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Home > History > Church History > The Da Vinci Code vs. Church History THE DA VINCI CODE vs. CHURCH HISTORYWestern History, Christianity, and the DaVinci Code PhenomenonThe unprecedented success of The DaVinci Code signals huge changes in our culture. In spite of the fact that it contains much historical distortion and error, it has become by far the most successful book written about Jesus and the Christian faith. Christians should carefully consider the reasons for its success. When the first two generations of Christians brought the gospel to the Hellenistic world, they met skepticism. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, the cross was a scandal both to Jews who expected Messiah as a conqueror and to Greeks to whom physical survival after death was impossible. But the gospel prevailed against both Judaism 1 and Paganism 2, and within three hundred years the emperor declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. In its first centuries Christianity spread rapidly in spite of the hostility of government and culture. It spread because of the riveting testimony of the apostles and other eyewitnesses to Jesus' life, death and resurrection. 3 But with the passing of time, it spread also because the story of Jesus answered the basic questions of human existence more effectively than did the stories of Paganism and Judaism. Christian monotheism was vastly superior to the superstition and inhumanity of Paganism, and the appeal of its universal ideals eclipsed the legalistic nationalism of Pharisaic Judaism. Many Christians in the early centuries took their faith so seriously and understood its implications so clearly that they were willing to die rather than renounce it. But once the cultural elite became "Christianized," being Christian was a means to social privilege. Soon everyone was baptized and became Christian by default. The shallowness of this new politically approved Christianity was highlighted in the 7th century when the followers of Mohammed swept through much of "Christendom" and quickly brought about the transfer of allegiance of most nominal Christians to Islam. During the next seven centuries nearly all the Pagan peoples of northern Europe adopted Christianity, and almost continuous Islamic threat strengthened the Christian identity of the West. The gospel quietly introduced radical cultural change. The time was ripe for renaissance. But the Renaissance 4 brought a new challenge to Christian consensus. The rediscovery of the great thinkers of classical times, along with the tremendous geographical expansion of Western power and the emergence of the scientific method created widespread confidence that human reason would be able to discover the secrets of the universe. Confidence led to pride, and pride to rationalism and an anti-supernatural bias that assumed that only things that could be subjected to the scientific method were real. As long as Western cultural leaders upheld Christianity's basic truthfulness and continued to give intellectual assent to the inspiration of Scripture and the historicity of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the masses continued to hear and believe the gospel story . . . however imperfectly. But the leaders of the West were drifting into agnosticism. Many viewed skepticism about miracles, the incarnation and the supernatural intervention of God in the created world as a mark of intellectual sophistication. As leaders they participated in the corruption that resulted from merging church authority and state power. Their own success in using Christianity to manipulate the masses probably added to their doubts about its authenticity. At the end of the nineteenth century, cultural leaders put their faith in rationalism, evolutionism, and other ideologies that denied the fundamental truths 5 of Christian faith. The spirit of the age overwhelmed most evangelicals. Only a relatively few Christian scholars, like A. A. Hodge, Augustus Strong, and B. B. Warfield had the training, imagination, and faith to compete in the world of academia. Most believers simply denounced intellectual trends and withdrew from the conflict, retreating to their isolated faith communities. They ignored the implications of scientific discoveries, rejected scholarship without understanding it, and embraced any obscurantist "prophet" that offered a defense against reality. Christian abandonment of science and scholarship to unbelievers reinforced the view of cultural leaders that Christianity is irrational. Their opinion—broadcast by the media, and propagated by public education—percolated down to the masses. Rationalistic "Jesus scholars" especially paved the way to the popularity of The DaVinci Code. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries "Jesus scholars" 6 began to reflect the skepticism of the cultural leaders. "Jesus scholars" generally respected Jesus. Few wanted to entirely deny his worth, so they interpreted him in ways that could preserve some aspects of his significance at the same time as they asserted the superiority of their perspective as modern interpreters of his life and ministry. By the early twentieth century, the universal genius, Albert Schweitzer (who in his long career was a brilliant musician, scholar, and physician to the poor), summarized the results of nineteenth century scholarship with the comment that doing Jesus research was like looking into a deep well and seeing only the dim reflection of one's own face. Schweitzer despaired of discovering anything factual about the real Jesus of history. He concluded that researchers would find only the reflection of their own ideas. From Schweitzer to the end of the twentieth century, most Jesus scholars shared the assumption that little could be known about the real historical Jesus. 