There's a Lordless Power in My House! Thinking Theologically about Television

Introduction

We watch a lot of television (TV). ¹ In fact, renowned psychologist Csikszentmihalyi once said that the only activities many of us devote more time to than watching TV are working and sleeping. ² Admittedly, this was written in 2002, in a pre-smartphone, pre-social media era. And yet, more recent statistics point in a similar direction. The 2021 American Time Use Survey reported that the typical American watches 2 h and 51 min of TV each day. ³ My own country of Australia is less but still considerable at approximately 2 h and 8 min per day. ⁴ At this rate, the average person will spend roughly 7–8 years of their life in front of the TV. And the entertainment industry is well aware of its captive audience! A ‘golden age’ of TV has begun in which a proliferation of streaming services and a surge of new shows seek to capitalise on our hunger for ever more entertainment. ⁵ This avalanche of content is not easily ignored. From billboards to buses to pop-up ads strewn throughout the internet to that go-to conversation question, ‘Have you watched [insert name of TV show] lately?’, TV is our very present companion on this earthly pilgrimage. This is, of course, quite intentional! Those who generate all this content depend on our attention for their survival and so are diligently at work to promote and encourage our viewing, an activity that can increasingly take place anywhere and at any time. ⁶ The last refuge from this onslaught is sleep, which was recently identified by Netflix both as a competitor ⁷ and as its greatest enemy. ⁸

TV's inescapable presence raises the question as to where it fits within the life of Christian discipleship. A good first step towards answering this question—which is as much as this article ventures—is to consider the theological significance of our TV watching practices. ⁹ How might we describe our interaction with TV theologically, that is, ‘reflect[ing] on it before God within the church in light of the Gospel?’ ¹⁰ Admittedly, this is a task that others have undertaken before with varying results. Given the nature of TV as the most powerful and pervasive storytelling medium in our culture, some scholars have offered accounts of television as a vehicle of prophetic talk, observing that these stories have the potential to ‘draw our attention to things in society that stand in the way of justice, peace, and freedom and help us to imagine an alternative, better picture of social reality’. ¹¹ Along similar lines but more boldly, others see TV as a site of divine encounter, ‘a potential location for the Spirit of God to speak in and through these contemporary forms of life’. ¹² These more daring accounts lean heavily on theological categories such as general revelation, ¹³ pneumatology, ¹⁴ our creative potential as those made in the image of God, ¹⁵ even sacramental theology. ¹⁶ If care needs to be taken in formulating dogmatic accounts of divine activity, especially as it operates economically in relation to aspects of creaturely existence such as TV, the broad point that God may speak thus is sound enough—even Karl Barth, so insistent that revelation is inextricable from Christ, was aware that ‘God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog. We do well to listen to him if he really does.’ ¹⁷

Nevertheless, such attempts to understand TV theologically strike one as insufficient for the simple fact that they do not adequately capture how TV typically functions in people's lives. Generally speaking, people—and Christians do not seem to be much of an exception here ¹⁸ —do not use TV as an opportunity to seek God but watch ‘out of boredom’, ¹⁹ for ‘the fun of being grabbed in the gut by a story’, ²⁰ because TV ‘is just plain pleasurable’, ²¹ in a word, for entertainment. This, of course, is very fitting; the ‘beautiful spectacle’ and ‘visual delight’ that is TV ostensibly suggests that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. ²² As such, theological explorations that grapple with this dimension of TV within the broad framework of everyday discipleship appear more in step with what we use TV for, namely, as an entertaining daily pastime.

While such a framework might naturally lead to critical evaluations of the content of TV, ²³ another profitable approach is to examine where TV watching per se fits in the Christian life by analysing this practice within the context of ethical reflection on leisure or recreation (or rest). Conor M. Kelly provides just such an account of TV in his recent exploration of leisure and recreation in the moral life. ²⁴ Drawing on the doctrine of creation to construe recreation as an instrumental good that acknowledges human finitude by allowing time and space for the rejuvenation of body and soul, ²⁵ Kelly explores TV as our culture's dominant form of recreation. The analysis is admirably balanced, recognising the potential advantages of TV watching, ²⁶ while also being very aware of the need to reform our TV-watching practices if TV is truly to promote the restoration of creaturely beings in a way that aligns with other precepts of the gospel, predominantly the centrality of relational flourishing.

