I’d really love to read an essay on Stoker’s theology as it is presented in Dracula. I don’t think I could write it myself but there’s something here about the way God is represented as an impersonal force or a universal law like gravity, rather than loving or merciful. Stoker’s concept of God is a higher power whose holiness can be harnessed conditionally, and whose holiness also harms people indiscriminately for any violation of purity. God is more akin to electricity than humanity. It seems to make perfect sense that the dry men of science, Seward and Van Helsing, are the ones who are the most religious, because theology is treated as yet another field of natural science.
I think it's interesting especially when you see how different characters react differently to Mina's damnation
-Mina is almost scientific about it. The fact of the matter is "I'm unclean in the eyes of God". No matter what Van Helsing has told her she still concludes near the end "Alas! I am unclean to His eyes, and shall be until He may deign to let me stand forth in His sight as one of those who have not incurred His wrath." God's wrath is upon her and that's the fact, to her, because the evidence is on her. She still prays to him to keep Jonathan safe, kind of to how in the Iliad the Trojan women still prayed to Athena for safety despite knowing Troy had brought her wrath.
-Van Helsing plays God's advocate a lot. He tries to justify the mark, its purpose, God's intentions, and promises on Judgement Day God will right all wrongs, including the mark. He tries to compare her to Jesus than a sinner. "Till then we bear our Cross, as His Son did in obedience to His Will." However, Mina doesn't agree; as we see later, she keeps seeing herself as unclean to God.
-Jack seems to question God's judgment, indirectly. "...that sweet, sweet, good, good woman in all the radiant beauty of her youth and animation, with the red scar on her forehead...and we, knowing that so far as symbols went, she with all her goodness and purity and faith, was outcast from God."
-Jonathan believes in God, he had even chosen to die in God's mercy over being left at the mercy of the vampires to turn him into one. But like Mina, he sees the scar as evidence that God has judged her. Unlike Van Helsing, he doesn't try to claim that God doesn't see her as such. God has marked her as unclean, and Jonathan declares while Mina is asleep "This I know: that if ever there was a woman who was all perfection, that one is my poor wronged darling." She's perfect to him and that's what matters, and also if she is damned to walk the earth in the darkness he will go with her over staying in the light with God.
This quote "This I know: that if ever there was a woman who was all perfection, that one is my poor wronged darling." is interesting because of the word wronged. Wronged by whom? Dracula? Or by God?
Something else indicating Stoker's theological thoughts might be here: Jonathan at first bargains that surely God wouldn't let someone like her perish like this! (He later concludes that even if God does, he will follow her). Mina laments how much her husband has suffered despite him never having harmed anyone, and similarly she had cried that she's been righteous all her life and yet this happened to her. It seems like Stoker believed that suffering isn't punishment for sins, because people who never did wrong like the Harkers still get immense suffering.