I owe Dan Brown a debt of gratitude. If I'd offered a Sunday School class titled "Why the Nicene Creed Was Written," back in 2002, it'd been me, myself and I attending. Now I can teach this and many other topics to a room full of folks simply by calling it A Class On The Da Vinci Code.
Some debunking is in order, but I've tried hard not to make tearing the novel apart the centerpiece of the class. That's no fun. That's too much like the Youth Group meetings I attended where the Moonies, Mormans and Jehovah's Witnesses were lined up before a rhetorical firing squad. I simply note the points on which the novel departs from reputable history, and then proceed to engage the class in some study of the real issues in biblical scholarship and church history.
I've found the Thoughtful Christian curricula helpful. I've also had to crack open the spines of textbooks on my shelf that haven't been cracked in a while.
What I've found: There is an agenda that unites such disparate moves as fixing the canon and writing the Nicene Creed, but it's not a coup against the Royal Family of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It's about keeping Christianity's feet planted firmly in Jewish soil.
The big story about the canon isn't the gospels that didn't make the cut. The big story is that two testaments, one in Hebrew and the other in Greek, one the history of the Jewish people, the other the story of a Jewish Messiah finding a home among Gentiles, make up the Christian canon.
Marcion, who thought that the Old Testament God was an evil demiurge whom Jesus came to overthrow, made the first canon. His Bible omitted the Old Testament and the more Jewish sounding New Testament books. Our present canon was a No to Marcion's anti-Jewish version of Christianity.
Mutatis mutandis the Nicene Creed. Brown was wrong to say that Nicaea accomplished a divine Jesus for human Jesus switcharoo. Both parties at Nicaea affirmed the divinity of Christ. They diverged on whether or not Jesus was uncreated.
The Nicaeans prevailed because average people were scandalized by the thought of worshiping a creature. The Old Testament's stubborn, relentless, iconoclastic commitment to the First Commandment could not be overcome even by arguments as forceful and logical as Arius's: that the Son cannot be uncreated, for that would make him a Brother to the Father and not a Son. As my church history textbook states, the Nicaeans were less rational than the Arians, but more monotheistic. Jesus can only be worshipped if he is of one substance (homoousios) with the Father. In the end, monotheism trumps every card in the deck.
When you think about it, it's amazing that it didn't go the other way, given the overwhelming Gentile majority in the Church. We could have had a modest tritheism that stood between the disorderly polytheism of Greco-Roman culture and irascible Jewish monotheism. We could have had Jesus as Sage, as Gnosis, as Enlightenment. In fact we do get a bit of that in the New Testament. But what we get in spades is Jesus as Messiah of Israel, seed of Abraham, priest and victim. Special people, the Jews! Their hopes and dreams, their ethics, and their uncompromising monotheism, hold the nations spellbound. And this is a good thing.
I'm told that eschatology is more fertile soil for interfaith dialogue than the Trinity. Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament quotes Martin Buber, who once addressed a group of Roman Catholic priests. He said, in effect, "We hope for the Messiah to come. You hope for him to come a second time. So let's wait for him together. And when he arrives, and someone asks him if he's been here before, I hope I am close enough to whisper in his ear, 'For God's sake don't answer that question!'"
I like that quote. I like the Spirit of that quote. I wonder if there's not a similar quote out there waiting to be uttered in the realm of the Doctrine of God.
Many (but by no means all) Jews regard the Trinity as idolatry. Indeed, Christians are idolaters to the extent that they aren't Trinitarian. If Jews (or Muslims, for that matter) cannot affirm the Doctrine of the Trinity, perhaps they can affirm the Spirit in which the doctrine was formulated.
As for The Da Vinci Code itself, I'm still not sure what to make of it. I have a hard time not being irritated by the liberties that Brown takes with Church History and biblical scholarship. If he knows enough to know there's such a thing as Q, then he knows good and well it's not a secret document that could shake the church to its foundations.
On the other hand, is it really any worse than Amadeus? The real Salieri harbored no grudges against the real Mozart, much less conspired to kill him. Nonetheless, the movie is utterly compelling. I guess I care about the Church and Jesus more than I do the good name of Antonio Salieri. Enough so that I can't just shrug my shuolders at The Da Vinci Code and say, It's a good page-turner.
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