If accounts such as this are more attuned to what we actually do with TV, there is more to be said theologically as to why such a broken form of recreation has such a stranglehold on our free time. This article will explore this issue by pursuing a description of TV within the theological context of the lordless powers, specifically, as the base of operation for a lordless power. While that claim may sound rather dramatic and overblown, it is not actually new. Others have sensed that the pervasive presence of TV in our lives (as evidenced in the statistics above) suggests a force ‘in constant rebellion against its properly subordinate role’ rather than a neutral tool over which we can dispose at will. ²⁷ However, these accounts tend to skim over the theological bedrock required to make such a claim, leaving only a vague sense of how TV is operative and experienced as one of the principalities and powers of this world (Eph 6:12). The challenge of this article is to provide a thicker account of the lordless activity at work in the everyday activity of watching TV, a task pursued in three steps. First, we will investigate Karl Barth's account of the nature and activity of the lordless powers as found in his posthumously published lecture fragments, The Christian Life. ²⁸ Barth's “character profile” of these tyrannical forces offers a robust theological framework for understanding what it means to claim that some part of this world has been co-opted by a lordless power. Second, we will turn to philosopher Albert Borgmann whose critique of technology illuminates how TV manifests the defining features of this character profile. Taken together, if Barth offers us a vision of what a lordless power is, Borgmann's analysis suggests how TV is bound up with such forces. These two explorations are then drawn to a conclusion by offering two short reflections on the account sketched here.

Before we begin, a word on definition is in order. Attentive readers may very well be wondering, what are we referring to when we speak about TV? What used to be a fairly straightforward category—whatever was viewed on that box in the corner—is now much less homogenous. Is YouTube TV? What about a news clip that a friend posted on Facebook and I watched on my phone? What about a live stream of my local church service? While such questions are important, exploring these intricacies would take us too far afield of our stated goal. It is sufficient for the purposes of this article to note that here TV is used in the more colloquial sense to refer to our watching of content that has been, historically, consumed by means of a television set although may now be available via a range of screened devices, with the quintessential form of such content being the TV show. If this definition seems vague, it is intentionally so. The hope is that such a broad definition will provide space both for the following critique to be unburdened by qualifications, given the complexity of individual cases, and for readers to discern whether the following analysis applies to their own screen time.

Barth and the Lordless Powers

Broadly speaking, The Christian Life traverses the first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer (‘Our Father’, ‘Hallowed be your name’, and ‘Thy kingdom come’), unfolding both how these pleas offer insight into the encounter between God and his covenant partners and how this vision guides responsible human participation in this history. Barth's discussion of the lordless powers occurs in his consideration of the third petition, ‘Thy kingdom come’. Distancing himself from a substantial tradition in which this request was thought to be answered in the renewed lives of Christians, Barth reinvigorates the eschatological vibrancy of this prayer: to cry out for God's kingdom is to look to the kingdom that comes solely from above. This is so because the kingdom is ‘the universal and definitive revelation of the righteousness of God which judges and establishes humanity … It is thus God himself in the victorious act of overcoming the disorder which still rules humanity. Christians have the freedom to pray that God's kingdom, God himself in this act, will appear and come—will come to us, from heaven to earth.’ ²⁹ The disorder that is overcome by this liberating divine action is the corruption and brokenness of humanity in its foolish attempt to live against God's intended order of life and fellowship and peace. As much as this is our guilt, it is also our plight, the ‘fall of people from God which as such ineluctably carries with it their fall from one another, the changing of their being with one another, which corresponds to their being with God, into a general being without and against one another … Man can only become a wolf in relationship to man.’ ³⁰

There is, however, another element to this predicament, the lordless powers. A helpful way to enter Barth's thought here is to attend to his appreciative passing reference to Goethe's poem, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which captures ‘with such frightening profundity’ the life of these lordless powers. ³¹ Goethe's poem tells of a lazy apprentice who seizes the opportunity of his master's absence to lighten his burdensome chores by summoning spirits to enchant a broom.

