“Does God Care Who Wins the Super Bowl?”

         Yes.
         Any activity that concerns the human persons God made and God loves concerns God.  Indeed God is more concerned with the details, diversions and directions of our lives than are we ourselves.  Any God who bothered himself to count the number of hairs on our heads (Matt. 10: 30) is surely sufficiently concerned as well about the activities by which we amuse, absorb, elevate or pervert ourselves -- sports included.  Any God who cares when a sparrow falls (Matt. 10: 29), also cares when the Falcons, the Cardinals, or the Eagles fall.  Only if religion has nothing at all to do with human excellence, human achievement, human diversion and human performance could we say that God does not care who wins the Super Bowl.  The really shocking fact, of course, would be if he did not.
         The important point regarding God’s interest in human affairs is not that he is interested even in our games, but why he is.  Because God loves us, he intends our fullest happiness, our complete blessedness, which is to say he desires us to be like his Son.  Activities that either hinder or help our conformity to Christ’s character are therefore always of supreme interest to the God who both made us and redeemed us.  Sports have, as do virtually all human endeavors, the capacity to aid or to arrest that development.
         In other words, when responded to properly, both winning and losing can be conducive to sanctification.  Sinful responses, of course, yield the opposite result, and that result concerns God deeply as well.  In that sense, God is not so much interested in the outcome of a sporting event as he is in how those concerned with the event respond to that outcome.
         But if the openness of God theologians are correct, God might be interested in the outcome of sporting events for another reason -- namely, before it happens even he doesn’t know the outcome.  To the openness theologians, some contingencies, by their very nature, are beyond the power even of God to know for certain.  Because God is a rational being, and because the universe he created is rational as well, we must consciously demand of ourselves that when we speak of God and the things he can or cannot do, we speak of him sensibly, in a fashion that is non-contradictory, in a fashion that befits the rational nature of God and of his world.  In that light, contingent events are, by their very nature, contingent, which means they are by no means either certain or inevitable.  Because those events are uncertain, they might not be absolutely knowable, or absolutely predictable, even by God -- that is what contingency logically implies. 
         Indeed there are many things that God does not know, the openness theologians argue.  The Son of God himself, God in the flesh, did not know at least two things: (1) The timing of the Second Coming ( Matt. 24: 36 -- a lesson in humility for those eschatology-crazed lunatics who think they know what Jesus did not, and who insist on telling the world about it); and (2) The person who bumped into Him in a crowd and who was able to draw healing power from Him in so doing (Luke 8:45).  In other words, just as omnipotence means that God has the power to do all that can be done, so omniscience means that God knows all that can be known.  If the openness theologians are correct, the outcome of the Super Bowl might not be one of them.  If not even God knows the outcome of the Super Bowl before it is played, it might, as a result, be of interest to him to find out.
         Of course, because God has an intimate knowledge of all the players and coaches -- their strengths, their weaknesses, their motivations, their fears, their experiences, and their plans -- he knows better than do the coaches and the players themselves how well they likely will perform and what outcome that performance is likely to produce.  Given all that he does know, even under the openness paradigm, God has a better line on any of the games than does even a Vegas bookie.  He is that bookie than which no greater can be conceived.
         If only he’d tell me. 
         Then I’d have an interest in the Super Bowl too.        
           

date modified:
5 July 2006