7 The most famous Jesus scholar of the twentieth century was Rudolf Bultmann, who maintained that the gospels don't reveal anything about the Jesus of history: they reveal only the beliefs of the church. (Bultmann was so in the grips of rationalistic prejudice against the supernatural that he reflexively discounted all miracles, including Jesus' resurrection.) After Bultmann, the publicity-savvy "Jesus Seminar" (about 70 scholars who convene every year to vote about which passages in the Gospels are genuine) has probably had the greatest scholastic influence on the popular view of Jesus. The overwhelming popular success of The DaVinci Code raises the question of how long the Christian consensus of Western culture will survive. Has the end of a Christian consensus already arrived? Will only a dwindling group of traditional Christians hold to their convictions against scholarly evidence and the scorn of a dominant post-Christian culture? If evangelical Christians continue to surrender the realms of scholarship, education, communications, and art to unbelievers, it is clear that Christian consensus will soon end. But although Western culture has descended a long way towards skepticism and paganism, God's providence can be seen in tremendous cultural changes that favor a Christian worldview—or at least are "leveling the playing field." These changes favor renewed Christian involvement in culture, and they may signal the beginning of a Christian renaissance of cultural influence and evangelism. After the disillusionment of two World Wars and the hideous ideological experiments of Fascism and Communism, the West began to question the Renaissance/Enlightenment model of truth. Mere rationality was bankrupt. The West began to move beyond modernity— identified with virtual worship of the scientific method—into post-modernity. Postmodernism has focused (some would say "obsessed") on the fact that the truths we perceive are related closely to our cultural context. Postmodernism explains why most Jesus scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries found it so hard to believe in a Jesus who performed miracles and was resurrected after death. Their cultural conditioning made it difficult for them to even consider that the New Testament might have recorded Jesus' teachings and actions with a high degree of accuracy. Postmodernism doesn't endorse the gospel, but neither does it—like Modernism—dismiss it as mere fabrication and myth. Perhaps even more significant than the rise of Postmodernism are changes that have occurred in the "hard sciences." Most scientists have moved away from optimism that mankind is on the verge of discovering all of the secrets of the universe. The study of complexity has yielded even greater complexity, and the term "Anthropic universe" (coined over 20 years ago) has been widely adopted as an expression of how the universe seems to have been designed from its earliest nanoseconds to produce human life. Evolutionism is no longer the swaggering bully it was during most of the twentieth century. In fact, scientists have now become so conscious of the impossibility of "accidental" evolution in our universe that the completely unsupported and speculative hypothesis of "bubble universes" was invented by dogmatic evolutionists in an attempt to rescue evolutionary theory from extinction! (A secular best-seller by a former agnostic, Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Post-secular World, provides a concise overview of these changes in the sciences.) Just as a revolution is occurring in science's view of the evidence for God's existence, a scholarly revolution is occurring in "Jesus studies." The old rationalistic paradigm through which the life of Jesus was viewed for over a hundred years has burst. Careful historical and linguistic study of the cultural context of the New Testament and the recorded teachings of Jesus has begun to yield an array of evidence showing that the "pre-critical" views of Jesus held by simple believers through the centuries were mostly right . . . at least in respect to the things most essential to faith. N. T. Wright 8 and other contemporary "Jesus Scholars" are providing overwhelming evidence that Jesus' teachings as recorded in the Gospels are authentic and solidly planted in the Jewish world of the first century, not later teachings of the church inserted cleverly by the gospel writers into Jesus' mouth. Regardless of the new potential for credibility that twenty-first century Christians enjoy, those who control media, education, politics, and the arts are the shapers of culture. If Christians don't respond to the challenge of the twenty-first century, Western culture will continue to drift towards unbelief and neopaganism. The profound influence of C. S. Lewis on modern evangelicalism is based in his ability to grapple with the most difficult issues of the day and provide answers to the average person struggling to keep faith. Through C. S. Lewis, the ability to answer the great questions of the age was passed down to other scholars, teachers, pastors—and regular Christians. It wasn't necessary for a person to have Lewis's training in languages, history, and the humanities to understand his logic when he gave reasons for his faith. His brilliant defense of "mere Christianity" fended off despair for millions who had been bombarded for decades with the propaganda of unbelief. C. S. Lewis wrote that a day is coming when every person will be a philosopher. That day is almost here. The children and grandchildren of laborers and factory workers now graduate from college and work in skilled professions. It is time for Christians to awake and break free from the hypnosis of an anti-Christian media. Today, one need not be an Oxford don to effectively defend and explain the faith of the apostles. Worship through ritual, spectacle, and emotional release are no longer adequate expressions of dedication to Christ. Eastern religions have ritual, spectacle, and emotionalism. Neopaganism has them. Animism has them. Even Hollywood has them. What distinguishes Christianity from every other cult and religion is its grasp on truth. The time has come for Christians of the West to serve God with heart, soul, and mind. In the providence of God, much of the blindness of over two hundred years has been stripped away. Today, if Christians are willing