Washblog || What's the problem with the Da Vinci Code?

What's the problem with the Da Vinci Code?

By Arthur Ruger
Thu Feb 16, 2006 at 07:10:55 AM PST
Section: Diary Topic: General news/info

What role does/should scripture play in the practice of religion?

Can we be spiritual and religious in the absence of a Bible?

Do spirituality and a life of personal moral practice require a "book" or set of rules by which to live?

Although most of us have been programmed to assume that religion in general and Christian religion in particular cannot exist without a supporting scripture, such is not the case.

Prior to the invention of the printing press religion as an integral part of the pattern of living was much more a function of word-of-mouth wisdom accumulated by a culture over the time of its existence. One might make the case that a more commonly shared and practiced set of harmonious beliefs flourished better in the absence of written precepts and rules.

Spiritual information shared verbally as opposed to written form meant that the information was shared experientially between individuals.

One could further make the case that scripture is then a product of a culture's experiential relationship with its god - a record of how the culture has come to interpret and create a consensual understanding of who God is and how God is experienced.

How Did the Bible Get Its Content?

Marcus Borg, Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University is the author of READING THE BIBLE AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME, a marvelous look at how the Bible remains useful even if not taken literally.

Literal fundamentalists tend to believe the Bible to be an inerrant and infallible collection of declarations of God to man. In DeMille's film, The Ten Commandments, Moses watches in astonishment as a lightning-like "finger of God" writes the commandments in Hebrew words on stone tablets.

Is that how you believe the Bible came to be?

If so, how would you describe the process for how subsequent Bible books not attributed to Moses were written?

For example, how did God dictate His words to Isaiah, Jeremiah and the others?

If you don't believe that such is how the Bible came into being, can you describe for yourself what it would take in terms of understanding the Bible's origin in a way that keeps the Bible's status as sacred scripture useful in the here and now?

Christian Liberals tend more to see the Bible as containing expressions of early Christians' interpretation of their experience with God.

Alan Watts references the "Finger Pointing at the Moon" where literalist Christians tend to focus on the finger rather than the moon.

Borg relates an anecdote in which one of his students expressed the thought that if the Bible is a lens through which we see God then some people believe that the most important thing is to believe in the lens.

Part of the acceptance of the Bible as literal and inerrant is an inheritance from what common folks in the Middle Ages were taught by the Catholic priests. This was prior to the printing press when the Bible became more available to those who wanted to read it for themselves.

Until the Bible became more available, the priesthood used the Bible as leverage, presenting it as literally true and inerrant and then citing carefully and cunningly chosen passages from it to invoke fear, shame and guilt.

For those who had no Bible to read for themselves, the manipulation of a self-serving priesthood to maintain control by such leverage was a primary tool of dominance.

"God says in the Bible that such and such, so you'd better do what I say."

Those early Catholic pre-printing-press religious writers from are also known to have edited and altered what ultimately came to be the New Testament as we have it today.

In some instances even today the strongest fundamentalist literalists have little to say about this process of redaction that resulted in a scripture that contains only what those early Catholic scholars wanted us to know - doctrines and stories that supported Catholic theology and dogma.

In some ways, the mysterious and current Catholic hierarchical opposition to the Da Vinci Code suggests that scriptural redaction - rather than thretening alternate biographies of Jesus and Magdalene - is what they are trying to avoid.

From the Protestant Evangelical viewpoint, casting doubt on the Jesus story as a literal and absolute truth as presented in the New Testament again challenges interpretation. It becomes, ironically, the wrong kind of anti-redaction where inaccuracies cannot be clarified because of a stubborn dogmatic belief in the finger and the lens.

Again, Jesus and Magdalene are the talking points. Historical redaction is the real issue.

The formal canonization (declaring sacred) of the recollected words and actions of Jesus and the letters of Paul and other writers did not occur until approximately 300 years after Jesus.

That canonization is what became the Bible.

What do you think the criteria were at that time for including those writings chosen to become The New Testament?

We know that Constantine placed severe restrictions on who and what Jesus was and would become in formal Roman Catholic Christian doctrine.

