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Scriptural Realism in Application to Television May 28, 2008

Posted by Kent Brandenburg in : Culture , 3 comments Print This Post Print This Post Email This Post Email This Post

For several weeks of summers, during my college years, I spent time in a cabin with jr. age boys.  I always had a disciplined group and rarely missed the few hours designated for sleep.  To get this accomplished, I didn’t make threats like:  “If you don’t stop making noise, I’ll jump from this bed, roll you in honey, and make you do 1000 push-ups on top of an ant hill.”  That was big talk that might work until they found out that you wouldn’t follow through with your promise.

We want to get rid of the television problem in churches, but we shouldn’t do that with big talk that we can’t back up with Scripture.   We should strive for air-tight application in the verses we use as guidelines for television viewing.  We also don’t want to set standards that we don’t enforce because we can’t due to the fact that we’re not convinced of them ourselves.  A few things will happen in a church if we do that.

1.  Lots of television will be watched; we’ll just not know about it.

2.  The people who do watch will limit talk about television to those with the least discernment in the church—those with the most discernment won’t talk about it.

3.  Kids will grow in the church seeing the standard as phony, so won’t have sustainable convictions.

4.  Wild contradictions will exist in behavior in the church relating to entertainment.

5.  We’ll be a joke to the world and deserve it.

I’ve already explained my television credentials.  You may not do better than sending your TV to the dump.  We survived just fine the centuries before television came along.   With television, networks possess a convenient pipeline to send out their moral sewage.  Advertisers will feed your lust and news outlets will manipulate your view of the world.  Even the sports is often a distraction to what’s really important.

You know all that.   Still most people will own them.  Most won’t go so far to say that merely owning one is sin.  Scripture is powerful (Hebrews 4:12Open Link in New Window).  Rightly divided and applied, the Bible will strengthen believers in their walk with the Lord.  The church will do as well as it can do when it takes the sufficient Word of God and turns it on television.

A Communication Device

Since the TV is a communication device, we can analyze it almost the same as literature.  To start, paper, ink, screens, and knobs are morally neutral.  Nothing is inherently wrong with any of it.  The images of television are what differentiate it in impact from written materials.  However, once we’re settled on that point, we need to go to Scripture for our evaluation just like we would the things we read.

Scripture adequately meets the demands for deciding acceptable television viewing.  It provides all the criteria necessary to evaluate anything successfully.  Mostly the burden of proof falls today on the television abstainer to provide

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God of the Thoughts May 20, 2008

Posted by Kent Brandenburg in : Culture , 4 comments Print This Post Print This Post Email This Post Email This Post

Does television exalt itself against your knowledge of God?  If it does, it probably does through its images.  God revealed Himself and His will through His Words.  God is a Spirit.  We can’t see Him.  Our understanding of Him comes through Scripture.  He won’t captivate our mind if we can’t allow Words to dominate our thoughts.

Our brains more easily access images.  They are mind candy.  Something close to the equivalent would be the choice between koolaid or water, a coca-cola or h2o, or a candy bar or a piece of celery.  If thinking is a road, images are downhill compared to words uphill.  We machete through words and coast through images.  We sweat through words and relax through images.  Images are the elephant in the room.  Words are the dust mite.

Everywhere we go we have the choice presented between words and pictures.  The Bible or the game.  The book or the movie.  The reading or the activity.  Images are the enemy of pondering.  We can’t meditate when the pictures have muscled their way to the front.

The more we give into the visuals, the deeper their groove becomes in our mind.  We become more comfortable with them.  It gets harder to think about what God said or a book about it.  Our mind tires on the long sentence and thick paragraph.  The golf cart’s there, so why walk the eighteen.  Just push on the gas.

We won’t submit to God, when something else dominates our brain.  The images crowd God out.  He wants to fellowship through the Words and sentences.  He wants to inform, to convict, to guide, to encourage, and to help.  He wants our attention.  Whenever He doesn’t get it, whatever it is that does is what we worship.  How much competition should we give Him?

What Television Says about Values May 16, 2008

Posted by Dave Mallinak in : Culture , 3 comments Print This Post Print This Post Email This Post Email This Post

Graduation is tonight, then I’m off for a couple of weeks that will include some R & R, some family reunion-ish activity, and some guest preaching. But I don’t want to quit on our discussion, so I’m leaving a short and sweet post for you all — enjoy!

