Truth Unites - The Early Church on Entertainment

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Gavin Ortlund explores how the early church viewed entertainment in the Roman Empire. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

In this video, we're going to work through how the church fathers and other early Christians viewed entertainment, things like the gladiator games and going to the theater and stuff like this, and then draw implications for what this means for us. This has been convicting. I've been studying this, but there's a measure of hope in it as well. I thought it'd be only conviction, but there is some grace and some help along the way as well. I've been studying this because my friend Trevin put me onto this book from Chris Hall. It's fascinating to learn about the church father's views. on social issues, and I've done a video. Two other videos came out of this, one on persecution and one on pacifism. You can see those. This is probably the last one, maybe. But there's so much to learn from church history. Who knows maybe what next will come up, because it's just endlessly fascinating,

all we can learn. I want to make three arguments. Number one, entertainment in the Roman culture of the early church has some fundamental similarities to what we're facing in the modern West. There's actually a ton we can learn. Number two, the church fathers were very insightful and very deep. discerning about how entertainment can shape us and form us, especially in negative ways. And number three, there's grace and there's healing through the work of Christ. And so ultimately,

this video will leave us with some hope and not just condemnation and so forth. So first, let's talk about entertainment in the Roman culture of the early church because it really does have similarities, even though, you know, they don't have our technology. They don't, they didn't have social media, of course, and TV and so forth. There are some basic similarities where you'll see as we get into this. And this is important because it shows the relevance of this topic. If there isn't a similarity, then we don't have as much to learn from them. But I think we have a lot to learn from them. In the Roman Empire, there are, entertainment was huge. You have the gladiator games, which were so violent. You have a lot of sexual immorality in the theater. And this is serving as a

source of temptation for early Christians, and they need to think through, how do we respond to this? Not always in grandiose ways. Sometimes it's something simple, like Chrysostom, you know, we'll talk about him in the 380s having to accost some of his congregants for going to the theater rather than going to church. By the way, parenthetical comment, if you're a pastor and you struggle with people leaving church early to get to watch the football game, or maybe they left during COVID and haven't come back, don't take it too personally because it even happened to, it even happened to the greatest preacher of the early church. Helps a little bit. But these kinds of things are going on in the early church.

Sometimes we have a glamorized view of church history. We forget there's the mundane aspects of it too. And in the specific ways that it functioned, entertainment in Roman culture had some similarities to things like the Super Bowl, Saturday Night Live. You could think of the ancient mimes is kind of like today what Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel are. When I was growing up, it was David Letterman and Jay Leno, but I'm a little dated now. But, you know, there's similar dynamics. You even had celebrities. You know, you have some of the biggest gladiators and charioteers of the ancient world were then like what movie stars and famous athletes and musicians and so forth are today. So you could buy lamps or bells or baby bottles.

with gladiators stamped on them in the ancient world. It's kind of fascinating, right? So you have this whole culture surrounding entertainment that we can definitely relate to today. And it's a huge part of Roman culture. Throughout the year, there's all these festivals and games that are held in honor of the gods. Some of these resemble how you might envision

like a modern fair or festival or something like this. And then you have the Olympic Games, which are huge. So the Coliseum in Rome, which I'll put up a picture of, host these gladiator fights, as well as animal huntings and executions of criminals and other things like this. This is still the largest amphitheater ever built. It's absolutely massive. If you ever get a chance to go, it's worth seeing in Rome. And, you know, it's huge. It's, it can, most people think it could hold more than 50,000 people. Some people think it can hold up to

70 or 80,000 people. For the ancient world, it's absolutely massive. That's like the size of like a Taylor Swift concert today. So that's a lot of people. Now, by the second century, games and festivals are happening about 135 days out of the year. So every couple of days, there's these things going on, and a lot of violence is going to be then constantly in view. We'll talk about that a little more. Also, you have so much sexual immorality. Kyle Harper wrote this book, From Shame to Sin, the Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. He's basically saying how erotic art was ubiquitous in the culture. This is a lot of times when you live in a prosperous society, what happens is basic moral boundaries start breaking down.