And now come, you aged sweeper,

Take this poor and raggedly coat;

You have long been a housekeeper;

Now all of my wishes promote!

On two legs, stand up spry,

Screw a head on top,

Rush swiftly now and fly,

With the water pot! ³²

Barth sees our alienation from God functioning in a similar way to the apprentice's wayward experiment. Discontented with remaining as God's beloved partners, humanity rejects God, seeking to escape from his lordship in a bid to seize control. However, something else happens in this arrogant flight from God's gracious rule. Just like the broom, our capacities and abilities, distorted from being implemented against God's good order, take on an existence which escapes from our control: ‘His capacities when he uses them … become spirits with a life and activity of their own, lordless indwelling forces.’ ³⁴ Indeed, Barth insists that humanity's rebellion against God has unleashed another rebellion, ‘that of human abilities, exalting themselves, as lordless forces, against man himself’. ³⁵ This connection between our abilities and their evolution into lordless powers can be seen where our capacity for abstract reflection distorts into ideologies, our ability to coordinate and order community is perverted into the demonism of politics, and our dependence on resources for life and livelihood warps into an obsession with acquiring as an end in itself. In all cases, the transformation is generated as our wilful disobedience breathes into life ‘entities with their own right and dignity … [who] act at their own pleasure … [with] some kind of existence and dominion of their own’. ³⁶

And these forces enslave us. Irrespective of the fact that these powers originate in the creaturely nature declared good by God, the dominant relationship between humans and the lordless powers is one of dominion, subjugation. So, quite in contrast to maintaining mastery over them, Barth envisions these powers as exercising immense control over us, not simply as they colour and frame the world in which we live but as they actually shape and rule this world. In other words, they not only influence and control our thought and speech but are ‘the hidden wirepullers in man's great and small enterprises, movements, achievements, and revolutions’. ³⁷ They are ‘agents of human progress, regress, and stagnation in politics, economics, scholarship, technology, and art, and also of the evolutions and retardations in all the personal life of the individual’. ³⁸ And all this to such an extent that it is ‘not really people who do things, whether leaders or the masses’; rather, ‘things are invisibly done without and above man … by the hosts of absolutisms, of powers that seek to be lordless’. ³⁹ The picture Barth sets before us, then, is one of powerful actors who operate—not rightfully but nevertheless compellingly—as ruling forces in our world, restricting and dictating the boundaries of our vision and imaginations, advancing world history according to their own design, and enslaving us, whether we realise it or not, to their destructive ends.

Germane for our purpose is a group of forces Barth designates as the chthonic powers. These are powers that emerge from humanity's effort to make something of the world in obedience to the divine command to explore and discover creation's possibilities and pursue them so that the creation may flourish. However, in contrast to flourishing, the outcome of this venture is that humanity, acting in its fallen and corrupt state, ‘revolutionise[s] the natural forces that are coordinated with him and subordinated to him, first those that slumber and then awaken in himself, then the spirits of the earth that are first concealed in the surrounding cosmos but are then discovered and unleashed by his keen-sightedness and skill’. ⁴⁰ Barth points, for example, to how our ability to move through space when coupled with technological progress in transportation has been overtaken by the powerful instinct to hurry as quickly as possible through the world irrespective of what is missed or what damage is caused. Most important for our analysis of TV, the enslavement of these chthonic powers now unleashed upon the world is especially characterised by the disjunction between what they promise and what they deliver:

In satisfying his earlier wants, they fill and excite him with new ones … In simplifying and easing his life, they also complicate it and make it more difficult. They take away his little anxieties but create new and bigger ones. They seem to promise him courage and greater zest for life, but increased worry about life is the fulfilment of their promise … [They] rob him of his freedom under the pretext and appearance of granting every kind of freedom. ⁴¹