I invited our church members to participate in a little experiment… watch one hour of television, leave it on the same channel for the entire hour, and count how many commercials there are in that one hour. I think you would be surprised at the answer. Any television-saturated person will also be a commercial-saturated person. To watch television is to watch commercials.

Of course, some of our faithful readers (thanks, Mom!) have already thought to themselves, “I don’t watch the commercials… I mute them.” Perhaps you do what my dad did when I was growing up. Of all the things on television that bothered my dad, the commercials made his skin crawl the most. So, he invented a Commercial Curtain. He had my mom cut and hem a piece of dark material that we couldn’t see through, he gray-taped it over the screen, and then put a message on it. It said, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes.” Whenever the commercials started, he would flip the Commercial Curtain over the screen.  Then, he would turn down the volume, and every once in a while peak to see if the commercials were finished.  When the regular program (which, apparantly, was not the ‘wicked thing’) returned, the Commercial

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Television: My Story part second May 14, 2008

Posted by Kent Brandenburg in : Culture , 5 comments Print This Post Print This Post Email This Post Email This Post

A man heard a hot message from his preacher against television.  He told the pastor that he had decided to put his TV in the closet for one month to honor the Lord.  About halfway through the month, his pastor asked him how it was going with the television.  He replied: “We’ve had a hard time all fitting into the closet.”

When I was a kid, my family didn’t leave on the TV like it was another household appliance.  Did you ever have one of those moments though, growing up, when someone says, “I don’t have anything to do”?  Translated:  “Can I watch TV?”  You don’t have anything to do and so you think and you think about what you can do and television’s the answer. Can television by definition count as something to do?  Isn’t it the apex of do-nothing?  Isn’t the TV in the same picture with the couch potatoe?  Isn’t television in the definition of “sedimentary”?

When we had a television, we turned it on.  I don’t imagine that there are many families that get home at night, who don’t turn it on.  People ask, “What’s on tonight?”  If the answer is, “nothing,” that doesn’t mean that they don’t watch.   First they look, but then they find the best nothing on there and sit and watch it.  Is there anything else that we say we’re glued to, besides TV?  Imagine children glued to homework.

More On Videos

Essentially, no television was available to me from the summer of 1980 for the next ten years.  I spent some time standing in the television section of department stores, admiring the new technology for covering NFL and college football.  I remember the advent of the close-up, cameras now zooming close enough to see clearly the ball manufacturer.  I recall thinking that it would be nice to watch that kind of football coverage, briefly coveting the experience.  It was during those silent years, however, that the video arrived, first Beta, then

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What Television Says about Us May 12, 2008

Posted by Dave Mallinak in : Culture , 5 comments Print This Post Print This Post Email This Post Email This Post

Shhhhhh.  Your television is talking.  Just listen.  Quiet now, everybody.  Can you hear it?  No, no, don’t turn it on yet.  Even when it is off, it still has plenty to say. 

You probably know what I mean.  It speaks to you at night, when you sit down with a plate of Oreos and a mug of milk.  It calls your name.  It begs.  It promises you a good time.  “Just pick up the remote… go ahead!  It won’t hurt anything.  Just for a little bit.  Won’t you please?” 

Of course, your television talks to you when have it turned on, too.  And I’m not just talking about the images on the screen, either.  They talk to you, of course.  But not just them.  Your television talks, too.  You listen, sometimes.  Your television reminds you that there are other options than the one you are watching.  It reminds you to check and see.  You could check the TV guide.  But why ask someone else?  Your television is right there, promising an answer.  “Go ahead, answer your curiosities.  Forget what that newspaper says, I’m the expert about myself.  I’ll tell you whether there is anything else worth watching.  Just use your remote, and explore me for a while.”  You oblige.  The TV keeps its promise.  And doesn’t. 

Your television doesn’t just talk to you.  It talks about you.  We already saw that.  It tells us about your priorities, about your life, about your relationship(s).  It has a lot to say.  More than you know.  But that is not all it says.  Your television talks to you, talks about you, and talks about us.  It not only tells your story, but it also tells our story.  The story of our culture, of the so-called “Age of Information” is projected in its glow.  Listen carefully.  Your television has something to say.

