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While on staff retreat this past week I have been preparing the sermon I plan to preach Sunday morning at College Church from Genesis 12. The title is “Pilgrimage of Faith.” The basic point of the message is summarized in the following extract by J. Hudson Taylor.

Hudson Taylor (1832 – 1905) was a key figure in the spread of the gospel in nineteenth-century China. As the founder of the China Inland Mission (CIM) in 1865, Taylor blazed a trail for the kingdom, leaving 125,000 Chinese Christians at his death. Despite many temptations to trust in human schemes and solutions, Taylor remained a man of daily dependence, trusting God to breathe life into his missionary ventures. Unlike many of his day, he did not see faith as something mysterious; faith was merely relying on a reliable God.

“What is faith? Is it not simply the recognition of the reliability or the trustworthiness of those with whom we have to do? Why do we accept with confidence a Government bond? Because we believe in the reliability of the Government. Men do not hesitate to put faith in the Government securities, because they believe in the Government that guarantees them. Why do we, without hesitation, put coins into circulation instead of as in China, getting a lump of silver weighed and its purity investigated, before we can negotiate any money transaction with it? Because the Government issues the coin we use, and we use it with confidence and without difficulty. Why do we take a railway guide and arrange for a particular journey? . . . Well, one has confidence in the reliability of these official publications. As a rule we are not put to shame!

Now, just as we use a railway guide we must use our Bible. We must depend on God’s word just as we depend on man’s word, only remembering that though man may not be able to carry out his promise, God will always fulfil what He has said. . .1

[The work] is either of Him, and for Him, and to His glory, or else it had better come to nought . . . it could not hold together for three months if the great mainstay—God’s own faithfulness, God’s own help, God’s own power—were taken away. We have nothing else to depend upon, just as we have no-one else to serve . . . Faith has often been tried, but God has ever made these trials of faith such a real blessing to me that they have been among the chief means of grace to my own soul, as well as the chief help to my work.”2

Footnotes :

1 Hudson Taylor, Hudson Taylor’s Legacy: A Series of Meditations, ed. Marshall Broomhall (Philadelphia: The China Inland Mission, 1931), 123.

2 Ibid., 90.

In recent weeks, Christians have produced an astonishing array of books, videos, and materials dedicated to “debunking,” “cracking,” or “breaking” The Da Vinci Code. The seemingly countless errors in the book leave one with the following dilemma: either Dan Brown’s self-proclaimed attention to historical detail is self-delusory, or he is engaging in a very sneaky misdirection play. Perhaps these errors service another agenda, and act as a distraction tactic, if you will. If this is the case, then perhaps Dan Brown is having the last laugh after all. Here’s why.

The most important thing an author can do is to know his audience. In the case of Americans and Europeans, they are postmoderns. Facts just are not that important to them. They are taken more by emotions, such as resentment, anger, desire, and the like. The Da Vinci Code taps into some powerful feelings at work in the culture, some of which have merit, and some that do not. These include the sense that religious leaders have betrayed the public trust and have not been honest with us, and the impulse to question or abandon traditional mores. And yet, there is the persistent feeling that people still need spirituality, even ancient religious spirituality. Brown’s entertaining and superbly written novel touches a nerve on all of the above.

Given the scandalous material in The Da Vinci Code, it is predictable that Christians from Nome to Rome would respond to the accusations. It is the responsible thing to do. For some groups, in particular, the stakes are very high. For example, one feels badly for members of Opus Dei, a real-life organization that has helped revitalize the faith of large numbers of Roman Catholic laity. But Brown’s fictional rollercoaster ride presents ordained clerical representatives of this religious order running around assassinating people. For Opus Dei, significant resources have had to be expended to restore their name.

Elsewhere, pastors of evangelical churches have spent the last few weeks scrambling to get up-to-speed on a cultural conversation everybody seems to be in on except them.

Evangelicals and Roman Catholics have dispatched their best thinkers to respond to the film with the truth. Meanwhile, the novel continues to intrigue the hearts of readers with an alternative “truth.” Could it be that conservative Christians have been duped to venture out upon a mission with little or no reward? In other words, whilst the modern day heroes of Christianity are out there “proving Dan Brown wrong” with their presentations of fact versus fiction, their efforts, culturally speaking, are being met with a collective yawn. People are far more likely to remember the thrill of The Da Vinci Code plot, the sights and sounds of the Ron Howard directed film, and memorable dialogue from their favorite scenes.

