Article

Creed

Sport

31 January 2024

6 min read

Even the best have their limits: Jürgen Klopp’s lessons for life

A famed football manager’s resignation tells us a lot about human nature. Jonny Rowlands explores both his and our limits

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A football manager stands on the touchline and stares hard, dressed in a black coat and hat.

Klopp faces the future.

Liverpool FC.

10.36am, Friday 26 January 2024. A video is posted by Liverpool Football Club. It’s an interview with Jürgen Klopp himself. They only do this if it’s something big. Maybe he’s going to extend his contract at the club? Maybe they’ve found a replacement hamstring for Mo Salah?!

“I will leave the club at the end of the season.” It is an absolute gut punch, and the sentence hits me like a truck. A feeling of shock washes over me. I’m reminded of a video of a young lad in Liverpool in 1974 being told Bill Shankly has resigned. He is in complete denial and just flat-out unable to accept the truth of the matter. Fifty years later, at 10.36am on Friday 26th January 2024, I am that young lad. This can’t be real. He’s not really going. This is one of those AI-deepfake things. Jürgen’s not leaving. Is he? I knew this was coming, but I didn’t think it would be so soon. I’m not ready.

My mind is chaos, and I am a mess of contradictions. My wife is out and the only other person in the house I can talk to is a cat who does not understand the gravity of the situation. All too quickly it becomes painfully clear that this is real. He is leaving. And soon.

The seeming mundanity of Klopp’s decision to leave, and his reason for doing so, speaks to his own philosophical nature.

When I return to reality, more questions emerge. Why is he leaving? Is he okay? Has he been offered a better job? Has he been sacked?! “I’m running out of energy,” he says. Jürgen Klopp, manager of Liverpool Football Club, has the best job in the world, is outstandingly good at it and, at only 56, feels as though he doesn’t have the energy for it anymore. What a thought. Surely there has to be more to his leaving than this? It can’t be that simple.

But no; it really is that simple. It’s something unheard of in modern football. Jürgen hasn’t been sacked for poor results; Liverpool are flying at the moment and, at the time of writing, could still win every competition they’re in. He hasn’t been offered another job somewhere else; he says he won’t manage anywhere else for at least a year. He just hasn’t got the energy to do this anymore. Despite what everyone at Liverpool wants – himself included – he feels it’s the right time to acknowledge that he has simply reached his limit. He can do no more.

Jürgen shares many similarities with the pantheon of great Liverpool managers, of which he is now a part; the likes of Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Kenny Daglish, still sung about on the kop to this day. One characteristic, however, strikes me above all others. All of Liverpool’s greatest managers have been deeply philosophical, both about football and about life itself. Klopp is no exception. The seeming mundanity of Klopp’s decision to leave, and his reason for doing so, speaks to his own philosophical nature. It also speaks to something seldom noted about human nature more generally: our finitude.

There is goodness in finitude. Our creaturely limitations remind us that we are not God; our finitude reminds us that we come from infinitude.

By finitude, I mean our inherent limitations are created beings. Put bluntly, one day, we will die. We are finite, not infinite. This finitude is an inalienable part of being human: to be human is to be limited rather than limitless. We encounter our finitude at all moments of our lives. In our need to sleep, rest, eat, drink, and so much more besides. Any moment at which we are not wholly self-sufficient (if we are ever wholly self-sufficient), when we rely on something beyond ourselves, we are faced with our own finitude.

This finitude can certainly lead to difficult moments (like, for example, having to watch one of your footballing heroes suddenly announce he’s leaving your club). But despite this, there is goodness in finitude. Our creaturely limitations remind us that we are not God; our finitude reminds us that we come from infinitude. It reminds us that we need those around us and, in turn, that they need us. These are good things to be reminded of, that we always live in a complex web of dependence on one another, as we navigate our finitude together.

Jürgen’s resignation is such a shock because it speaks directly to this often-unnamed aspect of our nature; this inter-dependence we all rely upon due to the limitations built into our human nature. He has simply recognised his finitude. It comes as such a shock, in part, because it is rare to see someone acknowledge their humanity and their limitations so plainly. Jürgen is running out of energy. Aren’t we all?

It is also striking, as the UK endures the slow run up to what is likely to be an unedifying general election, that when faced with his own finitude, Jürgen has sought not to consolidate his own power and position, but freely to give it up. He could have had the run of the place for as long as he wanted. If he had asked for a life-time contract, few would have wanted to say no. This is part of what makes him such a compelling leader; his willingness to vacate positions of leadership when the time is right. Because it is this very vulnerability that makes him so authentically human.

