The Doctor and the Apostle. Jeffrey A. Nelson
strange figures they can meet. I was past due to get to know the boundless possibilities of action and excitement that Doctor Who offered, and just as I had back in my most formative years, I was not disappointed.
All of this is to say that I consider myself a genuine Whovian. I am also a minister with an interest in how popular culture and faith may interact with each other. I’ve been a fan of Jesus for at least as long as I have been of Doctor Who, although I like to think that I’ve been more committed to the former than the latter over the years.
From a spiritual perspective, the potential for learning about faith through the exploits of The Doctor is rich and deep. The show often reflects on the power of kindness, peace, love, endurance, and working together over and against the use of violence, hatred, intimidation, and destruction. It has explored themes of inequality, racism, oppression, creation care, the interaction of religious belief and science, genocide, fundamentalism, and ethics, among so many other issues that a life of faith should have something to say about, if it is to be in any way useful and relevant.
And that is the premise of this book. There is so much that Christians may be able to learn from Doctor Who. I have long thought that pop culture can sometimes be a more accessible onramp for exploring important truths about God, life, service, and community than Sunday worship or Bible study can be. Sometimes this is because the former is just more interesting and engaging. Sometimes it’s because the former is more willing to talk plainly about life’s complexity and struggles. And sometimes it’s just because the former is easier to understand. That sounds like a critique of more traditional expressions of faith, and I suppose that it is. But whatever helps us connect more deeply to the truths that my belief system professes, there seems to be more sense in making use of it than avoiding it.
All of that is why I decided to write about one of my favorite shows in this way. Christians can cull a lot of insight from Doctor Who that pertains to their faith journey. Whether you’re already a fan or this book is your very first brush with the show, I hope that this is true for you.
Our Principal Players
I’ve already begun to explain why I see value in exploring the Doctor Who universe for its relevancies to faith. It touches on many subjects that parallel what it means to be a Christian—how to love God and love neighbor in the spirit of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. The Doctor encounters situations that, while set in fantastic times and places with strange and often non-human characters, nevertheless have the basic questions and dilemmas of life at their core. These include how to treat those who are different from us, whether to solve disputes using violence or more peaceful means, what it looks like to trust or hope when you can’t clearly anticipate an outcome, what it means to rely on others and live in community, and how it looks to believe in others’ redemption even if they are unable to do so themselves.
There is also the figure of The Doctor him—or herself, and the growth, conflict, change, failures, and successes that the viewer is able to watch them experience. Far from being an omniscient or all-powerful character, The Doctor experiences many flaws and struggles. In more than one instance, The Doctor describes themselves as just a traveler who stops in and helps people the best that they can, while learning along the way as much as any other character on the show.
As will be explored throughout the book, these lessons do not often come easily. Part of what makes The Doctor such a compelling character is that they are completely immersed in the situation. They choose to insert themselves in mystery, conflict, and danger, and they react to it with as much fascination, frustration, anger, joy, curiosity, and wonder as anyone else would in a similar predicament. They have the benefit of having lived so long and seen so much that they usually have the knowledge and wisdom to eventually get themselves out of it, but not before deepening their understanding along the way.
For those less familiar with the show, a few basic facts are appropriate to share about The Doctor and the universe in which they reside. The Doctor is an alien from the planet Gallifrey, who is able to travel through time and space thanks to their ship, the TARDIS, which looks like an old British police box. They often travel with one or more companions who are usually human, although there have been some rare exceptions to that over the years.
The Doctor has had at least fourteen different faces since the show’s debut. This is due to a special power that The Doctor’s species, the Time Lords, came up with known as regeneration, which is triggered when one of their kind suffers a fatal injury. Rather than dying, they morph into a new body with a fresh lifespan, although the length of that lifespan is mostly undefined.
As a result, The Doctor has taken on a variety of personalities and stylistic choices. At times The Doctor has been more gruff and standoffish, and at times more whimsical and compassionate. They have been more grandfatherly and they have been more of a peer or romantic interest. They have been more inquisitive and they have been more confident, even arrogant, about their own intellectual ability.
For these reasons and more, fans of the show often have their favorite incarnations of The Doctor. Viewers gravitate toward certain mixtures of personality and physical traits, and may prefer one or more Doctors over others. Since The Doctor does not have a known name besides this title, the common way to refer to each version of the character is by numerical order, beginning with William Hartnell as the title character in the show’s debut: he is The First Doctor, Patrick Troughton The Second Doctor, and so on through the current Thirteenth Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker. The one exception is when John Hurt was introduced as a non-sequential version of The Doctor for the fiftieth anniversary episode, “The Day of the Doctor”; he is known as The War Doctor.
That should be enough to get the reader started. Much more about the character and the show will, of course, be explored in the chapters ahead.
That brings us to our other main figure in this book, the Apostle Paul. Some may be wondering why I might choose to focus on his specific contributions to the Bible and to Christianity rather than a more generalized exploration of Christian faith. I have a few different answers to that.
First, I think that Paul is a much richer and fascinating person than some may give him credit for being, and that includes both devotees and detractors. The former tend to see him as a sagely and steadfast keeper of the faith, with wisdom that can be lifted from his writings to apply to modern situations just as cleanly as it was when he first composed them. Entire theological systems have been constructed with his thoughts as a foundation. But this view is always in danger of minimizing his flaws, which he is often honest about in these same writings.
The latter are more prone to see those flaws, as well as how problematic it can be to apply some of his ideas to present-day situations. Some of what is attributed to him concerning the place of women in the church and in society in general have been especially damaging throughout the centuries, and many have left him behind as a result. The ways in which Paul’s writings have been used to bully, suppress, exclude, and discriminate have brought him much scorn and dismissal.
I think that the real Paul lives somewhere between these two views. He was certainly far from perfect, and he admits this about himself more than once. His words were also contextual, written for specific situations that were playing out in real time in the communities to which he wrote. While this does not excuse ideas that still may cause harm so many centuries removed, it at least helps us better understand why he said what he said.
Paul is credited with having written thirteen letters contained in the New Testament. Scholars have disputed whether at least some of them actually came from his pen or were written by people either familiar with his ideas or who wanted to add credibility to their own. Due to this dispute and for the sake of simplifying things, this book will focus on those letters considered to be genuine: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.
The second reason why I am focusing specifically on Paul is because, for reasons already mentioned, I have not always had a good relationship with Paul’s writings myself. I have my own stories of having his writings used in abusive ways, as well as the stories of beloved and trusted friends who have been on the receiving end of weaponized Pauline words, and so I have not always trusted these parts of Scripture as much as others.