On Friday I shared a quote about why Piper doesn’t own a TV. I can’t find any evidence to suggest that the Doctor also abstained from this modern form of entertainemnt. There are multiple references to the things “we watch on televion” in his sermons. However, Martyn Lloyd-Jones had serious reservations about TV, as this quote demonstrates. I wonder if the Internet is less mind-numbing? I suspect that if you read certain parts of the Net and engage with it, on the contrary, it could even be positive for one’s ability to think. I know that Piper does indeed own a computer—a Macbook, of course. If the Doctor lived today, I’d like to believe he might have spent more time in front of a computer screen than a television.

“This generation that boasts so much about its intellect does not think. If it did, it would not believe all the advertisements on television. That is just psychology, subliminal thinking, and does not bring about active, conscious thinking. People are given information by constant repetition and absorb it without knowing it. This is probably the most drugged, deluded, controlled generation the world has ever known. This is the age of propaganda and of advertising—and of the negation of thinking. Obviously, not everything that is recommended is bad. No, but whether good or bad, people will buy something if they are told sufficiently frequently to do so. We had a second world war in the twentieth century largely because people would not think; they did not want to think. They said, “Two world wars in one century are impossible—it cannot happen.” They would not face the facts, and when one man warned them, they said, “This man is a warmonger.” They dismissed him out of prejudice—they would not think. He was trying to get them to think, but they would not. Here is the great message of the Gospel—you are called upon to think.

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Authentic Christianity, 1st U.S. ed., (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000), 295.

I came across this old quote from Dr. Piper about TV. I wonder what could also be said about the things reading blogs does to people today? Certainly some of these observations apply equally. Perhaps we could add to this list becoming cynical and argumentative. Having said that, if God is gracious to us, I think those of us who are bloggers do realize at some point the folly of our ways and find that as we blog more and more, the blog wars attract us less and less. Anyway, here is John Piper on the subject of television:

“I know that in my preaching I am addressing a visually oriented and TV influenced people. I know that 98% of you have televisions, and in 1971 the average adult in America watched 23 hours a week. I believe John Stott is right in his new book on preaching when he says that lengthy exposure to television tends to produce physical laziness, intellectual flabbiness, emotional exhaustion, psychological confusion, and moral disorientation. What this means for us preachers (especially me) is that we must improve our ability to communicate effectively and hold attention with no antics, no stringed orchestras, no violence, and no sex. But it does not mean that we can abandon our calling to preach the whole counsel of God. And therefore it should be expected that preaching will sometimes be the most demanding thing you hear all week. I can’t see how it would be otherwise, unless I make easy what the apostles couldn’t.”

John Piper, Grow in Grace and in the Knowledge of Our Lord, June 20, 1982. (Available electronically from Logos Bible Software.)