‘Da Vinci’ players

Thanks to the book and movie versions of “The Da Vinci Code” and the discussions about the Gnostic gospels of Mary Magdalene and Judas, God and Jesus are once again hot topics in our society. With these issues on everyone’s minds, it might be helpful to remember that there are disagreements on all sides of these issues, pros and cons, and con artists.

Everyone views the world through a certain worldview, and what follows are the primary worldviews involved in the current discussions/arguments about Jesus and The Da Vinci Code. This helps us know who the players are in this latest rhetoric against faith.

The first group of players are the agnostics. Agnostics say they don’t disbelieve that God exists; it’s just that they haven’t found enough evidence to convince themselves one way or another. This view tends to make a seeker of truth always doubtful about finding truth. This view tends to make a seeker stop seeking for the truth at all and become closed-minded against it.

Our next group of arguers are the atheists. They say that God does not exist— that somehow we have not been told how — they have traveled the universe and seen everything that there is to see, so they know for certain that there is no God. Some atheists will go so far as to say that they believe that there is a “power” or that nature is behind or in control of the universe, but all they have done is rename God as “Nature” and “Power.”

The last group of players in our list of debaters are Christian believers. There is enough historical evidence to convince most researchers that Jesus really existed in human history and is not just a made-up story. Books have been written against The Da Vinci Code, and the Sci-Fi Channel even broadcast a special against it. Sci-Fi was very fair in its treatment of conservative Christian scholarship.

So if there is good evidence for Jesus in his story, then what about His resurrection? We know that His earliest followers died horrible deaths. Since no one would die for a lie, then I believe that these deaths prove the resurrection. The Christian church has often been the subject of persecution and ridicule throughout history, and just why are people so sensitive to the subject of Jesus on the one hand that they don’t want His name mentioned outside of church and then they use it for a curse word out in public? I think there must be some spiritual reason for that. If Jesus were dead, He wouldn’t be a problem, would He?

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