Barry's Blog

The recent release of the controversial screen adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling fictional novel, The Da Vinci Code, has opened to staggering numbers worldwide. Since it's opening on May 19th, it has grossed some $146 million in the domestic market, and $319 million on foreign soil. And unless you have been abducted by aliens for months, or have been bidding your time in a cave away from television and media, it is hardly possible that you are unaware of the theological brouhaha that has been stirred by Brown's novel and, in recent days, Ron Howard's faithful screen adaptation.

While such an uproar might be surprising if the work was meant to be considered a work of pure fiction, the book begins with a page labeled "FACT," in which Brown claims, among other things, that "all descriptions of...documents...in this novel are accurate." While this gives the reader the false impression that the novel is based upon sound historical research, many scholars (not just Christians) have come out of the woodwork to show where Dan Brown is wrong.

While a complete summation of the book and film is beyond our scope (a cottage industry of books have spawned recently as theological correctives to Brown's novel), let's touch on some of the underlying tenets and conjectures of Brown. Much of the novel's claims are focused on the supposed "greatest cover-up in human history," that there was, centuries ago, an organization that kept secret certain truths about early Christianity, but which has been "hushed up" by the power-brokers of the Catholic Church. Some of these "secret truths" include: 1) that the early church never really considered Jesus Christ to be divine (but only a good man) until the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine, in the early fourth century (yet this is patently false, as our earliest New Testament documents of our Bible would suggest otherwise) ; 2) that the canonical Gospels of our Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) are not our earliest Gospels, but instead the suppressed Gnostic "gospels" (such as the Gospel of Philip or Mary) are our earliest and most authoritative sources, but that they were supressed by Constantine at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. Again, it is simply untrue that the Gnostic Gospels were suppressed prior to the formation of the New Testament canon - the "books" in our Bible. They just were not recognized as authoritative by the early church, but the lack of recognition is not the same as suppression.

A third conjecture of Brown's The Da Vinci Code is that Jesus was married - and to Mary Magdalene at that, and that their marriage produced children. Brown's hero Teabing argues that the early Church had to hush up such a notion that Jesus was married because "a child of Jesus would undermine the crucial notion of Christ's divinity and therefore the Christian Church." Even though, a priori, there is no reason why Jesus could not have been married, as Jesus did not teach that sex was defiling (indeed, He speaks of it as the means by which the man and woman become one flesh as God intended, see Mark 10), because the New Testament is completely silent on this issue, most Biblical scholars, even those of a liberal mindset, see this as a far-fetched idea.

"Everybody loves a conspiracy,"  the saying goes. And it is not hard to see why this kind of work is having such an impact in our postmodern culture, where it is the power of the rhetoric, and not the accuracy of the reporting, that matters most. Robert Langdon, the hero of Brown's book, himself stresses that "every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of fatih - acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration...the problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors...those who understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical."  While it is true that sometimes the truths of the Bible are expressed in symbols and metaphors, the Gospel stories themselves are not simply allegories, or cleverly devised tales (see 2 Peter 1:16). Rather, they are ancient biographies written according to the literary and historical conventions of the time, and as such, are the reports of eyewitnesses to historical facts.

Joseph Loconte's excellent article, "Debunking the Debunkers," that appeared in The Wall Street Journal on the day The Da Vinci Code opened in theaters, provides a fitting response to those distressed by Dan Brown's novel. Loconte reminds us of C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Christian apologist, who not only exposed the fault lines of modern secular thought, but also likewise saw the weaknesses of the church with great clarity. There are few things more corruptible, Lewis observed, than religious belief and practice. "We must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better," he wrote a friend, "it makes him very much worse." Books and films of the ilk of TDC have a great appeal for people who are acutely aware of the historic shortcomings of the church, and Lewis was familiar with them as well. "If ever the book which I am not going to write is written," Lewis cautioned, "it must be the full confession by Christendom to Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty."

And yet, as Loconte reminds us, "Lewis would insist that a confession of Christianity's sins does not absolve us of the obligation to think: conspiracy theories are no substitute for calm and clear arguments about matters of faith." In one of Lewis' many brilliant essays, "Fern Seeds and Elephants," he debunked the critics of his own day - those who held that the Gospels were the product of myth, legend, and outright deception. He began by drawing attention to what he called the "shattering immediacy" of the Gospel stories, the often brash realism of Jesus' encounters with ordinary, simple people. Likewise, Lewis would also probably point out that theories about great "cover-ups" presented in such novels as TDC ignore an "elephant-sized" fact - that there are also many people and events reported in the Bible that are, to be quite candid, embarassing to believers. Do you recall that the lineage of Jesus Christ includes Rahab, who was a prostitute? Or what are we to make of Israel's history which presents a rather unflattering portrayal of great King David, who was both an adulterer and a murderer? Why did the earliest Christians not excise these characters and events from their story?

As Loconte concludes, "Here is the real harm of these modern conspiracy theories: They may appeal to our emotions, but they violate our common sense. They reject reason, just as surely as they reject revelation. 'I do not wish to reduce the skeptical element in your minds,' Lewis explained. 'I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else.'

Sound advice for the skeptics as well as the faithful.

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow 

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