Time of the Angels[]
The idea of Christianity being a single Church in the 51st century certainly isn't something you can take for granted (as the article currently does). The Church was continually dividing and reuniting in the early centuries, until the first permanent schism, between the Roman and Syriac Churches, in the 5th century. All branches have continued to split since then (the Roman splitting into Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, then the Anglican and Protestant Reformation splitting from the Catholic Church, the immediate splintering into about a dozen different lines of Protestantism, and those lines continuing to fork and diverge to his day). While it's not completely inconceivable that in another 3000 years some amazingly successful ecumenical movement will somehow united all of these Churches into one, there's no indication at all in the show, or anywhere else, that such a thing has happened.
In fact, there's no evidence at all that the Clerics from Time of the Angels are even Christian. They don't mention Jesus, and they have no Christian iconography. All we know is that they are a "church", that they pray, that they have faith, and that they all take sacred names (some of which seem to have Christian heritage, but others don't). The first two are common of just about any religion that would call themselves a church, and the last one is something that isn't actually true of Christianity today.
So, I'm going to remove the newly-added paragraph. --Falcotron 15:31, April 25, 2010 (UTC)
Time of the Angels (again)[]
After I removed the parapraph, another paragraph was added--this time less definitive, but it still seems problematic to me:
- The Doctor and companion Amy Pond met a small squadron of priests led by Father Octavian, and are assumed to be Christians due to their names (Father, Cleric, etc,.). (DW: Time of Angels-Flesh and Stone)
Besides the grammatical problem (the sentence is saying that the Doctor and Amy are assumed to be Christians because of their names), and the fact that Father, Cleric, etc. are titles rather than names, the more important problem is that these titles are not in any way specific to Christianity.
It's rare that a day goes by without "Islamic clerics" being mentioned in the news. And anyone who's ever played any RPG should know that there are clerics to every deity in the game. (There is a more restricted, Christian-specific sense of the word, but it's only used by the Eastern Orthodox, while the characters seem far more Anglican than Greek, and they don't have the haircut that's part of that meaning.)
"Father" is an even more generic term--while many Protestant denominations avoid its use because of the Catholic connotations, it's used to translate forms of address from east-Asian religions (including by practioners of those religions), and used similarly in works about fictional (especially science-fictional) religions, as well as by some neo-Pagans, occultists, and Satanists.
My suspicion is that it was a deliberate choice to avoid explicitly making them Christian. It would be way too speculative to guess whether this was to allow them free play to ambiguously hint at both Anglican and Orthodox connections without contradiction, or to avoid offending Chrisitan fundies in the American audience that the show is trying to expand, or just to leave a little mystery (or some leeway in case some future writer decides to have, say, the Anglican Church disappear before the 51st century).
So, I'm going to remove this again. If someone wants to re-add it, please add a comment on the talk page supporting it. --Falcotron 21:59, April 27, 2010 (UTC)