Sermon from August 29, 2004

A French woman named Sophie Neveu is the female protagonist of Dan Brown’s best selling novel, The Da Vinci Code. In the story she remembered a time as a child, when she read something controversial her grandfather had said about Jesus and Mary Magdalene in a newspaper article.

“When her grandfather came into the kitchen, he saw Sophie with the paper and frowned.” ‘You’re quick.’

“Sophie said, ‘You think Jesus Christ had a girlfriend?’

“‘No, dear, I said the Church should not be allowed to tell us what notions we can and can’t entertain’” (The Da Vinci Code, 247)

My initial, acerbic response to that is to say, “No, of course the Church should not be allowed to tell us what notions we can and can’t entertain. Instead, we let Dan Brown and Martin Scorsese do that. We allow television documentaries to do that.”

That response serves a limited purpose, but it may obscure something more profound. I happen to agree that the Church should not be allowed to tell us what notions we can and can’t entertain. That’s the job description of a Muslim cleric, not a Christian pastor. The Christian faith always does best when its aim is to propose, not to impose its understanding of truth.

Now, that’s all well and good, but it raises a question: can we respond to ideas we believe are false without trying to impose our own ideas on unwilling people? I believe we can, but two obstacles make it difficult.

First, evangelicals have bad habits we need to overcome. We’d rather fight than negotiate, and we tend to attack people rather than engage ideas. These habits go back to the Reformation in the sixteenth century; they are hard to break.

Second, we see challenges to our faith as nothing but threats, when we need to see them as opportunities as well. That’s easy to say but hard to do, because it involves a shift in how we look at the world. Deep within the evangelical Protestant psyche is a fear that if we engage false ideas in a thoughtful, courteous way, then, sooner or later, we will betray the faith we hold dear. Out of this fear and our old attack-dog tactics, we have often responded to ideas we believe are false by trying to impose what we believe on unwilling people.

Books like The Da Vinci Code, movies, television programming, social and political issues, and goofy ideas from the Episcopal Church will never stop. Maybe Dan Brown’s novel offers us an occasion to revisit our habits and fears and learn how to deal with these unending and often transient ideas with greater confidence and with our eye on an eternal perspective. I’d like to tell you how I try to go about this. Let’s begin with a remarkable text from 2 Corinthians 10:3-5.

Unique Weapons, Unique Strategy
For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

Taking captive every thought and making it obedient to Christ is a vision worth pursuing. To achieve that vision would be to influence the command and control center of a culture – its ideas. It would be a strategic move for the kingdom of God.

In the late 1980s Martin Scorsese produced the film, The Last Temptation of Christ. Before its release, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ and James Dobson of Focus on the Family offered to buy all copies the movie with the understanding that they would destroy them. With all due respect to those luminous leaders, their offer was a strategic blunder. Think about it from Hollywood’s point of view.

Aside from the sensitive issue of freedom of expression, Scorsese would have become a Quisling in the film industry by accepting their offer. He would have sacrificed artistic integrity for money, and he would have had no future in Hollywood. That’s an example of responding to ideas we believe are false by trying to impose them on unwilling people. They resented it, and evangelicals came across as tone deaf to their legitimate concerns as artists.

Until something radical changes, censorship of any kind will meet resistance and resentment. We live in a culture where we are free to do anything we can get away with. If we are going to take captive ideas and make them obedient to Christ, we have to work with that reality. Here’s how I try to do it.

In 1 Corinthians 5:12 the Apostle Paul made an astute observation. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? I am reading a biography of Jonathan Edwards. His father, Timothy Edwards, pastored the church in East Windsor, CT, where Jonathan grew up. The book describes Rev. Timothy Edwards as the “God-ordained overseer of the morals of the community” (Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 34).

That may have worked in Puritan New England; it does not work today. Paul’s words about not judging those outside the church fit our circumstances well. My pastoral responsibility is not to the community but to the congregation I serve. You have granted me a certain access to your hearts and minds. What Mark and I have done with The Da Vinci Code is a model of how I approach troublesome issues.

First, we didn’t insist that you have to read the book. You won’t be a better Christian for reading it or a worse one if you don’t. If you want to discuss it with friends who are reading it, you would probably do well to read it yourself, or at least read a good book about it.

Second, we have tried to focus on ideas, not on Dan Brown’s or anyone else’s personality or motives. Personal attacks can cloud judgment. A reasonable and passionate effort to address ideas can engage a person’s mind and make progress toward taking captive ideas raised by the novel and making them serve Christ. Maybe that doesn’t sound very exciting to you, but if 20,000 pastors would guide their congregations that way about all the issues that challenge our faith, the Church might have a better chance of being a player in shaping American culture.

Of course, if I have the right opportunity presents itself for me to talk about these ideas with a larger audience in our community, I am willing to do that too. And there is a piece of our Christian heritage that is rooted in the Bible, which can influence the way we engage ideas that come to us in books, movies, TV and classrooms. Let me show you.

Plundering “Egypt”
Look with me at Exodus twelve. The previous chapter tells the story of the death angel that God sent throughout Egypt to kill the firstborn of every living thing. That dreadful act finally persuaded Pharaoh to set free the children of Israel from the house of bondage where they had served so long. Exodus 12:33-36 tells almost in passing a curious sidebar to the Jewish exodus from Egypt. Here is what it says.

