Thoughts on Doctor Strange 5: Life Wins

Dormammu:     Then you will spend eternity dying.

Dr Strange:       Yeah. But everyone on earth will live.

Doctor Strange (2016)

“What’s the opposite of eternal life?” asked my GCSE Religious Studies teacher one lesson.

Ever pedantically logical, I hazarded: “Eternal death?”

It was the right answer, apparently, though the concept sat slightly oddly with me. I could see how life could go on happening forever, but I envisioned death as a delimitable process, a finite moment, a singular event. I envisioned it as the transition: you’re alive, and then you die, and then…

And then someone buys cut flowers for your funeral - alive, but not for much longer. Does that strike anyone else as a bit odd?

Well, that’s where the underdeveloped thanatology of my proto-Christian teenage self¹ hit a bit of a snag: then what?

Death, the Bible makes clear, is more than a transition or a singular event. Death is the apt punishment for those who mutiny against the immaculate rule of the all-perfect, all-powerful God (“the wages of sin is death”²) – and that punishment is exacted eternally:

“…the Lord Jesus [will be] revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…”

That’s from the first chapter of Paul’s second letter to his fellow-believers in the city of Thessalonica.³ Or, to similar effect, compare the following chunks of Matthew (25:41, 46) and Revelation (20:10, 14-15):⁴

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’ … and these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

“And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever … then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.”

Emphasis mine, of course – just to highlight that eternal punishment in the lake of fire is very explicitly identified as death. The transition is really not the point here; the death we should be worried about is the endless one that happens afterwards: “I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!” (Luke 12:4-5).⁵

If I seem to be going a tad overboard with the references, I hasten to assure you that I’m selecting mere snippets of vast swathes of the Bible that are given over to discussing these matters of death and punishment. Jesus talked about them a lot⁶ – and yet we his followers shrink from the topic like cockroaches from light. Obviously there’s an extent to which that’s understandable – the notion is the very opposite of a pleasant one⁷ – but I tend to feel that there must be something a tad awry if it’s easier to find an exploration of the concept of eternal death in the Marvel Cinematic Universe than in the sum of mainstream Christian media and conversation.

The final showdown of Doctor Strange consists of our eponymous hero taking an endless time-loop created using the infinity stone he purloined from the library at Kamar-Taj into the Dark Dimension, where there is no time, and whence the evil Dormammu is busy embarking upon destroying the planet (so far he’s basically managed a street or two, but he seems to be warming to his theme).

Dr Strange actually makes the time-loop round his wrist, where one might, under other circumstances, wear a watch, which I think was quite a fun cinematic choice.

“Dormammu!” announces Dr Strange. “I’ve come to bargain.”

“You’ve come to die,” Dormammu corrects him, and kills him.

But, seconds later, Dr Strange is back: “Dormammu! I’ve come to bargain.”

Dormammu, perplexed, wonders whether this is some kind of illusion. Dr Strange assures him it’s real, he, in return, remarks his approval of the fact, and proceeds to kill our hero again.

Dr Strange reappears again: “Dormammu! I’ve come to bargain.”

It emerges that the time-loop means Dr Strange will just keep on coming back however many times Dormammu kills him, as the protagonist explains: “This is how things are now: you and me, trapped in this moment, endlessly … I can lose, again, and again, and again, and again, forever, and that makes you my prisoner.” Dormammu points out that this means he will spend eternity dying – suffering endlessly. His reply is to the effect that it will be worth it to save the lives of the inhabitants of the earth. We the viewers are treated to a number of subsequent restarts of the time-loop; a housemate and fellow-cinemagoer of mine remarked that we got something of a taste of the utter frustration that eventually causes Dormammu to surrender and agree to let the earth go.⁸ But in truth, we only had to put up with a couple of minutes of that jazz, and it wasn’t as if we were experiencing the kind of pain Dr Strange would have been as he was repeatedly murdered.

The scene got me thinking about eternal death, how utterly grim and horrific and hopeless a prospect it is, nothing to look forward to but more of the same suffering. It also persuaded me of Dr Strange’s character development, because the arrogant, success-obsessed neurosurgeon we met at the start of the film would never have given himself over to a fate like that for the sake of saving other people.

