Correcting Dan Brown's Confusion About Faith

As I was reading through an article recently titled "Who Was Jesus?" by Bart Ehrmann in Newsweek magazine(December 17, 2012), I noticed that he referred to Dan Brown (author of The DaVinci Code) as "that inestimable authority."  His estimation of Dan Brown is precisely the reason why I likewise have so little respect for Ehrmann.  The bottom line behind today's posting, however, is to challenge Brown himself.  Why either of these individuals is received by the secular press with so little critical analysis is for me beyond rational explanation.  The following is an article I wrote for a nationally circulated newsletter from the Seattle chapter of "Reasons to Believe:"

FACT, FAITH, and CONFUSION

Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code (Doubleday, 2003) has been a hot item for almost two years.  It has for months found a home at the top of the New York Times “Best Sellers List.”  Reviewers hail the work as “brilliant” and “riveting.”  Critics, on the other hand, have labored to expose its flaws.  I side with the critics.  The DaVinci Code is riddled with errors, not only in its details, but also in its premises.  That it is written as fiction does not negate the damage spread by its anti-Catholic (incidentally, this writer is not Catholic) and anti-Christian agenda.  Yet, again, his attempt is not successful.  The very notion, for example, that the Roman Catholic Church reeled in all the Scriptures already in circulation, deleted their embarrassing “feminine” attributes, and got contemporary believers to swallow a newly-invented, masculinized god-head, is utter rubbish.  Such a scheme was both sociologically impossible to pull off at the time, and it is unsupportable by any reputable evidence.  Apologist Hank Hannagraaff and historian Dr. Paul Maier have responded with their book, The DaVinci Code: Fact or Fiction? (Tyndale, 2004) in order to set the record straight on Brown’s long list of mistaken assertions. 

For all the attention this book has already received, however, there is one aspect that is not adequately covered.  In addition to his explicit attacks, Dan Brown also distorts the very definition of faith in the biblical sense of the term.  In a conversation between the two main characters, for example, Robert Langdon says to Sophie:

“Every faith in the world is based on fabrication.  That is the definition of faith—acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.”   [Proceeding, as Langdon does, to allege contradictory documents of all the world religions, including Christianity, Langdon continues,] “Those who truly understand their faiths, understand the stories are metaphorical” (p.341,2).

To ensure a tight critique here it is important to throw Brown a few bones.  In truth, some aspects of Christianity are metaphorical.  This is not news.  The open teaching of Christianity from the beginning is that the God of the Bible is not a literal “Father,” in the sense of having a physical body, and Jesus is not a literal “Son of the Father” in the sense of being born from a goddess!  Language by its nature falls short in expressing these matters, which elementary wisdom understands.  Secondly, Christians also concede that by strict definition Christianity is not absolutely provable (this situation is in fact parallel with scientific and historical inquiry in general).  Notice, however, that atheism, agnosticism, humanism, scientism, and post-modernism aren’t provable as faith positions either.  One must rather do the work of actually weighing the case for each position and choose the strongest position.

Beyond these two points Brown utterly confuses his readers just as he appears confused himself.  What we find in the above quotation are a series of non-sequiturs, half-truths, and the confusion of terminology.  Readers may rightly wonder whether Brown knows in his own mind what he is talking about.  His basic intention, however, is hard to miss.  The author wishes to convey to his readers that faith is an irrational act.

 

To be continued...