Competing Spectacles E-Book

Tony Reinke

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 181

Beschreibung

We live in a world full of shiny distractions, faced with an onslaught of viral media constantly competing for our attention and demanding our affections. These ever-present visual "spectacles" can quickly erode our hearts, making it more difficult than ever to walk through life actively treasuring that which is most important and yet invisible: Jesus Christ. In a journalistic style, Tony Reinke shows us just how distracting these spectacles in our lives have become and calls us to ask critical questions about what we're focusing on. The book offers us practical steps to redirect our gaze away from the addictive eye candy of the world and onto the Ultimate Spectacle—leading to the joy and rest our souls crave.

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“Thirty years after Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Tony Reinke’s Competing Spectacles takes the impact-analysis of modern media to new levels. The conception of this book is not cavalier; it is rooted in the profound biblical strategy of sanctification by seeing (2 Cor. 3:18). The spectacle of Christ’s glory is ‘the central power plant of Christian sanctification.’ Ugly spectacles make us ugly. Beautiful spectacles make us beautiful. Reinke is a good guide in how to deflect the damaging effects of digital images ‘in anticipation of a greater Sight.’”

John Piper, Founder and Teacher, desiringGod.org; Chancellor, Bethlehem College & Seminary; author, Desiring God

“This book shows us how to pull our eyes away from the latest viral video or our digital avatars of self and toward the ‘spectacle’ before which we often cringe and wince: the crucifixion of our Lord. That’s the spectacle we need.”

Russell D. Moore, President, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention

“Competing Spectacles not only diagnoses our distorted vision; it prescribes spectacles that give us twenty-twenty spiritual vision. Essential reading.”

Sinclair B. Ferguson, Chancellor’s Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary; Teaching Fellow, Ligonier Ministries

“As a millennial who desires to abide in Christ while simultaneously engaging culture, I found this book incredibly helpful. The world seeks to captivate our attention through an endless stream of distractions, but Reinke encourages us to revive our hearts to the spectacle of Christ. I walked away encouraged to gaze upon the glory of the gospel, knowing it will reverberate through me and empower me to walk in Christlikeness.”

Hunter Beless, Host, Journeywomen podcast

“Leaning on Scripture as the lens through which we view this digital age, Tony Reinke communicates in brilliantly lucid prose a proposal for how we can glorify our unseen Savior in this world full of sensory diversions.”

Bruce Riley Ashford, Professor of Theology and Culture, Dean of Faculty, and Provost, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

“If this book helps readers to digitally detox and to unplug from all sources of media that threaten to drown us in noise and to rob us of the capacity to attend to the things that truly enable us to flourish as human beings, then it will only have begun to do its good work.”

W. David O. Taylor, Assistant Professor of Theology and Culture, Fuller Theological Seminary

“How to navigate the Christian life in a media-saturated culture feels more confusing than ever. Tony Reinke provides a dose of desperately needed clarity.”

Jaquelle Crowe, author, This Changes Everything: How the Gospel Transforms the Teen Years

“Tony Reinke issues a grace-filled and prophetic call to examine ourselves as we navigate through a world of endless entertainment, spectacle, and distraction.”

Trevin Wax, Director for Bibles and Reference, LifeWay Christian Resources; author, This Is Our Time; Eschatological Discipleship; and Gospel-Centered Teaching

“Competing Spectacles can guide us back to reality, honesty, and calm, as we lift our eyes humbly to the Crucified One and pray, ‘Please show me your glory.’”

Ray Ortlund, Lead Pastor, Immanuel Church, Nashville, Tennessee

“Tony Reinke offers a succinct exposé of the threat that our image-saturated society poses to faith and to wisdom. We’ll do well to heed his message.”

Craig M. Gay, Professor, Regent College; author, Modern Technology and the Human Future and The Way of the (Modern) World

Competing Spectacles

Other Crossway books by Tony Reinke

12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You (2017)

Lit: A Christian Guide to Reading Books (2011)

Newton on the Christian Life: To Live Is Christ (2015)

Competing Spectacles

Treasuring Christ in the Media Age

Tony Reinke

Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in the Media Age

Copyright © 2019 by Tony Scott Reinke

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Micah Lanier

First printing 2019

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-6379-9 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6382-9 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6380-5 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6381-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reinke, Tony, 1977- author.

