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.

Did You Just Call the Christian God a Mary Sue

“While the four officers languished in the Sick Bay, Lt. Mary Sue ran the ship, and ran it so well she received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Vulcan Order of Gallantry and the Tralfamadorian Order of Good Guyhood. However the disease finally got to her and she fell fatally ill. In the Sick Bay as she breathed her last, she was surrounded by Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Scott, all weeping unashamedly at the loss of her beautiful youth and youthful beauty, intelligence, capability and all around niceness. Even to this day her birthday is a national holiday of the Enterprise.”

Paula Smith, ‘A Trekkie’s Tale’, The Menagerie (1974)

 

A handy chart of Starfleet insignia for ignoramuses like myself who know next to nothing about Star Trek. Thanks to m1kclark at newgrounds.com.

So I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed the other day and stumbled across a screenshot of a post that went as follows (well, with a few adjustments for the sake of keeping things polite):¹

Greek myths are great because their gods are so human. They argue, they mess up at things, they make fun of each other, they tick each other off, it’s great, there’s so much human interaction and then Christianity comes in like that guy and is all like “oh my god is infallible and knows everything and immortal and everywhere at once and you can’t see it but its [sic] totally there and stronger than everything” shut up Christianity go take a writing class

Below this, another user had added a comment:

did you just call the Christian god a Mary Sue

I laughed. And then I thought, huh, what an interesting proposition. Might a bit of a compare-and-contrast exercise between the God I worship and the fictional character type known as Mary Sue help me reflect on his attributes in a fresh way?²

If you’ve not come across the term Mary Sue before, here’s a quick introduction. Our story begins in the 1970s, when the literary genre known as fanfiction was taking its first wobbly steps. A Star Trek fan called Paula Smith noticed that one common but lamentable pattern in fanfiction written about the series was the centring of stories around a prodigiously capable and extraordinarily attractive young female protagonist, who would quickly worm her way into the affections and usurp the roles of the established cast, save the day by exercising a vast range of skills that it defied all logic for her to have ever acquired, and then usually die in some splendidly heroic fashion and be deeply mourned from all quarters. Smith wrote a four-paragraph story parodying this tendency, ‘A Trekkie’s Tale’,³ and dubbed its main character Mary Sue, a name which subsequently came to be derogatorily used to refer to any original character who displayed similar sorts of attributes. There isn’t a definitive list of the attributes required to qualify as a Mary Sue,⁴ and the already blurry edges of the term are made even blurrier by the way that people sometimes toss it about merely as a generic insult for (usually female) protagonists they don’t like or think are poorly written, but the following constitute some of the characteristics most heavily associated with the type.

A Mary Sue is best at everything. She has phenomenal talent in just about any field one cares to name. She has no flaws; if she does, they’re endearing, or actually strengths in disguise. This, as you can tell, is the heart of the accusation outlined in the first post quoted above, and it’s not at all an inaccurate one when applied to God. The LORD is best at everything: he wields ultimate power over every single entity in existence; morally, he’s entirely inscrutable; he does everything perfectly; he has no flaws. This aspect of Mary-Sue-ism is indeed something he exhibits to the extreme.

Concomitant with that first aspect, though, comes another: a Mary Sue is best at everything compared to the preestablished cast. It’s in these terms that the accusation made in the above-mentioned post is framed, and here the accuracy falls apart. Granted, the author of the post is completely right to observe that the LORD in his supreme power and righteousness is on a totally different level to the highly anthropomorphic deities that populated the panthea of pagan societies; but it’s incorrect to treat said pagan deities as the preestablished cast whom the LORD, as Mary Sue, subsequently usurps. For starters, the author of the post talks as if the concept of this almighty, flawless, omnipresent, invisible God sprang into existence together with Christianity, which is patently not true whatever your religious persuasion: the character of the LORD had been described in literature for centuries before Christ trod the earth. (So blame the Jews for that particular bit of Mary-Sue-ism, why don’t you; people have tried to blame them for virtually everything else they dislike about the world, after all.) Moreover – and at this point religious persuasion does become relevant – it isn’t merely that the character of the LORD was invented earlier on than the author of the post gives him credit for, but that he isn’t an invented character at all. On the contrary, he invented everything else, and indeed that’s the reason behind the comprehensive omnipotence for which the author of the post has so little patience. The idea that the LORD usurps pagan gods couldn’t be further from the truth: they make pathetic attempts to usurp him. And pathetic attempts they are, because, as we’ve already established, the LORD is inexpressibly greater than any other power in existence. He made every other power in existence.

