May 21, 2006

Da Vinci Code Sermon

You’ve seen movies or read books about World War II, haven’t you?  Submarine adventures or spy thrillers, with juicy love-triangle plot twists included?  What is always the same about them?  In the end, the Nazis always lose, and the Allies always win, right?  Now, imagine you are going into the theatre to see a World War II movie…  A murder-mystery-espionage blockbuster filled with intrigue.  A great flick.  But in the end, Hitler wins the war and Roosevelt and Churchill get put on trial!  And people who don’t know history end up thinking: “Wow, what do you know?  That must have happened.  It’s in print!  It was in the movie!”

A survey by Decima Research, Inc. showed that one out of three Canadians who have read the book The Da Vinci Code now believes there are descendants of Jesus walking among us today!  Dan Brown’s red hot page-turner The Da Vinci Code has become a runaway bestseller and now a major motion picture directed by Ron Howard.  What is mind-boggling is the effect the story is having on popular culture.  By cleverly mixing fact with fiction, Brown has created a raging controversy over how many of the novel’s claims are rooted in reality.

Dan Brown broke the unbreakable rule.  He wrote a work of historical fiction, and writers of historical fiction make a deal with their readers – that while the novel features fictional characters engaged in imagined activities, the basic historical framework is itself correct.  However, the Da Vinci Code clearly contains many historical errors covering a wide variety of issues: church architecture, religious symbolism, the Roman Empire, ancient Israel, and different spiritual belief systems.  If Brown cannot be relied upon to accurately recount the most basic of historical facts, then how can he be trusted to correctly explain the more complex subjects?

And here is the danger.  Because it’s in print, because it’s on film, people are going to accept it as accurate history.  And if they do that with this story, they would miss out on the most important fact of all history for them and for us:  That Jesus, the Son of God, came to this earth out of love to be our Saviour.  (Romans 1:1-7).

I’ve read The Da Vinci Code.  It focuses on a subject that many of us know little about: The Holy Grail.  Most of my knowledge of this comes from two movies:  Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.  Watching these movies qualifies me to speak as an expert on this topic.  At least as much of an expert as author Dan Brown who wrote Da Vinci Code.  The difference is that the first two movies never pretended to be anything but fiction.  Brown’s main source of information concerning the Grail comes from a 1982 book entitled “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”. The authors of that book drew primarily on documents provided to them by a French citizen by the name of Pierre Plantard.

The problem here was that Plantard had forged these documents as a rouse to prove that he was actually a direct descendent of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. And a true King of France. It was Plantard who created The Priory of Sion, which Dan Brown claims is one of the oldest secret societies in existence. In The Da Vinci Code, the Priory of Sion is said to have been established in 1099 when the Knights Templar discovered trunks full of documents buried beneath Solomon’s Temple which not only revealed the location of the Holy Grail but contained evidence that would totally discredit Christianity. The book tells us that Leonardo Da Vinci, the famous Renaissance painter, was actually the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. So were Sir Isaac Newton, of apple fame, and Victor Hugo, the French author.

However, the Priory of Sion wasn’t actually begun until 1956!  On June 25, 1956, official paperwork was filed establishing the Priory of Sion as a society to lobby the French Government for more affordable housing.  The person who filed the papers was none other then Pierre Plantard.  The same Plantard that spent time in jail for fraud in 1953.  And in 1993, Plantard, under oath, admitted he had made up the whole Priory scheme!

OK, but it’s just a novel, right?  Just a movie. True. And if it were only presented as a story, there would be no problem. To be honest, Dan Brown is a great storyteller.  The story begins in France where Robert Langdon, the noted symbologist from Harvard University, has been visiting as a guest lecturer. (By the way, there are no such thing as symbologists in real life.) Langdon is disturbed at his hotel room by the French Police who take him to the Louvre to assist in a murder investigation. One of the curators of the museum, Jacques Sauniere, has been murdered. However, before dying, Sauniere is able to leave a variety of clues scattered around the gallery he has locked himself in as an unsuccessful bid to escape his killer.