But that said, Dr Strange had a couple of pretty compelling reasons why it wouldn’t be so bad for him to trap himself in an endless time-loop of being killed by Dormammu. First off, he wasn’t actually planning to be there for eternity if he could help it: his intention, as he made very clear, was to bargain with Dormammu for the release of the whole earth, including himself; granted, there was a possibility the plan would fail, but he was obviously very much hoping it wouldn’t. Second, he only really had one other option, and that was to let Dormammu destroy the world, in which case he’d basically end up enduring an eternity of unpleasantness anyway; the only difference would be that so would the rest of the planet. So I’ll admit that Dr Strange’s choice was relatively self-sacrificially heroic – and I do love a bit of self-sacrificial heroism at the climax of a good story, so thumbs up, Marvel – but it’s absolutely nothing to write home about compared to a certain other act of self-sacrificial heroism that you were probably anticipating I was going to mention at some point.

Jesus might only have been on the cross for three hours, and dead for three days, but what he went through equated to an eternity of suffering. It has to have done: the chunks of Scripture I quoted above make it clear enough that eternal death and destruction is the just and appropriate punishment that faces those who disobey God, and so if it’s true that Jesus took the entire extent of that punishment upon himself, such that our debts are paid in full as soon as we place our trust in him,⁹ then he can have endured nothing less than the equivalent of eternal death. Unlike in the case of Dr Strange, such suffering wasn’t a possible consequence supposing the plan went wrong: it was the plan. And unlike in the case of Dr Strange, nothing at all untoward would have happened to Jesus had he opted, entirely reasonably, not to go through with that plan; at absolutely any point in the proceedings, he could have summoned a huge army of angels,¹⁰ had them exact just retribution on those who would dare to so maltreat the Son of God, and resumed his place in heaven, in the endless love and joy and peace of the Godhead. But he didn’t. He chose to go through all the horrors of eternal death so that evil people like you and I, O Helplessly Sinful Reader, might be spared them – and instead enter into eternal life.

Thus he who has life in himself was subject to the full extent of what death is capable of. And as a result, he drained death to the dregs; he exhausted every ounce of its resources. How could that which is the wages of sin ultimately triumph over the sinless? And even though death threw everything it had at Jesus, how could it overcome the very source of eternal life? Jesus wasn’t just our substitute, but the victor over our oppressor, and if we are on his side, then we share in his victory. At the very heart of God’s salvation plan, in the Lord Jesus Christ and in him alone, death is defeated. Life wins.

Footnotes

¹ What I mean by this phrase is that I’m not at all sure whether I was really trusting Jesus at that point in my life or not, but the point is I am doing now, and since that means God planned my salvation since before the foundation of the cosmos (Ephesians 1:4), it really doesn’t matter in the slightest at which exact moment of my life the fact first became manifest. Fancy some Adam4d insight on the subject? Of course you do: http://adam4d.com/what-that-means/.

² That’s from the end of Romans 6: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+6&version=ESVUK. I’ve never quite understood why the ostensibly plural noun takes a singular verb here – the original Greek, incidentally, has no verb at all – but there you go.

³ I had to rip the syntax apart a bit to trim the quotation down to a manageable length, so do check out the whole chapter for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+thess+1&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Here’s the Matthew, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+25&version=ESVUK, and the Revelation, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+20&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Last Bible Gateway link for today: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+12&version=ESVUK.

⁶ A lot of people seem to chuck around the assertion that Jesus spoke about hell more than he did about heaven, but whether or not that’s true depends very heavily on what one is or is not prepared to count as a reference to one or the other. In any case, Jesus did mention eternal punishment on pretty frequent occasions – I’ll give a few more very explicit examples (there are lots more less explicit allusions) from Matthew to give a sense of density: try 5:29-30; 13:40-41; and 18:8-9 – and the point is that we should be taking everything he said as true and valuable, regardless of whether or not he talked about other things more often.

⁷ There aren’t (at least in my experience) a lot of songs that deal with how much it hurts to know that there are people you love that are, as things stand, set to face eternal punishment, which is a great shame, because it’s exactly the kind of emotional millstone that merits being set to music. Here’s one of the few, a favourite of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ku4jFaYlHE.

⁸ Ooh look, a high-quality clip of the scene in question, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3lA6abQprM; my thanks to the kind human who uploaded it.

⁹ Which he did, by the way. “Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace … all we like sheep have gone astray … and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5-6) and “there is no more condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1) and “God made [us] alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by cancelling the record of debt that stood against us” (Colossians 2:13-14) and, oh, I don’t know, the entire Bible, basically.

¹⁰ More than twelve legions, to be precise (Matthew 26:53). A legion at this stage consisted of 10 cohorts of 500 men each (or thereabouts), so twelve legions would mean some 60,000 soldiers. To put this in perspective, there were only about twenty-five legions in the entire Roman Empire at this point. In other words, Jesus was saying he could appeal to his Father and immediately obtain access to a heavenly army consisting of half the entire military might of the most formidable martial power the world had ever seen. He could have – but he didn’t.