Thoughts on Doctor Strange 2: The World Through a Keyhole

The Ancient One:     You’re a man looking at the world through a keyhole, and you’ve spent your whole life trying to widen that keyhole, to see more, to know more, and now, on hearing that it can be widened, in ways you can’t imagine, you reject the possibility.

Dr Strange:                No, I reject it because I do not believe in fairy tales about chakras or energy or the power of belief. There is no such thing as spirit. We are made of matter and nothing more. We’re just another tiny, momentary speck within an indifferent universe.

Doctor Strange (2016)

 

Not an awful lot visible through this keyhole, is there?

Let’s play a game. You have, I’m assuming, a rough idea of the way my blog tends to work. I’ve given you an opening quotation. Now you try to guess where I’m going with the rest of this post. I’m not trying to catch you out; mainly I’m curious as to the extent to which your brain works the way mine does.

To pick up the story from where we left it last post, Dr Stephen Strange’s desperate quest to reverse the damage to his hands ends up with him spending his last dollar on a one-way ticket to Kathmandu, and eventually tracking down the place of healing he was tipped off about. There he meets a woman known as the Ancient One, who offers him a cup of tea and an insight into the way she thinks the world works. The lines quoted above constitute part of that encounter,¹ and I have to admit that when I heard them, they did a very effective job of pushing certain buttons in my brain. Stephen’s materialism, his refusal to acknowledge the possibility of anything existing beyond the physical, scientifically-demonstrable realm, his insistence that the universe must operate according to blind, purposeless happenstance – these ideas are familiar territory for anyone who’s ever entertained even a mild interest in Christian apologetics. Even the use of the term ‘fairy tales’ felt reminiscent of the kinds of accusations that seem to be often levelled at a Christian worldview: replace the subject-matter of such fairy tales as Dr Strange gives it with something a bit more Jesus-y, and this chunk of scripting wouldn’t sound out of place in, I don’t know, God’s Not Dead or something.² You see the buttons, right?

And then the Ancient One shoves Stephen’s ‘astral form’ out of his ‘physical form’, and introduces him to mirror realities and a vast compendium of mind-boggling alternative universes, and altogether indisputably proves to him that there really is far more out there than an indifferent material realm. And of course I’m there internally cheering something along the lines of, “That showed him!” Dr Strange denied the existence of a spiritual reality, and his presumptions were shattered to dust before his eyes. He was arrogant enough to limit his understanding of the cosmos merely to things he was personally able to grasp, and he was soundly taken down a peg. He thought he was so clever, and he was wrong. Yes, it’s only a story, and yes, the spiritual reality I believe in doesn’t much resemble the mystical multiverse of the MCU, but I still felt pleasingly vindicated. You were wrong, Stephen Strange. Your worldview has joined battle and been thoroughly trounced. So there.

Clearly, the Christian thing to do in these kinds of situations is to sit there feeling smug for having been clever enough to figure out that there really is a supernatural reality beyond the material realm – unlike narrow-minded, scientistic, arrogant morons like Dr Strange. Right, guys? Right?

Ahem. Or, um, maybe not.

For one thing, avoiding the trap of believing that an indifferent, material universe is all there is has nothing to do with being clever, or insightful, or virtuous, or superior to one’s fellow humans in any other manner one cares to name. Regardless of the sort of people we are, we all of us stumble along our own dark little paths, groping for understanding, trying to widen the keyhole, but we are spiritually blind and spiritually deaf and the truth, should we encounter it, comes across to us exactly as ridiculous as the Ancient One’s words did to Dr Strange. Like him, we need something on a different level; we need to actually encounter the super-material for us to acknowledge its existence. Now, I don’t mean by that that everyone has to have some kind of seismic, miraculous, road-to-Damascus experience³ in order to be truly counted a believer – I never had one – but I do mean that nobody ever comes to believe in Jesus unless God is already working in that person by his Spirit.⁴

Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. – 1 Corinthians 2: 12-14

None of us figures out the truth of the gospel. To us as we naturally are, it sounds ludicrous. We need to be transformed from natural people to spiritual people – the process known as ‘being born again’⁵  – if spiritual truths are to make any sense to us. So there is no occasion to pat ourselves on the back for being cleverer than Dr Strange. Left to our own devices, we settle ourselves in our own erroneous worldviews exactly as resolutely as he settled himself in his, until supernatural reality comes and gives us a shake round the shoulders. We look at the world through a keyhole until the Spirit comes and opens the door.

And on top of that, I think we’re awfully prone to responding to the door having been opened by building another door, setting it up not ten yards beyond the first, outfitting it with a slightly larger keyhole, and settling back down in the same position we’re used to in order to look through it – by which I mean that we fail to behave like spiritual people when it comes to discerning spiritual things. We look at scripture and assess it according to a slight variation on the same worldview we had when we were looking through the first keyhole. A particular passage comes across as a bit harsh, a bit discriminatory, a bit unlikely, a bit reminiscent of this or that denomination or tradition, a bit naïve, a bit unachievable, a bit petty, a bit weird. We are seeing with the spiritually-blind eyes and hearing with the spiritually-deaf ears of our old, natural selves, exalting human wisdom, instead of relying on the Spirit who teaches us interpretation of spiritual truths.

On this front, we have something to learn from Dr Strange. Once his experience of the multiverse has been concluded, his response is to beg the Ancient One, “Teach me!” He sees now the folly that was everything he thought he knew; he throws it aside and pleads to be taught about the way things really are. He is so determined in this that even when she denies his request and throws him out of the building, he refuses to leave until he is let back in again. His understanding of life, the universe, and everything has been so thoroughly revolutionised that his only conceivable option is to press the one who so revolutionised it to enlighten him further; to go back to the way he used to think is, well, unthinkable.

Should the same not be true of us who have been enlightened of real spiritual realities? Should we not be ready to fling aside our old preconceptions and embrace the teaching of the Spirit – who both inspired the writing of God’s word and enables us to interpret it? And yet how often do I allow my natural, unspiritual understanding to cloud my ability to discern spiritual truths?

And so it turns out Dr Strange might be rather cleverer than me in the application of his worldview after all…

Footnotes

¹ If you’d like a clip of the scene, some kind human has uploaded one to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgM4JE7agIs.

² Don’t watch the film; watch SayGoodnightKevn’s review of it: https://vimeo.com/139840667.

³ The allusion is to the conversion of Saul/Paul, in case you didn’t know: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+9&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Do get some context on this one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+2&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Jesus explains this jazz in John 3: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+3&version=ESVUK.