In the end, then, it is an act of love from Jürgen. Clearly the decision has weighed on him somewhat; he is clear that he doesn’t really want to go, but that he feels it’s the right thing to do. Faced with his own finitude, with the limitations of his own creatureliness as a human being, the most loving thing he can do for the club is to walk away, to admit his human fragility. There is something reminiscent here of the apostle Paul, who claimed he would boast in his weaknesses, because that was how Christ dwelled in him. “Whenever I am weak, then I am strong”. Jürgen, too, a devout Christian himself, has displayed immense strength in his weakness. I do not speak lightly when I say it is a deeply Christ-like decision on his part.

To acknowledge our dependence on others, to acknowledge our inability always to be dependable; these things are acts of love born from recognition of our finitude. To love one another is not to pretend we can fix each other’s problems, nor is it to avoid being a burden on other people. In depending on others and being depended upon, we become more and more like that which God has called us to be: finite, limited creatures in need of those around us. Our limitations are an opportunity to display love, not a hindrance to it.

In all this, Jürgen acknowledges his own finitude in a way that is rare to see and, clearly, difficult even for himself fully to come to terms with. Like Jürgen, we are all running out of energy. This need not be a cause for sadness; it merely points us towards the one from whom that energy comes and reminds us of our dependency on Him, and on those around us. Our finitude is a gift, releasing us from the burden of being all things to all people. I still wish Jürgen was staying, though.

Essay

Creed

Politics

10 May 2024

7 min read

MAGA’s sorting of America

What would Bonhoeffer make of the rogue creed?

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A red baseball cap, with Make America Great Again written across it, sits on an open bible.

Natilyn Photography on Unsplash.

“Ten years is a long time in the life of every human being.” So begins Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay, After Ten Years. For him, the decade in question was 1933 to 1943. The place, Germany.

The original essay, penned to mark the new year of 1943, reflects on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s ascendancy to power through democratic machinery. The piece was sent to an inner circle of Bonhoeffer’s friends. “Are we still of any use?” asks Bonhoeffer. There’s a question I can relate to.

And so, I’ve returned to these modest words again and again these last few years. They’re prophetic, a jolt of honesty born of resilient hope. Not unlike Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, both could be modern epistles.

Their prophetic edge is clearer with eyes on our own situation. 2024 is not 1968 or 1933. As an American citizen, we have our own “decade” to reflect on in the United States. And that is the decade of MAGA, or “Make America Great Again.”

What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community.

Just 10 years ago, Trump wasn’t sitting in courtrooms. Back then, he stood on a stage to address the Conservative Political Action Conference. He wasn’t a candidate, but a businessman, reality TV star, and disrupter of status quo.

It was at that 2014 meeting Trump uttered that now ubiquitous slogan. Near the end of the speech, less rambling and sharper than his stream-of-consciousness rallies today, the line appears, “we need to make America great again.”

Trump wasn’t the first to use it, that was Reagan in 1980. Then, like now, it evoked a sense of nostalgia, of “good old days” that never were. But nostalgia is powerful, primal. It allows us to persist in the illusion that, for example, the social order of Jim Crow America was somehow more moral and upstanding than our present situation. As if lynchings, mob violence, and political inequality vanish in the mists of our longings. This is and can only be the imagination of white supremacy.

Trump didn’t invent the slogan, but perhaps he was the first to tap into its deepest lode in the bedrock. What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community. Now, “MAGA” is its own qualifier. We have “MAGA Republicans” and “MAGA Rallies” of the “MAGA faithful.”

Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this.

And where have churches been in these days? Hans Ulrich calls the church a “place of reversal” a place where rogue creeds and words ought to be emptied of their power, where a different public is constituted around the wine, bread, and water. But the lines of MAGA are drawn straight through our churches in America.

Caleb Campbell pastors in Phoenix, Arizona. I asked him recently his thoughts on the impending election, and how it would affect his church. Most churches have already been sorted, he told me. In 2020, churches fractured from within, torn from the pandemic, protests, and the Presidency. But now, there has been a sorting, and settling. The partisan lines, those borders the church is empowered to transgress, are sadly reinforced.