TV actually (albeit briefly) appears in Barth's consideration of the chthonic power Pleasure. When humanity's ingenuity in uncovering and developing means to enhance enjoyment and delight is thwarted by humanity's corruption, Pleasure is breathed into life and derails this whole pursuit. Barth envisions this power operating in the fleeting and unsatisfying nature of whatever form of entertainment we gravitate towards. In contrast, then, to true enjoyment, a joy only possible as we stand under the lordship of the one true Lord, our desperate attempt to escape from this kindly rule frustrates our capacity to be joyous because it calls forth ‘a special kind of earth-spirit’ ⁴² which, ‘instead of providing him with entertainment … can only pervert all his entertainment at the very root’, ⁴³ twisting our ability to find true enjoyment into an unquenchable thirst and desire for ‘increasingly refined and massive means of providing pleasure’. ⁴⁴ Barth hints in passing that TV—alongside jazz, cinema, reading, alcohol, and sex ⁴⁵ —may be a means by or base of operation from which Pleasure subjects and enslaves. The implication, then, is that the empty promises of life and joy, the increase in worry and anxiety, and the illusion of freedom, all characteristic of chthonic powers, are what Pleasure inflicts on us from the TV set in our living room.

Isn’t this a little much? Is Barth right to see TV functioning as this military outpost? It is obviously a piece of technology designed and developed in humanity's endeavour to unearth the potential latent in God's good world that aims at increasing our enjoyment in life. But is it really complicit in the rule of Pleasure that robs us of true enjoyment and entraps us in an endless cycle of hunger for more? More technically, does Barth's character profile of a lordless power really capture the spirit of TV and so justify us in judging TV as something co-opted by one of these tyrannical forces? Borgmann leaves us no doubt that it does, and his analysis of TV demonstrates as much by clarifying just how TV functions as a piece of reality that promises joy but delivers much less. To this we now turn.

Borgmann and the Rule of Technology

Borgmann's reflections on TV emerge from his critique of technology in general and so it will be helpful to explore this broader critical vision before turning to his more specific comments on TV. This more extensive critique centres on Borgmann's description of a technological device, which is the materialisation of technology's promise to liberate us from disease, hunger, and toil, and enrich our lives with learning and leisure. A technological device fulfils this promise by making goods available: ‘Goods that are available to us enrich our lives and, if they are technologically available, they do so without imposing burdens on us. Something is available in this sense if it has been rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.’ ⁴⁶ Take warmth, for example. Once warmth was not available in this sense. In pre-technological times, to access warmth required a series of labour-intensive actions. One must find and fell a tree, and chop, shift, stack, and dry the wood. Moreover, the building and maintenance of a fire required significant effort and regular attention. A technological device, in contrast, removes the burdensome toil involved in this process by outsourcing this effort to machinery that delivers for our enjoyment the good we desire. So, a central heating system is a technological device because it ‘procures mere warmth and disburdens us of all other elements … [which] are taken over by the machinery of the device’. ⁴⁷ These, then, are the two components of a technological device: the machinery, which increasingly recedes into concealment so that we are relieved not only of toil but also freed from anything that might obtrude between us and the commodity (the second component), which is what Borgmann terms whatever the device is there to provide. This pattern of disburdenment by machinery that makes a commodity available is the heart of Borgmann's description of technology, and it permeates our modern world: the machinery of a telephone procures communication, a car provides transportation, frozen food delivers a meal, and a stereo set supplies music. ⁴⁸

