I Met God and His Name is Chuck

WARNING: THERE ARE POTENTIAL SPOILERS HERE, ESPECIALLY TO THE LAST SEASON OF SUPERNATURAL.

          So Chuck is all-knowing.  This is God, the God, according to “Supernatural”.  When we met God…Chuck…he was, as in the Beatles song, a paperback writer.  If you are not familiar with the show, it has just concluded a fifteen year run on the CW.  It revolves around two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who are hunters…and later men of letters.

          They hunt monsters.  Ghosts, urban legends, mythological beings, angels and demons, and everything in between.  In the course of the show, we met Chuck, who was essentially transcribing their lives into paperback novels.  Turns out, Chuck is God, the God, not ‘a god’ like Bill Murray thought he might be in Groundhog Day.

          This is significant why?  Because this portrayal of God is not particularly kind to the Christian tradition.  And while that is important, I think there is something even more significant in this portrayal.  I think it is significant because it reflects a lot of popular attitudes about God in the public consciousness.  After all, to be a hit show, the writers have to find some touchstone with the experiences of their audience.

          So here is a thumbnail sketch of their God.  They subscribe to the Clockwork theory of creation.  Chuck created it and then let it go, and it runs.  He is not a “hands on” kind of guy-and he is definitely a guy.  Where did Chuck go?  It was not like Genesis where God rested on the seventh day.  No, Chuck goes on to create other versions of his creation, shuffling them into a multiverse like so many cards in a deck.

          He is not really a punishing God, but is not much of a loving God either.  But while his ‘angels’ presume him to be all-knowing, Chuck created a situation in which, to kill off an apocalyptic strength character, one of the Winchester boys would have to sacrifice their own lives.  He called it an Abraham and Isaac kind of thing, but this time there would be no ram to sacrifice in place of Isaac.  So Chuck is a God who likes to play games with the lives of his creation.  And the sense was Chuck did not know how it would turn out.  So we were created with free will, apparently even beyond God’s knowledge.    

          Essentially, Chuck is a jerk with transcendent powers.  He either does not care about what happens in his creation or he purposely manipulates it for his own malicious ends. 

          Sure, this is not the God that I believe in as a pastor in the Presbyterian Church.  But how prevalent is this understanding of God in the popular culture that it is so strongly drawn in a television show of long duration and large audience?   How much of the world really thinks this way about God?