The lasting power of “Make America Great Again” over the last decade is significant. Among practicing Christians, the story we tell about America in our churches has theological consequences. And every church tells this story, implicitly or explicitly, in speech or in silence. And rather than emptying the rogue creed “Make America Great Again” it would seem that in and among many churches across America, it has been given an ample charge of theological authority.

MAGA trades in all the elements of a seemingly eradicated virus called fascism. A mythic past, demographic anxiety, authoritarian rule, all elements converging and colliding in American life. And curiously, the one thing that gives fascism its strength is a failure to remember.

And perhaps this is why Bonhoeffer’s letter, read on the rising tide of anti-democratic platforms, speaks so directly to us. It holds space for a necessary exercise of remembering.

“Who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer asks in the wake of Hitler’s ascendancy. Even the Confessing Church, organized to resist the Nazification of the German evangelical church, soon folded. Pastors either took the oath of loyalty, or enlisted. Time had proved how most attempts to stand firm in the Third Reich had collapsed in on themselves. Such failures mark our day, too.

Bonhoeffer answers his own question in a way that is instructive for us. He surveys all the failed responses to Hitler’s rise. For example, there’s the “reasonable ones” who simply think better answers and clearer communication win the day. Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this. Even more stalwart, institutional efforts fail here. In the torrent of raw information sewage flowing with conspiracies, algorithms, and slogans, reason isn’t enough.

Private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

There’s the ethical fanatic, who tries to “meet the power of evil with purity of principle.” Many in days like ours are earnest in their convictions, but white-knuckling principles is satisfied not with responsibility but with keeping to some arbitrary vision of integrity that prizes its artificiality, confusing the arbitrary refusal to cede principles with responsible action. There’s those of conscience who, Bonhoeffer notes, can never know the difference between a bad conscience (which can be strong) or a deceived conscience.

The path of duty seems attractive, until we recognize that “just following orders” is the justification of every functionary in Trump’s MAGA machine. And of course, freedom, which can side with the wrong to prevent the worst and so lose its own solid footing. When all else fails, Bonhoeffer holds out private virtue as that last course of action. Not to be confused with monastic retreat, private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

If all these routes are taken off the table, we find ourselves in position to recognize a bitter truth: we’ve made resisting Trump a good business. Good for convincing stakeholders to fund new ventures, good for justifying ourselves as a moral opposition. After 10 years of MAGA, it’s true that we have assumed much about democracy that can only be realized by vigilance.

Our democracy is a spectacle, not a process. It is an oligarchy of represented interests, not a democracy of representatives. And Trump? The ethos of greatness has always been tied to the former, not the latter. And it is in this situation, not uncommon throughout history, but novel for us who face it, that we can receive the question, “who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer’s question resounds.

If the resistance of reason, principles, duty, or virtue fail, then what? Bonhoeffer’s insistence is that responsible action is “nothing but an answer to God’s question and call.”

Does this mean only Christians can save the world? That Christians are inherently “better” or “righteous” in politics? No. But ten years of MAGA would seem to suggest that this belief continues to animate the evangelical political machine. This is not Christendom; living “in answer to God’s question” means that Christians, simply by virtue of the story we confess and participate in, point to the One who saves.

The singular answer Christians give, of a witness to God’s call, is a window into the story in which the world may find its salvation and hope. Logics of inclusion and exclusion are shattered in the event of reconciliation. There’s a politics in these wider horizons that can heal the bitter contempt that marks our present situation. And sure, Bonhoeffer’s conclusion may strike some as trite sentimentality, of veiled Christian piety that belongs anywhere but politics or the public square. But that’s precisely it.

The Christian story creates a public with its own politics. And this doesn’t mean the church is a counter-society, set up against the world, rather, it is precisely in our participating with fellow citizens in the mess of political process where such a witness can be given and made. There is a free responsibility to this presence. This is not Christian dominance, Christendom 2.0, or MAGA visions of authoritarian power dressed up in Christian rhetoric. This is something more modest, and yet deeply radical.

A decade of MAGA ought to have taught many of us much more than we currently know. And such learning can only happen once we stop incentivizing and normalizing assaults on democratic machinery that come to us as a spectacle for our consumptive entertainment. There remains a way to stand firm, a way that resists necessities and immediacies, primarily because it has the audacity to confess the truth that the world is already reconciled, it just doesn’t know it yet. And nowhere is this ignorance more concentrated than in the retributive, ascendant vision contained in the phrase, “Make America Great Again.”