Borgmann contrasts technological devices with focal things. A focal thing is a feature of reality that is ‘eloquent’ ⁴⁹ and ‘addresses us in its own right’. ⁵⁰ This ‘commanding presence’ ⁵¹ orients and centres us in time and space, inviting us to ‘arrange all other things around this centre in an orderly way because you know what's important and what's not’. ⁵² Furthermore, a focal thing is inseparable from its context so that ‘the experience of a thing is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing's world’. ⁵³ Put differently, to encounter a focal thing is to know oneself claimed, that is, called to respond in a way that fittingly corresponds to the richness and depth of the thing itself. Borgman terms such a response ‘engagement’, for what is required of us is the active participation of our minds and bodies, exertions that take concrete form in ‘the acquisition of skills, the fidelity to a daily discipline, the broadening of sensibility, the profound interaction of human beings, and the preservation and development of a tradition’. ⁵⁴ Given this dynamic of generous invitation and commanding summons from outside ourselves, Borgmann invokes the language of grace to describe focal things: these are things that ‘used to and still can engage and grace us in their own right’. ⁵⁵ Such language is oddly fitting because a focal thing is ‘unprocurable and finally beyond our control’. ⁵⁶ What it offers cannot be commandeered—above all, it cannot be secured technologically!—but only received as a gift as we respond to this grace with an enduring commitment of engagement in which the fullness of our powers and abilities are called forth and determined by the presence of the thing itself.

To return to the example of warmth, Borgmann directs our attention to a hearth as a place around which the family gathered for work and leisure and where tasks were assigned for the mutual effort of sustaining the warmth—the mother tilled the fire, the children helped collect wood, and the father chopped. A hearth is a focal thing because ‘it provided for the family a regular and bodily engagement with the rhythm of the seasons that was woven together of the threat of the cold and the solace of the warmth, the smell of wood smoke, the exertion of sawing and of carrying, the teaching of skills, and the fidelity to daily tasks’. ⁵⁷ In contrast to a hearth, a central heating as a technological device takes one aspect of this—warmth—and makes it instantaneously and easily available to us (i.e., a commodity), concealing the actual process of providing heat behind a complex machinery that makes no demands on our skill, strength, or attention; that is, the commodity is ‘enjoyed without the encumbrance of or the engagement with a context’. ⁵⁸

For Borgmann, this pattern of exchange that defines modern technology is deeply concerning. ⁵⁹ The issue is that when we outsource such toilsome burdens to technology, trading in our labour and time for an available commodity, we are disburdened in such a way that our ‘commerce with reality’, ⁶⁰ ‘the way we take up with the world’, is radically altered. Instead of an engagement with the world that has a richness and depth, ‘in the modern universe of abundance and availability our contact with the world is reduced to effortless and inconsequential consumption’. ⁶¹ Put differently, technological devices in the modern world provide ubiquitous commodities, which are, essentially, ‘narrowly defined aspects of what used to be things of depth’. ⁶² It follows that, because these goods are shorn of their context and so unable to encounter us as something that might make a demand on us or require a commitment from us, when we confront them, the intuitive and required posture we assume is that of consumption. We devour isolated entities without engagement with or even awareness of their context and depth nor with any obligation of preparation, commitment, skilfulness, or tradition that such awareness would entail. ⁶³ The end result of technological progress, then, is one of severe loss. Rather than being ‘animated by the full-bodied exercise of skill, gained through discipline and renewed through intimate commerce with the world … our contact with reality has been attenuated to the pushing of buttons and the turning of handles’. ⁶⁴ This promising but ultimately degrading exchange is the irony of technology: ‘liberation by way of disburdenment leads to disengagement, enrichment by way of diversion is overtaken by distraction, and conquest makes way first to domination and then to loneliness’. ⁶⁵

And TV? According to Borgmann, TV ‘remains the purest, i.e., the clearest and most attenuated, presentation of the promise of technology’. ⁶⁶ This is because it epitomises the combination of hidden machinery—not only the technical construction of the TV but the vast industry that works tirelessly to produce content—and commodities that we can consume with little to no requirement that we do anything other than regularly sit and watch. The commodity that is procured in the case of television is the endless information and entertainment instantaneously, easily, and comfortably available, which frees us from the restraints of time and place and ignorance and delivers to us the riches of the world in all their glamorous beauty. ⁶⁷ The question Borgmann's analysis of technology raises is, of course, what has been exchanged in this apparent liberation and enrichment of our lives? Borgmann doesn’t struggle to find an answer: ‘Television to some extent takes the place of stories, pictures, ballads, gossip—other ways of informing ourselves about the world … Telling stories, reading, going to the theatre, socialising with friends, just taking a walk to see what's up in the neighbourhood.’ ⁶⁸ Borgmann's goal with these examples is to highlight how TV has changed our commerce with reality by encouraging us to trade practices and forms of life that would require of us skill, commitment, and engagement for a path of effortless and inconsequential consumption that places minimal demands on us. What is especially noteworthy from these examples is how the disburdenment from the toil associated with other forms of entertainment that TV replaces frequently liberates us from the demands of human connection, effectively replacing our engagement with others—spaces that require not only our time and presence but also troublesome things like vulnerability, patience, and skill at listening—with a safe and easy one-sided relationship with the characters and stories of the TV world. In being disburdened, for example, ‘of preparing a meal and getting everyone to show up at the table and sit down’, or, ‘of reading poetry to one another or going for a walk after dinner’, ⁶⁹ we are not only forfeiting engagement with a focal thing—the great meal, poetry, the neighbourhood—we are also forfeiting connection with the focal thing par excellence, the other who is sitting right beside me on the couch. ⁷⁰

