The Same Thing We Do Every Night, Pinky

Pinky:  Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?

Brain:   The same thing we do every night, Pinky: try to take over the world.

Pinky and the Brain opening sequence (1995-1998)

 

I laughed so hard when I first saw this. The joke admittedly loses its flavour a little after one writes an entire blog post based on it.

The entire concept of this post is owed to the above meme. I would credit its creator if I knew who he or she was; as it is, I shall simply have to cast my gratitude into the digital ether and hope nobody sues me for copyright infringement.¹

Pinky and the Brain is one of a number of cartoons of which I only have any awareness because each enjoyed a brief stint as a feature of the after-school CBBC slot on BBC One during my childhood; other highly recommended examples of such cartoons include The Batman, as well as a great personal favourite of mine, W.I.T.C.H.² The premise of Pinky and the Brain, for those of you who, unlike myself, weren’t avid consumers of the whole gamut of analogue children’s broadcasting during the early noughties, is pretty well explained by the programme’s theme song:

They’re Pinky and the Brain.

One is a genius; the other’s insane.

They’re laboratory mice.

Their genes have been spliced.

They’re dinky; they’re Pinky and the Brain.

Before each night is done,

Their plan will be unfurled:

By the dawning of the sun,

They’ll take over the world.

They’re Pinky and the Brain.

Their twilight campaign

Is easy to explain:

To prove their mousey worth,

They’ll overthrow the earth.

They’re Pinky and the Brain.³

And so the plot of every episode revolves around our two rodenterous⁴ heroes making use of the hours of darkness during which the laboratory where they are kept as test subjects is deserted, to hatch some kind of ludicrously elaborate plan for world domination – or rather, the Brain, with determined seriousness, actually doing all the plan-hatching, while Pinky occupies himself with being generally daft and amusing.⁵ The Brain’s strategies have included everything from your standard clone army and various hypnotic devices, to luring the world’s population to a papier-mâché replica (and then taking over the now-abandoned real earth), creating the world’s most emotional film (and then taking over the world while everyone is too sad to stop him), and becoming head councillor at a summer camp for world leaders’ children.⁶

Predictably, however, Pinky and the Brain never actually do manage to take over the world. Like so many cartoons, the programme makes a point of always having everything revert back to normal by the end of the episode, meaning there is always some hitch or hindrance or unforeseen circumstance that brings all the Brain’s best-laid plans crashing down around his abnormally large ears. Granted, he never gives up; every episode begins, even before the theme tune, with a renewal of his commitment to his goal:

“Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?”

“The same thing we do every night, Pinky: try to take over the world.”

Still, we the viewers know, even before the Brain reveals the particulars of today’s dastardly scheme, that said scheme is destined to fail. And that means that, much as I certainly derived a great deal of amusement from the above meme when it appeared on my Facebook newsfeed a while ago, it nevertheless takes on an oddly pessimistic quality upon second consideration. Is the Christian’s daily process of repenting and believing the gospel really so comparable to the Brain’s futile nocturnal endeavours?

I feel I should briefly mention that I don’t ask this question with the intention either of upholding the meme in question as an example of sound doctrine or condemning it as a shameful heresy according to the answer on which I end up settling. I get that the meme is just a meme and it’s funny and that’s the point of it. Still, that doesn’t prevent it from acting as a stimulus towards a discussion worth having, as I think this one is.

Significantly, the reason the Brain tries to take over the world every night is because he didn’t manage to take over it the previous night. If there was ever an occasion on which he actually pulled off one of his ridiculous plans and successfully took over the world, there would be no need to attempt to do so again the following night – unless he had, during the intervening day, been somehow completely usurped and deposited back at square one. Every night, the Brain attempts to gain the same ground; every night, he fails. That’s what necessitates the constant repetition of the same activity.

So what about our constant repetition of the same activity? Is the reason we repent and believe the gospel every day because we didn’t manage to do it successfully yesterday – or because we have, during the intervening period, lost what the process gained us and ended up back at square one? Are we, like the Brain, always trying and failing to gain the same ground?

Can one fail at repenting and believing the gospel?

