Thoughts on Doctor Strange 4: It’s Not About You

“Arrogance and fear still keep you from learning the simplest and most significant lesson of all … It’s not about you.”

Doctor Strange (2016)

Ah, the selfie. Is there anything that so acutely encapsulates the unmitigated self-obsession rampant in our society?

Let’s talk about Jonathan Pangborn.

Who? Well, exactly. He’s not exactly the most memorable of the auxiliary characters that populate the world of Doctor Strange; in fact, he’s very little more than a plot device. I’m talking about the guy who went to Kathmandu paralysed and came back able-bodied, and whose testimony of the fact prompted our hero’s own Himalayan expedition. We don’t hear much of him after that until the astral forms of our hero Stephen Strange and his mentor the Ancient One are having a Deep Meaningful Conversation on a hospital balcony, as her physical form lies in surgery, dying from wounds sustained in a spectacular mirror-world showdown with her villainous former protégé Kaecilius.¹ I mean, she was clearly going to die; mentor figures pretty much always die as soon as the protagonist has a basic grasp of the grand task with which he is charged.² In this case, that task is stopping Kaecilius from letting Dormammu absorb the world into the timeless chaos of the Dark Dimension, and the Ancient One, aware that she’s on the brink of death, is pretty keen to impress the importance of stepping up to this challenge upon her acolyte before she goes.

So she pulls no punches. She tells Stephen that his fear of failure has kept him from greatness. She tells him that his arrogance has blinded him to basic truth. She tells him it’s not about him. And then she drops the bombshell that Jonathan Pangborn was never actually healed of his paralysis; he has to use the skills he learned under the Ancient One’s tutelage to channel dimensional energy, every moment of every day, in order to be able to use his body normally. Stephen is quick to realise the implications of this news for his own situation. He knows enough magic now that he could use it, in the same way Pangborn does, to enable his hands to function as well as they did before: he could go back to his old life, become a neurosurgeon again, pick up all the excellence and prestige and wealth he’d lost. He could have everything he wanted, everything he was looking for when he arrived at Kamar-Taj.

He hesitates.

The Ancient One has painted the decision Stephen faces in stark colours: “[Jonathan Pangborn] had a choice, to return to his own life or to serve something greater than himself … You could [have your hands back again, your old life], and the world would be all the lesser for it.” Somehow, everything Stephen wanted just doesn’t look like very much any more. He may have arrived at Kamar-Taj with his own agenda, seeing everything he was learning as merely a means to an end, a way of achieving his personal desires, but things have changed since then. He knows the truth about how the universe works now, and he knows that there are bigger things going on here. There are cosmic battles. There are worlds at stake. He has what he needs to fight on the right side – the knowledge, the tools, the power; how can he stand by as the world tumbles into the clutches of a fate worse than death? He takes up the challenge – and that’s why Stephen Strange is the hero, and Jonathan Pangborn is just a plot device.

Jonathan Pangborn could have chosen to serve something greater than himself, but he didn’t: he chose to serve only himself – and that’s despite the fact that he had been taught the truth about the universe and shown demonstrations of extraordinary power, just as much as Dr Strange had: remember he knew enough magic to cause his paralysed body to function normally without expending unreasonable effort. He discovered the existence of something greater than himself, but saw it only as a means to an end, the end in question being the fulfilment of his own pre-existent desires. He kind of reminds me of a guy called Simon who shows up in the eighth chapter of Luke’s sequel to his account of Jesus’ earthly ministry, commonly known as The Acts of the Apostles.³

Simon lived in Samaria – the dodgy not-quite-Jewish province north of Judaea⁴ – and he was a magician, a pretty prestigious one actually. But then the apostle Philip showed up in Samaria telling everybody that the Messiah had come and they needed to repent and believe in him, and backing up what he said with miracles whose extraordinariness exceeded anything Simon had been able to achieve with his magic. Simon was convinced and was baptised as a believer in Jesus. It turns out he still didn’t quite get it, however, because when Peter and John pootled over to Samaria too and started laying hands on people that they might receive the Holy Spirit, Simon tried to pay them money to teach him to do the same thing. Peter was appalled, and told Simon he could have no part in their ministry, because his heart was not right before God; he was still imprisoned by his wrongdoing and needed to turn from it and be forgiven. In other words, Simon wasn’t really a believer at all.

Simon’s trying to pay for the power of the Holy Spirit reveals that he was seeing the gospel as a tool to be used for his own purposes. He had been taught the truth about the universe and shown demonstrations of extraordinary power, but he hadn’t understood that the only appropriate response to that was to give up serving himself and serve something greater.

Let’s not drift into making the same mistake.

In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton published a book called Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, which was the result of a research project called the National Study of Youth and Religion. They concluded that a lot of Americans who identified themselves as Christians actually subscribed to “Christianity’s misbegotten stepcousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”, or MTD. The ever-excellent Adam4d describes the god of MTD in the following way:

The god of this religion is passionately focused on serving us while making us feel really good about ourselves. He’ll mind his own business until we need something, and then he will spring into action. It’s not about him; he requires nothing of us. It’s all about us. He is at our beck and call.⁵

In other words, MTD makes the gospel into a means to an end, namely our own personal satisfaction. It’s a mistake of the same ilk as the one Simon made in Acts 8. And much as I suspect that MTD isn’t quite as pervasive in the UK as it is in the US, I still think we need to keep our guard up and make sure we’re not affirming it instead of the gospel. The point of the gospel is not our satisfaction. Certainly there is no true satisfaction to be found anywhere except the gospel, and certainly it’s possible to come to Jesus seeking satisfaction, the same way Stephen Strange came to Kamar-Taj seeking the healing of his hands, but if we don’t subsequently come to understand that simplest and most significant lesson – it’s not about us – then we have believed in a false gospel, a false Jesus. There are bigger things going on here. There are cosmic battles. There are worlds at stake. We have what we need to fight on the right side – the very word of God, unrestricted access to petition the sovereign Lord of the universe to bring about his will in us, the same power that raise Jesus from the dead living within us; how can we stand by as the world tumbles into the clutches of a fate worse than death? Whatever we were looking for when we first started looking into this Jesus guy, surely it doesn’t look like much next to what it is we’ve found.

Don’t be like Jonathan Pangborn; don’t be like Simon the magician; don’t be an adherent of MTD. It’s not about you, O Darling Reader; it’s all, always, about Jesus.

Footnotes

¹ It was well dramatic, though unfortunately this was about the best clip I could find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Af3G6ifeQA. Hey, just pay to watch the film if you want to see it in high quality.

² As detailed in this rather charming sketch from the endlessly superb Studio C: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQTsaDKxmvA.

³ Do have a look at the story for yourself, to check that my paraphrased version isn’t way off the mark if for no other reason: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+8&version=ESVUK.

⁴ It was a dodgy, not-quite-Jewish area because a bunch of the Israelites who lived there had been exiled to Assyria, and a bunch of other randomers had been resettled in the area (because forced mass exile was how you ran an empire in the Ancient Near East); the details are given in 2 Kings 17: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings+17&version=NIVUK. And hence derive all the Samaritan/Jew tensions that are evident in such gospel passages as the story of the Samaritan woman at the well and the parable of the (atypically) ‘Good Samaritan’.

⁵ Adam4d’s description of MTD is superbly thorough, clear, pertinent, and convicting. I strongly encourage you to check it out: http://adam4d.com/mtd/.