The Gospel According to Doctor Who

In connection with the 60^th anniversary of Doctor Who, here's a sermon from November 30, 2008. There has been some updating.

If you are trying to communicate, you need to know something about your target audience. What are they interested in? What are their needs? Their desires? Their fears? The success of your message depends on how well you speak to these things. Sometimes it is just a matter of how you communicate your message and what you emphasize. By changing what you highlight, you can win people who previously were indifferent to your message. As long as the core is the same, you aren't changing the message; you are merely translating it into a language the audience understands.

That's what happened to Doctor Who. It was already the longest running science fiction TV series in the world and a very popular one in Britain. But over here it was a cult series, a show with a small but extremely devoted following. In 1989, after 26 seasons, the BBC cancelled it. But like the original Star Trek, fans kept it alive. And eventually it was revived. The hero remained the eccentric Time Lord known only as the Doctor, who travels literally everywhere in his T.A.R.D.I.S., which stands for “Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.” The Doctor continued to pick up companions on his adventures. And if he is fatally wounded, he can regenerate a new body. With it comes a new personality, either grumpy, or goofy, or straightforwardly heroic. What is constant, besides his technical savvy, is his wisdom, compassion and thirst for justice. The Doctor also prefers to solve his problems by using brains rather than brawn. So what did this new version of the series do differently that has made it into an international hit?

Since this is a sermon and not a TV review, I will focus on something the original version rarely touched on but which the current series put front and center: the messianic nature of the Doctor.

When the original series debuted in 1963, the day after President Kennedy was assassinated and C.S. Lewis died, the Doctor was a cranky exile from another world who dressed in Victorian garb. He indulged his granddaughter by letting her go to school on earth. Two of her teachers, concerned about how she could be so precocious about science and history and so ignorant about things like the money system, follow her one evening—to a junkyard! When they think an angry old gentleman has locked her in a blue box, they force their way in, only to find that the box is a lot bigger on the inside.

In a fit of rage, the Doctor traps them in his craft, throws a switch, and the blue box, his Tardis, travels back 10,000 years. It turns out the Doctor can't control his time machine very well. It was in for repairs when he stole it. He is also not always to be trusted. He will put his companions into danger to satisfy his curiosity. His scientific detachment is at times, well, alien. But he begins to change after encountering the Daleks, a race so mutated by a nuclear war that they started, that they have encased their squidlike bodies in individual armored vehicles. Bred to believe they are superior to all other races in the universe, the Doctor decides to oppose them. Eventually he becomes more heroic.

When the first actor to play the Doctor became too sick to continue, the writers came up with the idea that the Doctor can regenerate when mortally wounded, essentially dying and being reborn. So a variety of actors have played the role: tall, short, skinny, fat, funny, serious. In the new series the Doctor has regenerated into a woman and even changed his race. With a hero who can look like anyone and who can have adventures anywhere in time and space, this is the most flexible format for a TV series ever.

As a hero, the Doctor in the original series was more mad scientist than messiah. He was less like the once and future king Arthur and more like Merlin. But when writer Russell T. Davies finally managed to reboot the series in 2005, he saw something else in the character's self-selected title of Doctor. Rather than interpret it as a doctorate in science, as the classic series had, the new series sees the Doctor as “the man who makes people better.” Whereas the old series often ended its stories with the defeat or destruction of the bad guys, in the current series the bad guys and monsters are sometimes redeemed or healed.

This was first seen in an episode in which a mysterious plague is changing people into creepy zombies with gas masks for faces. The Doctor realizes that this is the result of alien medical nonogenes who have been trying to repair wounded human beings during a war. They were incorporating the gas masks not knowing what humans looked like. The Doctor finds the child the nanogenes first encountered and reunites him with his mother, hoping they will recognize her as the source and correct their genetic mistakes. They do. Then he redirects the reprogrammed nanogenes towards the others they fixed wrong so they will make them right again. As the people change, he utters what sounds like a prayer: “Come on; give me a day like this!...Just this once—everybody lives!” The Doctor, whose own planet was destroyed in a war with the Daleks, get to savor a victory where no one dies but is resurrected and restored.

In the same episode, the Doctor meets a slick conman from the 51^st century whose scam inadvertently caused the plague. Inspired by the Doctor, “Captain” Jack Harkness risks his life to stop a bomb. The Doctor saves him and the reformed conman becomes a member of the Tardis crew and, in his own TV series, a hero in his own right.