Driver or Passenger? 

First, I would point out the fact that television really does speak about us.  In a culture that talks incessantly about television, we should note this.  Television actually has more to say about us than we have to say about it (as hard as that

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Television: My Story May 7, 2008

Posted by Kent Brandenburg in : Culture , 5 comments Print This Post Print This Post Email This Post Email This Post

Hi.  My name is Kent. 

I want to tell you the true story of me and television.  The names will not be changed to protect the innocent.  I’m not innocent.  Is anyone?  We could add a chapter to James and say that he is a perfect man who can control the television.  A television can no man tame.  But I digress.

Before I really get into this story, I want to give you a few preliminaries.  First, for the last 20 out of 21 years, which is my married life, we have owned a television, but had no antennae or cable hook-up, which in California means that we don’t receive any actual television to view.  We do own a combination DVD/CD player and a VCR.  Second, I think television can be as dangerous as anything to us.   But so can guns.

The Early Shows

OK, I grew up watching television.  I watched Armstrong make his one giant leap for mankind on our black and white tube television, peering through the porch window where my brother and I slept on a very warm July late evening before my dad left for graveyard shift at the factory.  Did you notice that I remembered all that and television was a positive part of it?  Yes.  Gilligan’s Island, Hogan’s Heroes, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show, Get Smart, Gomer Pyle, Petticoat Junction, Leave It to Beaver, and The Waltons strand my cultural fiber.  I remember the talking heads of the Watergate hearing.  I first witnessed the amazing growth of homosexual political power in San Francisco on a news program on the same black and white.  I’d never go to San Francisco after witnessing that.  Ooops.  Many days

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What Your Television Says About You May 3, 2008

Posted by Dave Mallinak in : Culture , 7 comments Print This Post Print This Post Email This Post Email This Post

At the founding of our nation, if someone had told America’s forefathers that in the future, a significant part of an American’s day would be spent staring at a box in the living room, I feel fairly certain that he would have been dismissed out of hand.  Somehow, it is hard to imagine that men like Franklin, Madison, Adams, or Washington would have the ability to fathom such a cultural phenomenon.  Let alone imagine the possibility of it.

And no, I am not simply referring to the invention of miniature projectors of animated images.  Certainly, there are many inventions of the modern era (e.g., automobiles, telephones, i-pods, and tennis shoes) that would have baffled them.  I am referring, not to the invention, but to the activity of television viewing.  Considering the amount of time spent on this activity, we would have had one confounded Founding Father. 

Yet here we are, right smack-dab at the start of the Twenty-first century, where Television has replaced baseball as America’s favorite pastime.  To borrow a line from Neal Postman’s delightful little book, we twenty-first century Americans are consumed with amusing ourselves to death. 

One might say that this new pastime of ours has had an impact on our culture.  That would be irrefutable.  And yet, one gets the vague feeling that such a statement somehow gets off the train a few stops short of reality.  Television has had more than a mere impact on culture.  Television has become our

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Now This… May 2, 2008

Posted by Jack Hammer in : Children, Culture, Jack Hammer, Standards, Worldliness , 3 comments Print This Post Print This Post Email This Post Email This Post

Television, Smell-a-vision, Aitch-e-double-hockey-stick-A-Vision. 

We can’t live with it.  We can’t live without it.  Some do, but most won’t.  We need our nightly news-fix.  We love our commercials.  Quality time with the remote — Priceless.  Channel surfing is the new sport.  It is our babysitter, our nightly pacifier, our family unifier.  Touch my couch, and you are welcome.  Touch my coffee table, and you are forgiven.  Touch my piano, and you are sophisticated.  Touch my television, and you are ignorant, presumptious, meddling. 

American culture is television.  We live it.  We imitate it.  It imitates us.  It pushes us.  We push it.  We follow it.  It follows us.  We teach with it.  It teaches us.  We need it.  It needs us.  It is us. 

Should we have a television?  Should we watch television?  Why should we watch television?  How should we watch television?  What does television say about us?  What does it teach us?  How does it affect us.

May is televison month on JackHammer.  Hard to watch while your hammering, but it makes a nice sparky arch when it explodes.  Fireworks!  And we aren’t even to July yet. 

Stay tuned!