But there is also something much deeper and more insidious at work here than the mere damaging influence of pop culture. Dan Brown seemingly hopes to offer something that “we” orthodox Christians don’t. Da Vinci protagonist Professor Robert Langdon describes the matter bluntly as he reveals the meaning of this so-called religion of the “sacred feminine”: “Physical union with the female” he says, is “the sole means through which man could become complete and ultimately achieve gnosis—knowledge of the divine. Since the days of Isis, sex rites had been considered man’s only bridge from earth to heaven. By communing with a woman . . . man could achieve a climactic instant when his mind totally went blank and he could see God.”1 Langdon contrasts this worldview with the repressive sexual ethics of the Church, a perspective that is, of course, “a threat to the Catholic power base.” Simply put, he reduces salvation to the act of orgasm.

This stuff is nothing new. The ideas rehearse the same old ancient pagan fertility cult worship that was confronted variously by Moses, Joshua, the prophets, and the apostles in their day. But if there ever was a generation that wanted to believe it could be saved by sex, it is this one—right here, right now in the 21st century West.

Despite praise from feminists’ groups, the irony in all of this stems from the fact that a pagan sexual religious ethic actually demeans women. The female functions as little more than an instrumental means to the end of male sexual/spiritual enlightenment. Sex as religion? What could be more au courant than that, right? How convenient for a culture determined to normalize pornography and perpetuate the “hookup culture.” Ultimately, even despite Dan Brown’s intentions, The Da Vinci Code is not pro-women. It is decidedly anti-women. By contrast, it was the Hebrew-Christian revelation—and particularly the ministry of Jesus Christ—that made women’s equality a possibility in Western civilization. That may prove to be a most helpful reminder for summer readers and moviegoers everywhere.

Footnotes :

1 Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 308-309.

The previous two posts asserted that The Da Vinci Code is a fictional work with historical pretensions—with an emphasis on the word pretense. Just keeping up with the mistakes, fallacies, and ad hominems in the novel can be exhausting.

Perhaps no slander is greater in The Da Vinci Code than character Leigh Teabing’s assertion that orthodox Christianity, with its belief in a divine Jesus, was a scheme cooked up by Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in the early 4th century in a crass attempt at political deal-making and power consolidation. Consider the following exchange between Teabing and the incredulous Sophie Neveu (a thinly-veiled name suggestive of the meaning “new wisdom”).

“At this gathering [Nicaea],” Teabing said, “many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon–the date of Easter, the role of bishops, the administration of the sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus.”

“I don’t follow. His divinity?”

“My dear,” Teabing declared, “until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet . . . a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.”

“Not the Son of God?”

“Right,” Teabing said. “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.”

“Hold on. You’re saying Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?”

“A relatively close vote at that,” Teabing added.1

This claim is utterly preposterous. From the beginning of the Church’s history, the received teaching directly from the New Testament writers was that God was a Trinity of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Consider the evidence from just a small selection of the Apostolic and Ante-Nicene Church Fathers from the first and second centuries, who wrote long before the council ever occurred:

Ignatius of Antioch (c. 35 – c. 110 A.D.)
“For our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary in accord with God’s plan.” (Letter to the Ephesians, 18:2).

Clement of Rome (c. 96 A.D.)
“Brothers, we ought to think of Jesus Christ, as we do of God, as ‘Judge of the living and the dead’” (2 Clement 1:1, 2).

Justin Martyr (c. 100-165 A.D.)
“The Son . . . who also, being the first-begotten Word of God, is even God” (First Apology of Justin, 63).2

While it is true that there were dissenting voices about the person and nature of Jesus (e.g. the Gnostics), they were decidedly in the minority. Elaine Pagels, a Princeton University religion professor and oft-quoted expert on the Gnostic Gospels, has been quick to point out that these people were simply a different variety of Christian who did not consider themselves heretics.3 But then again, when do heretics admit that what they believe is, in fact, heresy? The fact is that the early Christian Church flatly rejected Gnosticism as wrongheaded.

As for the Council of Nicaea, it was called in 325 by Constantine because a certain young priest named Arius had been gaining popular support for his view that Jesus was created by God; similar to God (Gr. homoiousios), but not co-equal with God (homoousios). One thing, however, was certain even in this assertion. No one at the gathering considered Jesus Christ to be “mere mortal.”

Even with this qualification, the vote at the Council of Nicaea was a landslide in favor of Jesus’ divinity. Although twenty-eight bishops came prepared to support Arius at the beginning of the meeting, they were almost all won over by the arguments of orthodox stalwarts like Athanasius who contended that Jesus was “the Word of God, God of God, light of light, life of life, the only begotten Son, firstborn of all creation, begotten of the Father before all ages, by whom all things were made.”4 The final tally was 318 in favor of the creed, to 2 opposed.

