Article

Character

Creed

Identity

Sport

17 April 2024

4 min read

Scheffler’s secure identity

At the top of the game, win at all costs doesn't cut it.

Jonny Reid

Jonny Reid leads the communications team at Christians in Sport.

A golfer cups his face as he realises he has won.

Scottie Scheffler realises he has won The Masters.

Augusta National.

Scottie Scheffler is very good at golf. Insanely good. He’s the world Number One and now the reigning Masters Champion. He’s also incredibly competitive. So much so it makes him feel sick.

"I was sitting around with my buddies this morning, I was a bit overwhelmed," Scheffler said Sunday evening. "I told them, 'I wish I didn't want to win as badly as did I or as badly as I do.' I think it would make the mornings easier.

"I love winning. I hate losing. I really do. And when you're here in the biggest moments, when I'm sitting there with the lead on Sunday, I really, really want to win badly.”

It is striking to then read that Scheffler says his golf is soon to be the fourth most important thing in his life. It is his job. It has been his whole mission for decades to be the best golfer in the world and yet in his press conference he went to speak about how his faith, his wife and his soon to be born child, are all more important to him than winning golf tournaments.

This feels very counter-cultural in the culture we swim in. One where winning is the only currency. Especially so at a tournament like the Masters, steeped in such tradition and cult-like folklore.

His faith is what he says makes the biggest difference to his outlook. Before we speak more on that, we need to say again, Scottie Scheffler has been blessed with incredible hand eye co-ordination, the right physical attributes, and opportunities at a young age, to practice and develop. And he has worked incredibly hard to become the best player in the game.

But his faith does seem to enhance his performance and especially his ability to deal with pressure. This runs counter to a caricature which might say that becoming a Christian diminishes your competitive edge.

As golf journalist Kyle Porter articulately says:

While Scheffler is not devoted to his faith for the purpose of winning golf tournaments -- quite the opposite, in fact -- in listening to him speak about it, one would find it difficult for a golfer to have a better mind space. He holds the line between "cares a lot" and "identity not tethered to outcome" perfectly.

Only by separating our self-worth from our achievements (or potential ones) can we find satisfaction and security – not slavery.

In his press conference after winning the Masters, Scheffler explained more about how his faith impacts his golf. Having narrated how much he wants to win he said:

"My buddies told me this morning my victory was secure on the cross. And that's a pretty special feeling to know that I'm secure for forever and it doesn't matter if I win this tournament or lose this tournament. My identity is secure for forever."

What does Scheffler mean?

He is speaking about how he believes his standing before God is unchangeable because Jesus died in his place on the cross. Scheffler believes he is “secure for forever” because of it. The Bible describes the new identity Christians have as been formerly slaves, but now “dearly loved children.”

St Paul once described the new identity Christians have as been formerly slaves, but now “dearly loved children.” Scottie Scheffler feels safe. There are many ways to live as a slave. Being a slave to achievement is one. Your happiness and security is based on your success. Being a slave to approval is another. Your joy is rooted in your approval from others. It is not hard to see how easy it is for sportspeople to live in this kind of slavery.

Today’s culture encourages us to look within ourselves to find ourselves. Sport is a very easy way to do this. It is natural to base our identity on our skills and our successes—to fashion for ourselves an achieved identity. And that is a shaky place to find worth and value.

Rory McIlroy, one of Scheffler’s great rivals, seems to struggle with pressure of the Masters more than most. It’s not surprising, the former world N umber Oneis waiting to complete the career grand slam at Augusta and has been trying since his last major victory in 2014. McIlroy longs to be known and respected for his performance, recently reflecting:

“It’s hard for me not to define myself as one of the best golfers in the world, so when you struggle [like that], you feel a little lost.”

Only by separating our self-worth from our achievements (or potential ones) can we find satisfaction and security – not slavery. Ashley Null has worked as a chaplain in five Olympic Villages and knows this only too well:

Only love has the power to make human beings feel truly significant, not achievement. Only knowing that they are loved regardless of their current performance has the power to make Olympians feel emotionally whole.

Scottie Scheffler seems to know he is loved regardless of his golfing performance, and this enhances his ability to deal with pressure. This freedom and security his faith provides seems to allow him to know that all he can do is control what he can, doing the best he can any given week.

Scottie Scheffler will not win every week. He’s said himself that “professional golf is an endlessly not satisfying career” with its grind and the variables at play each week.