Why would we make such an exchange? While Borgmann doesn’t envision TV's presence in our lives as an irresistible fate, he is also aware that TV is not a neutral tool that we freely master and control. Rather, the structure of our lives in advanced industrial countries, in which we are trained to take up with the world as consumers of technologically procured commodities, creates an environment in which we are strongly oriented and disposed to watch TV.

Why do [so many] families or households watch television…? Is it because they decided that that's the best way to spend their time? No, something else must be going on. And what's going on is that the culture around us—including work that is draining, food that's easily available, and television shows made as attractive as some of the best minds in our country can make them—encourages us to plop down in front of the TV and spend two hours there. ⁷¹

If Barth's reflections provided a theological character profile of a lordless power, the key feature of which is the promise of pleasure and enjoyment even as we are actually robbed of these things in their true fullness, what Borgmann's analysis adds is a specification of how TV functions as a base of operation where this deceptive exchange takes place: as a technological device TV procures for us boundless entertainment but at the cost of cheapening our commerce with reality, disburdening us of the joy and pleasure that can only be experienced as we engage with the world in all its richness and depth. In doing so, Borgmann helps us to see how TV, something that obviously originates from the abilities and capacities of human beings, is no longer a neutral tool subordinate to human control. Entangled with the rule of technology—that ‘characteristic and constraining pattern to the entire fabric of our lives’ ⁷³ —it is bound up with a rebellion against its supposed masters, becoming complicit in our enslavement and diminishment. We have cause to be deeply concerned, then, that TV has been overtaken by Pleasure—a pervasive and almost irresistible force that promises life and yet delivers something far less, that so convincingly offers enrichment but extracts the cost of engagement, that is so ubiquitously and excitingly available that it dominates our options for leisure (all the more enticing because it demands nothing from us and is designed to captivate and delight) even as it makes other options that would lead to a truly fulfilling life seem increasingly like unnecessary burdens.

Parabolic Free Time

Of course, such a critique assumes that it really is detrimental to the life of discipleship when one exchanges a deep engagement with reality for surface-level entertainment. Is this really the case? More pointedly, is what Borgmann speaks of as engagement really more fitting for the Christian disciple than a life that lacks engagement? Without that assumption in place, the account presented above would struggle to maintain that disciples are confronted with any malevolence or degradation in our decision to watch TV; indeed, might there not be some space in following Jesus for entertainment that requires nothing of us, even if this renders our contact with the world rather tenuous? If so, it might even be possible for TV to be portrayed very positively, perhaps along the lines of a provider of refuge and escape in an exhausting world. But such a conclusion would miss that it is entirely appropriate to see a correspondence between enriching engagements with focal things and faithfulness to Jesus Christ, so that the trade offered by TV is fittingly described with reference to the sinister power Pleasure. ⁷⁴ In fact, consideration of a life of engagement with the world as a form of faithful action provides a compelling way to assess the extent to which free-time activities (in this case, watching TV) are consistent with obedience to the gospel.