It certainly feels like it sometimes. When I stare at my Bible for a goodly length of time, but my brain is occupying itself with anything other than pondering the precious truth it reveals; when I’ve forgotten all about the tear-inducingly convicting sermon I heard on Sunday by the time I wake up on Monday morning; when I know I’ve not been living the way God wants, but, even in prayer before him, can’t seem to generate any appropriate sort of horror or disgust at the fact at all, it certainly feels like it. I draw a session of attempted meditation to a close and think, well, that didn’t really achieve what I wanted it to. I’ll try again tomorrow. And maybe then it’ll work.

All of which just goes to show that I haven’t properly understood what repenting and believing the gospel is actually about.

The big way in which my repeated process of repenting and believing the gospel differs from the Brain’s repeated process of trying to take over the world, is that while the latter represents a striving towards a goal that has not yet been achieved, the former represents a response to a goal – my righteousness and ability to relate to God – that has already been achieved, not to mention permanently guaranteed. Jesus died and rose to establish that for me. Left to my own devices, I would indeed be even more firmly doomed to failure by my inherent sinfulness than the Brain is by the cyclical structure of the programme in which he features, but the entire point of the gospel is that I’m not left to my own devices.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience – among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. – Ephesians 2:1-6⁷

My sinfulness rendered me so helpless as to be genuinely (spiritually) dead, but God – not because I warranted it, but because his generosity goes beyond all expectation and reasonableness – made me alive, and has already seated me in heavenly glory as surely as he has seated Christ Jesus in whom my whole righteousness is found. And so the real way in which I fail at repenting and believing the gospel isn’t manifest in the kinds of distracted-from-the-Bible, forgetful-of-teaching, lacking-in-real-conviction scenarios I outlined above. These faults and shortcomings are predictable symptoms of the fact that my natural self has an all-consuming inclination towards rebellion against God. The real failure to repent and believe the gospel is when I try to induce my own mini-epiphanies at obscure portions of scripture, or to make myself more mindful of Sunday’s sermon by berating my own forgetfulness, or to persuade my own evil thoughts to discern and recoil at the very evil within them – all without recognising that it’s only God who can change me, in line with the righteousness he has already granted me, and asking for him to do so. It’s no good simply trying to repent and believe the gospel in a more effective manner, like the Brain hatching a new scheme; the gospel’s perfect effectiveness has already been guaranteed, and that certainly wasn’t achieved at my end of the process.

Without God, each of us is entirely helpless, and that’s why we need to be constantly renewing our reliance on him. We doom ourselves to failure only when we don’t recognise that, outside the righteousness given us in Christ, we’re doomed to failure. We need to be constantly repenting and believing the gospel not because we need to make constant fresh attempts to achieve a goal we haven’t yet reached, but because our goal has already been achieved on our behalf and we need to be constantly relying on him who achieved it.

Gee, what do you want to do tonight?

The same thing we do every night: repent and believe the gospel.

Footnotes

¹ I can at least say that I encountered the meme on the Reformed Humor Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/reformedhumor/.

² Two series were made, both of which are available for free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZCdw_RbiNA&list=PL7D52F46060974C55. That said, I did have some awareness of the W.I.T.C.H. universe before the cartoon appeared on CBBC through the associated magazine, whose major feature was a monthly instalment of the original Italian comic book on which the TV series was based. Some very kind people have archived many of the comics online: http://z8.invisionfree.com/WITCH_comics/index.php?showtopic=2.

³ Or if you’d like the full audiovisual experience, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBkT19uH2RQ.

⁴ Not, I confess, a real word – but I maintain that it, or some kind of equivalent, should be.

⁵ A particularly fun running joke is “Are you pondering what I’m pondering?”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-xrnIXQ3iQ.

⁶ As I found out from the relevant Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pinky_and_the_Brain_episodes. Hey, it was a long time ago that Pinky and the Brain was on BBC One; I might have been able to dredge up memories of a couple of plotlines, but nothing like a proper list of examples.

⁷ What a chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+2&version=ESVUK. The whole of the first few chapters of Ephesians is really just Paul passionately splurging brilliant doxology. It’s fun imagining his scribe trying to keep up.

Thoughts on Power and Truth

“I am the king of France, and the truth is that child is whoever I say he is.”

