We’re all Cretans now: toward a theology of entertainment

Issue #162

Cretans! Always liars, evil beasts, lazy bellies! This testimony is true; for which cause convict them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not giving heed to Jewish fables and commands of men, turning themselves away from the truth; all things, indeed, are pure to the pure, and to the defiled and unsteadfast is nothing pure, but of them even the mind and the conscience are defiled; God they profess to know, and in their works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work disapproved. (Titus 1:12–16)

The past few issues, I have chiefly been concerned with the outcome of of our behavior in terms of our affections or emotions: how we feel, what we find ourselves wanting, and how we find ourselves trying to fulfill those desires. I have argued that there is a deep and profound connection between consumption and how we feel — and a deep and profound connection between consumption and being transformed. I have shown that there are two patterns for consumption: a fallen one, and a redeeming one — and the patterns of consumption in the world today are the polar opposite of the patterns of consumption that scripture gives us to follow. The way in which we consume, and the things we consume, are wrong — so naturally, we feel wrong. When we binge on junk food, we feel sick; when we binge on spiritual junk, we feel spiritually sick.

Consumerism has shaped us into a discontented and covetous people who binge continually, and then we wonder why we feel gross. Spiritual obesity is the unseen epidemic of our day.

Fasting is an especially helpful way to overcome this, because it is naturally liturgical — it is a kind of ritual way to embody the right pattern of consumption. But it isn’t the only instruction God gives on how we should consume.

For instance, in the previous issue on fasting, I briefly touched on how Paul gives fasting as the exception to marital intimacy, while the norm ought to be that we do not defraud each other — meaning, as often as either person wants it, we should provide it. Not for the sake of indulgence, but because that is the normal use of those appetites. Sex, too, is a form of consumption — which is why, to take an example that is equal parts illuminating and horrifying, cannibalism and homosexuality are so frequently found practiced together.

The point I wish to draw out here is that God designed us to engage our appetites; not to indulge them, nor to deny them. We have seen that he gives us an elementary liturgical pattern for discerning between engagement and indulgence: we ought to thank him before consuming. This is a very helpful rule of thumb for figuring out when we are going too far, because it focuses our consciences upon the use of our appetites, forcing us to bring our consumption before God’s judgment and commit it to him, before we commit it ourselves.

It is impossible to give sincere thanks for something when we know we are indulging beyond what we ought.

That said, we do also know that consciences can be seared. Our perception of what is “too far” is not just innate, but also shaped by how far we regularly go, by how far we see others regularly going, by what is considered normal and acceptable, by what is considered strangely severe, and by what is mocked as overly religious or legalistic.

This puts us in a pickle, because how can we know if our perception has been skewed? How can we know if what feels like normal engagement of our appetites is actually wanton indulgence that we have been gradually conditioned to accept and normalize by a degenerate world that wants to prey upon our depraved lusts? How can we know if our consciences are seared? (I do not ask how we can know if our consciences are too tender, because that seems to me like a good example of C.S. Lewis’ analogy about running around with fire extinguishers while the ship is sinking.)

One way to test ourselves is to hold up our behavior against the immovable standard of scripture. We know that scripture is fully sufficient to completely equip us for every good work, which means that it is sufficient to equip us to answer questions like, “Am I checking my phone too often?” and, “Do I have an unhealthy relationship with YouTube?” and, “Are we watching too many episodes while we blaught on the couch at the end of the day?” and even, “Should we watch secular entertainment at all?” Despite the Bible being written in a time when there were literally not words to ask those questions, it is nonetheless sufficient to answer them, because God in his exceeding wisdom and mercy has designed the world to work according to spiritual patterns, and so his answers to questions about consumption of food and drink are also answers to questions about consumption of weird artificial things that we only invented six thousand years after he created food and drink. So what I want to zero in on, in order to begin answering these kinds of questions, is a connection that I see between Proverbs 23 and Titus 1:12–16: the connection between gluttons, sluggards, and fables.

