New Resource for Responding to “The Da Vinci Code”

Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, continues to sell in record numbers. The suspense thriller is actually an undisguised attack upon Christianity. In my initial review, Deciphering the Da Vinci Code (written just as the book was published), I explained: “The human characters take a back seat to the grand conspiracy that gives the book its plot, and in that conspiracy is the heresy. The Da Vinci Code’s driving claim is nothing less than that Christianity is based upon a Big Lie (the deity of Christ) used by patriarchal oppressors to deny the true worship of the Divine Feminine. Still hanging in there? If you thought The Last Temptation of Christ was explosive, The Da Vinci Code is thermonuclear. The book claims that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, that a child was born of this marriage, and that Mary and her child fled after the crucifixion to Gaul, where they established the Merovingian line of European royalty.”
In other words, “Brown has crossed the line between a suspense novel and a book promoting a barely hidden agenda, to attack the Christian church and the Gospel.”
Now, faculty members at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary have responded to the book with a two-day workshop that is available on-line in audio form. Professors consider the novel in terms of its central charges, its impact, and the Christian challenge of responding to this publishing phenomenon. [To access the audio files, go here.]
These helpful materials are especially timely as the summer reading season is upon us — and as the film adaptation of the novel is in development.