We can see why Borgmann's life of engagement is a fitting aspiration for the Christian disciple if we attend to the language of grace that Borgmann uses for our interactions with those things that require something of us. To repeat, this grace is the gift of employing the fullness of our powers and abilities that a technologically unprocurable part of reality offers to us. While Borgmann does not elaborate on these passing references to grace, they suggest an alignment between engagement and obedience that can be illuminated through a consideration of Christian action as essentially parabolic in nature. The intent of this description is to call attention to the form of Christian action, in this time between the times, as creaturely activity, agitated by God's own redemptive action, that anticipates and attests the eschatological lordship of Christ here and now. These human actions that give testimony to the new day dawning are parabolic because they are structured like the parables of Jesus. In the same way as parables, in which ‘the all-too-human, secular, and everyday become the site of surprising and disruptive attestation of the ever-new truth of the Gospel of God’, so too in parabolic action ‘all-too-human ways of being in the world … nevertheless as fruit of the Spirit manage to “tell forth” about the “liberating lordship of Christ” and indicate something of the reality of the inauguration overthrow of the anti-God powers that is afoot with the advent of redemption’. ⁷⁵ Christian moral action is understood as parabolic, then, because it enacts ‘the inspired performance of a kind of “prudent unlawfulness” amidst the creaking schemes of the present age, a parabolic attestation of the new creation in, with, and under—but also no doubt subversively contra—the old’. ⁷⁶

Within this framework, Borgmann's passing recognition of engagement with the world as moments in which grace is given and received can be interpreted as an indication that such activities bear a parabolic character; that is, these ways of engaging the world function as creaturely parables, attesting the kingdom of God in its glory and splendour amidst the dying life of the present age. They do so because what is at stake in such actions (in contrast to a life of consuming technologically procured commodities) is a life that is open to the pattern of grace and gratitude birthed by an encounter with focal things. ⁷⁷ This life—characterised by the interplay of grace given as thing in its own right encounters us and a thankful response that takes form in our time, commitment, patience, and ongoing engagement—is more fitting for a disciple of Jesus because this movement of give-and-receive bestows on human existence a parabolic shape, that is, one that better corresponds to the economy that sits at the very heart of all reality, the one great gift of grace God has given in Jesus Christ of which we can only be the grateful recipients.

To expand, God has reconciled our entire lives to himself in Jesus Christ, ‘binding himself up with us in the same bundle of existence and being and life’ ⁷⁸ so that what we truly are as faithful and beloved children of God is found hidden outside ourselves in Christ (Col 3:3). As receivers of such marvellous grace, we know that our entire lives here and now have only one path: to conform to the reality found in Christ. What Borgmann has identified as the way we ‘traffic with reality’ is also a realm of our existence destined for this conformity. It seems reasonable to suggest that the way we take up with the world attains a greater congruity to the new life we have been given in Christ when it sheds its tendency to consumption and acquires a pattern that parabolically approximates the great gift of grace given to us and received with grateful hearts. And one of the ways such a parabolic pattern takes on concrete form in our life is as we intentionally expose ourselves to events of grace and gratitude, regular moments where we are able to receive gracious gifts given through encounters with pieces of God's good creation and respond with focused engagement as a form of thanks. Precisely because they bear this character, these events, even in all their littleness, bestow on our lives a shape that resembles the gift which can only be given to us and we can only receive, the great new thing of the kingdom of God. ⁷⁹ As illuminated by this eschatological gift, the perhaps faint and weak pattern of grace given and received with gratitude that takes place now in relation to the focal things that encounter us acquires the mighty form of witness as it reflects the light that shines from that coming day, attesting to ourselves and those around us that there is cause to hope, that there is a promise of undiminished life—life in its fullness—that has been made and is speedily being kept. Using a parabolic account of Christian obedience to interpret Borgmann's suggestive statements about grace indicates quite clearly, then, that a life of engagement is not immaterial to the life of a disciple; rather, it is a supremely fitting way for the disciple to pursue conformity to Christ.