Why do you think that the earliest formal Catholic organizational structure was an exact model of the Roman civic governance structure? Only the names and titles were changed. That's Constantine fingerprint is an exact match.

What concerns and priorities of the Roman Emperor and other civil authorities do you think had - if any - impact on what those earliest Catholic Christians included in The New Testament?

The internal imagery - the mental construct - for most adamant and politically active Christian evangelicals is the massive literalist assumption that the Bible is the inerrant word of God;

that the Bible contains a literal history of a speaking relationship between God and man;

that such a relationship once existed but does not today - because we have the Bible to which we can blindly turn and suspend any internal spiritual sense of logic and reason in resolving moral or ethical dilemmas.

Such literalism is not a spiritual root of a communal relationship with a living, active and speaking God.

Rather, it is a weak crutch, overused as a pretended etched-in-stone justification for the flaws, inconsistencies and instinctual mean-spiritedness of lazy literal and judgemental right-wing Christian activists.

Rejecting the literalist mode of Christian spirituality is a mighty catastrophe always lurking behind a massive curtain of camouflage. As more and more thinking human beings drift toward a rejection of literalist thinking, those among them who still recognize an inherent spiritual hunger and sense of living must reconcile the intent and usefulness of scripture.

These are those whose progressive thinking harbors the greatest hopes for a constructive Christian impact on global humanity.

These are those whose refusal to continue blindly following blind guides will shove Christian congregations back from the abyss of a Taliban society.

That's why the Da Vinci Code is dangerous.

It suggests a Jesus who really looks more like Ghandi and less like a spiritually commanding and meddling Julius Caesar.

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What's the problem with the Da Vinci Code? | 17 comments (17 topical)

Brown is wrong - but you are on the right track

Your overall argument here concerning the importance of textual redaction and the logical conflicts in attempting to take Christian scripture too literally are fine, however the ways in which you come at them are a little off base.

For example, your construction of manipulative Catholic priests scaring poor illiterate peasants as the best way to understand the roots of biblical literalism is just not true and could have come right out of 16th c. Reformation propaganda sheets. Did such things happen? Of course they did - and do today in all denominations.

But if you want to understand medieval biblical interpretation you should probably start with the widely accepted method which held that there were four different levels to scripture. They were the literal/historical meaning, the allegorical meaning, the moral meaning and the anagogical meaning - (what the text reveals about the mystical/eschatological world). If anything, medieval Catholic thinkers were later accused of not being literal enough.

As for the process of canonization, you are right to note the structural influences of the Roman Empire on the nascent Catholic hierarchy. But it seems to me that you conflate this influence with some sort of invention placed onto Christianity by the emperor. The better way to think about it I think is to look at it as more of a suppression of difference. The central fact about the first four hundred years of Christianity is its diversity.

There were people who believed that there were between 2-30 gods, that the Old Testament was an evil book, that God did not create the world and that Jesus was not only not divine, but that he did not have a soul either. Every one of these beliefs were held by substantial groups of churches and they were all definitively Christian. You are right to say that in the process of canonization and legitimation in the empire came about some of these factions became more popular then others and had an influence on which religious texts made it into the bible. But it is not some great conspiracy ala Dan Brown, but rather more like inside baseball on developing a political platform.

Speaking of Mr. Brown, The Da Vinci Code is crap. I mostly say that on literary grounds, but his theology and history are bunk too. One of his main sources is a well-know forgery. The whole idea of a 2000 year conspiracy makes for good story-telling, but it is lousy history.

The official acceptance of certain versions of belief became part of the ruling elite made them more popular and gave them the force of government behind them, but they did not and could not eliminate the diversity of belief. At no time in Christian history has there ever been anything like consensus on correct belief, practice or biblical interpretation.

We can all play the game, as many modern Christians do, of setting out a specific set of true and proper Christian beliefs and then going back through history and call some people good Christians and the others as nasty evil heretics. But it doesn't help us understand what happened much.

by Nindid on Thu Feb 16, 2006 at 09:33:58 AM PST

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