Unbeknownst to Langdon, he is actually a suspect in the murder and only escapes with the help of the beautiful police cryptographer, Sophie Neveu. Langdon discovers that the murdered Sauniere not only is Sophie’s estranged grandfather, but he is also the Grand Master of Priory of Sion, a secret society entrusted with a secret, which if revealed would destroy the Christian church as we know it. Their quest for clues to break the Code leads them to Leigh Teabing, a British Royal Historian, who is one of the foremost authorities on the Holy Grail. Their journey takes them through France, across the English Channel on an illicit flight, while staying one step ahead of the police, an albino monk killer, and the “teacher,” a mystery man orchestrating the entire story. It’s during the trip that Langdon and Teabing are able to lecture Sophie about the fallacies of Christianity and the Bible as well as the evils of the church.

But it’s just a story, right?  True, but here’s The Problem.  Before the novel begins, there is a page included in the book entitled “Facts” which states: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” So Brown begins by saying “Trust me, I’ve done my homework.”  But the question is, “Has he?”

It’s not just Christians who have problem with that claim. Here is a quote from Bruce Boucher, the curator of European decorative arts and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. “It is also breathtaking to read that the heroine, Sophie Neveu, uses one of Leonardo’s paintings, "The Madonna of the Rocks," as a shield, pressing it so close to her body that it bends. More than six feet tall and painted on wood, not canvas, the "Madonna" is unlikely to be so supple.” So, you have to wonder, if he can’t even get something that simple right, how accurate are Brown’s descriptions of other things in the book?

By claiming up front that all the documents are accurate, the reader is left with the impression that Brown in a historian on par with the characters in his novel. The truth is that Dan Brown is a school teacher and novelist who writes fiction.  He’s not an art expert, he’s not a historian and he’s certainly not a theologian.  As sociologist Andrew Greeley states, “Brown knows little about Leonardo, little about the Catholic Church, and little about history.”

Let’s start with what The Da Vinci Code says about the authority of the Scriptures. The premise of the Code is that there are more reliable gospels then the ones in the Bible.  In particular, Brown’s characters refer to The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary. These were in their opinion part of more then eighty gospels that were considered for the New Testament, but were turned down by the church and destroyed. According to Langdon and Teabing, Coptic scrolls found near Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 are the earliest Christian records and disprove the Gospels which the church accepts today. These fifty-two Coptic scrolls, only five which were referred to as Gospels, the Gnostic Gospels, have been the subject of much study since their discovery. That much is true.

However, most scholars, even liberal scholars, will concede that the four Gospels which we hold to were written between 50 and 100 AD. Those same scholars tell us that the earliest of the Gnostic Gospels was written at least a generation later and some of them as much as 200-300 years after the event and even after the early church had established the Canon of the scripture!

So in reality, there weren’t 80 gospels being considered!  There were 5 or 6.  And the four agreed on had been accepted officially since early in the second century. Around 150 A.D. both Justin Martyr and Tertullian spoke of the four gospels.  This is at least a hundred years before the gospels of Philip and Mary were written!  By the time the earliest of the gospels found at Nag Hammadi was written, the church had already settled on Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the inspired Scripture. And this was at least 150 years prior to Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, who Brown asserts masterminded the entire conspiracy of the New Testament. This must have been quite a feat, seeing it happened at least 100 years before Constantine was born!

In their book “Cracking Da Vinci’s Code” Jim Garlow and Peter Jones wrote “The New Testament Canon is not the invention of Constantine in the fourth century. It is an essential part of the teachings of Jesus and his apostles from the start. In the first century the Canon was in organic form and functioned without formal church declaration.”

That is the truth about the Gospels.  There is persuasive evidence that the Gospels are reliable.  1) They are rooted in direct and indirect eyewitness testimony.  The men who wrote them walked and talked with Jesus!  2) They were written so close to the events – the first one completed maybe ten years after Jesus’ ascension!  They couldn’t be legendary because the people who lived the events were still alive when they were being written about!  3) The Gospels contain embarrassing material.  Hard to explain sayings by Jesus.  Their own short-comings.  The involvement of women in key events.  Had they been made up, they wouldn’t have been written that way.  And 4) Archaeology and ancient writings outside the Bible corroborate the accuracy of the Gospels.  The other “later Gnostic gospels” were inaccurate and not backed up by history.  Dr. Mark Strauss, a NT scholar, says, “The four Gospels from the New Testament are the only historical documents that really can be shown, with certainty, to be first-century documents.  That is, they are documents that arose within the first and second generation of Jesus’ followers.  The claim that these other gospels were competing with those until this particular date is just simply not accurate.”