Title: Competing spectacles : treasuring Christ in the media age / Tony Reinke.

Description: Wheaton : Crossway, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018040212 (print) | LCCN 2018056092 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433563805 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433563812 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433563829 (epub) | ISBN 9781433563799 (tp)

Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and culture.

Classification: LCC BR115.C8 (ebook) | LCC BR115.C8 R43 2019 (print) | DDC

261.5/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040212

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2019-03-05 04:21:09 PM

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

—Colossians 3:1

Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied,

and never satisfied are the eyes of man.

—Proverbs 27:20

O that I might see the joy that I desire.

—Anselm

Contents

Part 1: The Age of the Spectacle

§1: Life inside the Digital Environment

§2: Spectacles Defined

§3: Distracted Spectacle Seekers

§4: Image Is Everything

§5: The Spectacle of the Self in Social Media

§6: The Spectacle of the Self in Gaming

§7: Spectacles of Tele-Vision

§8: Spectacles of Merchandise

§9: Politics as Spectacle

§10: Terror as Spectacle

§11: Ancient Spectacles

§12: Every Nine Seconds

§13: The Spectacle of the Body

§14: The Church in the Attention Market

Part 2: The Spectacle

§15: Spectakils in Tension

§16: Prynne’s Footnote

§17: The World’s Greatest Spectacle

§18: Is the Cross a Spectacle?

§19: Two Competing Theaters

§20: Spectators of Glory

§21: The Church as Spectacle

§22: The Church as Spectacle Maker?

§23: A Day inside the Spectacle

§24: Our Unique Spectacle Tensions

§25: One Resolve, One Request

§26: The Spectator before His Carving

§27: A Movie So Good It Will Ruin You—Would You Watch It?

§28: Resistible Spectacles

§29: Summations and Applications

§30: My Supreme Concern

§31: A Beauty That Beautifies

§32: The Visio Beatifica

§33: Dis-Illusioned but Not Deprived

Part 1

The Age of the Spectacle

§1: Life inside the Digital Environment

Never in history have manufactured images formed the ecosystem of our lives. They do now. Sixty years ago Daniel Boorstin warned us: “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very home in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.”1 Sixty years later, this risk is now our reality. We live as if all the media broadcast into our eyes is life itself, as if our images now offer us an alternative existence.

To this cultural phenomenon I raise my objection.

In a consumer society, images are the language of transaction. Images aim to provoke something in us in order to get something from us. New images ask us for all sorts of things—our time, our attention, our outrage, our money, our lust, our affection, and our votes. Is it possible to resist them? Should we try?

This book is a theology of visual culture, a culture that is increasingly closing in around us. It will not help you prioritize your TV options. Online viewing guides will help you there. It will not help you watch pop films through a gospel lens. Several good books do this already. Nor will it help you untangle the narrative threads of a thoughtful film. Long conversations with friends are superior. More intentionally, this book is a companion for Christians walking through digital detoxes, the now necessary periods of our lives when we voluntarily unplug from pop media, news media, and social media in order to de-screen our eyes and to reorder our priorities.

As a convention, I must litter this book with two hundred footnotes.2 On first read, ignore them and read slap through the book as if they didn’t exist. Later you can return to the notes for deeper exploration.3

To keep the book brief, I painted my argument as one rough silhouette using a wide bristled brush and black paint on a white canvas. A much longer book could bring in a full spectrum of detail and color. Here I simply seek to answer one question: In this “age of the spectacle” (as it has been called4)—in this ecosystem of digital pictures and fabricated sights and viral moments competing for our attention—how do we spiritually thrive?

1. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage, 2012), 240.

2. Well yes, technically, they could have been endnotes in the back, but I’m a footnote guy.

3. No, really, ignore them.

4. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chast, 1967).