At this point, though, another significant aspect of the Mary Sue type becomes relevant: a Mary Sue is to be identified with the creator of the story in which she appears. An author who writes a Mary Sue is writing herself into the story – and I think it’s fair to say that she may be validly characterised as the God of her own fictional world. Nonetheless, she doesn’t write herself into the story as she actually is in real life: the character is an idealised version, more attractive, more accomplished, more adept, and more admired than her real-world counterpart. The author fashions a plotline around this improved fictional version of herself for the sake of her own personal wish-fulfilment. The Mary Sue character is remarkable and flawless because she represents what the author wishes she could be like; God is remarkable and flawless, on the other hand, because that’s just what he’s like. In the case of a Mary Sue, then, an imperfect author inserts an idealised version of herself into the world she created. In God’s case, he’s already a perfect author; he couldn’t idealise himself any further. He did insert himself into the world he created, though. The eternal Word, the one without whom there would be no story at all,⁵ gave up the privilege of experiencing the universe as its author, and became just another character living through the plotline day by day. He kept the flawlessness that comes with being God, but aside from that flawlessness, his experience was, it must be said, pretty different to that of your typical Mary Sue.

 

And this represents an idealised version of the start of the process of writing something.

A Mary Sue is beloved by the established cast, but Jesus was rejected by the world. What makes this difference particularly striking is that, with your average Mary Sue, even though she is best at everything – and best at everything compared to the established cast, moreover – there’s still always a bit of a question mark over whether she really deserves all the attention and adoration she gets. Why should every other character’s storyline get swept aside in favour of an overwhelming focus on hers? The only person worthy of that kind of extreme elevation is – well, God. And yet when God showed up as a human character in the grand story of history, the rest of the cast was unimpressed with him. The rest of the cast actually ended up having him killed. When your average Mary Sue has died her splendidly heroic death, everyone rallies round and mourns for her; when Jesus faced a death more heroic than any other ever could be, the subjection of himself to the wrathful judgement of the almighty and perfect Author of the universe, on behalf of other characters who hadn’t even properly recognised him for the authorial self-insertion he was, let alone given him the attention and adoration he deserved – when Jesus faced that, his closest friends abandoned and disowned him.

In that respect, then, Jesus couldn’t be much further from your average Mary Sue. But then again, take another look at the first two Mary Sue attributes I mentioned above: previously I was applying them to God more generally (probably principally the Father? I’m not much good at Trinitarian theology), but try applying them to Jesus in particular. A Mary Sue is best at everything, specifically when compared to the preestablished cast; and Jesus is best at everything, specifically when compared to the preestablished systems whereby humans might relate to God. The book of Hebrews is literally all about this jazz: it’s like a giant list of things Jesus is better than.⁶ He’s better than angels; he’s better than Moses; he’s better than the Levitical priests; he’s better than the tabernacle; he’s better than the sacrifices required by the Law; he’s better than anything that previous generations encountered. And why? Because he’s not just another character; he’s God. Of course he’s best at everything. That’s not the surprising thing. The surprising thing is that the almighty and perfect Author wrote himself into the story at all.

When a fanfiction writer inserts herself into the world she creates as a Mary Sue, this remarkable and flawless and unilaterally beloved character, she does it to elevate herself. When God inserted himself into the world he had created in the form of the Lord Jesus Christ, he was doing the opposite. He’s already remarkable and flawless and worthy of being unilaterally beloved; in stepping into the human story, the Word humbled himself to an unbelievable degree.⁷ God’s the ultimate universal Author, he could have told any story he liked with human history, and yet he chose to tell one whose fundamental plot point is his own Son’s willing sacrifice of himself so that we might have life. And so even the most flawless, capable, heroic Mary Sue who ever saved the day is, like everything else, nothing special at all compared to Jesus.

Footnotes

¹ Though I didn’t have the presence of mind to save or bookmark the post when I saw it, I did fortunately manage to track it down elsewhere, so here it is for your consultation: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/366339750935374696/.

² In case you hadn’t twigged, this kind of thing is basically the entire premise of my blog at its most typical: I wander around fictional media going ‘God is like this in such-and-such a way’ and ‘God is not like that in such-and-such a way’ with the aim of moving myself to worship – and if I can bring any of you lovely readers along with me, so much the better.

³ Full text available here: http://web.archive.org/web/20100830041159/http://www.fortunecity.com/rivendell/dark/1000/marysue.htm.

⁴ Although for a fuller discussion of how the term is used, check out this very helpful article on TV Tropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue.

⁵ Because everything that has been made was made through him: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+1&version=ESVUK.

⁶ Check it out: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+1&version=ESVUK.

⁷ I mean, I couldn’t not link to Philippains 2 here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=philippians+2&version=ESVUK.