We or an Angel from Heaven

“Every day it’s harder to remember what’s real any more … but it’s all right, because I know he has a plan, and one day soon, he’s going to come back and save us all.”

Doctor Who S10 E8, ‘The Lie of the Land’ (2017)

 

The picture works on two levels: first, it’s someone’s artistic impression of the sort of angel to which my title refers; and second, it looks plausibly a bit like the Weeping Angels who show up in Doctor Who from time to time.

One of the (many and various) things I love about Doctor Who – yes, sorry, I’m back on that subject again, and actually, come to mention it, I’m not sorry at all – is the way it plays with genre. Overall, granted, we have what is very clearly a sci-fi drama, but individual episodes can and often do disguise themselves as belonging to other genres, or different sub-genres within sci-fi, extraordinarily well. 2007’s Voyage of the Damned was a disaster film; 2008’s The Unicorn and the Wasp was a 1920s murder mystery; 2012’s The Angels Take Manhattan was a teary romance; last year’s Christmas special The Return of Doctor Mysterio was a superhero story; and the episode that aired yesterday evening – I write this on Sunday the fourth of June 2017 – was a textbook example of dystopian fiction. I suggest you read no further if spoilers pertaining to it are likely to cause you distress. ¹

The episode opens on an earth that has been taken over by a bunch of red-robed walking corpses from some unspecified alien planet. They’re called the Monks and they claim to have been around as long as humanity has, guiding and defending it in all peace and justice. They use a special psychic transmitter to brainwash everyone into believing their version of history, and punish anyone who challenges it with internment in labour camps or with death. All our favourite features of the classic dystopia are present: armed guards raiding houses to cart off suspected dissidents in sinister vans; regular spot checks on identity papers; a restriction of permitted clothing to dull, shapeless, monochrome garments; ubiquitous propaganda videos reminding everyone how absolutely fine and dandy everything is under the all-praiseworthy System and encouraging each to betray to the state any neighbour behaving suspiciously; you know the sort of thing.

Bill, this series’ primary companion, is a reluctant citizen of this new world order, trying amidst it to cling onto the truth that the Monks have really only been around for a few months, and to her faith that the Doctor has, as he so consistently does, a plan to save the world which he will shortly implement. Eventually she manages to get herself into the same room as the Doctor (the Monks have incarcerated him on an old prison hulk) and is suitably overjoyed at the fact – until the Doctor turns round and says that he’s changed his mind and joined the Monks. Their style of government may not be ideal, he admits, but it’s better than what humans would get up to if left to their own devices. Bill gives him an opportunity to let her know subtly that he’s lying as part of some grander plan, and he explicitly rejects it. She’s heartbroken – but more so than that, she’s absolutely livid: “Do you have any idea how hard the past few months have been? It would have been so easy just to give in and believe their lies, but I didn’t; I fought against it, for you, for when you came back, and now you’re saying you’ve joined them, you’re helping them?” She grabs a gun from the nearest of the guards the Doctor called when she arrived. She pauses to make absolutely sure he’s serious, and then shoots him. Several times.

It turns out, after all that, that the Doctor hadn’t actually joined the Monks, that he was testing Bill to see whether she had been at all corrupted by their brainwashing (the gun was loaded with blanks) – and she, of course, has passed that test with flying colours. Despite the suffocating pressure of the past few months to renounce what she knows is true, and now this further devastating blow of the Doctor’s betrayal, she has refused to give in and to accept what is wrong and untruthful and immoral, even though approval of it is coming out of the mouth of the person she trusts most in the world. It doesn’t matter who it is that speaks the lie; a lie it remains, and she will not tolerate it.

Now, the society we live in might not fit the classic dystopia model quite as well as the one Bill was living in (and I have to say I’m enormously glad of the fact), but there are some parallels that I’d say can be fairly reasonably drawn between her experience in that world and the Christian’s in this one. Like her, we know the truth, but are, at the hand of our society, constantly bombarded by lies that contradict it, to the point where it becomes very easy and very tempting simply to stop holding onto the truth and assent to those lies. Like her, we believe that there is someone who is able and willing to bring an end to what’s wrong with the world – he has a plan, and one day soon he’s going to come back – and we hope and long for the day when he will do that. And like her, adelphoi, we must not let go of what we know is true. Even if the person telling us otherwise is our most trusted friend. Even if the person telling us otherwise is the individual we admire most in the world. Even if the person telling us otherwise is the reason we started believing that truth in the first place.

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

That’s Paul writing to the followers of Jesus in Galatia, and he’s pulling no punches.² If anyone – anyone – tries to get the Galatian believers to relax their grip on the true version of the gospel, Paul is doubly determined that such an individual should be accursed. Incidentally, ‘accursed’ there is Greek ἀνάθεμα (anáthema), literally a thing dedicated (or even more literally a thing laid upon, and therefore hence an offering laid upon an altar) but specifically in the sense of being dedicated to evil or destruction. Remember the book of Joshua, and the way God orders the Israelites to totally annihilate certain of the cities of Canaan, killing everything that breathes? The Hebrew root used for that kind of dedication to destruction, חרם (ḥrm) was rendered in Greek translation as ἀνάθεμα and related terms.³ That’s the kind of fate these verses are wishing upon anyone who offers alternative facts on the matter of the gospel.

Anyone. Even if that’s one of the apostles, or indeed Paul himself. Even if the heavens part and a shining figure descends declaring himself to be a messenger of God. Even if this is someone we trust to be on the side of truth and right and goodness as absolutely as Bill trusted the Doctor. If what someone is saying does not match up with what we fundamentally know to be true, we must not accept it, whoever said someone is. We must not accept it, even if it’s what the entire rest of the world seems to be saying, and it would be so easy just to give in and believe their lies. We must not accept it, even if the consequences if we don’t could be dangerous or distressing in ways we can’t anticipate.

That’s not to advocate pig-headedness. The gospel is not the same thing as every tiny detail of the theology to which I subscribe at this present moment, and if we won’t give others a fair hearing on theological matters, how are they supposed to do their iron-on-iron job of building us up more fully into the image of Christ? Nobody has everything right, and the shorter the time since we came to Christ, the less we most probably understand. So it’s useful to listen to different viewpoints in order to assess whether they’re actually more consistent with the gospel than the ones we hold at the moment. But that, fundamentally, is the method whereby we are to assess them: do these ideas match up with the gospel, with the core truth by which we came to salvation? If not, then we are to give them no further hearing.

Because the one in whom we place our hope, Jesus the Christ, the Lord, who died for our sins and rose for our justification, is coming back, and in that day the lies will be exposed for what they are. Be encouraged, all you beloved in Christ; one day you will be vindicated in having clung to the truth that God gave you grace to see when you were blinded and dead in your sins. Keep the faith. Stand firm. And to him who is able to keep you from falling be glory forever.

Footnotes 

¹ You could always open this link in a new tab and come back to my ramblings once you’ve seen the episode: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08tlkdm/doctor-who-series-10-8-the-lie-of-the-land. Or equally, you could open this link not in a new tab and just watch the episode instead. It’s a pretty good one. 

² Whole chapter so you can check I’m not mishandling this stuff: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians+1&version=ESVUK. 

³ A fact which I ascertained by having a play around on Step Bible, a resource I tend to take any and every opportunity to recommend to people: https://www.stepbible.org/. It’s really intuitive to use (basically stick whatever you’re looking for, be it words, chapters, translations, etc., into the search bar) and you don’t have to be able to read the Biblical languages in order to get a lot of use out of it.