We Are the Perpetual Resistance Movement: A Review of COMPETING SPECTACLES by Tony Reinke
A great book by one of my favorite authors.
As we discussed purity and parenting during a seminary class, Rob raised his hand from the back of the room. Our professor called on him. Rob said, “More than I want my daughter to not wear clothing that draws attention to her body, I want my daughter to want to not wear clothing that draws attention to her body. I want her to want the right things, not just do them.”
It was a formative moment in not only my seminary education but in my Christian maturation. Rob was on to something, and I wanted to be on to it too.
Tony Reinke’s new book Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in a Media Age is a book to help us not only look at our smartphones less, but a book to help us want to look at them less by giving us something better to behold.
Competing Spectacles is a solid sequel to his book 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You (2017). In a culture of “viral moments competing for our attention,” Reinke explores how we can not only survive spiritually but even thrive (p. 13). “Few of us,” he writes, “have reckoned with the consequences of this tele-visual culture on our attention, our volition, our empathy, and our self-identity” (p. 33). But Reinke has reckoned with the consequences, and he relays them well—not in an alarmist, fear-mongering way but as a concerned friend and father.
Competing Spectacles has an uncommon structure. It’s one long essay broken into 33 mini-sections, which are separated into two parts, “The Age of the Spectacle” and “The Spectacle.” This structure might catch a few readers off guard, but he’s such a gifted writer that a 34,000-word essay isn’t as imposing as it might sound. Reinke is senior writer for Desiring God and author of several other books, The Joy Project (2018), John Newton on the Christian Life (2015), and Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books (2011). I’ve only done this for a few authors, but I make it a point to read (and in Reinke’s case, write reviews of) all his books.
“Spectacle” can mean different things. Spectacles are something we wear to help us see. But spectacles can also be what we see. This is the way Reinke uses spectacles throughout the book, spectacles as events. So, for example, each year the Super Bowl is a spectacle. The recent box-office hit Avengers: Endgame is a spectacle. The 2016 presidential election is a spectacle—actually the 2016 election had lots and lots of spectacles to it, something Reinke explores extensively in several sections of the book (especially “§9. Politics as Spectacle,” pp. 39–44).
But a local church worship service is also, by this definition, a spectacle. It’s a different spectacle, a smaller, less sexy spectacle than the latest Hollywood blockbuster or Adam Levine half-naked at half-time, but the gathering of the people of God is a spectacle nonetheless.
Competing Spectacles has tons of crispy writing, the kind of writing prevalent in Reinke’s other books. Just to give you a taste, he writes of the way “we never stop hungering for the Turkish delight-sized bites of digital scandal” (p. 56) and how the spectacle industry is a “gatling gun firing at us new media modules nonstop” (p. 150). That’s good writing! My favorite quote comes during his discussion of the spectacle of the local church. It’s a long quote, but read it slowly, perhaps even out loud.
Matched to the multi-million dollar CGI spectacles of Hollywood, the church’s interior spectacles seem dull. But they are beautiful and profound. Each week the local church reenacts the same things—Bible preaching, the Lord’s Table, water baptism—all of them faith-based, repeated, microspectacles (unlike the sight-based and unrepeated, expiring spectacles of the world). These church ordinances are weighted with cosmic influence. In Colossians and Ephesians, Paul is careful to show how the gospel-driven love and unity of local churches is a spectacle of the victory of Christ to the powers and principalities who seek to destroy God’s created order. The church is the perpetual resistance movement. And from generation to generation, she displays a spectacle of God’s victory to his cosmic foes, repeatedly striking those enemies with déjà vu of their defeat at the cross. (p. 101)
A few weeks ago, with as much passion as I could muster, I read this quote to our church. I might as well have been William Wallace on horseback with blue warpaint. “They may take our lives, but we are the perpetual resistance movement!”
For the first time in our 20-year church’s history, we enjoyed preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper in the same worship service. We preach each week and have regular communion services, but we’ve always done our baptisms offsite in special services. We did this, in part, to mark baptisms off as special—they got their own service. But performing baptisms at another time than Sunday morning and in another location than our church building also meant we disconnected baptisms from the spectacle of a regular Sunday. Yet there is nothing, Reinke implies, regular about it at all. “From generation to generation, [local churches display] the spectacle of God’s victory to his cosmic foes.”
I want Christians to not only come to church each week but to want to come to church. And a big part of wanting to come to church regularly involves coming alive to the extraordinary reality of what happens on every ordinary Sunday in every ordinary local church.