And this was happening in Rome, as it is happening in our culture, a modern Western culture, more generally, I know not all my viewers are from the West, but a lot are. And Harper says, the inhabitant of the Roman Empire was constantly bombarded with visual allurements. So moderation was a virtue called upon constantly to perform heroic feats of restraint. When I read that quote, I thought, people today can surely relate to this. We don't have as much pornography like in our architecture necessarily, but definitely through TV and the internet. It has made it so available. And just like, and by the way, just like today in our world, there's a link between pornography and the trafficking of women and children. So in the Roman world, there was a link between the theater and prostitution rings.

And there were laws coercing women to perform on stage. There's often a link between sexual immorality and exploitation of the vulnerable. So we should always take sexual sin seriously because it harms people. But point is, just like the early church, to be faithful to Christ, in our context, we're often going to be swimming against the grain in our approach to entertainment. And there's a lot we can learn from the early church, whereas we think about trying to take the difficult path of discipleship, where we kind of steal ourselves to be pure and not be corrupted by these things bombarding us from every angle, not just violence and sexual immorality, but also just some of the greed and luxury and extravagance among the wealthy.

You know, one of the concerns that comes up from Clement of Alexandria is he's basically rebuking people for the presence of these toilets made of silver and gold. I won't read this whole quote. It's kind of funny, especially in English translation now. But the point is you can see how there's this over-the-top wealth among a few people. to the neglect of most people. And in the United States, where I live, you know, we live in an extremely wealthy time of history. There is a lot of extravagance here as well. That's not actually removed from us. A lot of Christians have to think about what is self-indulgent, you know?

We want to live in line with Scripture where you have First Timothy 6, 8, if we have food and clothing with these, we will be content. Or Proverbs 38, which says, give me neither poverty nor riches. It's convicting. When you realize that compared to global and historical standards, we in the United States are really wealthy. You say, when do we violate Proverbs 38? You know, what does that look like? And the encouraging thing there is to know that our Heavenly Father, as we're following Jesus, will take care of our needs.

So we're not supposed to say, if we have nothing, we will be content, and give me neither riches nor my basic needs, nor does the Lord's prayer say, you know, give us today nothing but spiritual joy. You know, it's okay to pray for your needs. It says, give us today our daily bread, and those verses are talking about, you know, meet my needs, but the extravagance, that's around us. You know, self-indulgent extravagance, over-the-top wealth, it's around us as well. So the point is, given these similarities between Roman culture and our culture,

this kind of decadent wealth and sexual immorality and violence, as we'll talk about, we can learn from the early church and how they face things. Let me, second section of the video here, let's talk about the church fathers, and not just the church fathers proper, but early Christians in general, their discernment about the shaping influence that entertainment can have. There's a lot we can learn. This was so fascinating, and I'll bring in a C.S. Lewis quote, which really shocked me too. The fundamental insight is that entertainment is catechesis. The word catechesis means teaching. It's formative. What we view that entertains us is not a neutral influence, and we can be so naive about this. We can just do whatever we feel like watching

on TV at night and so forth. But we, and social media, oh my gosh, how it's changed the world. We are being shaped and formed and catechized by our devices. And the Church fathers understood this. Chris Hall says, the unity of the father's perspective on this particular issue of entertainment is impressive. They believe the choices Christians make concerning what they choose as entertainment, whether through specific actions of their own or merely viewing the performance of actors or athletes are freighted with ethical significance for our lives as Christians, and indeed for how we think and act in worship and devotion. Let's unpack that a little bit. Just as, so we've noted in Roman culture, you had the violence of the gladiator games

and the sexual immorality of the theater. One of the interesting lessons you can get is how both of those things were opposed with equal indignation. Whereas a lot of the times in our culture, we think of violence in the modern West tends to make harm everything. But the early church fathers had this, had other, a more full-orbed kind of ethical sense about them. So they understood how wrong it is when the good gift of sexuality is degraded in the ways that it was in that culture and increasingly is in ours. Let's just unpack that a little bit. So we're talking about, but really both the sixth and the seventh commandments here. murder and adultery. And basically what the church fathers understood is that the depiction of these

