Exposing ‘The Da Vinci Code’ Agenda

By Chris Peterson, Assistant Pastor

On May 19^th Hollywood is expected to unleash the suspense thriller ‘The Da Vinci Code’ to the big screen. In 2003, Dan Brown’s best-seller hit the top of the Amazon.com ratings and listed at second place in the New York Times hardcover fiction list. Hollywood has equally high expectations for the screen version of Brown’s book. If the storyline does not pull viewers to the box office, the director and character cast will. Ron Howard, Oscar-winning director noted for his role in ‘The Beautiful Mind,’ directs ‘The Da Vinci Code’ along with a supporting cast starring veteran actors Tom Hanks and British actor Ian McKellen (Gandalf in the Lord of the Ring’s Trilogy).

The storyline contains all the elements of a conspiracy theory including secret codes hidden in art spanning two millennia; the intrigue of ancient persons and societies including the Masons, the Catholic Church, Isaac Newton, and Leonardo Da Vinci; the convoluted and twisted plot of characters, homicide, narrow escapes, hidden identities; and of course, the sex rites of the ancient fertility cults that give our story a PG-13 rating.

Brown’s Twist

The major premise of this story involves a secret that has been kept hidden for two thousand years. The Roman Catholic Church successfully suppressed the truth, yet unbeknown to the world, a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, have kept this dark secret unveiling elements of the truth through encryptions hidden in ancient art and artifacts. Robert Langdon, a Harvard art historian teams up with Sophie Neveu, a French cryptologist, to unravel the riddle. The dark secret concerns the person and work of Jesus Christ. In short, Jesus married Mary Magdalene in order to continue the kingly line of David. Shortly after Jesus’ death (which had nothing to do with a substitionary sacrifice for sin) Mary fled to Gaul where she established a royal line. The Priory of Sion (a secret group of men and women) protect the royal line and its ancient religious heritage through sexual orgies paralleling the fertility cults of the Ancient Near East. Brown pulls flippantly from history to assert that Constantine, the Roman emperor of Byzantium at the Council of Nicaea in the 4^th century, master-minded Christ’s deity, His death and resurrection, as well as the New Testament books we now know as the Bible. Brown asserts that Christ had turned leadership over to Mary since she carried the royal line. The disciples, especially Peter, influenced by a male dominated society, rewrote history ignoring Mary’s superior role. Constantine shut out the truth for 2,000 years by canonizing the testimony of the disciples in the 27 books of the New Testament.

Poison in the Water

At first glance, the storyline seems as farfetched and unbelievable as Hollywood’s attempt in the 80’s to destroy the person and work of Christ with the ‘Last Temptation of Christ.’ We may be even less concerned when we hear ‘fictional narrative” applied to the book. Of all the genre types of literature, how could ‘fictional narrative’ be believable? Yet, this book has the potential to do great damage not because the storyline is believable or even because Brown recast the character of Newton and Da Vinci. In effect, Brown’s fictional narrative serves as the ‘harmless’ water for the poison he offers. ‘The Da Vinci Code’ is lethal because Brown built his story on a prevailing worldview that began in the 1800’s and moved through Europe and into the United States by the early 1900’s. This back-draft was ignited by Darwin in his promotion of evolutionary theory, that all life can be explained from naturalism through natural selection or the survival of the fittest. European seminaries melted under the flame of evolutionary thinking as they began to apply a naturalistic approach to studying the Bible. It was only a matter of time before Harvard and Princeton of America went up in the flames of this secular belief-system. These seminaries began to look for a naturalistic explanation for the supernatural events recounted in the Bible. Out went the supernatural and with it went the deity of Christ. The cross became a demonstration of supreme love rather than a substitutionary sacrifice for sinners.

The Attack on God’s Holy Word

Evolutionary Thinking Attacks the Bible

Okay, so what does all this have to do with the Da Vinci Code? Let me connect the dots. Evolution promotes the belief in change through the process of natural selection. Those who survive are the winners because they adapted to the prevailing needs of the time in order to survive. Let me demonstrate how this fleshes out in current secular thinking today. When modern, secular scholars in the field of history, archaeology, language development, or literature look back to explain the past, he/she assumes evolutionary processes. The secular scholar assumes that communication evolved from a lengthy period of oral communication. Due to evolutionary development, stories were passed on orally through the community. Each generation revised the stories to fit the need of that particular culture. Finally, someone took the final form (having underwent much development) and wrote it down in its present form. This final form is the winner, the fittest, the superior. In terms of the Da Vinci Code, the disciples were the winners. Constantine was the winner. Both were the fittest, in evolutionary vocabulary. Mary’s account was lost, hidden in the dominant gene-pool of history and literature. How do the scholars of our day know this? Well they know it because the winner is by definition the survival of the fittest. The one who survived is the winner.