The Risk of TV

Having come this far, the reader may very well be wondering if there is no such thing as good TV? Is all TV so inimical to that engagement with reality Borgmann so prizes, so irredeemably under the control of a lordless power? Or does the engagement of a TV critic who insightfully analyses story arcs, character developments, cinematography, and so forth, immediately undermine such a claim, as does the possibility that TV can ‘communicate alternative framing stories that question the truth of what is asserted’ ⁸⁰ by our culture's dominant consciousness or even provide occasion for ‘people to encounter the divine Spirit in their everyday lives?’ ⁸¹

While the foregoing critique may seem to inexorably lead to the conclusion that good TV is an oxymoron, the intent was not to deny that there is wonderfully creative and innovative television that exhibits compelling storytelling and lucid insights into ourselves and the world, indeed, TV that just might help us to hear God's Word that bit better. There is even the possibility that TV may serve a life of engagement. While Borgmann would be hesitant in naming TV itself as a focal thing, he nevertheless recognises more broadly that technology can aid us in our pursuit of focal things. ‘Technology provides us with the leisure, the space, the books, the instruments, the equipment, and the instruction that allow us to become equal to some great thing that has beckoned us from afar or that has come to us through a tradition.’ ⁸² If we applied such a sentiment to TV, we could easily identify instances where TV might facilitate engagement. The TV show Glee, for example, has created a community of “Gleeks” who share together as they journey through the show. Watching a cooking show can enhance one's preparation of the Great Meal by offering a learning resource for recipes and techniques (i.e., traditions). And TV show connoisseurs can meticulously analyse the lighting, costumes, music, and other elements of TV shows in light of storytelling conventions and cinematic theories. Indeed, ‘for one who practices a sport or plays an instrument, it is an inspiring and gratefully accepted experience to see the best perform on television’. ⁸³ The burden of this critique is not to contest that TV may enable engagement in these ways.

Rather, the intent of this theological description of our TV watching is to call attention to the fact that alongside the ubiquitous examples of TV content that cheapens our lives, there is a great risk that even the very best TV has to offer will still fail to engage us. Put differently, locating TV under the dominion of a lordless power that is determined to diminish us makes clear that there is no automatic necessity that the potentially more profound engagements mentioned above will be realised. In fact, there is an extremely high probability that they will not happen, especially when one considers the devious forces Pleasure has arrayed against us, above all, the fact that these richer engagements with TV must be conducted against the grain of the medium and so require a level of intentionality, focus, and time that TV does not promote.

This observation is of some moment. The frustration of engagement that results from the misalignment of such a goal with the form of TV is not simply an unfortunate yet easily avoided possibility; it is close to the heart of the very nature of the medium, as Neil Postman reminded us all those years ago. Postman saw that TV construes reality in a certain way which, in turn, ‘imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas’. ⁸⁴ More specifically, because on TV ‘all subject matter is presented as entertaining’, ⁸⁵ because ‘entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television’, ⁸⁶ the innate way of life it encourages is not one of deep engagement with the content beamed into our lives but one that uses TV in accordance with the way it presents itself, that is, as something that is simply ‘there for our amusement and pleasure’. ⁸⁷ So, while TV may be employed as an aid to engagement—as evidenced in the examples above—there does not seem to be any necessity to it being used thus. Indeed, the very medium of TV on which everything ‘is presented, quite simply and without apology, as entertainment’, ⁸⁸ has a very different agenda that, in fact, impedes such use, one typified in the autoplay feature on many streaming services which permits no space for contemplation or application but encourages us to immediately to watch another episode…and then another…and then another. Put succinctly, one can quite easily watch Glee without becoming a Gleek, cooking programs without ever entering a kitchen, and the most technically and artistically sophisticated show while looking at their phone.

The contribution of the foregoing critique, then, is to help us see, in a theological key, the sinister power at work in TV so that if we are still bold and curious enough to interact with TV, such interactions should be understood as incursions into enemy territory and so to be undertaken with more strategy and resolve than might be assumed necessary. Such caution is wise as the lordless power Pleasure ensures the ever-present danger that watching TV—even good TV—is accompanied by the considerable likelihood of being deceived into exchanging a life patterned after the giving of grace and thanks for a shallow existence illuminated by a flickering screen.