to grapple with the evidence they will find history and science on their side. Like the Jesus scholars who were reluctant to reject Him entirely in spite of the influence of rationalism, most people in our culture are still drawn to the story of Jesus. His unparalleled story of matchless love, suffering, and redemption touches them deeply, even when they lack ability or willingness to understand its fullness. The church is no longer a tiny minority with no cultural influence. It is large, educated, and prosperous. The power of the gospel to conquer a hostile Hellenistic world wasn't merely the result of good fortune or psychology. Christianity spread explosively because it is based on God's revelation and resonates with the deepest spiritual needs of our race. God's Word became Flesh in a stupendous event that changed the world forever. Faith in God has always required faith. God provides no guarantees for the timid. Yet, irrational faith leads to madness. Well-reasoned apologetics is essential to the growth and witness of the twenty-first century church. This is already evidenced by the rapid growth of apologetics-based ministries and the introduction of apologetics to the curriculum of some of the largest evangelical churches. As Christians confront the postmodern world, they will (a) compartmentalize their faith and withdraw from the competition of ideas, (b) accept the dominant secular consensus, or (c) integrate the essentials of their faith with the known facts of science and history. Although careful historical and scientific thinking isn't easy, it isn't beyond the grasp of most people. Most people can read, write, and use computers. They are in search of meaning, just as people have always been. The gospel is the only answer to the deepest longings of their hearts. Every religion and ideology faces the test of time. As more and more people face the major questions of the age they will find it harder and hard to cling to faiths that are based on deception and psychological tricks. Only Christianity is firmly based in the real world. The alternative to evangelical Christian witness? The alternative is for evangelical Christians to continue to surrender cultural ground to anti-Christian spiritual forces, including a new paganism that will be dressed up in the terminology of science. During the Second World War, C. S. Lewis used the diabolic character in The Screwtape Letters, to prophetically describe the disguise that the demonic would assume in future generations. The demon, Screwtape, said: "I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The "Life Force", the worship of sex, and some aspects of psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"—then the end of the war will be in sight." Much of the appeal of The DaVinci Code to postmodern readers is in its advocacy for popular Neopaganism. The new "spirituality" of the West often appears in either Neopagan forms or the forms of Eastern religion or animism. The same postmodern perspective that offers Christians new opportunities for cultural influence, also lends respectability to Hinduism and Santeria. Today's postmodern, multicultural world is remarkably similar to the Hellenistic world in which the Christian church began. All the ingredients are there: a powerful empire, general peace (with explosive violence building up around the fringes), Paganism, Animism, intellectual skepticism, and rank materialism. To represent Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God properly, today's Christians will transform culture from the grassroots up, just as the early church did before Constantine co-opted the power of the gospel as a tool of governmental power. (1) Prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and temple by Titus in 70 AD, Judaism had been quite open to converts from the Gentile world, and Jews living throughout the Roman Empire constituted about 10 percent of its population—approximately 6 million. Within 400 years, the number of Jews had fallen to well under a million.
(2) A broad range of viewpoints was represented by Hellenistic Paganism, from the elite philosophical movements of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Cynicism, through the esoteric mystery religions, to popular worship of the Pagan gods.
(3) http://www.questions.org/answer/religion/davinci/jesusclaimed.xml/
(4) "The great revival of art, literature, and learning in Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th cent., based on classical sources: it began in Italy and spread gradually to other countries and marked the transition from the medieval world to the modern" (definition from Webster's New World Dictionary).
(5) The fundamentals of Christian faith are generally agreed to include the inspiration of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the historicity of biblical miracles, and Christ's substitutionary atonement and bodily resurrection
(6) Top scholars, expert in the ancient biblical literature and languages, who devoted themselves to the study of the historical Jesus. Probably the three most prominent members of this group during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were David Friedrich Strauss, Albert Schweitzer, and Rudolf Bultmann.
(7) Schweitzer violated his own principle by claiming that he knew some important facts about Jesus. He portrayed Jesus as a noble fanatic who believed that the end of the world was approaching. When God didn't affirm him as messiah he committed suicide by the Jewish hierarchy and Roman governor to force God's hand. While Schweitzer's view of Jesus was inaccurate and crude, his placement of Jesus in the context of the Jewish culture of His day laid a foundation for a much more accurate examination of Jesus as an historical figure at the end of the twentieth century.
(8) N. T. Wright's work is remarkable for many reasons. Along with his scholarly work, he has written these marvelously accessible books: The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is; What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?
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