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Facing the challenge of television

An eight-week study booklet for small groups

Remote control?

FACING THE CHALLENGE OF TELEVISION
An eight-week study booklet for small groups
Focus Radio. 48 pages. £9.99
Available from office@focus.org.uk

US media critic Ken Myers says that TV is ‘the single most significant shared reality of our entire society’. For that reason alone it is something Christians need to get to grips with, understanding both its dangers and its potentials.

The purpose of this discussion course for small groups is to lead people to become more aware of how TV affects us and wider society and to help us think biblically about TV. There is a leader’s guide and sets of questions to answer (which can be photocopied) in advance in preparation for the discussion.

The course directs us to various Bible verses and does a good job of seeking to get participants to apply biblical principles to their TV habits. Apart from the obvious concerns of sex and violence the topics covered include seeing how TV creates our ‘world’, auditing how much time we spend viewing, how TV can confuse us about matters of truth and its ability to distort reality in the way things are reported, edited or ‘spun’. It also, more positively, has sessions on how TV may promote world mission and provide starting points for evangelism.

Basically I am very enthusiastic about this booklet. However, alarm bells went off in reading one paragraph which says, ‘Violence rarely solves anything. Some Christian traditions speak of “the myth of redemptive violence” — that is the false belief that violence can put things right.’

The so-called ‘myth’ of redemptive violence is one of the ideas which Steve Chalke has used to argue against the cross of Christ as a penal substitution. This is a tricky area, but to baldly state that it is false that violence can put things right calls into question the whole idea of God’s punishment of sin in his judgements both in this world and in hell. So it is extremely unfortunate that this section was not handled in a better way. But that does not negate the value of the rest of the course.

John Benton