Proverbs 23 is perhaps too long to quote here in its entirety; I trust you have a Bible. It is largely about disordered consumption: either about avoiding it; or about what it looks like, and what its fruits are. (This is another way that we can see that sex is also a form of consumption — Solomon makes free to switch between gastronomic and sexual motifs, and evidently sees nothing confusing or random in doing so.)

What Paul says to Titus about Cretans is also along the lines of disordered consumption. Cretans are gluttonous: “lazy bellies,” or to translate a little more dynamically, “idle gluttons” (ASV). But there is another connection to Proverbs 23 which has special relevance to us, given that a chief concern I want to address is what we could generally call entertainment — social media, YouTube, shows, movies, all that kind of thing.

Proverbs 23:21 tells us that “the quaffer and squanderer become poor, and drowsiness clotheth with rags.” Gluttony and sloth are here presented as natural brothers. The squanderous glutton is also a sluggard — he is poor and sleepy. Proverbs 20:4 takes up the same motif: “the sluggard will not plow by reason of the winter, therefore he shall beg in harvest, and have nothing.” He is poor. Again, Proverbs 26:13 says, “as the door turneth upon its hinges, so doth the sluggard upon his bed.” He is sleepy. So both the glutton and the sluggard are poor and sleepy — which suggests these are really the same man. You might say, in fact, that sloth and gluttony are twins. A glutton is going to be inclined to sloth: to laziness and idleness — and a sluggard is going to be inclined to gluttony: to wanton consumption and the wasting of things on his own appetites. Proverbs 19:24 confirms this: “The sluggard burieth his hand in the dish, and will not so much as bring it to his mouth again” — he has tired himself out from eating so much.

In the ancient world, this presented a bit of a dilemma — because the lazier you are, the less you tend to have; but the more gluttonous you are, the more you tend to want. You thus end up being very miserable. “The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing” (Pr 13:4); “The desire of the sluggard killeth him, for his hands refuse to labor” (Pr 21:25). However, in the modern day, we have solved that problem by making most of our consumption digital. It requires very few resources. It is very cheap. And we have invented socialism to ensure that everyone has enough to be a sluggard and a glutton.

But what does this have to do with the Cretans? In Titus 1, Cretans are lazy bellies — they are sluggards and gluttons. But notice what Paul infers from this: that they will be tempted to go after Jewish fables that turn them aside from the truth. On the face of it, this seems like a strange connection; a bit of a left turn. Why is that likely to happen? Why that temptation? Why does he not rather warn Titus about them being inclined to not work, or to bring shame on the name of Christ through selfishness? After all, we know that hospitality and charity loomed large in Paul’s mind for every Christian. Yet he does not voice such concerns here. He instead warns Titus that slothful gluttons are going to want to go after fables. The Greek word here is mythos, from which we get the word myth; in 1 Timothy 4:7, it refers to old wives’ tales, and in 2 Peter 1:16 it refers to how the story of Jesus is not an “ingeniously concocted myth” (LEB) — what in today’s language we would call a conspiracy theory.

I don’t know how conversant you are with certain online “ministries” today, but it has been my observation that Paul’s concern is timeless. Lazy consumers have a disordered desire for myths and old wives’ tales and conspiracy theories — along with any other kind of entertainment.

We are all Cretans now.

Notice the connection between the characteristics Paul lists for these Cretans. Firstly, they are liars. Secondly, they are evil beasts. In other words, they are like animals in having uncontrolled appetites — but they are worse than animals, because they have a moral ability to direct their appetites, but choose not to; so they are evil animals. Thirdly, they are lazy bellies. That is the chief way in which they are evil beasts: their wanton appetite leads them into sloth and ease rather than diligence and labor. But this leads us back to them being liars — because what does that have to do with these other characteristics?

What is the connection between lying and gluttony?

Simple: they must be liars in order to have a wanton appetite for fables. Or, to put it differently, a liar and a glutton will have a wanton appetite for nonsense. It is only nature. By contrast, a man who cares about the truth, and works diligently to seek it, is not slothful or gluttonous in his consumption of information, but rather careful and restrained.