things in the context of entertainment is not a morally neutral issue. So with the gladiator games, for example, you can find early Christians like Cyprian condemning these as basically our participation in homicide. This is actually pretty clear in all the early Christians. You can't go to the gladiator games. You can't go watch people getting slaughtered for the amusement of a bloodthirsty mob, if you go, if you participate in that, you're actually participating in the homicide. Theophilus of Antioch in the second century says Christians are forbidden so much as to witness shows of gladiators lest we become partakers and abettors of murderers. You see those words, partakers and abettors, he's saying, you're in on the deal if you go. You can't just say, oh, I'm just watching.

By participating, by attending, you are supporting that. You're actually a part of the murder. In my video on pacifism, I already quoted Athenagoras, who's saying, to see a man put to death is much the same as killing him. That's a strong statement. Now, he's not saying if you accidentally are walking down the street and you witness a murder. He's talking about the gladiator games, but still the concern here is so strong. Now, someone might say, well, that's just because in that context the gladiators were actually dying, whereas today, when we watch a movie, a violent movie, and we see a murder depicted upon it, the actor, it's not real. The actor doesn't actually die.

It's on a screen and it's being portrayed in that way, but it's not actually, no one actually dies. But the concern of the early church was not just about that one guy out on the sand and the Coliseum, having his life taken away, important as that is. It's also how it shapes the entire culture when murder is held up in this manner, as a of entertainment and the way that shapes everyone watching. So viewing violence in this way is basically that one of the concerns is this teaches people how to be violent. And that's a very insightful point. And this is a theme that I'm going to keep belaboring here is that entertainment is a form of

catechesis. It normalizes certain things and behaviors. It teaches certain things. It models. It sort of teaches us what to admire, you know, and what is normal human behavior. It shapes culture. And so you can't just say, well, because an actual murder isn't taking place, therefore it's morally neutral. And this is what Cyprian's point is. Basically, he's saying, crime is not only committed, but taught in the gladiator games. What can be more inhuman, what more repulsive. It is a training that one may be able to kill and that he kills is a glory. You see what he's saying there? It's like it's teaching you that killing is cool.

That's what's going on. That's the concern. And we need to be mindful of that today when we're watching TV, movies, social media, et cetera. The whole intake, it's all around us. It's bombarding us. So you can see why this topic is so convicting and why I've been wrestling with it so much. You have to think about the impact. It's all around us.

You have to think about this the way this is happening and the impact it's having upon us. With Cyprian, though, it's not just murder. It's also adultery. and incest and these horrific things that are happening in the theaters. And he has the same concern here. Adultery is learned as it is seen. How great a collapse of morals, what a stimulus to base deeds, what a nourishing of vices, to be polluted by the gestures of actors.

Ask now whether he who looks upon this can be healthy-minded or chaste. Can I say these videos on these social issues often turn into sermons, even though they're not on the scripture, but nonetheless, ethical exhortations or something like that. Do we today have the same, you feel the indignation, right? Do we have that? Do we have the same indignation as the church fathers? You can't even look upon that.

This sense, you think of those words, a nourishing of vices. It's a lot of our social media, a nourishing of vices, yes. TV. By the way, whenever we're talking about this, this is what I try to do. It's always helpful to start with our own heart. Because otherwise we're just going to be blasting away at others, but we got to start with ourselves. We can be polluted.

That verb polluted assumes that entertainment can be a contaminant. Okay? It's like the way you feel when you're in a room with a bunch of sick people and you're like, you're like covering your nose and you wash your hands right after and you're like, you know, very wary and so forth. Cyprian is saying we need to think about entertainment. It's easy to be contaminated. Again, we need to, we can benefit from the sense of.