He will face periods in his golfing career, as he already has, when his form fails, or picks up injuries and drops down the rankings. It is at those moments, as well as on the morning of potential major victories, that he also needs his friends to remind him his identity is secure forever.

Explainer

Belief

Creed

30 March 2023

4 min read

Beyond cold certainties

The Creeds set out a vision of reality – a vision that cannot be proved to be true, but which was found to be true by a community of people.

Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath retired as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University in 2022.

A red shutter door bears a large painted message reading 'io ci credo'

'I believe it.'

Paolo Gregotti on Unsplash.

“I believe.” For many, the opening words of the Christian Creeds are self-defeating. Why read any further, when all they offer is opinions, rather than certainties? Faith is just a lower form of knowledge – a kind of hesitant half-truth, which seems out of place in today’s more sophisticated world, informed by science and philosophy rather than outdated worldviews inherited from a credulous past.

It’s a fair point. We cannot believe anything we like; there has to be reason to believe it, evidence in its support. For those wedded to a hard rationalism, we can only believe what can be proved to be true. Yet the problem is that the secure truths of logic and mathematics are existentially inadequate. We seem unable to escape the lure of “ultimate questions”, to use Karl Popper’s term for truths about meaning and value in life that frustratingly lie beyond the scope of science to confirm.

We can prove shallow truths. Yet the truths that really matter to us seem to lie beyond rational confirmation.

When it comes to the really important things in life, we are confronted with a rationalist dilemma. We can prove shallow truths. Yet the truths that really matter to us seem to lie beyond rational confirmation, often leading us into vicious argumentative circles rather than offering clear and persuasive proof. Bertrand Russell made this point in his famous defence of philosophy: “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”

Albert Einstein was fond of using mental experiments to open up some fundamental scientific questions, finding that they combined imaginative reflection with rational analysis. Here is a useful mental experiment. Suppose we limit ourselves to a mental and imaginative world in which we only accept what can be proved to be true. What sort of world would that be? It would, obviously, be a world from which Christianity was absent. Yet, perhaps less obviously, it would be a world from which all beliefs – moral, political, social and religious – are excluded. It would be a world without moral values, which remain obstinately resistant to rational or scientific verification. My suggestion is that this mental experiment indicates that this world would be existentially, morally and personally uninhabitable.

The human quest for wisdom, goodness and meaning takes us beyond the cold certainties of logic.

The opening words of the Creeds need to be seen in this context. The human quest for wisdom, goodness and meaning takes us beyond the cold certainties of logic into a world in which we believe or trust certain things to be true, life-changing and live-giving – but cannot prove them to be true. The Latin word credo – traditionally translated into English as “I believe” – is better rendered as “I trust,” invoking the world of relationships rather than mere beliefs.

The Creeds set out a vision of reality – a vision that cannot be proved to be true, but which was found to be true by a community of people, who have passed down in the Creeds their collective witness to what they discovered. As C. S. Lewis remarked, “the one really adequate instrument for learning about God is the Christian community.” This vision is affirmed to be trustworthy – not merely something that is transformative and liberating, but something that can be lived, not merely thought.

Getting the bigger picture

Faith is thus not a half-hearted hope that there might be a God. For Christians, it is a broad recognition that we live in a world in which certainty is not possible, save in closed mental domains that have little relevance to the serious business of living well and authentically. It is about “getting” what things are all about in an epiphanic moment of putting everything together and seeing a bigger picture within which we realize we belong and can flourish. There are other big pictures, of course – but all of them lie beyond proof. In choosing any of these, we are making an informed judgement that goes beyond the available evidence. We may believe (and have good reasons to believe) that it is the best big picture; yet we cannot show that it is true. What we do know, however, is that others have grasped this vision in the past, and transmitted this way of thinking and living to us.

‘Decentring’

The Creeds are thus not a demand to believe, but a description of what has been found, an affirmation of its capacity to satisfy and sustain, and an invitation to explore, discover and inhabit this new world. The Creeds provoke us into looking beyond the world of familiar banalities, and being prepared to be receptive to strange truths, which others have found to be life-changing. The vision of reality that we find articulated in the Creeds might be described as “decentring” – a term used by Iris Murdoch to describe the process of breaking free from our worrying obsession to make everything focus on us. As Plato suggested in his famous analogy of the Cave, there is a greater world that lies beyond us which, once grasped, makes us see things in a very different way. For Christians, faith is about the discernment of this vision of reality, and deciding to act as if it were true, in the firm belief that it can be trusted – and living meaningfully and authentically as a result.