We would like to think that we are such careful, restrained people. But if you think of how we actually consume information, you will quickly realize that we are not as pure as we would hope. Think of the echo-chambers. Think of how social algorithms curate our news feeds so we only see things that they calculate will encourage and reinforce our existing beliefs, and cause us to repost what we read, because we want it to be true, or we want it to be false — whether or not it really is true or false. Think about how often we actually bother to check if what we’re reading is true; or how often we seek an alternative viewpoint, or follow up, or do due diligence before taking it in and integrating it into our minds and hearts, and often sharing it with others in the hope they will do the same. Like the Athenians, we have become a people who spend their time in nothing else than to tell or to hear some new thing. Like them, it does not matter to us whether it is true — only that it is new. We want it to be novel, and if it tickles our fancy, we will fancy that it is also true.

Not only are we liars, then, in this sense of not caring about the truth nearly enough, but we are also lazy bellies. Idle gluttons for ever more trivia, ever more news, ever more controversy, ever more gossip, ever more anything, as long as we can keep scrolling, keep watching, keep avoiding the work set before us, keep procrastinating, keep numbing ourselves, keep choosing fun over fulfillment.

And to add to it all, we are also evil beasts, consuming and being consumed by platforms and pundits that have grown fat and engorged through engagement “farming,” click-bait, and rage-bait.

Every day we gorge ourselves, and at the end of the day we ask, “When shall I awake? I seek it yet again!” (Pr 23:35). We doomscroll ourselves to sleep, and we wake up the next morning to the important work of checking notifications and scrolling more feeds before we are even out of bed. As a door turneth upon a hinge, we turn over to seek it yet again.

We live in a Cretanous world that is continually trying to form us in Cretanous ways; to fashion us into liars and evil beasts and lazy bellies, turning away from the truth, defiled in mind and conscience — people calling ourselves Christians but often denying our profession by our works. Our Christian forefathers would look at us, and be amazed.

What our fathers said

This brings me to the second important way that we can test our intuitions about what is a normal engagement of our appetites, and what is indulgent or gluttonous — or squanderous, as I translate Proverbs 23:20–21, where the Hebrew means to make light of consumption: consuming great quantities like it ain’t no thang, and thus not just indulging in it, but wasting it on ourselves.

I said before that the chief way we can test how we are using our appetites is by holding them up to the immovable standard of scripture. But that is not the only test God gives us. A second, which is of course subject to scripture as well, but is nonetheless of real weight, is the wisdom of our fathers. It is a curious thing to me that churchmen are generally quick to recommend our fathers on matters of theology, but very slow to hear them on matters of practical living — as if the two were entirely disconnected. I have heard Calvin quoted many times in sermons, to support some doctrinal point or abstract truth — but I don’t believe I have ever heard him quoted on how to live; how much we should eat or drink; what we should wear; how men and women should relate to each other; the proper manner of corporal punishment; or really anything like that. And if I did hear him so quoted, I would more than half expect it to be in the negative, as if to say, “that was then, but this is now.” I have personally witnessed many Reformed pastors thoroughly repudiate — indeed thoroughly abominate — the teachings of our fathers on gendered piety, for instance, as if because these are social matters, they are not also theological, and therefore can safely be discarded as the blinkered opinions of a more savage time.

We should not automatically assume that the men who came before us were right about everything. In some respects it was a more savage time. But if we think they were wise, let us at least be consistent. Let us believe that if they were wise in the scriptures, and the scriptures are sufficient to equip us for all good works, then they were probably wise in good works also. We should not think that in the scriptures they were giants, but in social matters they were simply stunted products of their time — as if scripture could correct them on doctrine, but not on living it out. If that were the case, then we should abandon all hope of figuring out how to avoid being stunted products of our own time. We are what we are, and like fish in water, there is simply no way to tell that we are wet.