of vigilance that they had. Now, what's helpful about this, too, is they're not just using that for murder, but also for adultery. From Commandment 6 to Commandment 7, he's saying the same thing. Whether it's a bloodthirsty slaughtering, or whether it's scandalous, licentious, sexual immorality, the indignation is basically the same, in fact. Lactantius in his divine institutes, who, he's going on about child exposure and violence in the gladiator games and saying how terrible this is, But then he talks about the corrupting influence of the stage or the theater is even worse. If then, it is in no way permitted to commit homicide. It is not allowed us to be present at all, lest any bloodshed should overspread the conscience,

since that blood is offered for the gratification of the people. And I am inclined to think that the corrupting influence of the stage is still more contaminating for the subject of comedies are the dishonoring of virgins or the loves of harlots, and the more eloquent they are who have composed the accounts of these disgraceful actions, the more do they persuade by the elegance of their sentiments. And it goes on and on. I'll put up on the second part of this passage if you want to read it. It's helpful to take in, and again, you feel the indignation as you're reading.

So the same concern is here is that the influence upon the viewer of the entertainment. What he's saying in this quote is it's teaching you something, it's normalizing certain, And he also speaks of it as a contaminant as well. So this is sobering, you know, we need to wrestle with this of what we can learn from this. So in the early church for the Catechumans, by the way, if you were going to be baptized, you couldn't remain a gladiator. You couldn't remain a public official who was concerned with the gladiator games, and you couldn't remain an actor in the theater.

Now, I'm going to say this again at the end, and I'll put up this from the apostolic tradition to see that. I'm going to say this again at the end, but let me say it now. I don't think this means it's wrong to be an actor in any context. I have friends who are actors, I think that that can be a very noble profession depending on how it's done. You know, you can do Shakespeare plays and it's going to be wonderful and so forth. But in that context, the theater was rife with immorality,

and we've talked about the exploitation of women and so forth. We'll talk about that a little more. So just footnote there. Nonetheless, it's very clear the early church's rigid, opposition to the immorality around them. Here's another example. Last example I'll give on this. This is from Khrostom. This is the best part of the video probably for what I'm going to quote from Chrysostom and C.S. Lewis. So don't too now quite yet. If you're about to click off, at least wait until these two happen, then click off. Chrisostom is rebuking members of his congregation for going to the

theater instead of church like we talked about. And he brings up concerns about the theater for things that are obviously bad, like the water mimes. These would be women who would swim naked at the theater. So that's the kind of thing. It's like, we're not surprised that he's opposing that. But here's what's interesting is his concerns about comedy and how it's functioning. So he quotes Ephesians 5, 4 about crude joking and filthiness and so forth. And he says, what is yet more grievous than these things is the subject of the laughter. For when they that act those absurd things utter any word of blasphemy or filthiness, then among many, the more are thoughtless laugh and are pleased, applauding in them what they ought to stone them for.

So the concern here is, in the context of comedy, it's really easy to cause you to be flippant about something about which you should be serious. You may have seen this happen before when you're watching a comedian or something like this. They're making people laugh, and you're sort of accustomed to laughing. And so then all of a sudden a joke gets thrown out about something that's actually kind of blasphemous or disgraceful or disgusting, and people are accustomed. So uncritical people in the audience are just still laughing. And you're like, that's really a problem. See, S. Lewis talks about the way humor can be misused to create flippancy like this in the screw tape letters. He says, humor is the all-excusing grace of life. Hence, it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. He's

speaking from the perspective of a devil here. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is mean, if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer mean but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful. Coward is boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful, unless the cruel man can present it as a practical joke. But flippancy is the best of all. Only a clever human can make a real joke about virtue or indeed about anything else.

Anyone, any of them, can be trained to talk as if virtue. were funny. Among flippant people, the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it, but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor plating against the enemy, that's God, that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy. it deadens instead of sharpening the intellect, and it excites no affection between those who practice it. I like this Lewis passage, because if you read it in context, he's showing that the concern is not with humor or laughter itself.