§2: Spectacles Defined

First we must clear up some definitions. Spectacles can mean one of two things. Spectacles are eyeglasses that sharpen human vision, bringing clarity as we look through them. In this sense, worldviews are metaphorical spectacles by which we see the world. But that is not how I will use the word. For this project, spectacles is confined to its second meaning: a moment of time, of varying length, in which collective gaze is fixed on some specific image, event, or moment. A spectacle is something that captures human attention, an instant when our eyes and brains focus and fixate on something projected at us.

In an outrage society like ours, spectacles are often controversies—the latest scandal in sports, entertainment, or politics. A spark bellows, grows into a viral flame on social media, and ignites the visual feeds of millions. That’s a spectacle. As the speed of media grows faster and faster, the most miniscule public slip of the tongue or passive-aggressive celebrity comment or hypocritical political image can become a spectacle. And often the most viral social media spectacles are spicy tales later exposed as groundless rumors and fake news.1

Whether it’s true, false, or fiction, a spectacle is the visible thing that holds together a collective gaze. And that’s the focus of this book. A spectacle can come packaged as a brilliant photograph, an eye-catching billboard, a creative animation, a magazine centerfold, a witty commercial, or a music video. It can be an advertisement or a sarcastic anti-advertisement, a sitcom or a mocking anti-sitcom, a talk show or a cynical anti-talk show. Spectacles can go meta: TV shows about TV shows, ads about ads, and movies about movies. Spectacles are ambitious video-game landscapes, network television series, a blockbuster movie, a horror film, a sports clip of an athlete’s glory (or injury), or a viral GIF on social media.

Spectacles can be accidental or intentional—anything that vies for our eyes: a historic presidential inauguration, a celebrity blooper, an epic fail, a prank, a trick shot, a hot take, a drone race, an eSports competition, the live streams of video games fought with fictional cannons, or real warfare fought with steel weapons. Spectacles are the latest video from a self-made YouTube millionaire sensation, or a flash mob meant to appear as a spontaneous gathering in public. And the age of spectacle making spawns a particular form of celebrity: the loudmouthed provocateur and the nitwit icon—notoriously unsuited for any other social role but fame.

Ad makers use premeditated spectacles to bolster corporate profits, but spectacles can have more grisly origins: a teen suicide on Facebook Live, a public assassination, a police-shooting video, or traffic footage of a deadly accident.

A spectacle can target you while simultaneously speaking to a million “yous” (like a popular video ad meant to coax purchases). Or a spectacle can gather together a community for a unified purpose (like a live political speech meant to coax votes). A particular tweet can become a viral spectacle, but the whole ecosystem of Twitter is one endless spectacle too.

Some spectacles draw us together in regional unity, like cheering for a local sports team. Others bring us together disconnectedly, like watching a movie in a theater. Some spectacles draw us together in small groups, like projecting movies on a TV in the living room. Some spectacles isolate us, like streaming Netflix on our iPad, scrolling social media on our phone, and gaming on a solo device. Some spectacles spatially separate us, like VR goggles.

Additionally, different modes of spectacle invite different forms of vision. Many spectacles, like our best movies, fixate our minds in a dream-like trance and put our bodies in a state of inertia. Some spectacles, like social media, offer a dopamine jolt as we become the center of attention. Other spectacles, like a TV show watched live and interacted with on Twitter, absorb us into a community of watchers. Spectacles can lead us to be self-centered or self-forgetting or others-focused. Others stoke our obscene voyeurism and personal lust.

Spectacles engage us differently. The Super Bowl is a supreme example, and it gathers our attention in different ways: live and in person, inside a stadium roaring with sixty thousand spectators; live and remotely, inside your living room with six friends; or on-demand, in the time-shifted medium of next-day highlights on your phone. The Super Bowl is also a prime example of how popular spectacles overlap. The event is a hybrid of athletic spectacles, celebrity spectacles, entertainment spectacles, and advertising spectacles—all generating mass interest for the latest consumables, devices, video games, and Hollywood releases. All the culture’s most powerful spectacle makers meet at the Super Bowl, and even feed off one another, to create a four-hour, multilayered feast for the eyes.

Behind it all, spectacles want something from us. “Consuming” is part of it, but we don’t merely ingest spectacles; we respond to them. Visual images awaken the motives in our hearts. Images tug the strings of our actions. Images want our celebration, our awe, our affection, our time, and our outrage. Images invoke our consensus, our approval, our buy-in, our respreading power, and our wallets.

