The Da Vinci Code

A friend of mine emailed me a couple of weeks ago about the Da Vinci Code and asked my opinion. He asked me today to post my response on my blog, so below is the original, unedited response I gave to his question.

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Skinner -

I saw this article about the Da Vinci Code today. I haven't completely formed my opinion on where I stand on the issue because it is a fictional book that three years after its publishing has not to my knowledge spawned any new religions or any back lash to the church by feminist movements... Or am I just in the dark.

Let me know what you think about this article and about the effect that the movie is or will have on society.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/commentaries/othercott.html
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My Response Below
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Andy,
I’m not sure if you have read the book or not, but I actually just finished reading it (it’s always important, in my view, before one criticizes something to actually have experienced it, whatever it may be....almost whatever that is haha). It is a well-written novel with a solid plotline and suspenseful action sequences, but it is based on a rather blasphemous premise. I can’t say I have a wholesale rejection of some if its statements concerning the male-dominated nature of the Christian faith. I think that gender issues have been demagogued for the purpose of social control in Western society for two millennia.

The Church’s bleak history on women’s rights is hardly an argument for radical secular feminism, but nevertheless, I am quite firm in my commitment to a contextual reading of all texts on gender and sexuality, even if such readings are considered heterodox by the majority of those in the conservative wings of the church (Catholic, Southern Baptist, Bible Church, and PCA). In fact, if we scrutinize the scriptures, we will find that, for example, the fourth chapter of the Philippian epistle makes reference to women who were “fellow workers” or as some translations put it “fellow ministers” with Paul in the Gospel. This, combined with the mountain of Old Testament references to the power of influential females in Israel ought to make one reconsider the androgocentric interpretations that have pervaded modern Christian thought.

Interestingly, we can trace a good majority of contemporary conservative thinking on gender and sexuality to the works of Augustine of Hippo, whose philosophy more resembles baptized Platonism than it does thorough Christian theology, not only on this subject but on a number of them (e.g. God’s relationship to Time, the Duality of Body & Soul, and others). Yet it was Augustinian theology that influenced Calvin and other of the Calvinistic Reformers on Soteriology, and they translated their acceptance of Augustine’s Soteriology into an acceptance also of his Ethical and Moral Philosophy. Now, whether or not Augustine’s conception of Original Sin is accurate, I think the Reformer’s embrace of his Moral Philosophy was improper, given his Platonic presuppositions and his inability to get away from some of their more fundamental beliefs. This is one of the reasons why it seems that there is such a discrepancy between Old and New Testaments. The interpreters of the Old Testament who informed much of the tradition of the Early Church were in fact Hebrews themselves, and Jewish Rabbis. However, the first interpreters of the New Testament after the Apostolic Creeds were holdovers of Greek education. Thus, there emerge certain dichotomies that unnecessarily now plague the Faith as a result of the infiltration of the norms and beliefs of the time.

I say all of this to mitigate the overraction to books and movies like Da Vinci Code. I obviously do not embrace the core tenets espoused in the book, but I reject the supposition that says that the Faith would be destroyed or rendered moot if those tenets were true. Let us examine this logically. If we consider the primary argument of the book: namely that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had children, it does not inherently contradict any of the teachings of the Scriptures. The Scriptures say that Christ was sinless. Marriage and sexual intercourse are not sinful for us, and we must infer, as a result, that they would not have essentially be sinful for Christ. This is not an argument that it happened, but merely a caution against the sometimes rabid responses we hear from the fundamentalist right-wing of the Church who are literalist and exclusionist in their hermeneutics. I do not want to seem like I am being radical, but simply objective and logical.

Now, I still haven’t answered your question, though I felt it was necessary to preface my answer with the foregoing commentary. You are correct that, to date, there has been no new religion spawned or any (new) backlash from feminists against the Church (as I have noted previously, the Church has done enough in actual history to get such backlash). I think that this, just like any other book or movie, has entertainment appeal. Take the Chronicles of Narnia for example. It was an acclaimed film with a great cast of actors and directors, a wonderful plot and storyline, and raked in millions of dollars. But it didn’t cause a massive revival or awakening, in spite of its New Testament allegory. Even the Passion of the Christ did not have the kind of cultural impact that people expected it to have. Nobody walked out of the movie loving Jesus the way many predicted, and nobody walked out of the movie hating Jews like many predicted. It is sad to say that little affects our fat and entrenched culture these days, even the power of visual literature. Widespread cultural shifts take place one person at a time on a very compressed scale. The tipping point. We are due for one—one way or the other at least.

With something to think about...

Skinner