Doctor Who, Doctor Schaeffer, and Christianity Today

Every once in a while Christianity Today gets it in their minds to publish something. Worse still, every so often I actually read what they publish, and then I get annoyed when it turns out to be hogwash. I quite understand that Christianity Today is writing for the broader evangelical audience, including (unfortunately) those more liberal elements, so I can’t really complain when they publish things which I think very wrongminded. But it’s when they publish something that is just plain silly that I start scratching my head and wondering how the editors ever let this sort of thing in their magazine.

So, a couple weeks back, they published a piece in the “her.meneutics” (not my doing, don’t blame me) section about the wildly popular English Sci-Fi show Doctor Who. I read it, mostly because I actually like Doctor Who, but I was very disappointed by the article. Fast forward a bit, and I was reading some Francis Shaeffer, when something he said reminded me of that article, so I figured it was time to bust out the old ink and vellum, and here we are.

If you were eagerly anticipating a post in which I nerd out over Doctor Who, I’m afraid this might not be fun for you.

I’m not going to argue that Christians can’t watch or like Doctor Who. It’s fun, and funny, and exciting, and clever, if sometimes downright corny. There are certainly worse things on TV these days, and Doctor Who is relatively benign. But, as with all art, it is the product of a certain worldview and as such it is based on certain presuppositions. If a Christian decides to watch it, fine, but he should do so knowing where the show's writers are coming from, and he can then enjoy that which is fun, and dismiss that which is heathen. What we mustn’t do is pretend that it espouses a Christian worldview when it clearly doesn’t (and I say this as one who has given Charlie Daniels’ Devil Went Down to Georgia a rigorous treatment as theological allegory).

Here’s a quote from the article:

The concept of the show involves Christian symbolism; the series reboot gets referred to as a “resurrection” and each new Doctor an “incarnation.” As the central character, he’s a mysterious and powerful hero who travels through space to earth (and across the universe) to help and save . . . Theologian fans use the Doctor’s stories to contextualize the gospel with small group studies on how the sonic screwdriver is mightier than the sword or how we are both inside and outside of time.

Right. Except it’s not Christian symbolism. These are words which have relevance to Christianity, yes, but in context they are completely divorced from any sort of Christian meaning. Implicit in this paragraph is that the Doctor is portrayed almost as a type of Christ. Now, we have such types in Scripture. Moses and David typify Christ. I will be so generous as to assume that the author is not intending to reduce Christ to “a mysterious and powerful hero who travels through space to earth (and across the universe) to help and save.”  I was going to pass over the sonic screwdriver is mightier than the sword bit, but it’s really bugging me, so I shan’t. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is a phrase coined in 1839 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton for a stage-play, so why exactly we’re adapting it to Doctor Who and designing small group studies around it is frankly beyond me. If Solomon had said it that would be one thing, but alas, he did not. As old Leonidas would say, much to the point, elsewhere.

Also, we’re not “both inside and outside of time.” Like, at all. We’re inside time. God is outside of time. God, the creator, is outside of time, and we, the creation, are in time, where he placed us. Right? Right. What do they teach in these schools!

The real problem here, however, is that the Doctor personally, and the show generally, espouse a cosmology that is very un-Christian. It is naturalistic in its presuppositions and existential in its philosophy. Far from promoting Christian ideas, the thrust of the show’s philosophy is an attempt to take a strictly naturalistic cosmology and somehow derive meaning and value from it.

C.S. Lewis once gave a lecture called Is Theology Poetry? in which he considered the argument that Christianity is merely poetic in the same way that Greek or Norse mythology is, and that this is the attraction to it. In the course of his argument, he also considers the poetic merit of evolutionary naturalism, which he compares favorably to a good Elizabethan tragedy: against all odds, life emerges from the primordial goo, against all odds it develops over millions of years. We see the caveman, mastering fire, striving with the elements and with beasts much stronger than he. We see the emergence of modern man, using brain rather than brawn, subduing nature. But then, the universe runs down, and man is powerless to stop it. After emerging the conqueror against all odds, man finally succumbs, with everything else, to nature.  