With the historical record this clear, the explanatory power of books like The Da Vinci Code—which claim to offer an alternative version of Church history—is reduced to insignificance. Unfortunately, in the meantime, however, people are still going to see The Da Vinci Code movie or read the book. Facts aside, such persons may unwittingly fall prey to what may be a more insidious cultural agenda. That program is rooted in a pagan worldview that views sexual intercourse as the ultimate path to religious enlightenment. This issue will be taken up in next weeks’s post.

Footnotes :

1 “Nonetheless, establishing Christ’s divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman empire and to the new Vatican power base. By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable.” Brown, 233.

2 Other sample citations from this period include:
Polycarp (c. 69-155 A.D.)
“For you have ‘believed in Him who raised up our Lord Jesus Christ . . . .To Him all things in heaven and on earth are subject. . . . He comes as the Judge of the living and the dead” (The Epistle of Polycarp 2).
Melito of Sardis (d. 180)
“The activities of Christ after his baptism, and especially his miracles, gave indication and assurance to the world of the deity hidden in his flesh. Being God and likewise perfect man, he gave positive indications of his two natures: of his deity, by the miracles during the three years following after his baptism, of his humanity, in the thirty years which came before his baptism, during which, by reason of his condition according to the flesh, he concealed the signs of his deity, although he was the true God existing before the ages” (fragment in Anastasius of Sinai’s The Guide 13).

3 Elaine Pagels, “The Gospel Truth,” The New York Times, April 8, 2006,

4 For an account of the proceedings at the Council of Nicaea, see Harold O. J. Brown, Heresies (1988; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1998), 116ff. For an extensive documentary history, including the creed itself, see William A. Rusch, trans. The Trinitarian Controversy (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980).

In last week’s entry I argued that there is no reliable historical evidence to support the claims of The Da Vinci Code (DVC) that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered a child. But where did the theory come from? Dan Brown gets many of his ideas from an argument made in a previously published book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. That book and others like it, stake their claim on two basic strands of “evidence”:

1). References from the so-called “Gnostic Gospels”—the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary—demonstrate that Jesus favored Mary and was even seen kissing her. In The DVC, the “historian” Leigh Teabing asserts that “Christ himself made the claim” that he was married.1

Response: These documents were composed long after the completion of the four New Testament Gospels (Mary dating from the 2nd century and Philip dating from the 3rd). The early Church deemed such texts historically unreliable and heretical, because they were written so long after the actual events in the first century. Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons condemned such Gnostic documents in the late 2nd century in his treatise Against Heresies.

But even supposing Mary and Philip were trustworthy (which they are not), there is still no evidence to be gathered from them that would suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married.

In Philip 63:33-36, there is an obscure passage fragment that indicates that Jesus kissed Mary. But in context most scholars take this merely as an indication of spiritual fellowship. It is unlikely that the Gnostics would have meant that something sexual was involved.

In Mary 17:10-18:21, the primary focus is on a passage in which Peter disputes whether or not Jesus had given a special revelation to Mary. Secret knowledge (hence the term gnosis) was, after all, a key Gnostic theme. But here again, no hint is given, even in this Gnostic text, that Jesus had a marital relationship with Mary.

2). The second claim made by The DVC to support that “Jesus must have been married” comes from Jewish customs. “The social decorum during [Jesus’] time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried. . . . celibacy was condemned,” we hear Teabing say.2

Response: While it is true that men who were officially rabbis were married men, Jesus never claimed to be a rabbi, either. This was actually a sticking point with the Pharisees. As New Testament scholar Darrell Bock points out, “As far as the Jewish leaders were concerned, Jesus had no recognized official role in Judaism.”3 While His disciples did call Him rabbi, the sense of the word is simply “teacher,” as Luke’s Gospel points out. Further evidence shows that there was precedent from the Essene community in Qumran for celibacy during Jesus’ time for spiritually devoted persons. What is more, Jesus likened the call of the disciple to that of becoming a eunuch (Matt. 19:10-12).4 As Bock queries, “Why would Jesus issue such a statement, acknowledge [celibacy] as a demanding calling, and not follow it?”5

Footnotes :

1 Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 242.

2 Ibid., 245.

3 Darrell Bock, Breaking the Da Vinci Code: Answers to the Questions Everyone’s Asking (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 37. This book is the most helpful single volume that discredits the claims of The DVC.

4 “The disciples said to him, ‘If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.’ But he said to them, ‘Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it’” (Matt. 19:10-12).

5 Ibid., 38.