in a new life." ¹

This will do for a leverage point from which we can get a handle on what has been going on in theology and play studies since the original publication of Gods and Games.

In order to see the full force of Buri’s argument, comparing theologies of play and theologies of the death of God, it is appropriate first to locate the various contributors to recent theology and play studies by asking whether it is theology of play or play theology that is being attempted.² In the former instance, one presumably confronts an unknown but happy mystery, the phenomenon of play, with something well-known in advance, a viable form of classical theology. By applying the self-understood and well-instantiated categories of the known (theology) to the unknown (play), as if by some modern rational miracle, theology illuminates play and the unknown is baptized with meaning by the known. I think the works by Harvey Cox³ and Robert Neal⁴ fit this type. A play theology, on the other hand, is just the reverse. Here the pheonomenon of play, whose structures and dynamics are apparently not only to be valued without equivocation, but are also obvious for all sane men to see and understand fully — this phenomenon of play is applied to ailing or otherwise obtuse and abstract theology, thereby giving it new life. It seems that Sam Keen⁵ and Hugo Rahner⁶ adopt such a strategy, although in the case of the latter a Thomist influence side-slips the argument a bit in the direction of theology of play.

If we bracket Rahner from the group just named, it is not difficult to see support for Buri’s formal argument in both theology of play and play theology. Indeed, Robert Neale writes in praise of play as if no death of God, cultural or otherwise, had ever been announced. Despite a clear call, man has refused to delight in and enjoy his God.⁷ Whatever retreat from piety there may be is only temporary and is a result of the amalgamation of current ‘religion’ with contemporary work culture. ⁸ Though Neale adroitly utilizes a psychology of play and a secular phenomenology of religions to jar us loose from our fixated religious acculturation, when all is said and done traditional theological categories reemerge as having informed the argument Christianly from the beginning. And the same is true of Cox. In his chapter on Festivity and the Death of God, Cox argues that the vivid cultural experience of God’s absence, disappearance, or death occurred in a civilization where festivity in all its forms was in a state of steady decline,⁹ as if, had we been fantastic and playful in our cliched rituals, Nietzsche’s prophet would not have gone mad before the sepul- chured Churches. Cox, like Neale, support Buri’s analysis by supposing that though the death of God cannot be repealed ... it can be transcended.... If God returns we may have to meet him first in the dance....¹⁰ On reading The Feast of Fools one feels that Cox meant to say: if we dance, God will return. And one suspects that the doctrines which are to follow the experience of the dance, as Cox indicates they may, will be remarkably similar if not identical to certain German dogmatic theologies that we have already seen. The theology of theology of play is intact and, as Buri suggested, it is an answer to the theology of the death of God.

Bun’s argument gets support from play theology, too. And though it is of a slightly different sort, as the typology above gives clue, it has a similar function in the context of Buri’s sermon. In Sam Keen’s sub-chapter on The Death of God, Karl Barth and Harvey Cox are mentioned as following a line of argument that refuses to face the radical nature of the changes in Western self-understanding and hence the seriousness of the issue of the death of God. The God who revealed Himself in history is as vulnerable as the God who revealed himself in nature.¹¹ Traditional modes of theologizing are now problematic because they cannot support techniques of transcendence needed by Homo religiosus; former dogmatics cannot provide such support in our time because, far from affirming techniques of transcendence, they have been party to the three reasons those techniques are no longer viable: namely, radical historical and literary criticism of Scripture, religious pluralism in the midst of rising urban culture, and secularization which brings with it an alienation of religious affection. In Apology for Wonder Keen suggests a transformation of man’s self-understanding from Homo faber to Homo ludens as a possible recipe for theology’s diet. One suspects, however, this may shift theology’s anatomy, and, in To a Dancing God, in the section, A Way beyond the Death of God — or How to Tell Stories, we see that this is precisely the case. Keen writes: The death of God’ is best understood as modern man’s inability to believe that human life is rendered ultimately meaningful by being incorporated into a story. And then he offers: I shall try to rehabilitate the story as a basic tool for the formation of identity.¹² How unlike Robert Neale’s saying: Everyone knows what it would be like to participate in the story and game of the adventure of God in Christ!¹³ And yet, how much is Keen’s play theology as much a vindication of Buri as the theology of play of Neale and Cox! All are solving the problem of the death of God!

