Heresy Bingo: The Witchfinders

Becka:                 As King James has written in his new Bible, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

The Doctor:       In the Old Testament. There’s a twist in the sequel: love thy neighbour.

Doctor Who S13 E8, ‘The Witchfinders’ (2018)

A super cute Thirteenth Doctor drawing for which I am grateful to Triggerpigking at newgrounds.com. Clearly the Doctor knows substantially more about the manufacture of spoon-based devices than she does about basic Christian theology.

A quick disclaimer before we get down to business (spoilers ahead, of course): I did actually enjoy ‘The Witchfinders’ a lot. I mean, the plot kept me guessing, and there were some neat bits of dialogue, and I’m a huge fan of scenes where the hero ends up about to be executed for just trying to help (no prizes for guessing where I suspect my love of that particular trope comes from).¹ But man, was it crammed full of heresy. My Who-watching companion, to whom I’d coincidentally described my tendency towards getting cross at heresy only that morning, turned to me after the credits had rolled and told me I looked angry. I didn’t think I was – apparently my ‘contemplative’ face and my ‘cross-at-heresy’ face just happen to look remarkably similar – but I could hardly blame her for suspecting so given that I immediately began complaining about how terrible all the characters’ theology was.

Let me stress that a cast of characters with terrible theology doth not a bad piece of fiction make. All fiction propagates some heresy or other in the way that it portrays the nature of life, the universe, and everything. Our job as Christian viewers and readers and players and so forth is to discern where the fiction we consume aligns with the gospel and where it doesn’t. But I’ve gone off on one about that jazz before,² so for the present, suffice it to say that, although it was an enjoyable episode, there was just too much really, really obvious scripture-contradicting nonsense being chucked around for me not to write a blog post about it. Basically, I’m being lazy and gathering low-hanging fruit this week.

So, heresy bingo. Let’s go.

1) Dualism.

“Satan is all around us, all of the time,” claims Becka. What she’s doing here is taking a quality that’s exclusively God’s, namely omnipresence, and ascribing it to Satan, thereby putting him in some sense on a level with God. I’d consider this to be representative of a kind of dualism, the belief that there are two great powers at work in the universe, one good and one evil, locked in a struggle with one another. This is heresy because in actual fact, God’s completely in charge; Satan’s not an equivalent power on the other side of the battle, but a created being, devoid of any God-exclusive attributes, who can’t actually do anything without God having willed it. Check out, for instance, Job 1, where God has to grant Satan permission before he’s able to act against Job;³ and note also that Satan’s been busy wandering about to and fro in the earth, which he wouldn’t have to do if he was all around us, all of the time, now would he? Further manifestation of dualism in the episode comes in the form of the implication that Satan’s the big problem or threat that needs to be dealt with in order for people to be saved, which just isn’t true: on the contrary, the big problem is human sin. Satan is the accuser – literally, that’s what the word means⁴ – and if we’re not sinful, he’s got nothing to legitimately accuse us of; if we’re not sinful, he presents absolutely no threat to us at all. And since Jesus stands pleading our case in the heavenly courtroom,⁵ alleging in our defence his blood that covers over all our sins in response to every accusation, well, Satan’s frankly not much of a worry.

2) Pelagianism.

“If people are good, they have nothing to fear,” claims Becka. And she’s right about that, because God will reward a good person according to his deeds.⁶ But then Graham asks her, “Are you a good person, Mistress Savage?”, which is an extremely important question, because Jesus tells us that nobody is good except God alone,⁷ making Becka’s reply that her conscience is clear – anyone else getting Hunchback of Notre Dame vibes?⁸ – an absolute load of codswallop. Later, similarly, King James claims: “There is no darkness in me. I quest for goodness and knowledge, beauty and art, all of God’s virtues.” Again, codswallop. Evidently this fictional version of James never made it as far as, say, Romans 3 in his shiny new Bible translation.⁹ He and Becka both think themselves not fundamentally sinful, and capable in themselves of pursuing righteousness to such a degree as to be acceptable to God. The belief that this is true of humans is known as Pelagianism, after a fourth-to-fifth-century monk called Pelagius, who came from Britain, making this our nation’s very own home-grown heresy. Huzzah.

 

Amusing that the most widespread depiction of Pelagius the Internet has to offer is this 17th-century Calvinist one captioned by an insulting quatrain.

3) Works righteousness.

This is kind of similar to the Pelagianism thing, but I think it isn’t absolutely necessary to believe that humans are not inherently sinful, as Pelagianism asserts, in order to suggest that they can achieve salvation by means of their own deeds. Becka describes how she believed herself infected by Satan after her encounter with the Morax, but she adds: “I did God’s work in the hope that he would save me.” What she’s implying is that, even though she was already guilty of working with Satan, she could nevertheless claw her way to salvation by doing things pleasing to God. It really, really doesn’t work like that. Our salvation is a free gift, not of ourselves, not by works, so that no one can boast.¹⁰ Whatever we may be guilty of, our only hope of God saving us is to trust the blood of his Son to cover over that guilt. If we’re not in a state of trusting as much, we’re not capable of doing anything pleasing to God anyway.¹¹

4) The prosperity gospel.

Well, almost: the belief that God will ensure the physical wellbeing of true believers, certainly. King James at one point declares: “God will keep me safe as long as I do his work.” Again, it’s a massive problem that he’s relying on works rather than on faith here, but beyond that, it’s clear from the context that he’s referring to physical safety, from assassins and so forth, which is something God definitely doesn’t promise to those who love and follow him. People have always killed and persecuted God’s prophets, and Jesus tells his disciples to expect the exact same treatment.¹² We’re not greater than our Master, and he was, you know, tortured and executed under false charges in his early thirties. Strangely enough, I wouldn’t call that being ‘kept safe’.

