Dealing With The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown's Da Vinci code is coming soon to a screen near you. And what a great opportunity it will be if christian's are prepared to give reasoned answers to the issues it raises. Not only will the church be able to deal with the book, but they can use it to catapult conversation into authentic christian ideas and living.

Mark D Roberts has a great series on this opportunity if you are wanting to learn more about dealing with the story and why this is so important. Mark has studied many of the extra biblical Nag Hamadi that are mentioned in the story and it is well worth listening to what he says about it. From his series (which is still growing)

But," you might want to respond, "it's just fiction! It's a novel, for God's sake. It's going to be a fictional movie. Why get so worked up about fiction? Why refute fiction as if it were fact? Why get so worried about apparently factual elements of a fictional story?"

I can't tell you how much I wish every reader of The Da Vinci Code, and every viewer of the upcoming film, had this perspective. If everybody who was exposed to Dan Brown's story concluded, "Well, that was a great ride, but his stuff on Jesus was a lot of hooey!" then I could start blogging on something else, rather than exercising myself on this topic for the next several weeks. But, I'm sad to say, millions upon millions of readers and viewers of The Da Vinci Code will not reject its treatment of Jesus and early Christianity as wildly creative fiction. In fact, they will believe that Dan Brown has revealed the truth about Jesus. And they'll believe this passionately.

Everyone loves a good consipiracy, especially now they are almost indoctrinated from birth to distrust authorities as they supposedly are more interested in power than truth or justice.

Middlebrow also has a post on why Dan Brown has no real clue about the relationship between Jesus and John. This is one of the books main ideas in the painting of the last supper. Dan's idea is that 'john' in this painting is really mary magdelene and that is why she is so close. Perhaps Dan never read the gospel of John, where John is 'the disciple whom Jesus loved'.

Christianity Today also has articles responding to the Da Vinci Code, dealing with the formation of the canon of the bible and Jesus' divinity and the founding fathers.

LeaderU, the fountain of huge amounts of resources, has a rather large section dealing with the Da Vinci Code as well. You should especially check out a couple of great articles 'Crash Goes the Da Vinci Code' by Dr Ron Rhodes and 'Dismantling the Da Vinci Code' by Sandra Miesel.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Friday, March 17, 2006