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...
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