5) Marcionism.

Sadly enough, it’s the Doctor, rather than Becka or King James, who’s guilty of this one. When Becka quotes the KJV translation of Exodus 22:18 at her – “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” – she replies, “In the Old Testament. There’s a twist in the sequel: love thy neighbour.” This is kind of hilarious given that when Jesus uttered that statement, he was quoting another chunk of the Old Testament, namely Leviticus 19:18. Granted, there’s a twist in the sequel, but it’s the kind of twist that makes perfect sense out of everything that went before, rather than the kind that barrels in completely out of the blue and plasters over everything that went before as no longer accurate or relevant. God’s character and values didn’t change a bit between the two Testaments, because he is the same yesterday, today, and forever:¹³ rather, his preexisting plans were just brought about to a fuller extent. To claim otherwise is arguably at least a mild form of Marcionism (after the second-century heretic Marcion), namely the belief that the God of the New Testament is a different and superior being to that of the Old.

6) Magic.

Now here’s a delicious bit of irony. King James keeps a collection of magic-related artefacts, which would be fine in itself – collections of magic-related artefacts are literally my job at the moment, so, you know, I’m hardly going to denounce that as heresy¹⁴ – but he doesn’t just own them; he uses them. “That is why I need all these, to ward off evil spirits,” he tells Ryan, and gives him a charm to wear. I repeat: he advocates the use of physical charms to ward off evil spirits. Which qualifies as a form of, oh, let me see, magic – the very thing he’s busy going round killing people for purportedly engaging in.

Like all sins, magic in whatever form¹⁵ stems from a failure to really trust God, resulting in an attempt to take matters into one’s own heads instead of submitting to his plan and commands. And that lack of trust, in actual fact, was the brightest thread of heresy that ran through the whole episode. Becka and King James talked a lot about fighting Satan and doing God’s work, but not once did either of them express trust in the blood of Jesus for their deliverance. In other words, they were relying on themselves and their own efforts instead of on God and his grace. And, as you can tell from the list of heresies above, they provide a pretty excellent example of some of the dangerous trajectories one can end up on when one starts to do that.

So what about us? Well, I very much doubt that any of us thinks it would be a good idea to drown a bunch of elderly women in a river in order to purge Satan from our local neighbourhoods, but we can definitely take the warning about the human tendency to try to take our salvation into our own hands. We must not lose sight of the cross, not for a moment, because at the cross God displays that he’s the one in charge and his wrath, not the activity of any other entity, is what needs to be dealt with for our salvation, contra dualism; and that the only righteous human being who ever lived was the Lord Jesus Christ, and the rest of us need to receive the gift of his righteousness in order to be counted good, contra Pelagianism; and that salvation is indeed a free gift, contra works righteousness; and that the pattern of conduct we aim to follow is one of suffering for the sake of the gospel in this life and inheriting glory later, contra the prosperity gospel; and that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah who the Law and the Prophets predicted would suffer these very things, contra Marcionism; and that, with the Temple curtain torn, we’re granted full, unhindered access to the very presence of God, and so to the exercise of the greatest spiritual power that exists, no need to try to manipulate the supernatural for ourselves, contra magic.

Heresy starts when we stop trusting Jesus’ blood shed for the covering of our sins, and ends with throwing other people in the metaphorical river in order to keep kidding ourselves that we’re righteous by some other means. Don’t lose sight of the cross, adelphoi. Don’t lose sight of the cross for a moment.

Footnotes

¹ And there even followed a bit where the hero’s body was distinctly absent from where everyone was entirely certain it had to be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7g0ogEhMN8.

² Most extensively in ‘The Art of Watching Watchfully’, under March 2017 in the box on the right.

³ Here it is: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=job+1&version=ESVUK. The character of Satan appears more times in Job than any other book, fun fact.

⁴ For this reason, ‘Satan’ is not a given name, but a title, that can refer to different individuals in different contexts, but happens to be used most frequently of one particular being – just as, for instance, ‘Christ’ is. In fact, the first time the word occurs in the scripture, it’s actually referring to God, in Numbers 22:22: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=H7854&t=KJV.

⁵ Check out the start of 1 John 2, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John+2&version=ESVUK.

⁶ To continue the courtroom theme, have you ever spotted that according to Revelation, the dead are judged according to what they’ve done? https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+20&version=ESVUK But evidently nobody makes it through according to those criteria, because it’s whether your name’s in the book of life that ultimately guarantees your destiny.

⁷ I’m thinking of Mark 10: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+10&version=ESVUK. I was supposed to lead a small-group Bible study on that passage a few weeks ago and totally forgot to prepare; oops. To my relief and gratitude, the small group in question made it really easy for me to loosely guide a discussion rather than anything more demanding, haha.

⁸ Fancy a hard-rock cover of ‘The Bells of Notre Dame’ by the relentlessly excellent Jonathan Young and Caleb Hyles? Of course you do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-VPrpo52hI.

⁹ The classic place to go for that total depravity business: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rom+3&version=ESVUK.

¹⁰ Huzzah for Ephesians: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+2&version=ESVUK.

¹¹ “Without faith it is impossible to please God,” as the letter to the Hebrews says in reference to how Enoch pleased God: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+11&version=ESVUK.

¹² I’m thinking of the latter half of John 15: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+15&version=ESVUK.

¹³ I here allude to Hebrews 13:8: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+13&version=ESVUK.

¹⁴ Because I’m doing a PhD transcribing, translating, and analysing late-antique Jewish Aramaic magic texts from Mesopotamia, in case you didn’t know.

¹⁵ I actually think a lot of us are actually guilty of magic in ways we don’t realise: you can take a look at ‘The Magic Word’ under November 2016 in the box on the right if you’re interested in my thoughts on that.