Lewis remarks that such a narrative deserves a better treatment than it’s gotten. Doctor Who endeavors to give it just such a treatment. Through the Doctor’s travels, we are shown the beginnings of the universe, human history across the ages, great advanced civilizations, and then, finally, the very end of the universe, as time itself runs out, and the remnants of humanity struggle against the inevitable, seeking to hold out as long as possible before everything breaks down and there is nothing left except darkness and silence and nothingness.

Where do we find meaning in such a futile universe? The nihilist rightly concludes that there can be none. But Doctor Who is crafted around the desire to snatch meaning from the jaws of futility. How? In the chance of it all. In one season Seven episode, the Doctor is trying to talk a young girl out of sacrificing her life, saying:

Hey, do you mind if I tell you a story? One you might not have heard. All the elements in your body were forged many, many millions of years ago in the heart of a far-away star that exploded and died. That explosion scattered those elements across the desolations of deep space. After so, so many millions of years these elements came together to form new stars and new planets. And on and on it went. The elements came together and burst apart forming shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. Until, eventually, they came together to make you. You are unique in the universe. There is only one Mary Galel and there will never be another. Getting rid of that existence isn't a sacrifice, it is a waste!

Meaning is thus to be gleaned from the extraordinary unlikelihood of existence, the temporary nature of life, and the uniqueness of each person. The chance and futility of it all is part of the beauty. Indeed, the writers of Doctor Who have done an admirable job of making their cosmology seem attractive.

The problem is that Doctor Who is fantasy, and the sense of meaning propounded by its philosophy is also fantasy. It lasts just about as long as the music continues to swell. When credits roll and the orchestra clears out, so do the bubbly feelings. Glorying in one’s random uniqueness is all well and good until one is actually standing face to face with the real world, and finds that there is no screwdriver-wielding hero to set things right. Such a random universe is, at its core, futile, and, as the nihilist properly concludes, totally meaningless. “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

Entre Shaeffer. I’m going to quote him at length, but it’s well worth reading the whole quote. If I could write like Shaeffer, I would, and then you wouldn’t have to bother.

The two alternatives are very clear cut. Either there is a personal beginning to everything or one has what the impersonal throws us by chance out of the time sequence. The fact that the second alternative may be veiled by connotation words makes no difference. The words used by Eastern Pantheism; the new theological words such as Tilich’s ‘Ground of Being’; the secular shift from mass to energy or motion, all eventually come back to the impersonal, plus time, plus chance. If this is really the only answer to man’s personality, then personality is no more than an illusion, a kind of sick joke which no amount of semantic juggling will alter. Only some form of mystic jump will allow us to accept that personality comes from impersonality . . . No one has presented an idea, let alone demonstrated it to be feasible, to explain how the impersonal beginning, plus time, plus chance, can give personality. We are distracted by a flourish of endless words, and lo, personality has appeared out of a hat! This is the water rising above its source.  No one in all the history of humanistic rationalistic thought has found a solution. As a result, either the thinker must say man is dead, because personality is a mirage; or else he must hang reason on a hook outside the door and cross the threshold into the leap of faith which is the new level of despair (The God Who is There, 88). 

Got that? Doctor Who presents us with a random, impersonal universe. This presents us with the dilemma outlined by Schaeffer, and the Doctor’s solution is the latter option, to ignore the fact that this system doesn't allow for meaning or rationality or personality, and to continue on as though it did. It is the philosophical equivalent of knocking back half a bottle of Smirnoff and pretending your troubles don’t exist. 

For the Christian, on the other hand, there is an actual basis for meaning. There is an actual source for personality. The Christian is not condemned to the futile exercise of attempting to squeeze purpose out of randomness, for he worships a God of order. The Christian is not subject to futility, for God works all things together for good.

My turn to tell a story. You may have heard it, but it bears repeating: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.