The Divine Doctor

For the last few years, some of the world’s most interesting Mormon theology has been playing out in front of sci-fi geeks on laptops and television screens. Unbeknownst to nearly everyone, the writers and actors of one of my favorite shows have created a touching and compelling but still critical portrayal of Mormonism’s distinctive understanding of God.

I’m referring, of course, to Doctor Who.

For those of you who don’t share my love of fantasy, the BBC’s Doctor Who is among the longest-running programs on television, having aired its first episode the day after President Kennedy was assassinated. Fantasy author Neil Gaiman sums up its basic premise like this:

[T]here’s a blue box. It’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It can go anywhere in time and space and sometimes even where it’s meant to go. And when it turns up, there’s a bloke in it called The Doctor and there will be stuff wrong and he will do his best to sort it out and he will probably succeed ’cause he’s awesome.

But Gaiman’s “awesome” doesn’t do the Doctor justice. Really, he’s divine, a demigod at least. He speaks every language of every species (even “baby”),[1] understands every technology, human or alien, and can often invent his own on the spot. He has been present at every important moment of human history, from the Stone Age to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius; from the London Blitz, repeatedly, to humanity’s last futile struggle to survive the heat death of the universe. From the perspective of the characters he meets, he simply pops up out of nowhere to save the day, and since the science behind his tricks and gizmos is rarely coherent enough to explain with a straight face,[2] his intervention remains simply miraculous. Nearly every Doctor Who plot is just a long deus ex machina—or more precisely, a god from the time machine.

The Doctor’s godlike nature has not been lost on the series’ writers, who have occasionally flirted with theology for years. But when head writer Steven Moffat took the helm in 2010, flirtation became marriage, or at least cohabitation.

Moffat announced his theological intentions with the beginning of his very first episode in charge. As the Doctor hurtles through the sky in a time machine out of control, a little girl kneels by her bedside. She’s scared of a crack in her wall—she hears voices through it—so she prays. To Santa Claus. “Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It’s Easter now, so I hope I didn’t wake you . . . .” She asks him to send someone to fix the crack, and at that moment the Doctor crash lands in her front yard. One brilliant hour of television later, Santa is forgotten, the crack is fixed, the world is saved from aliens, and Amy Pond has a new God to pray to.

But what kind of God is the Doctor?

The most common Christian understanding of God insists that God is “that being, greater than which cannot be conceived.”[3] He must therefore be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, all-loving and perfectly good. He is immutable, since (the Platonic argument goes) being is greater than becoming. He exists necessarily—that is, it is impossible for him not to exist—while everything else exists contingently, dependent on his will. He must therefore be perfectly simple, without parts, since if he were made of parts God’s parts would be prior to God, which is impossible if God is the root of all being. From perfect simplicity it follows that God must be incorporeal, since a body has parts; from immutability it follows that God must be impassible. “Impassibility” means he must be unaffected by our joys and sorrows, since to be affected is to change.[4]

Perhaps most importantly, traditional Christian theologians insist that God is so great as to be beyond human comprehension, such that it is impossible to know him directly. When we call God father or creator or savior or friend, we do not actually speak of God as he is but of his effects on the world. In this view, the only things theology can say about God directly are negative, telling us what God is not, cutting down idols so that we can bask in the unknowable mystery of what God really is.

It would be difficult for a monotheistic religion to reject this theology more radically than Mormonism does. To Mormons, God exists necessarily, but so does the universe and in some sense so do we. Mormons call God all-powerful, but we cannot mean “omnipotent” in the traditional sense, as our scripture explicitly names things that God cannot do. He cannot create out of nothing, and he cannot make people truly happy without allowing them to choose evil and misery instead. Whereas traditional Christianity insists that God cannot change, traditional Mormonism teaches that “as man is, God once was” (though that idea plays little role in the religion today). And whereas traditional Christianity worships God’s impassibility, Mormons worship a “weeping God,” one deeply hurt by our sins and moved by our joys and sorrows.

As for God’s mystery, Mormons can hardly imagine it. To us, God is literally the father of each individual person’s spirit, and each person is spiritually a member of God’s species. Mormons read that humanity was created in the image of God, and we conclude that God has flesh and bones, hair, a mouth, ten fingers and ten toes. As Harold Bloom has written, the God of Joseph Smith is much like the God of the early Old Testament, “the Yahweh who closes Noah’s ark with his own hands, descends to make on-the-ground inspections of Babel and Sodom, and who picnics with two angels under Abram’s terebinth trees.” Or, I might add, like the Doctor, joking with Amy while he answers her prayer and puts his ear to the crack in her wall.

How thrilling it is to know such a God! And how terrifying. With the world saved, the Doctor whisks Amy away to explore the glories of the universe and help him answer other people’s prayers. The Doctor begins to rely on her, and her choices really begin to matter. Real triumph becomes possible, and real catastrophe. The Doctor saves her countless times, of course, but sometimes she saves him, and he often relies on her to save others. What if she fails? Again and again she faces a test: will she trust the Doctor?[5] Again and again she does, and it seems her trust is always rewarded. And as she trusts him more, she comes to know him, and it changes her forever. All of the Doctor’s companions leave after a time, but none of them I’ve seen ever lose their devotion to him.[6]

But is devotion to the Doctor justified?

I’ll drop the metaphor: is Mormons’ devotion to God justified?

We believe God is morally perfect. But our traditional Christian critics would ask, if he’s not immutable, how can we know he won’t stop being morally perfect? What’s to prevent him from growing proud, as the Doctor once did, and deciding in hubris to break his own laws?

We believe God is all-powerful. But our critics wonder, if we believe there are things even an all-powerful being may not do, how can we be sure God will be able to save us? When Amy’s fiancé dies and she begs the Doctor to save him, he tells her he can’t:

“Save him. You save everyone. You always do. That’s what you do.”

“Not always. I’m sorry.”

“Then what is the point of you?”

The Doctor has no answer. If we believe there are things God can’t do, how do Mormons know we won’t find ourselves having this conversation with him in our hour of need?

Perhaps the most frightening question is this: with the Mormon understanding of God, how do we know that life has meaning? The traditional Christian can point to God as the metaphysical foundation of all reality, the root of all meaning, and say that to commune with the divine cannot possibly be meaningless. But if God did not create the universe out of nothing, if he must cope with its limitations in some way like we do, can he be our metaphysical anchor? How do we know that he himself doesn’t sometimes doubt whether it all means anything? The Doctor does, in his darker moments, and when he tells a child that growing up will mean “mortgage repayments, the nine to five, a persistent nagging sense of spiritual emptiness,” we know the emptiness nags him, too. If even God can doubt whether it all means anything, how do we know that the whole of reality isn’t just a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”?

There are theological answers to these questions, and by and large I find them persuasive. We believe God is powerful enough to keep all his promises, that moral perfection is necessary to his omnipotence, and so on. But Doctor Who portrays Mormons’ better answer, an answer not theological but personal. By relying on God day by day and experiencing him in our lives, we come to know him, to “see him as he is.” And knowing God, we say with Amy:

I trust the Doctor.