Lewis had a lot to say about the goodness of humor. And he's saying it can be done unto the glory of God. It can be used to inculcate charity between people. It can be good for relaxation, you know. He even says humor can be good for inducing courage, which is, interesting. So he's not against humor, but the bad usage of humor to create flippancy can be deadening and takes you away from joy. You know, this attitude where like basically anything noble becomes treated as if it were funny. You see this in extreme forms of sarcasm. This is really not healthy. And this is something to watch out for in our appropriation of entertainment. It's really easy to start drinking that in. But here's what I want to finish with. As much as I was challenged and

convicted. What surprised me was also to see a measure of grace and help from the church fathers. And so let me get to the third point here to finish with continuing on with what I quoted from John Chrysostom in his homilies on Matthew a little bit. And we're going to talk about how there's healing and grace for us, where we've been contaminated by entertainment through the gospel of Christ. As much as you get conviction from the fathers, you do also get a reminder of the gospel. John describes a woman in one of his sermons named Pelagia. This was a famous, fourth century actress and prostitute in Antioch who becomes a Christian. He describes her as holding pride of place in the theater and her name was famous everywhere, not just in our city.

Kyle Harper notes she was famous throughout the Mediterranean world. So think of like a famous actress today, except Pelagia is also a prostitute, and then she becomes a Christian. She comes to Christ. John uses her as an example to show the power of the grace of God. Quote, she ended her life, having washed off all through grace, and after her baptism, having shown great self-restraint, for not even a mere sight of herself, did she allow to those who were once her lovers? Let no one then who lives in vice despair. By the way, when there's a genuine conversion, it results in a complete change of life. So it's not just a flippant thing.

But, so we've got to say that. But then we can say, happy news. I want to say this. may the Holy Spirit drive these words home into the heart of somebody out there. No matter who you are, no matter what you've done, you are not beyond the grace of God. As Christostom says, let no one who lives in vice despair. Those words washing off through grace. That's it.

That's the gospel. No matter how contaminated you might feel. Maybe you've watched things on TV and your computer and on your phone that are so filthy. You feel completely apart for it. God and unloved by him. Here's what Satan does to really destroy us. He first tempts us to the sin, but then he throws despair at us. And that is where you become irredeemable, you know, if you just give in and just never, and you think, no, I can't, I'm beyond hope. You know, and a lot of people feel like that. And believe it or not, everything else that I do on my

YouTube channel is driven by this fundamental passion that I want people to experience. the grace of God. I want people to know, and that's a magical thing when it happens, and it's only through the Holy Spirit. When it comes on your heart, when you stop thinking, yeah, Jesus is out there, you say, no, he's the most personal thing in all the universe to me, because he can forgive me. And that's what I want people to understand. No matter where you're coming from on this issue, there's that washing of and cleansing that Christ offers through the gospel is available to you. Why not accept it?

Why not reform your life with a thorough repentance? And if you need to, literally drive a nail through your phone if you need to. But be free of it. And accept, you know, when the gospel is communicated in the scripture, the imagery of clothing is used, being clothed in the white garments. That's what Jesus wants to give to you. He can actually give us our purity back. No matter how contaminated we've been through what he did on the cross,

can be washed white. And that's a happy thought. So summing up, how do we move forward? You know, what are some lessons to take away? Does this mean that we should never watch TV? Does it mean we should never watch movies? Does it mean we should never watch a YouTube video like this one? If that's truly what it meant, I would happily give up my YouTube channel in a day. I'm not in this because I have to be. I really am not. But I would say I don't think that is the lesson. I think the more, that's actually in some ways easier to do. The hardest and the most important thing to do is discernment of the influence that it is having on us. And so I think for most of us, that means a strict observance to make sure we're not engaging too much,

and then to look at the influence it's having upon us. We want to be the kind of people who are not deadened to holiness, but are very acutely sensitive to it so that when we see the Sixth or the Seventh Commandment being violently betrayed in in it. an entertainment context, we're not flippant about it, but we're grieved about it. As I was studying this topic, I was reminded of the Neil Postman quote from his old book, amusing ourselves to death. Christianity is it demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether. So basic, I'd have two suggestions and then one caution