What does The Da Vinci Code say about Jesus? You aren’t very far into The Da Vinci Code when you discover the theological beliefs of the main characters.  They tell us that Jesus was simply a mortal prophet, a great and powerful man, but just a man. The book maintains that the church hijacked Jesus’ message and claimed He was the divine Son of God.

What The Da Vinci Code wants us to believe is that the Divinity of Christ was something not believed by the early church. It was an invention of the Council of Nicaea in 325 and we are also told that it was a relatively close vote at that council!  300 bishops came together to discuss the teachings of a prominent preacher named Arius who had proclaimed that Jesus was a created being, just like the rest of us and wasn’t actually the “begotten Son of God.” From those discussions the Nicene Creed was adopted, affirming that the church has always believed that Jesus was divine.  And the vote?  298 in favour.  2 opposed!  No need for a recount!

The earliest Christian writings that we have come from St. Paul, whom even the most liberal critics will concede wrote his epistles between 48 and 60 A.D. What did Paul teach about the Divinity of Christ?  Romans 1:3-4:  “For the gospel of God…regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.”  Col. 1:15:  “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.”   And 1 Cor. 8:6:  “yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”  Throughout the letters that Paul wrote to the church he spoke of Jesus as God!

Read the Gospels!  Jesus allowed people to call him the Son of God, He called Himself God. He said he could forgive sins, He promised to rise from the dead.  He clearly testified at his trial that He was the Son of God. For that He was crucified, and still didn’t deny it. 

And then He did rise from the dead.  Everything He said could have been disproved if the resurrection hadn’t happened – and the evidence for the resurrection is extraordinary!  The historical evidence for the resurrection is overwhelming, even from a skeptic’s perspective.  First, Jesus actually died on the cross.  The Romans made sure of that.  Second, he was buried in a tomb. And we have the name of the tomb’s owner.  Third, three days later that tomb was empty.  Jesus’ opponents never claimed it wasn’t empty.  They could have gone and gotten the body and proved otherwise but they didn’t.  They couldn’t.  Fourth, Jesus followers saw him alive again, and were willing to die for that claim.  And Finally, the disciples’ lives were absolutely transformed by the resurrected Christ!

History tells us that all but one of the original disciples died martyr’s deaths; they were killed for their faith, and all they had to do to save their lives was to say that Jesus was just a man, that he wasn’t God.  Would you die for a lie?  No.  And neither did they. 

That is the truth about Jesus.  That is the same truth that has changed our lives.  Because Jesus is risen again, we know that our sins are paid for.  We are forgiven for all our failures.  We are at peace with God again.  God is real, and heaven is real, and we are going to be there forever because of the One who is the only Way there – Jesus Christ, the Son of God!  That message is important to you.  To me.  To everyone!

And that’s why we’re talking about this story, the Da Vinci Code.  Maybe you have read it.  Maybe you have seen the movie or will end up seeing it.  You need to know the real truth that this fictitious story attempts to undermine.  Arm yourself with the real facts so that your precious faith isn’t harmed.  The influence of false teaching is deceptive and powerful.  But it can’t hurt you if you are armed with the truth of God’s Word.  It can’t take the truth of Jesus from you.

Or maybe you had never thought about this book before.  Maybe you had no intentions of reading the book or seeing the movie.  That’s fine.  You aren’t missing anything.  But maybe your friend read it.  Maybe your neighbour saw the movie.  And now, they have some questions for you, the Christian.  The person who goes to church.  And they need you to answer them.  They are in an honest search for the truth, and you can shed some real light to their search.  What an opportunity that will be!  Let’s be ready for that!  Let’s equip ourselves.  As the movie says, let’s seek the truth.  But let’s seek the real truth!  And let’s be ready to share it!   Amen.

(Part two next week)

Sources used for this sermon (other than Holy Scripture):
“Exploring the Da Vinci Code” – Lee Strobel and Gary Poole
“Cracking the Da Vinci Code” – sermon by Denn Guptill
“The Da Vinci Deception” – Erwin W. Lutzer

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