When the BBC brought back Doctor Who in 2006 the first episode revolves around an invasion of London by sentient plastic. The episode Rose was meant to have undertones reminding us how our commitment to petroleum based products is destroying us, which is explained by the living plastic as it discusses why it is here. The plastic wants this world because it is a perfect habitat, and the Doctor is trying to dissuade it and allow him to take it to a different world, where it can find similar conditions without the violence of killing people. The whole time the Doctor sits on the means to kill the plastic, but as he has told Rose (his companion who we are introduced to in the episode) “he must give the plastic a chance to end the invasion peacefully. “We’re not here to kill it, I’ve got to give it a chance”. In the end the Doctor is prepared to destroy the plastic and the plastic is destroyed but not ultimately by the Doctor, but this exchange gives us insight into the how he thinks. And this concept is repeated in the show several times, the Doctor approaches the villain, who is bent on destruction, with the opportunity to live in peace.
One of the episodes that deals with this same theme is in Season 3 The Runaway Bride, where again London is secretly being invaded (it happens a lot) this time by spider-like creatures. At the end of the episode the Doctor is confronting the queen of these creatures and offers her the opportunity to leave earth and find a new home world. She refuses and defiantly tries to kill him and when he sees she is bent on destruction he releases a flood that destroys them all. What strikes me about this episode is that in it we see what happens when the Doctor is entangled with the violence other other creatures. He tries to actively oppose the violence by changing the creature’s mind and offering something new and better. But is met with rejection and hatred by a self-serving creature who is unwilling to see the value he places on human life.
This reminds me very much of the Flood narrative in Genesis a story often used to present God as a villain who simply destroys the innocent. But this reading oversimplifies the situation by failing to acknowledge that humanity was (as in the above episodes) threatening a universal violence to creation (and other humans). Humanity was already meeting the world with violence and so we are left to ask how was God to respond? (Here reading Daniel Hawk’s The Violence of the Biblical God and/or a good commentary like John Walton’s NIVAC volume on Genesis or his The Lost World of the Flood is helpful). We must ask how is God supposed to act at times when human violence gets out of hand? In the Flood narrative God removes protection and care from humanity and the chaos that comes in wipes out humanity. Humanity, in the story, is displaying the level of violence of the invading aliens in the show. Humanity (with one notable exception) has been thoroughly corrupted by its selfishness and has put the world on the path to destruction. The language of Genesis 6:5 “The Lord saw that humanity had become thoroughly evil on the earth and that every idea their minds thought up was always completely evil.” is very potent and implies that humanity is seeking to do violence against the creation they have been trusted to care for.
It would, of course, be oversimplifying the difficulty to rely too heavily on this analogy and this explanation for the presence of violence in the Bible. But there is a reality that to love someone is to immerse yourself in the problems that individual faces. And even though God is committed to peace and wants us to be so committed there is a reality that humanity as a whole does not live up to this desire and we are left with the problem of how we are going to meet a person committed to violence. These are the issues that faced theologians like Augustine when developing theories on the use of violence and Just War. We never celebrate violence, in fact Christians are called to grieve over violence as the destruction of God’s world, but we also recognize the difficulty inherent in meeting someone whose mind is already commuted toward such destruction. And it is only as we lament the use of violence that we will begin to seek other options for pursuing peace. And it is only when we exhaust available options that we are recognize both the moral weight involved in violence and the need to protect justice from flippant violence. This is what we find in the way the Bible describes God’s character, God enters our world where Divine justice is confronted by a human determination to do violence and God mus respond in some way to preserve peace. We may still struggle with the notion of Divine violence but maybe we can begin to understand that our violent ideas are at the root of the problem.
Squinting in the Light 
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