Reign S2 E1, ‘The Plague’ (2014)

 

A chess king has a certain amount of auctoritas, in that it’s the piece one needs to capture in order to win, but as concerns potestas, it can only move one square at a time, and so it’s not a particularly useful piece in actual gameplay. (The Latin terms feature a few a paragraphs down.)

I tend to feel one knows one’s got rather invested in the events of a television serial when one starts yelling at the screen urging the characters not to do the stupid thing they’re on the brink of doing. This is a point I have reached with the programme Reign, which is a totally unrealistic romp of a period drama following a young Mary, Queen of Scots.¹ For instance, at one stage in the first series, Francis, heir to the French throne and on that count technically Mary’s betrothed – though at this stage it looked very much as if he would be forfeiting both roles as soon as his half-brother Sebastian was officially legitimised to take them on – decided it would be a good idea to sleep with Lola, one of Mary’s ladies-in-waiting. I told them both it was a stupid thing to do, but for some reason these TV characters never seem to pay any attention. Still, I was proved right when Lola became pregnant with Francis’ child, attempted to keep said child a secret (particularly once Francis and Mary ended up getting married after all), almost underwent a primitive abortion procedure (though was persuaded out of it), married a relative stranger (who turned out to be an identity thief) in an attempt to pass the child off as his, and then nearly died in childbirth with none of her friends at her side. Dramatic and entertaining viewing, certainly, but Lola wasn’t exactly having the time of her life. I did tell them both it was a stupid idea.

Francis – by this point king following his father’s death – was eventually informed that he was the father of Lola’s child, and was thereupon confronted with a choice: either he could claim the child as his own, endowing him with a title and land, and Lola with the respected, if not exactly ideal, status of king’s mistress; or he could not claim him, and leave Lola to tell whichever lie she felt was most appropriate about her son’s parentage. The first option would, significantly, guarantee some kind of security for Lola and the baby, as well as facilitating the building of Francis’ own relationship with his son; the second would allow Lola more freedom, for instance to pursue another marriage, and lessen tension with Mary, who had not yet had any children and so whose position was unavoidably threatened by the existence of a son of Francis by another mother, even leaving aside any emotional concerns. A dilemma, clearly, but all the more so because of Francis’ status. He was king; his word was law; whatever he chose to say about this child would define his whole identity, case closed.

However rife with totally implausible (and extremely enjoyable) plotlines Reign may be, that kind of ruler’s power to make a lie the official truth is anything but confined to the realms of fiction. Examples can be plucked from all over the world and the whole length of human history: the attempted expunging of the pharaoh Hatshepsut from all official records;² the claim of Incan leader Pachacuti that the very rocks fought on his behalf;³ the propaganda disseminated by governments on all sides during both world wars.⁴ I’m quite sure you can think of plenty more examples of your own.

But the truth always gets out, doesn’t it? Despite the best efforts of posterity, we know a fair bit about Hatshepsut; I suspect very few of us are convinced by Pachacuti’s rocks-as-soldiers claim; and these days, wartime propaganda is recognised as exactly that, propaganda. Rulers might be able to decree something to be the case – they might even be able to convince the vast majority of their subjects of it – but that doesn’t amount to an ability to make it actually so. And likewise, back in the world of Reign, even if Francis had refused to claim Lola’s child as his own, he couldn’t have altered reality in order to make himself genuinely not the father.

Ancient Latin-speakers used to make a distinction between two kinds of power: auctoritas, that is, official political authority, and potestas, that is, the actual capability and resources necessary to get the job done. If you’re not totally appalled at the notion of explaining Latin terms using other Latin terms, we might equate auctoritas with power de jure, and potestas with power de facto. Although there is, admittedly, a little more nuance to the terms than that – they typically tended to be used to contrast the (positive) formal dominion of the elite with the (negative) unruly strength of the populus at large – I’d say they’re broadly similar to what we’re talking about here.⁵ Rulers like Francis and Pachacuti and those various wartime governments might have had total auctoritas over their subjects, but auctoritas doesn’t necessarily amount to potestas – and there are some things, like causing rocks to fight battles, or altering a child’s biological parentage, that no human being has the necessary potestas to achieve.