Buri’s critique is Pauline. I join him in critique, but I must demur from his orthodox strategy. It is one with which I no longer feel secure. It seems to me that the weakness of a theology of play is the same risk as that run by all of’-theologies, whether theology of language, of secularity, of the death of God, of revolution, of culture, of literature, or of hope (all of which compel me greatly). They tempt one in the direction of a relevance and thereby present a faddish syndrome in which one suspects the real disease is a hysteria concerning the proper subject-matter of theology. But theology properly so-called, we were all taught once upon a time, is the study of religion: theou logos. And if theos and logos are questionable, as they may well be in our time, then "of’-theologies are all problematic since they may be only expressions that there is no theology that can in any intelligible way be a theology of anything at all, including play. This is why I am relieved that theology of play has never become modish.

Play theology may be just as suspect, however, and for a quite similar reason. It attempts to revivify theology by inseminating new formal terminology from game and play theory and practice. Yet it may be that other disciplines and human experiences (those giving substance and sensitivity to constructs concerning games and play) may now also be suffering identity crises and radical ambiguity not unlike theology’s, in which case the drive toward a humanistic or serendipitous study of religion, expressed in this instance by an appeal from theology to the humanistic and behavioral sciences of play, though formally interesting, is no more nor less forlorn than the theology and the play gasping for resuscitation.

Though I am convinced that theology and play studies are in many ways unique in the American experience,¹⁴ it is important to unbracket Rahner at this point in order to see how he, as well as two other Protestant contributors from Tubingen, fit Buri’s scheme. The matter is put simply: God did not die in Europe! Neither Rahner, nor Jürgen Moltmann,¹⁵ nor Gerhard Martin,¹⁶ intend theology and play studies to be an answer to the death of God. Rahner rather takes the clue from the phenomenon of play, especially child’s play, and applies it to his historical researches, discovering that "eutrapelia," the forgotten virtue, has been lurking in the Fathers’ theory and practice all along. Play gives new life to theology, its Church and its God, but neither of these was really ever in question. Rahner’s theologia ludens, far from being an answer to the death of God, is the continuing answer of the life of God in Christ which is directed supernaturalistically to every question except the question about God and Christ.

It is the supernaturalistic mode, rather than its pre-mortem dei mood, that brings a response to Rahner from Gerhard Martin in his fascinating little book on the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure and play, according to Martin, are the key-words for a new theology of the seventies, just as death of God and revolution functioned similarly in the sixties. Martin both carefully and aphoristically presents evidence from the new sensibility and, above all, from American culture, placing this evidence alongside the Christian and revolutionary traditions. The result of this suggestive juxtaposition is an argument that "the freedom of the Christian is pleasure (Glück) and the Christian experience of pleasure is play — both the play of the Christian in the world and God’s play with the world."¹⁷ This means that our theology, which has been sociologically informed in the direction of the ethical, must be balanced by a properly religious aesthetic, since pleasure and play are terms that belong to the realm of aisthanomai, in the widest sense of this Greek word of sense.¹⁸ Thus, Martin’s argument is informed by Huizinga and Schiller in such a fashion as to stress play’s double-faceted nature: agon and paidia, ethical and aesthetic, social and psychological — it being the drawback of so many theologies, not to mention the many theories of play, that they emphasize one of these dimensions to the exclusion of the other. Martin follows Huizinga in viewing paidia as aesthetic diversion, pure play, and the play of a child, whereas agon is viewed as competitive gaming with