I just watched “Journey’s End”, the season finale of Doctor Who. This post contains spoilers. It also explores the Bible and theology in light of this episode of Doctor Who that you may find disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.
Loren Rosson is of course right that there were ad hoc resolutions to issues, unconvincing waves of magic technobabble that made problems resolve themselves. But that just means it was Doctor Who we were watching. The show has always tied itself up into temporal paradoxes that could only be resolved in unsatisfying ways. Whether that excuses this aspect of the show I won’t say. But I’d like to look beyond storyline flaws (which one can find anywhere, even in the Bible, if one is looking for them) and try to reflect on the story this two-part episode told.
The story was akin to the story of the Flood. But the Biblical flood story is just one example of a Biblical narrative that tied itself up in knots that it couldn’t disentangle in a satisfactory way. The earlier flood story, found in one version in the Gilgamesh epic, was not without problems. Gods of great power who nonetheless rely on humans for food. Gods who can’t find a better solution to the problem of human noise problem than extermination.
But when an ancient Israelite author tried to co-opt that story (which was too familiar and could not simply be discarded) into monotheism, it created the ultimate theological conundrum. How does one account for a single God both destroying the world and saving humanity? So it was that the traditions that stem from ancient Israel’s ended up with a God whose love and severity seemed impossible to balance, a God who was both Doctor and Dalek. A God who eventually is portrayed as judging humans for sacrificing their children, but earlier (in the Flood story) was willing to sacrifice his own children, his own creations, for the sake of a moral abstraction. Thankfully, somehow, without realizing it, most of us who cherish the Bible have managed to strive for an ideal of parenthood that excels that in this particular story.
The flood story, in both the Gilgamesh Epic and in the book of Genesis, is about an undoing of creation. In ancient Israel’s dominant conception at the time Genesis was put into something like its present form, the world was created from a watery chaos, and the flood reverted creation to that initial state, “formless and void”. The “reality bomb” in the Doctor Who episode “Journey’s End” had a similar effect, breaking apart the bonds that hold reality together, at the level of atoms, but in essence telling the same sort of story in contemporary scientific terms.
I wonder whether the Doctor Who story makes more sense than the Genesis story, and whether we can ever hope to come up with a better one than either of these two. In Doctor Who, the Doctor and his friends fight to preserve the universe, while Davros and the Daleks want to destroy it and leave only themselves. The part of the Daleks is more akin to the deity depicted in the Genesis flood story, while the Doctor is more like Abraham, pleading for Sodom and Gomorrah, rejecting the option of an “Osterhagen Key” that decides that ripping apart a planet, or a universe, is better than letting life continue to exist even with all the pain, suffering and death that is a part of it. Yet if we value existence itself, we still confront paradoxes, since it is the universe that has given rise to both those that value it for its own sake, and those that would rather wipe it out altogether than share it with those different than themselves.
The flood story was supposed to reinforce ethical monotheism, but the more we reflect on it, the more its deluge wipes away such earlier ways of thinking and leads us on to new insights and still greater mysteries.
The theological aspects of this episode are not finished, however. For the Doctor becomes “Trinitarian”, almost regenerating, then directing the extra energy into his severed hand, which then becomes a Doctor who is part human and a Donna who is part Doctor. We thus have two variations on the notion of Christ, the incarnational model and the apotheosis or exaltationist model.
Donna’s case shows what is wrong, not necessarily with either model, but with the idea of a person becoming God or God becoming a person in anything like the manner much of popular Christianity imagines it. We end up with an infinite mind in a finite person. Just calling it a mystery doesn’t help. If we were to place even the mind of the most advanced life form we can imagine inhabiting our universe into a human being, it would either burn the human out or be limited by its new host. The notion of a God-Man has always faced problems, and we must posit either a kenosis, or a Nestorian-type separation, or something. To simply state that there is neither separation nor confusion is to cause confusion, not only in the creed but in our minds.
And so we find this episode revealing to us one of the deepest truths, one of the darkest secrets. We do not know. The mystery of God, of existence, of why we are here, has not been given a definitive answer, either dropped from heaven or issuing forth from human minds, hearts and souls. We remain with uncertainty, about the past and about the future.
And so we turn ourselves to smaller mysteries that we may one day be able to answer. For instance, will what happened in this episode count as one of the Doctor’s regenerations? Does his not using all the regeneration energy this time cause the anomaly that occurs between his twelfth and final regenerations? Will the “Doctor” who left with Rose be at all connected with that?
In the end, we are left with the Doctor – a smaller, more manageable deity that we can ponder. He is quite human, for a time lord, but for precisely that reason we do not expect him to be perfect. We can accept him as benevolent, and yet (as Davros dies accusing him) at the same time “Destroyer of Worlds“.
Has the time come to take a more “Hindu” approach to Christianity, and resign ourselves to an ultimate, unspeakable mystery, and to human manifestations thereof that we do not pretend have the perfection of the ultimate? Is it time to let the flood carry away the notion that any concept we might come up with of the divine would ever be truly good, any more than we ourselves are good?
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