In another episode, the Doctor encounters an old foe, an alien from a criminal family, up to her old tricks, endangering earth. The Doctor originally intends to turn her over to her home planet, which will execute her for her crimes. But as he gets to know her better he becomes uncomfortable with this idea. When time energy from the Tardis regresses the alien back into an egg, the Doctor decides to put her with a different family, giving her a second chance to grow up. He gives her a new life. Because the Doctor makes others better people.

We see this in his companions in the new series. In the classic series they were mostly pretty young things whose job was to (A) ask the Doctor what's going on and (B) get rescued from the bad guys. His companions in the new series have more prominence. They are fully developed characters and they even get to save the Doctor at times. His first companion in the new series was Rose, a 19 year old who works in a department store. She finds herself torn between her exciting new life with the Doctor and her family and friends. Eventually they all become companions and are changed by their time with the Doctor. So they are no longer merely window dressing, nor lowly assistants to the hero. They come to emulate the Doctor's nobility and self-sacrifice. One, Martha, literally becomes an apostle for the Doctor, spreading the word about how he has saved earth. When the Doctor is captured by his old enemy, the Master, who has taken over the earth, Martha has people all over the globe call upon the name of the Doctor at a designated time, freeing him from the control the Master has over him. Basically the Master is defeated by faith, hope and prayer.

This religious content is anything but accidental. The new series has had robotic angel hosts and horned personifications of evil and sometimes even calls its hero “the lonely god.” In one episode things come to a halt as all the beleaguered people trapped in a worldwide traffic jam join in an unexpected but moving rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross”, where “the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain.” Though an atheist, Russell T. Davies seems to be sympathetic to certain Christian ideas and themes, like forgiveness and redemption, and he expresses them better than many Christians do.

So what does this have to do with Advent and the gospel? Just is: the newest incarnation of this show is obviously appealing to people's longing for a different kind of hero. In a culture that gives heroes a licence to kill large numbers of aliens and robots as well as humans, in the Doctor we see one who offers mercy as well as justice. He seeks to heal the suffering. He changes the lives of those who encounter him, inspiring and empowering them to be heroes as well. Sound familiar?

In Advent we focus on the coming of such a hero. Our Old Testament passages look for the Messiah, God's anointed prophet, priest and king, who will set things right. Some passages concentrate on the day God will judge and overturn the evil, corrupt and oppressive ways of the world, while others stress the hope of healing and reconciliation. Our New Testament lessons examine the paradoxical way in which Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God, not by killing sinners but by dying for them. They also look forward towards the day when he will finish the process, which, according to the book of Revelation involves a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth, where neither death, nor mourning, nor crying, nor pain will exist and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. (Revelation 21:3-4) The problem is that our familiarity with the texts have blinded us to how revolutionary the story of Jesus really is.

The old Doctor Who was a geek's dream, with the engineer as hero, who could come up with a technical fix for any problem. The new Doctor is more like a medic. He makes people better, both by healing them and by modeling a selfless life that they wish to follow. In a recent episode the Doctor finds out that after winning the lottery a former companion of his gave it all away to help people who were suffering, in imitation of the Doctor. The god the old Doctor most resembled was Prometheus, who stole the secret of fire from the Greek gods to give it to humans for their betterment. The divine person the new Doctor most resembles is Jesus, who changes people's lives.

Just as Davies brought out elements in the show's old mythos to revitalize the saga of the Doctor, we need to rethink how we present Jesus. Is he merely this authoritarian figure, easily confused with the establishment, who makes pronouncements that we dutifully observe without thinking? Or is he the ultimate hero, who creatively and daringly dealt with the problems with which we still grapple and who brought about a new way of making things right? Whereas the world decides to fight evil with grim determination—when it doesn't despair in the face of evil or cooperate with it—Jesus fights it with hope. Whereas the world sees peace as a wary temporary truce with those who cannot be trusted, Jesus brings about peace by bringing people from every race and nation together through faith in a just and loving God. Whereas the world seeks to eliminate enemies by shedding their blood, Jesus eliminates enemies by letting his own blood be shed and by offering them forgiveness and love and healing. He eliminates bad guys by turning those who respond to him into good guys.

When things get bad, the world fantasizes about James Bond or John Wick, who defeat evil by being more ruthless than it is. Doctor Who has offered a different model, a hero who wins by using his heart and mind and inspiring others. And the appeal of this hero's story is that it comes from what is essentially a fresh retelling of the greatest story ever told: the story of how God became one of us, lived and died as we do, and rose again to give us new life as new creations in Christ. It is up to us to leave the land of fiction and proclaim to a sin-sick world that there is a real hero we can follow, Jesus Christ, the Great Physician who makes people better.