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THE DA VINCI CODE Author Roundtable
8.
FaithfulReader.com: Which theological concepts addressed in the book do you feel require the greatest clarification?
Carl E. Olson: The novel's assertions about sexuality, femininity and masculinity. These are involved, complex issues that aren't as easy to address as whether or not prior to AD 325 people believed Jesus was divine.
Sandra Miesel: As previously stated, we need recognition that Christians have always believed Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of God, and that the New Testament is a trustworthy guide to his life and teaching. The trendy, dualist, anti-material pack of ideas known as Gnosticism badly needs refuting. Then there's the larger question of epistemology --- is Truth knowable? Christians have always said yes, both to Truth as a proposition and Truth as the Person of Jesus.
Steve Kellmeyer: I think the bottom line theological issue that Brown plays on is the relationship between the divine and human in relation to Church. Brown's scholar characters "shock" the uninformed by revealing the amazing truth that the Bible wasn't delivered by fax from heaven, that human beings had a role in writing and compiling the canon of Scripture, and so on. This is supposed to drive a knife into one's sense of Church as having any divine authority. I think this is very confusing to people, and it's a point that I try to emphasize in my book --- that this is what Church is: God working through and present in human experience. This is not a shock. This is the way God works.
His understanding of pain and of sex is the two theological concepts that require the greatest clarification if only because these are the two aspects of life that American culture understands the least. Pleasure and pain: historically, every human endeavor to understand the world has revolved around developing a proper understanding of the relationship between the two, and how these two things affect our relationship with each other and with divinity. For instance, science is, arguably, the use of a mechanical perspective to study how good and bad things happen, how to encourage the one and discourage the other. Religion and philosophy study the "why" behind these two. Art is commentary on all of it. Science, religion, philosophy, art --- that's the sum of human knowledge --- and these all revolve, at least in part, around understanding pleasure and pain.
Erwin W. Lutzer: First, the fact that the deity of Jesus was not made up by Constantine, but is rooted in the New Testament and also confirmed by the church Fathers who affirmed the deity of Christ long before Nicea. And second, that God is encountered through a sexual ritual rather than explicit faith in Jesus as the only qualified Savior in the world.
Darrell L. Bock: The most important issue is the distortion of who the earliest Christians believed Jesus to be. He was worshipped as divine by his followers from the start and at the center of that belief was an appreciation for the teaching and work of Jesus in bringing us to a restored, unending relationship to God.
Ben Witherington III: The misrepresentation of what the New Testament actually says about Jesus being both divine and human, attempting to fob this off the Council of Nicea as a later imposition on royal robes on a non-royal figure.
Richard Abanes: I think the most glaring theological error in THE DA VINCI CODE is Brown's truly absurd claim that the Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus did not begin until AD 325 and that it originated with the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicea (held during that year). References to belief in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth can be found in the writings of many early church leaders, including Justin Martyr (c. AD 150), Irenaeus (c. AD 185), and Clement of Alexandria (c. AD 200). I document all of this in my book.
James L. Garlow: As it pertains to the reality of the New Testament, Dan Brown's claims that the original "gospels" were Gnostic, only to be later replaced by late writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are totally bogus. He doesn't seem to grasp that the Gnostic writers wrote considerably later than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Secondly, the Council of Nicene did not declare Jesus to be divine as a manipulative ploy by Constantine. In contrast, the earliest followers of Christ perceived Him as being divine. The early church fathers in the second and third centuries consistently recognized the divinity of Christ. Jesus' divinity was established hundreds of years before the Council of Nicene.
And by the way, it wasn't as Dan Brown contends --- a close vote. It was a vote of 316-2, at the Council of Nicene, embracing what had been believed for several hundred years of church history. Perhaps most harmful is his definition of God. He simply sees God as the force of nature or nature itself. In other words, all of creation, including ourselves, is God. Dan Brown is a classic pantheist, in which he believes that everything that has been made is God. Thus, in order to find God you have to look within. Christians and Jews understand that there is a transcendent God. There is a God who is beyond us. That's why we believe in Genesis 1:1, where it says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Peter Jones: The divinity of Jesus; the Bible as an invention of Constantine; the confusion with regard to true spirituality; the nature of God.
Amy Welborn: Well, I think the issue of Jesus' identity requires a great deal of clarification, but that creeps over into the historical issues as well.
Dan Burstein: I will leave that to the theologians.
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