to finish off here. Suggestion one is we should give some consideration to where we can reduce our overall time-engaging entertainment, especially entertainment in the form of of a screen. This is something I'm trying to do lately, you know? It's easy to just watch TV at night. It's so easy because it's such a passive thing when you're tired. So I've just been trying to even, you know, just simple things. Just sit and reflect. Just go into a different room that has no screen. I have certain rooms of my house where I don't never bring any screen whatsoever. Like my phone just never goes in there. I pretend there's like an invisible barrier that my phone can't go there. So I know when I go there and it's calming actually. You kind of just realize,

okay, now I'm just going to be engaging elsewhere. Go there with a friend or with your spouse or with somebody and just talk. Have conversation. It's amazing the joy of conversation. Reading at night. I know my brain is tired at night, but if it's a novel, you know, try to get into new novels, trying to read through the book, Contact again. Remember that old novel?

Because I watched the movie the other day and it was good. Go on bike rides. I've been doing bike rides. You look at the stars. You know, find something that is nourishing for your soul that isn't constantly, I think the real danger is when we fill up every bit of spare time by looking at a screen that is so unhelpful. And then the second piece of this is not just reduced the amount of time, but discernment about its catechetical nature. Note the influence it's having upon you.

And then just, I will just say, here's another encouragement. Not only can God wash you and forgive you, but by the power of the Holy Spirit, he can help you change. And so what you do is you lean him, just as much as you're leaning upon him for your salvation, just as much as when you come to judgment day, you'll say, nothing I've done, Lord, it's all your work on my behalf. At that same heart posture, you say, now help me in the meantime to obey you and to root these things out of my life, because we all know where they're making inroads against us. But here's the caution. We also need to be careful about having, I think, an overly scrupulous conscience about this topic, because a lot of my viewers have obsessive-compulsive tendencies,

and I want to give some pastoral help here too. I think it's very easy to go too far, where we have so low a view of common grace that we think we can't enjoy or learn anything from the world. I don't think that's actually the pathway of holiness either, just the kind of complete abstinence and just kind of running the other direction. I think it's a little more complicated.

We need discernment. You know, even with the church fathers, they're not infallible. There is some oddity. We can learn a lot. I mean, believe me, I think they're better than us. But they're not infallible. I mean, there's some oddities, you know, like Augustine's view of sexuality is kind of weird.

It's overly negative. It's out of step with First Corinthians 7, I would say, in some ways. I love Augustine. But Jerome is another example of this. You know, he had this whole episode where he's racked with guilt about how much he likes Cicero. And he has this dream where he's before the judgment seat of Christ. And Christ says to him, you are a Ciceroon. not a Christian, and so he promises never to read pagan literature again and so forth.

Now, I would say, look, if reading Cicero is drawing you away from Christ, then by all means give up Cicero forever. But I can easily imagine people watching this video going too far with this, and so just three dangers I'll throw up here at the very end, even as the overall tilt of this video is a caution, and, you know, for me, I experienced this as a conviction as like, okay, I need to keep my barriers up really well. Nonetheless, some ways we can go too far. Number one is a rejection of art. Art is not bad.

Art can be done for the glory of God. And I think there is, actually in a lot of quarters of the church, I think there's too low a view of art. And just too much of a sacred secular distinction where we have a too low of view of vocation in general. And this is something I've said a lot of my pastoral work is just that Christians need to invade these spheres of culture, like, you know, being a painter, being a novelist, being an actor, all kinds of things.

Genesis 1 says the whole world is good. There's common grace. Like I talked about in my video responding to John MacArthur a few weeks back, there's easily ways we can go too far with this. The concern is about sin. The problem is not anything God has made or any culture per se. it's evil and sin and fallenness that invades it. So that's a danger we need to be alert to. A second thing, a second possible danger that could come in here is an overly negative view of sex.

