Two Good Voices in My Head. Two Pills: Red and Blue

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In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, good and bad angels speak persuasively to Faustus. He chooses the path of adventure, exploration and experience.

Two voices, saying different and opposite things. It’s a more common experience than I had realised. Billy Graham had a crisis with two voices--reason and Charles Templeton; orthodoxy and Henrietta Mears. He chose to believe in the literal inspiration of the Scriptures. He moved upwards into fame and adulation. Templeton lost his faith, and ended up bitter, because you see, he really did love Jesus, and felt he had lost something.

I have two voices in my head both two real life friends, both Christians. One voice says “Don’t question. That’s too painful.” The other says, “Think for yourself.”

Hmm.

Our family watched “The Matrix,” a couple of days ago, at the insistence of my daughter, Zoe, 17. Morpheus offers Neo two pills: take the blue pill, and continue believing in what you’ve always believed. Take the red pill, and you will see truth.

Of course, there is always the possibility that one can take the red pill, and continue believing what you’ve always believed, if what you believed was the truth.

So…blue pill or red pill? Which should I take? Continue believing what I’ve been taught?

Or pray, think, study scripture and think for myself? Encounter Scripture for myself. One is easy; one can be difficult and painful.

But, of course, if the truths of evangelical and Christian orthodoxy are the truth, they will withstand questioning. And Christ himself will withstand all questioning, of that I have no doubt!

So today, in my quiet time, one of those blessed times, in which I can actually see the face of Jesus (with the eyes of faith!) I asked Christ the question.

Should I pray, think, study and explore and encounter Scripture for myself? Blue pill or red pill?

* * *

The interesting thing about asking Christ questions is that he does not give two people the same answer. His varied responses to different people as recorded in Scripture stagger me.

And in Christian memoir, autobiography and biography, I’ve noticed the same thing: Christ’s hugely varied responses to the same existential questions put to him by wildly different people.

So, I ask him my question, and I see him smile. And I know his answer.

I am instinctively a rebel. I have a restless mind. I cannot but think for myself.

T.S. Eliot writes in Little Gidding,

We shall not cease from exploration,

and the end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started

and know the place for the first time.

May it be so for me.