If the local church is to become precious to us, another spectacle—the greatest spectacle—must first become precious to us: the spectacle of the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross is the heartbeat of Reinke’s book; it’s the central spectacle, both the theological center of the book and the geographic center of the book (e.g., the special attention the cross receives in section 17). He writes,
Into the spectacle-loving world, with all of its spectacle makers and spectacle-making industries, came the grandest Spectacle ever devised in the mind of God and brought about in world history—the cross of Christ. It is the hinge of history, the point of contact between BC and AD, where all time collides, where all human spectacles meet one unsurpassed, cosmic, divine spectacle. (p. 79)
Reinke’s book is not a book to get you to simply look at your phone less or watch media with a more critical eye. Competing Spectacles is a book to stoke your desire to want to behold something more than your screens; it’s a book, as the subtitle says, to help us treasure Christ in our media age. Channeling the famous quote by puritan Thomas Chalmers, Reinke writes, “The Christian’s battle in this media age can be won only by the expulsive power of a superior Spectacle” (p. 145).
* Photo by Barbara Provenzano on Unsplash
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12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You by Tony Reinke (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)
How is your phone changing you? I know it’s changing me.
I see it at stoplights. I see it during timeouts at my daughter’s basketball games. And I even see it when I stand in the back of the sanctuary during church services. When there’s a lull in the action, however brief, smartphones appear, and eyes are toward them.
But why must we check them so often? Is it because smartphones are such great tools for human flourishing or because they are evil taskmasters that make us less human with each use?
This is the dilemma with which Tony Reinke opens his book, and if you are like most people, the dilemma isn’t theoretical. Your phone is changing you. It’s certainly changing me. How could it be otherwise when we apparently check our smartphones every 4.3 minutes of our waking lives (p. 16)?
Reinke is the author of several books, as well as the host of the popular Ask Pastor John podcast and a senior staff writer for Desiring God. He is well suited to write this book for at least two reasons. First, Reinke feels the tension between the blessings and curses of technology more acutely than most. As a professional producer of online content, he must navigate reaching readers without succumbing to the click-bait, Buzzfeed-type posts that dominate web culture (to which, by the way, DG doesn’t capitulate).
Second, Reinke is the perfect person to shine the glare from our screens back into our eyes, not only because he is a competent researcher and a nimble wordsmith, but because he is also a God-centered theologian. And this trait is necessary because, as he points out, “conversations about our smartphones often do not raise new questions; they return us to perennial questions every generation has been forced to ask” (p. 24). And it’s this point about how new technology always brings us back to the perennial questions—questions about what it means to be creature not Creator; about beauty vs. efficiency; about loving God and neighbor—which makes this book so insightful.
Consider for just a moment our longing for approval (covered especially in chapters 3 and 6). Each generation must wrestle with this. The lore of Narcissus in Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection, certainly predates the 2004 birth of Facebook. Today, perhaps, there are just more metrics to measure our beauty (likes, retweets, followers, pins, subscribers, and so on). And if you let it, your smartphone will send you push notifications for each of these so that when you wake up in the morning, you can glance at your phone to find out how many others love your face too. “When we talk about ‘smartphone addiction,’” writes Reinke, “often what we are talking about is the addiction of looking at ourselves” (p. 110).
The chapters of the book include topics such as the way we become addicted to distractions, how we ignore people, crave immediate approval, get lonely, become comfortable in secret vices, fear missing out, and half a dozen other changes our phones are doing to us. Additionally, readers will find the foreword by John Piper something that not only recommends the book to us, but also begins to engage with the topics at hand, including several of the ways technology has changed in his lifetime. For example, Piper bought his first computer in 1984. It was an IBM PC with 256K of RAM, which he bought for $1,995. A quick internet search (and yes, I did it on my phone) tells me this would be nearly $5,000 in today’s dollars!
If there were something to critique about the book, maybe it would be the structure. The title and layout of the book (12 Ways …) could make the book seem like one giant list-article, or listicle as they’re called. Listicles tend to be the lowest common denominator of online content. I say this, by the way, as the author of several listicles. But this criticism, in my opinion, doesn’t hold. The depth of Reinke’s insights and his biblical fidelity resist formulaic chapters.
One final comment. I found the book disturbing. But not because the problems created by smartphones are merely “out there” in culture or even in the church. Rather, I’m disturbed because the problems are “in here.” Despite all the blessings of smartphones (connection to others, wealth of information, and Bible apps galore), I still see the negative impact in my heart and habits. Too often my children compete with a screen for their dad’s attention. Being confronted with this change was disturbing, but it’s the good kind of confrontation, the kind that when paired with repentance of sin and faith in the gospel, leads to the good kind of change.
* This book review originally appeared in the theological journal Themelios.
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