I think that is one thing you see in the Church Fathers, like Augustine. So one of the ideas you see sometimes is that sex is only really pure and holy if it's for the intention of and to the end of procreation. And that's where I would have a departure just because I think Paul is pretty clear in 1st Corinthians 7, that's not the only purpose that within marriage, it is wholly within marriage. And actually, Chrysostom has a little more balanced view on that, I think. But I guess I just wanted to speak to this because I think a lot of people experience a topic like this, especially young people, as like only restrictive. And I think this is another one of the lies of Satan is that basically God's commandments and God's restrictions and the pathway of discipleship following Christ is this

really cramped and narrow thing that wants to take away joy and make life less exciting, nothing could be further from the truth. There is no greater joy than following Christ. The commandments of God, like the Seventh Commandment in the Bible, not that we'll even get into much detail here, but just to say this much, that's for your flourishing and good. Think of it as fatherly counsel from a father who loves you. And I'll just leave it that. Most of my people watching this probably have some sense of that already. That's more in the realm of encouraging. regiment, I suppose. So last thing I'll say is another possible danger is we're trying to be vigilant about seeking holiness, but aware it can go off into some unhealthy terrain. It's just the

danger of legalism in how we apply this, you know? So if you say, like, I can imagine Christians thinking, okay, so based upon what we're saying about the church fathers and this, you know, entertainment is a form of catechesis, it's like poisoning us, it's a contaminant, therefore it's a sin to watch a rated R movie. And I would say, no. Basically, Jarembar's, my old professor in seminary, has helped me so much think about this. Basically, what you do is you emphasize the law of God, and that way you don't need to add on a bunch of fences around the law. And this is just such a helpful pastoral advice.

So, you know, there's no verse in the Bible that says, thou shalt not watch a rated R movie, but there are verses that say, that shall not commit adultery, that shall not commit murder. So, in other words, you emphasize the law, and then you leave room for individual consciences around the more disputed questions of what that will look like. Now, some things are obvious. You know, some things it's like, it's obvious that's going to lead to, you know, a violation of God's laws. But like on the question of violence, this is tricky. Can you ever watch a movie? I'm trying to actually address the practical questions that might come up from a topic like this. someone might say, can you ever watch a movie that has lots of violence in it without sin?

And I would say it really depends upon how the violence is being cast, I would say. Because, for example, I make a big distinction between what is glorifying violence, or sometimes it's hard for me to articulate what it is about it, but like the way in a horror movie it's portrayed, sometimes it just, it does feel like it's creating flippancy about it versus there are some historical dramas that are very violent, but it's kind of just depicting war realistically. And those are the kinds of things where I think we can be, I think we can make a distinction there. And I'm trying to create a little bit of wiggle room

for people to wrestle with this in their own conscience. But I think it's wise for us to be slow to judge other people on these very particular points. And the last thing I will say is this. Because when we experience the topic like this, we're thinking about the church fathers as kind of a challenge to us, I do want to emphasize at the end here that the Christian life is full of joy and these hard aspects of discipleship where we will be swimming against the grain and we will be having to steal ourselves against the pressures and temptations all around us.

And I do want us to remember that that is ultimately for the pathway of joy and flourishing. The problem with entertainment is not that it has too much joy in it, but that it deadens joy. So the reason we need to be vigilant about the impact that's having upon us is because it's for our own good. I mean, that's why I'm so passionate about this topic, is think about, like, the impact of social media. It is not, you know, being addicted to your phone is not joyful. It's not fun. It actually leads to a lot of anxiety. So, so the pathway of discipleship is hard, but it's for our good. And I'm very concerned about the way entertainment is affecting people. And even when it is hard, walking with Christ can alleviate the difficulty and he's with you every step along the way.

I'll leave you with this quote from Samuel Rutherford. If your Lord calls you to suffering, be not dismayed. There shall be a new allowance of the king for you when you come to it. One of the softest pillows Christ has is laid under his witness's head. Though often they must be set down their bare feet among thorns. Old English language, but I love that. That basically what I'm trying to say with that to finish off here is, even when it's really difficult, Christ is with you.

and that will alleviate some of the pain and some of the pressure. All right, let me know what you think about this topic. Did I miss anything? This is not something I'm an expert on. It's more just something I'm wrestling with and thinking about and trying to offer pastoral counsel on the basis of. So let me know what you think if I missed anything or if there's other quotes or other topics in this that you think are helpful.

Thanks for watching everybody. We will see you next time.