1. Robinson Meyer, “The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News,” theatlantic.com, March 8, 2018.

§3: Distracted Spectacle Seekers

Why do we seek spectacles? Because we’re human—hardwired with an unquenchable appetite to see glory. Our hearts seek splendor as our eyes scan for greatness. We cannot help it. “The world aches to be awed. That ache was made for God. The world seeks it mainly through movies”1—and in entertainment and politics and true crime and celebrity gossip and warfare and live sports. Unfortunately, we are all very easily conned into wasting our time on what adds no value to our lives. Aldous Huxley called it “man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.”2

Worthless or worthwhile, our eyes are insatiable things. And this visual appetite raises interesting questions about what attention is and how we should use it.

In the first volume of his landmark work The Principles of Psychology, William James explained the marvel and mystery of what it means to be an “attentive” being.3 He said that human attention is a “withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction.”4

Attention is the skill of withdrawing from everything to focus on some things, and it is the opposite of the dizziness of the scatterbrained spectacle seeker who cannot attend to anything. Thus, attention determines how we perceive the world around us. “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why?” asks James. “Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”5 James argued that of the many possible things that you could fix your mind on right now, you have chosen to attend to one thing—this sentence. Thus, this book is primarily shaping your life right now, not the one hundred other things around you that you must now ignore. That’s attention. Which means that we must learn the art of refocusing a wandering mind, because “the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”6

In other words, we’re not simply creatures of our environment. We are creatures shaped by what grabs our attention—and what we give our attention to becomes our objective and subjective reality. Identical twins raised in an identical environment will be shaped differently if they focus on different things. We attend to what interests us. We become like what we watch.

1. John Piper, twitter.com, April 12, 2017.

2. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 35.

3. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 1:402–58.

4. Ibid., 404.

5. Ibid., 402; emphasis added.

6. Ibid., 424.

§4: Image Is Everything

Tennis superstar Andre Agassi was only nineteen years old when he starred in a television commercial for Canon cameras. The spot featured him in all sorts of eye-grabbing poses, a spectacle on display before the viewer’s clicking shutter. As the ad closes, he steps out of a white Lamborghini in a white suit to speak his only line: “Image”—he says with a sly smile, pausing, tilting his head down to drop his sunglasses and to reveal his serious gaze—“is everything.” The ad caught fire. Agassi said that he heard the slogan a couple times a day, then six times a day, then ten, then endlessly.

In his autobiography, he recounts his shock. The slogan stuck. He couldn’t shake it. “Image is everything” became Agassi’s image, one he spent years trying to escape. “Overnight,” he said, “the slogan becomes synonymous with me. Sportswriters liken this slogan to my inner nature, my essential being. They say it’s my philosophy, my religion, and they predict it’s going to be my epitaph.”1 Crowds yelled the phrase at him whether he won or lost—because who needs tennis trophies when you can lose in style? The line mocked his tennis goals and minimized his athletic aspirations. It made him cynical, calloused to crowds, irritated by journalists, and eventually sickened by the public gaze. Perhaps Agassi was a victim, not so much of a scripted line but of a new impulse in the age of spectacles. Image and substance were now divorced—because that is what images are: a simulacrum, a representation, an object that makes space between appearance and substance. “In a world dominated by the image instead of the word, interior life gives way to exterior show. Substance gives way to simulation.”2

In the age of the spectacle, image is our identity, and our identity is unavoidably molded by our media. To use the evocative language of Jacques Ellul, speaking about movies, we choose to give ourselves vicariously to the onscreen lives that we could never personally experience. We escape into lives that are not ours and become adapted to the experiences of others. We live inside our projected simulations—inside the promises and the possibilities of our most beloved celebrities. The result, “like a snail deprived of its shell, man is only a blob of plastic matter modeled after the moving images.”3

Our popular movies represent “a pedagogy of desire,” a place where our loves and longings and identities are shaped for us.4 In the age of the spectacle, we leave the hard edges of our embodied existence—our shells—in order to find our own shape and definition as we live inside a media-driven