Michael White, director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas-Austin, quoted in the USA Today’s ‘Long-Lost Gospel of Judas Recasts ‘traitor’’ (April 6, 06), provides an example of this foundational thinking. White applied this idea of winners and losers to the recent promotion of the Gospel of Judas. USA Today quotes him as saying, “Scripture, like history, was codified by the winners, by those who emerged with the greatest numbers at the end of three centuries of Christianity.” Notice Brown’s view through his fictional character Teabing, “The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions” (231). It would be important to note here that this thinking is the prevailing opinion of our secular universities across America and has begun to move into the curriculum of leading evangelical colleges and seminaries.

Brown in ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ like Michael White, applies this thinking to his interpretation of the canonization of the books of the Bible. He looks back into history and notes that the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, and for White, the Gospel of Judas, were hidden for centuries, if not for thousands of years. Applying the prevailing evolutionary interpretation, the winners suppressed the losers, evidenced in the mass support that stands behind the canon of the Bible for the past two millennia. If we presuppose evolution, the losers contained the original interpretation of history. The winners (by virtue of winning) would have developed and changed according to the needs of the time, and what do we have but the survival of the fittest. This the opposite of biblical Christianity.

The Gnostic Gospels Re-Interpret the Bible

Let’s take a brief look at these three gospels. The Gospels of Mary, Thomas, and of late, Judas are characterized by Gnostic thinking, a mystical perversion of Christianity that did not arise until the 2^nd century (150 A.D.). The Gnostic claimed to have a secret knowledge attained through a mystical experience. This secret knowledge led them to write testimonies on behalf of characters in the Bible, secret accounts that no one but the Gnostics knew about even if it was 150 to 300 years later. They believed that the material, the physical, was inherently evil while the immaterial, the spiritual was good. The Gnostics believed that mankind must be rescued from his material body through secret knowledge. The Gospel of Judas resounds with Gnostic thinking telling us that Judas was the 13^th Spirit sent to help Christ escape from his physical body. The Gnostic believed that there was a divine self within that when tapped through inner contemplation would reveal god. In other words, man creates god. Consequently, the Gnostics taught that Christ died to allow us to discover our divine self.

What is Brown really doing when he and modern “scholars” give priority to the Gnostic gospels of the 2^nd century, while they themselves have been removed from the historical time-frame for 2,000 years? As already noted, Brown begins by interpreting the Bible through evolutionary glasses. His evolutionary foundation gives him the so-called right to ignore the consistent testimony of Scripture from the Old Testament to the New Testament and substitute a 2^nd century sect, the Gnostics to reinterpret Scripture. To justify his interpretive gymnastics, he pushes the formulation of the Bible back to Constantine of the 4^th century. He ignores the Bible’s claim that Scripture is God’s Word not because the winners, the masses, the power-house decided, but because the Bible speaks with God’s authority through apostles sent in the authority and power of Jesus Christ. I guess Brown can get away with all this in the name of a fictional novel.

The Authority of the Bible is the Bible

The early church, hundreds of years before Constantine, had already recognized the authority of Scripture when it was written and penned by an apostle or prophet connected to the apostolic ministry (i.e., Luke, Hebrews, Mark, James, Jude) (Ephesians 2:20). The church was built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Eph. 2:20; notice that ‘revelation’ is connected to these two offices, Eph. 3:5). Christ told the apostles that they would receive the Helper who would teach them all things and bring to their remembrance the things Christ had said to them (John 14:26). Christ was foretelling the writing of Scripture through the apostolic ministry. Each book of the New Testament connects back to the authority of Christ demonstrating inherent authority. In other words, the test of God’s authority was not the church or state, but the consistency of the doctrine and authority of Christ throughout each book of the New Testament. The early church recognized this and received it as the word of God (1 Thessalonians 2:13), copied it, and sent it on to the other local churches (Colossians 4:16; Revelation 1:11). Once again the test of legitimacy involved the consistency of the authority and doctrine of Christ through His apostles and prophets resonating in each book of the New Testament. The same standard was true of the Old Testament. The prophet’s revelation was to be tested by the inherent authority of God’s Law rather than the outside, external authority of miraculous demonstrations (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). Old Testament revelation culminated in the Supreme Prophet, Jesus Christ (Deuteronomy 18:18, c.f. Acts 3:18-23) continuing God’s revelation in the Supreme Prophet, the Son (Hebrews 1:1) and finally, closing with the coming of Christ and the cessation of prophecy (Revelation 22:18-19). It was this body of revelation that the church was built upon. The church did not arbitrarily start with an edict from Constantine, but with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of His Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:12-13; Ephesians 4:1-16, notice the connection of Christ’s descent and ascent as related to the body of Christ).

Turning to the topic of Christ’s deity it is interesting to note that the Bible has the authority on Christ’s Person, not Constantine. Christ testified to His deity (John 5:17, 18). The Holy Spirit through the pen of Paul affirmed His deity (Colossians 2:9).  A plethora of passages from the Old and New Testament could be consulted for a further development of Christ’s deity. In the end, it is God’s own Word that has the final say on the Word of Life.