Now with God, things are rather different. Have a look at Genesis 1:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light.⁶

I won’t quote the whole chapter, but do give the rest of it a scan. There’s a pretty distinct pattern, the first example of which I put in bold above. God said, “Let such-and-such be the case”, and such-and-such was so.⁷ This is the very first aspect of himself that God wants to get across to us when we pick up a Bible; this is our primary introduction to the king of the universe: he is a king whose power is such that his decrees don’t just make theoretical legal changes, but actually alter reality so that it conforms to them. What God says, goes, no exceptions whatsoever.

The same point is made in the book of Romans: God … calls into existence the things that do not exist. Or, as the King James Version would have it, God … calleth those things which be not as though they were.⁸ In other words, God’s power is so great, his will so completely irresistible, that he can issue a command to something that doesn’t actually exist yet, and said something will start existing simply in order to follow that command. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth – and all he had to do was order them to exist. Unlike with human rulers, there is no disparity between God’s auctoritas and his potestas; they are seamlessly tied together. Both are absolute.

And this is why God is truth. Francis could, through his auctoritas, have decreed it so that Lola’s child was legally not his; he could have perpetuated the lie using every resource at his disposal, every ounce of the limited potestas he could muster, but a lie it would nevertheless have remained. When God decrees something to be the case, on the other hand, that thing is immediately obliged to start being so. It cannot be a lie, because it cannot resist the absolute power – auctoritas and potestas together – of God who has declared it to be true.

It’s no surprise the Bible gives this truth about God prime position, because it colours the way we read everything else in scripture. Everything God affirms is bound to be so, not even just because God knows everything and is faithful to keep his promises, but because his very affirming it means it is literally impossible for it not to be so. That’s the kind of power we’re dealing with when we open our Bibles. I’m ashamed to say I often drift into thinking rather less of God’s word than that.

But what great comfort there is – not vague, numbing, fluffy-bunny-slippers-type comfort, but real, solid, dependable comfort rooted in unshakeable certainty – in the knowledge that it’s with that same power that God affirms our status before him, if we’re trusting in Jesus.

So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. – Galatians 4:7

God, the king of the universe, claims me as his own, gives me the status of a son in his family, establishes his relationship with me, endows me with an imperishable inheritance, guarantees my security forever – and because he has decreed it, it is impossible for it not to be so.⁹ Whatever he chooses to say about me defines my whole identity, case closed – and not just in some theoretical legal plane but in hard, physical fact. What God says, goes, no exceptions. I need never fear otherwise.

Footnotes

¹ Available on Netflix if you happen to like totally unrealistic romps of period dramas as much as I have discovered I do: https://www.netflix.com/browse.

² The BBC are very happy to tell you all about it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/hatshepsut_01.shtml

³ I’ll admit I got that one from a Horrible Histories song. I would link to it, but the music video appears to have vanished from both YouTube and the CBBC website. How disappointing.

⁴ Apparently, in 1915, the Bryce Commission, set up to investigate various outrages German military were popularly alleged to have committed against Belgians, actually concluded that many of the accusations were accurate: https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/depicting-the-enemy. Amazing what you can learn from a bit of online searching.

⁵ More details are available from kunthra at Transparent Language’s Latin Langauge Blog: http://blogs.transparent.com/latin/the-mobs-of-ancient-rome/.  

⁶ I’ll give you the whole chapter, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+1&version=ESVUK, though if you have a paper Bible about, it’s not exactly a hard chapter to find.

⁷ Minor point, but I think the two are tied even more closely together in the Hebrew: וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר׃ (wayyomer elohīm y’hī or way’hī or); because of the weird way the Hebrew verbal system works, the ‘there was’ is literally the same as the ‘let there be’, its meaning only changed by the ‘and’ stuck on the front of it.

⁸ Do have a look at the whole thing: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+4&version=ESVUK. God’s ability to call things into existence – and, similarly, life out of death – makes so much sense out of Abraham’s faith, which is then used as a model for our own. This stuff really matters.

⁹ I’m currently particularly excited about the doctrine of adoption having recently read J. I. Packer’s Knowing God on a church week away. It’s an extremely good read; I would highly recommend it. As usual, 10ofthose will do you a pretty good deal: https://www.10ofthose.com/products/489/knowing-god/.