[Kansas Preacher]

I just received the following via email from a pastor in Illinois. It is quite enlightening, to say the least.

Thank you for taking the time to the read the following.

The following is an excerpt taken from the book All That Glitters, A News-Person Explores The World Of Television by Coleen Cook; chapter 20 entitled “Why Christ Came Before TV”. The highlighted areas are mine for added emphasis.

“Why did Christ miss the “age of television”? It is a question worth pondering. Modern day religious leaders are certainly enamored with its potential. Pope John XXIII once called television “God’s greatest modern gift for communicating the Gospel.”(1) More and more Christian groups now rush headlong into the electronic video arena in an effort to fulfill the Great Commission. Some proclaimed television to be “a tool used of God to present the Gospel into homes of millions who otherwise would never set foot in the doors of the church,” and “a perpetual advertisement for local churches.”(2) One particular denomination predicted that Christian television would provide churches with a constant flow of people responding to the national and local programs his denomination planned to produce. (3) Cardinal John O’Connor once told a group of New York state broadcasters: “With 30 seconds of time given to me free on television or radio, I reach more people than Christ reached in a lifetime—in 33 years.”(4)

As a child, I remember wondering why Christ hadn’t come when television was available to beam His message to the four corners of the earth. Going into all the world to preach the gospel to every living creature sounded like a big job for just twelve people. Wouldn’t it have been easier and far more effective if Jesus had just founded the Christian Broadcasting Network? His arrival could have been announced before millions, just as was Justice O’Conner’s appointment to the Supreme Court.

I now know that television is best at creating illusions, not at communicating truth. Since Jesus was in the truth business, television might have presented some very perplexing problems for Him.

I wonder what kind of treatment Jesus Christ would have received at the hands of twentieth-century producers had He chosen to come at a time when television was the prevailing medium of communication. Would He have been the target of biased interpretation? In his book Christ and the Media, Malcolm Muggeridge muses about a fictional Fourth Temptation. While wandering in the desert for forty days, Jesus is offered free prime time television coverage by the devil but turns it down. (5) Notes television writer Lloyd Billingsley;, “[Christ] knew that through the miracle of editing, the network illusionists could make him appear however they chose, something they frequently do with his more outspoken followers [these days].” (6) Or, perhaps worse, as they did the babies in the Southern California storage container, would the media just have ignored Him altogether?

If Christ had come for TV, would He have waited to perform His miracles until the cameras arrived? Would He have repeated them for the benefit of a network crew that arrived late or whose camera suffered a technical failure? Would He have jumped off the Temple as Satan suggested—something really visual and spectacular—to attract the “right” kind of coverage?

Which one of the twelve disciples would have made the best press secretary? The outspoken Peter, who would have blasted the press like Spiro Agnew, or the wily Judas Iscariot?

Would Christ have risked the integrity of His ministry to a medium that inevitably generates illusion? Would He have catered to a medium where the premium is on visual performance rather than on unseen attitudes of the heart? If Jesus’ message had come under the excruciating time constraints of television, would we have heard only one of the nine Beatitudes?

Would we have rated Jesus on how warm, witty, and dynamic He was on the tube? We pick our politicians this way—and certainly our news anchors. I wonder, would we have chosen a Savior that way?

Would the man Isaiah described as “having no beauty that we should desire Him” have been just too ordinary and mundane looking to capture the hearts of the sophisticated TV generation? Would we have based our choice to follow on how charismatic or entertaining He was? Would we have held the Lord up to some of the same shallow standards of performance that we use to evaluate our Christian leaders and speaker today—good looks; dynamic, humorous delivery; and engaging smile? Would His TV image have overshadowed His words, which He declared were the source of all life? Would television have rendered Jesus into just another media performer competing for a share of the available audience?

NOTES

1. “The Electric Family,” Christianity Today, April 19, 1985, p. 77
2. Charles Page and Nelson Price, quoted in “When ACTS Comes to Town,” a brochure of the Broadcast Services Department: Radio and Television Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
3. Ibid.
4. “Speakers Take the High Road in Addressing NY Broadcasters," Broadcasting, July 22, 1985, p.90.
5. Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), p. 30.
6. Lloyd Billingsley, “TV: Where the Girls Are Good Looking and the Good Guys Win,” Christianity Today, October 4, 1985, p. 39.

Television alters everything it consumes. Nothing goes into television and comes out quite the same, including the gospel.