And then there are days when a topic falls into your lap, or drops out of the sky and slaps you around a couple of times until you give in.
The NFL preseason is underway, which means key players are already getting injuries that will keep them out for part or all of the upcoming season. This is not new; it happens every preseason, to the point where some people wonder if preseason games are all that good of an idea, if perhaps the preseason should be abolished or at least shortened.
The part I missed, though, is that apparently God is the one choosing which players will get hurt.
Introducing the theological stylings of Glover Quin, a safety for the Detroit Lions, after a play in which his tackle on Green Bay Packers receiver Jordy Nelson left the latter player with a torn ACL and likely to miss several weeks of play. You will see Quin's words:
But as part of the answer, Quin also said "God had meant for Jordy to be hurt."That was on Monday. After that touched off an agitated reaction in the media (social and otherwise), some media member on Tuesday came back with a question about that answer; a "did you really mean what you said?" moment. Quin responded with classic "I'm sorry you got offended" patter:
Quin clarified his comment Tuesday, saying he didn't believe he said anything that would have caused a backlash, but "obviously, it upset a whole bunch of people."OK, then. One can already observe that Glover Quin has a pretty insular religious outlook, if it didn't occur to him that such a remark -- that God had it in for Jordy Nelson this season -- might tick some people off.
More:
"I feel like injuries are going to happen, same way Jordy got hurt," Quin said Monday. "I hate that Jordy got hurt, but in my belief and the way that I believe, it was God had meant for Jordy to get hurt. If he wouldn't have got hurt today, if he wouldn't have played in that game, if he wouldn't have practiced anymore and the next time he walked on the field would have been opening day, I feel like he would have got hurt opening day.So this is less a theology than a recapitulation of the Final Destination movies, then?
I'm being somewhat flippant here only because otherwise I'd be swearing a lot. This isn't Christian theology. I say that in the sense that it, so far as it is a theology, is completely uninformed by the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is not Christian because there is nothing Christlike about it. Trying to connect this particular theological position to anything Jesus ever said or did will result in your lying.
It's a very self-serving position, in that it allows Quin to bear no consequences for his actions. It's not wildly different in that respect from reaction after another hit on a quarterback over the weekend, in which the Baltimore Ravens' Terrell Suggs blasted Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Sam Bradford after he had handed the ball off to a running back, specifically diving at Bradford's surgically repaired knees. (By all means click on those links and enjoy the kabuki theater of dueling coachspeak. Harry Frankfurt would have a field day.) If Quin is really feeling full of himself he can simply claim he was God's instrument for administering the required injury to Nelson. At any rate, he can't be blamed.
(Just so we understand each other, Glover, if in twenty years you can't remember your own name and get lost trying to go to the bathroom, we're to assume that's just what God meant to happen to you?)
I'm not naive; Glover Quin is hardly the only person in the world who holds some variant of this belief. It will, however, get a little extra push from its having been uttered by an NFL player, even a rather anonymous one like Quin. And there isn't a preacher in the country with enough pull to refute it, no matter how correct the preacher might be (and yes, there are plenty of preachers who will preach exactly the same thing).
God was not up in heaven plotting how to tear Jordy Nelson's ACL, any more than God was plotting how to kill Justin Wilson on Sunday at Pocono raceway, or Mike Webster after his NFL career. It's ghoulish and hateful to suggest otherwise, particularly when your actions played a part in the injury (like it or not).
If this seems a little personal to me, well, it is, to some degree. It was just three years and a day ago that I came out of my anesthetic fog after a colonoscopy to be told by the gastroenterologist that I had cancer of the rectum. By Quin's articulated theological position, God was going to do that to me at some point or other. God is Quin's agent of suffering, by his own admission.
Now I'll concede a lot of things about that cancer experience (for the uninitiated, I've been clean for a couple of years now). I'll concede that my experience of cancer was pretty mild, compared to some (I'm reminded of this frequently in my current vocation). I'll concede that I was in a pretty good place to be treated for it. And I'll even concede that it probably worked out better that it happened to me while a student at seminary than if I had still been in my previous career as a college professor; in retrospect I doubt I'd have been able to carry that load all that well, while I got through that year at seminary o.k. partly due to a lot of help and being too stupid to know what I wasn't capable of doing.
So, I've had some brush with traumatic illness, and there wasn't a headhunting safety or linebacker around to blame. (For what it's worth, according to my oncologist at the time, the most common risk factor for rectal cancer -- as opposed to colon or colorectal cancer -- is ... a family history of cancer.)
And the notion that God did that to me, again, has nothing of Christ in it. It might have some badly interpreted Paul in it (no, that old saw about "all things work together for good" does not mean it was good for me to have cancer, or for Jordy Nelson to have his ACL ripped; God will work through the bad circumstance, but that doesn't make the circumstance good or God-caused), but no Christ.
But thanks to Glover Quin, that's the theology, that's the view of Christianity that somebody out there is going to take in today.
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