At the invitation of REFORC and WCRS, American, British, and German scholars gathered in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 11–12, 2024, to discuss “Performance-based identity in the Reformation and today”. The speakers came from two different backgrounds. One group consisted of theologians, three church historians and three systematic and practical theologians; the other group consisted of non-theologians, a historian, a philosopher, a psychologist, and a sociologist.
In two brief introductory statements, Ashley Null and Benjamin Houltberg outlined what performance-based identity means and how the conference would approach the topic from historical and contemporary perspectives. The term ‘performance-based identity’ was coined by Ashley Null in the context of pastoral care for professional athletes. It describes a problem: that many professional athletes relate their self-image and their relationship with others to their athletic performance, which can have a negative impact on their athletic performance and their personal development. A look at church history shows that performance-based identity has been discussed time and again, and that alternatives are conceivable from the perspective of Christian faith that are relevant to the world of sports today.
The first section of the conference explored the topic from a historical and theological perspective. Three papers by Andreas Stegmann (WCRS), Colin Donnelly (Virginia Theological Seminary), and Ashley Null (WCRS) outlined how Martin Luther, early modern Catholicism, and the English Reformation Church understood human activity under the sign of divine grace. Georg Eckert (Freiburg University) introduced to early modern discourses on human self-optimization. He showed that the New Man was an ideal that was not pursued through self-optimization, but rather that there were clear limits to self-optimization that were only dissolved in the wake of the Enlightenment. A look at the discourses of the past, especially religious discourses, made it clear that there were pre-modern efforts to achieve identity and performance, and that today’s problematization of performance-based identity can draw on older arguments. In particular, the divine agency emphasized in the century of the Reformation, which can be reformulated – at least in part – in non-religious terms using the tools of relational ontology, proves helpful in dealing with performance-based identity today.
In October 2024, Ashley Null published an introduction to the problems of performance-based identity for a general readership (Anglican House Publishing).
Three papers discussed philosophical, psychological, and sociological aspects of performance-based identity using professional sports as an example. Sabrina Little (Christopher Newport University) argued that, from a philosophical perspective, virtue ethics is well suited to both limit and promote performance-based thinking in professional sports. Performance-based identity is philosophically problematic because it threatens the temporality of human existence and the morality of human action; the development of virtues in the practice of sport helps to avoid such dangers and to harness them for athletic success.
Benjamin Houltberg (Search Institute) explained that psychological studies have shown that performance identity is widespread in professional sports, but not without problems. The practice of psychotherapeutic counseling shows that a purpose-based identity helps to avoid the disadvantages of a performance-based identity and is beneficial for athletic success. However, as Graham Daniels (Christians in Sport) explained, sociological studies show that what seems desirable from a philosophical and psychological perspective, namely breaking the widespread pattern of performance-based identity in sport, is difficult to implement in practice. Only in recent years has there been a change in thinking, reflected in the interest of stakeholders in the issue of mental health. All three presentations on the philosophical, psychological, and sociological aspects of performance-based identity referred to the importance of religion for identity and performance.
Both sections were concluded by final discussions in which the results were examined in relation to the conference theme. The final discussion on the historical section was led by church historian Dorothea Wendebourg (Humboldt University, Berlin), while the discussion on the contemporary section was led by systematic theologian Jörg Dierken (Halle University). It became clear that the term of performance-based identity cannot easily be applied to historical constellations. However, a look back into history helps us to understand the problems of performance-based identity in the present more clearly and to think about alternatives. The Reformation was chosen as a point of reference that fundamentally problematizes human agency and offers a very different identity.