No, I do not believe that; this entire series presupposes the contrary. It is certainly not how scripture presents the matter, and not how God has worked in history. There is no question that we are products of our time — indeed, that we were made for such times as these, and to rise above them and reform them; as in every time. The Lord Jesus is reigning, and he is placing all of time under his feet, and so we can look to our fathers for wisdom to compare their way of doing things with our own. In particular, we can look to them for guidance on matters where we know our own times are aberrant; on questions that we know our own times are trying to answer perversely; on issues where we know that we have been formed into liars who are inclined to turn away from the truth.

I say all this to explain why I am going to do what I am about to do. Precisely because I don’t think our own perception of these matters is very trustworthy, I want to step aside for a moment, and let our fathers in the faith do some application for me. On this issue of entertainment, I think we are all likely to be compromised, and so I want to get a second opinion. These men did not have the forces working upon them that we do, to turn them away from the truth, and so they have far less bias, far less inclination toward the behavior that we may want to justify in our own lives. That makes their perception likely to be clearer than ours, or at least worthy of considering as a counterbalance to what we want to hear. As the Lord Jesus says in Luke 7:35, wisdom is justified of all her children. We can judge what is true wisdom by the fruit it produces. So let us look for fathers in the faith whose fruit has endured to our time, and ask them for their wisdom on these matters, that we may get a sense of where our own prejudices and weaknesses lie. What did the holy men of old say about entertainment?

There are two men I know of whose work has endured to our time, and who lived at just the opportune moment to give us useful counsel in the present day. They both wrote during the Victorian era — the period from 1837 to 1901 — when mass entertainment in the form of pulp novels was really beginning to take off. They obviously had no conception of the sprawling, always-on, instant-entertainment complex that we must deal with today — but they saw just enough of the coming technological marvel to be able to apply scripture to it, without being caught up in it themselves. As we consider what they said, we will see how applicable it is in principle to our day, even though the internet was still over a century away.

When thou sittest to eat with a ruler,
Considerest thou diligently that which is before thee,
And put a knife to thy throat
If thou art a man of appetite.
Have no desire to his dainties, seeing it is lying food.
Eat not the bread of an evil eye,
And have no desire to his dainties,
For as he hath thought in his soul, so is he,
“Eat and drink,” saith he to thee,
And his heart is not with thee.
Thy morsel thou hast eaten thou shalt vomit up,
And shalt lose thy sweet words. (Proverbs 23:1–3, 7–8)

Notice there how Solomon speaks of “lying food:” it is really a kind of trap, a snare, that baits the man who can’t control his appetite to his destruction. This is exactly what Robert Lewis Dabney says about entertainment in his savage little essay, On Dangerous Reading: A Warning Against The Reading of Novels, Fiction, and Other Poisonous Literature. I know, of course it sounds extreme to us — but let the man cook for a moment. Dabney was perhaps the greatest American theologian ever to live, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

He tells us that entertainment deforms our character and distorts our view of reality. It forms us falsely — it is a kind of trap or snare that baits us to destructive views and destructive behaviors. This is because nearly all entertainment is false in critical ways — and often intentionally so, with the aim of covertly drawing us away from virtue and into sin and error. Hear what he says about the stories of his day, and ask if it does not apply even more urgently to the stories of ours:

Many of them are, in truth, systems of error, covertly embodying and teaching ruinous falsehoods. Some are written for the secret purpose of teaching infidelity, and some to teach the epicurean philosophy [sensuality]. Many of them are the aimless effusions of a general hatred against every thing correct and pious. There may be no professed attack on right principles, probably no didactic discussion at all, in the whole book, and yet the whole may be false philosophy or heresy, teaching by fascinating incident and example. To the thoughtless young, in search of entertainment, it seems to be a tale constructed to amuse, and nothing more, and yet every character represented in it, and all the plan of the book, may be designed to place religion, morality, and right principles in a contemptible attitude, and to present the characters who advocate error in an attitude of superiority. How delusive this mode of teaching is, as a test or evidence of truth, can be easily seen. It is perfectly easy to draw two sets of characters, of which those embodying and representing error shall wear the superior, and those representing truth the inferior aspect, when the characters are all fictitious, and the painter is the errorist himself. When the lion and the man, in the old fable, traveling together, came to the picture of a man bestriding a conquered lion, the lion said to his human companion: “Had a lion been the painter of that picture the figures would be inverted.” So it is perfectly easy to paint truth at the bottom and error at the top when falsehood holds the brush.