The Egyptians urged the people to hurry and leave the country. “For otherwise,” they said, “we will all die!” So the people took their dough before the yeast was added, and carried it on their shoulders in kneading troughs wrapped in clothing. The Israelites did as Moses instructed and asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold and for clothing. The LORD had made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and they gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians.

As Christianity came increasingly into contact with the pagan world of the Roman Empire, it began to interact with established Pagan ideas. Some of them were attractive to Christians. How was the Church to relate to those ideas? One suggestion, by the Church Father, Tertullian, was to have nothing to do with them. He once famously asked, “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?”

Other Church Fathers disagreed and offered some fascinating ways of accounting for attractive pagan ideas. No Church Father did this more persuasively and with more impact than the great African theologian, Augustine. I want you to hear what he said and his allusion to the gold and silver of Exodus twelve.

“‘Pagan learning is not entirely made up of false teachings and superstitions. It contains also some excellent teachings, well suited to be used by truth, and excellent moral values. Indeed, some truths are even found among them which relate to the worship of the one God. Now these are, so to speak, their gold and their silver, which they did not invent themselves, but which they dug out of the mines of the providence of God, which are scattered throughout the world, yet which are improperly and unlawfully prostituted to the worship of demons. The Christian, therefore, can separate these truths from their unfortunate associations, take them away, and put them to their proper use for the proclamation of the gospel.’” (McGrath, Reality, 112)

Here are gold and silver that came out of the publication of The Da Vinci Code. It gave several million people a good read. As such, it gave them joy and a constructive way to spend their time. More important, it alerted people to the alternative understanding of Christianity which we call Gnosticism. That is a legitimate area of historical research, and now we are more aware of it. Third, Dan Brown, with help from other artists, brought Mary Magdalene to the attention of the Church. This corrected an omission on our part.

If I can go beyond Augustine for a moment, even the faults of the novel have had several unintended, beneficial effects. It has caused Christians to sharpen their grasp of the Christian faith, especially the doctrine of scripture and the doctrine of the deity of Jesus Christ. Second, it has given Christians opportunities to talk about their faith with some of their friends in a natural, unforced way. The novel even gave rise to this sermon and the chance to consider better ways for us to engage challenges to our faith.

Sometimes, non-Christians can teach us truth. At other times their very mistakes serve as occasions to bring truth to light. We need not fear secular ideas and ideas hostile toward Christianity, because our God is at work in those ideas. He is the source of all the good ones, and He can make good come out of all the bad ones.

Now, how can I say that? How is it that the non-Christian world discovers and expresses truth? This is one of the questions I hope to answer more fully when the sermon series on the doctrine of creation begins September 12. Today, I’d like to put the germ of this idea into your heads.

The Doctrine of Creation and the Non-Christian World
Let me express it briefly, using a short statement from Alister McGrath, the evangelical, Oxford theologian. McGrath has given the evangelical church a revolutionary and thoroughly biblical idea. Here is what he wrote.

“There will be continuities, however weak they may be; commonalities, however attenuated they may be; and correspondences, however oblique they may be, between Christianity and other attempts to make sense of the world, precisely because both that world and those who attempt to make sense of it have been created by the same God” (McGrath, ibid).

“That world and those who attempt to make sense of it have been created by the same God.” In other words God structured the world in a certain way, and He made the human mind compatible with that structure so we could figure it out. Two things make it difficult to figure out.

First, God made a profoundly complex universe. It’s only been 300 years since Newton figured out a universal law of gravitation, less than a hundred since Einstein refined it, and in my lifetime that Watson and Crick described the double-helix. By all accounts the physical universe still has more secrets than we have yet discovered. And relatively few human beings understand the mechanisms we have discovered.

Second, we are sinful. Our judgment is clouded by our sins, and as a result, we misinterpret the structures that God fired into the material creation and into the world of values and spirituality.

But God made us with a hankering to understand, and so we try. Trying to figure out God’s world in our ignorance and sin is like trying to recognize someone’s face from its reflection in water on a windy day. We make mistakes. But we get some things right; and if we are willing to listen patiently to what even our enemies say, we can affirm the truth they are able to discern.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Books like The Da Vinci Code can be upsetting. If it upsets you, it’s okay to ignore it. That will not make or break your relationship with God. But if you want to deal with such challenges to our faith, and if you’re willing to do your homework, you need not fear engaging them.

To engage our world like this requires two disciplines. One is the capacity to listen to what people are saying. So much public discourse finds people who are talking past each other. Being a good listener affirms the value of the other person. It is a fundamental act of loving your neighbor as you love yourself.

The second discipline is being able to state simply but clearly what you believe. For example, when someone is holding forth on the marriage of Jesus to Mary Magdalene, it is most impressive for you to be able to say, “I’m not sure He was married, but I do believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and He has changed my life.”

We can always say, “I don’t know.” We can always agree to disagree. People will respect us. What we can’t do is to be discourteous, and what we can’t do is to be silent. After all, God is already at work in the other person. We have inside help.