Abstract
This chapter focuses on a relatively small body of literature that emerged in the late 1960s, which the author calls “play theology.” Play theology emerged in tandem with death of God theology and shares many of its assumptions. But it sought to address a changed socio-cultural milieu by turning to what is often assumed to be the lighter aspects of religion, as a way to reinvigorate and transform the latter after God’s death. This chapter focuses on Harvey Cox’s The Feast of Fools and David L. Miller’s Gods and Games as exemplary.
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Notes
- 1.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), § 125.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Hugo Rahner, Man at Play (New York: Herder, 1972); Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Play (New York: Harper, 1972); Josef Pieper, Leisure (New York: Random, 1963). Pieper’s work was originally published in 1952, but it continued to have an impact on later studies, which is why I include him here.
- 4.
Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 4.
- 5.
Ibid., 268.
- 6.
Harvey Cox, Religion in the Secular City (New York: Touchstone, 1984): “A new age that some call ‘postmodern’ has begun to appear. No one is quite sure just what the postmodern era will be like, but one thing seems clear. Rather than an age of rampant secularization and religious decline, it appears to be more of an era of religious revival and the return of the sacral. No one talks much today about the long night of religion or the zero level of its influence on politics” (24).
- 7.
Although understandable given the context and time, it is unfortunate that play here serves to mark a division in kind between animals and humans. For an approach that emphasizes the way in which play indicates continuity in terms of degree, see Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us About Politics (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014). Donovan Schaefer’s work on religion, animals, and affect is important here as well, in that it may challenge the assumption that festivity and fantasy are uniquely human. See Donovan Schaefer, Religious Affects (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016).
- 8.
Cox, The Feast of Fools (New York: Harper, 1969), 22.
- 9.
Ibid., 23.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid., 24.
- 12.
Ibid., 26.
- 13.
Ibid., 62.
- 14.
Ibid., 10.
- 15.
Ibid., 69.
- 16.
Ibid., 70.
- 17.
Ibid., 75.
- 18.
Politics, in this sense, refers to the principles that generate society. Given that fantasy for Cox provides a window into both religion and politics, one could say that his reading of fantasy is theo-political. See, for instance, Claude Lefort, “The Persistence of the Theologico-Political?,” in Political Theologies, eds. H. de Vries and L. Sullivan (New York: Fordham UP, 2006): 148–187.
- 19.
Cox (1969), 87.
- 20.
Ibid., 139.
- 21.
Ibid., 157.
- 22.
David Miller, God and Games (New York: World, 1970). I am quoting from the Kindle Edition, which was published in 2013 by Stillpoint Digital Press. Part I of God and Games is devoted to outline the various ways in which the metaphor saturates such discourses.
- 23.
Miller, loc. 2646.
- 24.
Ibid., loc. 2657.
- 25.
Ibid., loc. 2657.
- 26.
Ibid., loc. 2695.
- 27.
Ibid., loc. 2752.
- 28.
Ibid., loc. 2793.
- 29.
Ibid., loc. 2836.
- 30.
Ibid., loc. 2874.
- 31.
Ibid., loc. 2902.
- 32.
Ibid., loc. 2940. For Tillich’s notion of faith as ultimate concern, see his classic Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1957).
- 33.
Ibid., loc. 3006.
- 34.
Ibid., loc. 3033.
- 35.
Ibid., loc. 3047.
- 36.
For the distinction, see Amos Niven Wilder, Theopoetic (Eugene, OR: Wipf, 2014). For a general, contemporary overview of theopoetics, see L. Callid Keefe-Perry, Way to Water (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).
- 37.
Miller (1970), loc. 3103.
- 38.
Ibid., loc. 3168.
- 39.
Ibid., loc. 3179.
- 40.
David Miller, Christs (New Orleans: Spring, 1981).
- 41.
Ibid., 67.
- 42.
Ibid., 70.
- 43.
Ibid., 126.
- 44.
The literature is too vast to mention here, but recent years have yielded a proliferation of works focused upon the relationship between religion and sports and religion and video games.
- 45.
Although I cannot develop the notion here, it is worth mentioning queer theology provides important resources for doing so. To give an example, Jay Johnson’s Peculiar Faith (New York: Seabury, 2014) exhibits an admirable playfulness with respect to Christian theology, in both form and content.
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Phelps, H. (2018). Play Theology. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_50
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