He goes on:

There are some reasons why the evil company of a bad book is even more corrupting and dangerous than that of a wicked living companion. One of these is, that the heroes and heroines, who are painted as defying the rules of good morals in some vital points, are still adorned with many imaginary qualities, such as courage, magnanimity, generosity, wit, and genius, which cause the young and impulsive reader to admire them in spite of their crimes. And from admiring the criminal it is but one step to excusing the vice, so that by this means the moral distinctions are worn out in the mind. Such a story as Bulwer’s Eugene Aram should be entitled “Murder made Amiable.” The usual tendency of these works is to familiarize the reader to viewing, without revulsion, nay, with actual admiration, the characters of duelists, drunkards, seducers, and other villains. And these fictitious villains are more dangerous companions than the bad men of real life, because this union of criminal traits with attractive and romantic qualities, which half atone for their faults in the view of the novel reader, is usually wholly imaginary. In actual life we find no such union, but wicked men appear coarse and repulsive. Vice soon robs their characters of that grace and delicacy which make the fictitious hero so dangerous an example.

You might say, “Well, I get his point — but it’s not real. It’s just fiction, and we all know it’s fiction. It’s only meant to amuse.” Perhaps you are right; that is something we should investigate in more detail. But Dabney’s rejoinder is hard to refute. He responds with Proverbs 26:

As one pretending to be feeble, Who is casting sparks, arrows, and death, So hath a man deceived his neighbor, And hath said, “Am not I playing?” (Proverbs 26:18–19)

Dabney is not impressed by the idea that when evil and wickedness and sin are portrayed in stories, they somehow become safe to view:

Not so judged the Psalmist when he prayed, “Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity.” (Psalm 119.37.) Not so judged the wisest of men when he urged, “Avoid it, pass not by it; turn from it, and pass away.” (Prov. 4.15.) Not so judged Paul, nor even the prudent heathen whom he quoted, when he taught that, “Evil communications corrupt good manners.” (1 Cor. 15.33.) All human beings, however amiable, have in their hearts, until sanctified, the dormant seeds of all the vices. Who does not know that the contemplation of such vices tends to awaken those seeds into life? It is just thus that evil companions and evil example tend to corrupt those who were previously innocent. It is dangerous to become familiar with wickedness, even by contemplating it in others.

In the same way, J.C. Ryle wrote similar comments in a little booklet called Thoughts for Young Men. Here is what he says:

[The devil] will try to throw dust in your eyes, and prevent you seeing anything in its true colors. He would eagerly make you think that evil is good, and good is evil. He will paint, cover with gold, and dress up sin, in order to make you fall in love with it. He will deform, and misrepresent, and fabricate true Christianity, in order to make you take a dislike to it. He will exalt the pleasures of wickedness—but he will hide from you the sting.

This is why Dabney goes so far as to say that entertainment is the “murder of time.”

These are strong words. We need not accept them as gospel truth; they are not scripture, after all. But we ought to let the wisdom of our fathers settle in our minds so that we can contemplate it without immediately giving an answer. We should not be hasty to dismiss these men. We should be quick to listen and slow to speak — and slow to anger, for if there is anything that provokes us to resentment and disagreement more than being told that our precious luxuries should be rejected, I am not sure what it is. That alone should make us think that perhaps our affections are out of order. Perhaps, even if we can justify entertainment, it simply isn’t worth it, considering what else we could be doing. Certainly we are not on a trajectory to achieve the sorts of things that Dabney and Ryle achieved.

So let us store up their comments in our hearts, and return to scripture again next time, seeking deeper and more clarifying principles on what a theology of entertainment should look like.

Until then,

Bnonn