The Attack on God’s Holy Character

We noted that the first prevailing assumption taught by Brown in ‘The Da Vinci Code’ concerned an evolutionary reinterpretation of the Bible. Brown espouses a second prevailing assumption that is rooted in evolutionary thinking. It is the attack on the distinctiveness of God’s character, in essence, His holiness.

The Pagan Nations Dictate God’s Character

The prevailing assumption is that the Jews and Christianity were both evolutionary developments from the pagan religions around them. This worldview or belief system assumes that the Jews moved through the evolutionary plane of change by developing their religious system from the polytheism (many gods) of the nations around them to the monotheism (one god) of the Old Testament. Based on this assumption, scholars can study the pagan nations surrounding Israel and find the genuine story behind Yahweh, the God of Israel, and His interaction with His people. This ideology would go something like: ‘Since the Ancient Near East interpreted their heroic accomplishments through the framework of myths, that is, cosmic gods in the heavens, so too Israel interpreted her deliverance from this framework.’ Such thinking would purport that God did not really step in supernaturally to part the Red Sea (we know this because we understand naturalism, so we are told) but Israel actually applied the pagan way of thinking, mythologizing their escape from exile. The “scholars” of our time (Historical Critics) apply this same theory to Christianity. The idea goes something like this: The Greeks used myths to interpret life and Rome asserted her governmental superiority by mythologizing Caesar as the son of god who ascended to heaven at his death. This ideology tells us that Christianity viewed Christ in this same light, as a superior governmental program, rather than really believing that Jesus is God who died for the sins of the world. The assumption is that neither Israel nor Christianity could separate their religious thinking from the influence of the world they lived in. Christianity could do nothing more than interpret their history in light of myths anymore than Greece or Rome.

Brown Applies Mythology to the Bible – An Attack on God’s Holiness

Brown picks up this philosophy, “Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.” “Religious allegory has become a part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people” (Da Vinci Code, 342; c.f. 232 for specific examples). The assumption that Christianity could not separate itself from the pagan religions directly contradicts the emphasis of Scripture. Israel was called out from the Canaanites to be a holy people (c.f. Leviticus). Israel was to be a light and witness to the Gentiles (Isaiah 43:10). 1 Peter 2:11-12 calls Christians to keep their behavior excellent among the Gentiles, even proclaiming God’s excellencies to them (10). Isaiah 40 – 48 rings with God’s supreme authority. He alone is God and there is no other (Isaiah 45:21). Central to Scripture is God’s holiness, His separateness, His distinctiveness, His exclusiveness. Christianity is set in the context of God’s holiness and God’s unity as the one God. Jesus Christ came on the scene in the context of the Old Testament prophecies rather than in the context of the Roman Caesar. He is the Anointed One in Psalm 2, the Son, not the mirror of Rome’s Caesar-program. Jesus is God’s answer to the rebellious religious systems of the world (Psalm 2).

It amazes me that so-called scholars of the 21^st Century would assert that Christianity could not interpret itself apart from the influences of the pagan nations. They make this conclusion while attempting to reach back through 2,000 years of history to interpret Christianity from their naturalistic belief-system. Brown, like many others, ignores the testimony of the Bible and chooses to become his own authority, employing his worldview to reinterpret the Bible.

Brown Promotes Sexual Immorality – An Attack on God’s Holiness

Brown not only attacks the deity and substitionary work of Christ, but he takes a stab at God’s holiness in His call for sexual purity. Brown, pulling from the pagan nations once again writes, “In the Temple, no less. Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple housed not only God but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah. Men seeking spiritual wholeness came to the Temple to visit priestesses or hierodules – with whom they made love and experienced the divine through physical union. The Jewish tetragrammaton YHWH – the sacred name of God – in fact derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah” (Da Vinci Code, 308-09). Brown couldn’t even get the history right! Jehovah was a European pronunciation of YHWH combined with the vowels of Adonai. The Hebrew “Y” sound was given the Indo-European ‘J’ pronunciation for our European Bible translations. Worse than his history is his reinterpretation of clear exhortations in Scripture not to participate in harlotry and immorality, prostitution and homosexuality, like all the other nations.

The Believer’s Response to ‘The Da Vinci Code’

Brown’s agenda is quite clear and dangerous. Brown has reconstructed a pagan religion of self-works coupled with sexual immorality. He has resurrected Gnostic heresies which deny the person and work of Christ. Yet, Brown’s agenda is not new. Throughout the pages of history, men have sought to exchange the truth of God for a lie. He should listen carefully to Jude’s warning that false teachers are known for their denial of sound doctrine while following after their own ungodly lusts (18). Jude responds to such men by calling the church to “remember the words that were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ (17) … building yourselves upon your most holy faith; praying in the Holy Spirit; keep yourselves in the love of God; waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life. And have mercy on some who are doubting; save others, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh” (20-23).