A thriller, not a historical document
Here's one reviewer's take on The DaVinci Code:Why all the fuss over a fictional story? It's because Brown skillfully used real artwork, documents, buildings and people in his book, which has been read by an estimated 75 million people worldwide.
How could readers not think "The Da Vinci Code" was real, considering that Jesus Christ, Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton are as real as the Mona Lisa painting, the Louvre Museum and the Opus Dei?
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Will "The Da Vinci Code" cause some Christians to question some of their beliefs? Definitely. Will they abandon their faith because of this movie? If they do, then they couldn't have been very good Catholics to begin with. Agreed, and hence the problem with the book and the movie. I've found it amazing that educated people accept it as it is (trash, even if somewhat entertaining to those with an axe to grind against the Church), yet the fear seems to be amongst the uneducated who will assume wrongly and live their lives accordingly.
I don't know if that's a sad commentary on our society, or on our education system, or whatever culprit one might care to find. At least there's a silver lining behind the cloud: controversies such as these always lead the open-minded to truth, so long as they are willing to abandon the Hegelian dialectic (e.g. truth being in the middle) and accept that some explanations really are better than others (e.g. primacy of truth).
After all, there's a reason gnosticism died out, not the least of which is that it's just plain silly.
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James Atticus Bowden 
2 Comments:
The gnostic heresies are:
(a) Syrian
(b) Hellenistic (the major one fought against in Scripture)
(c) Dualists
(d) Antinomians
All the same theme of gnosis though...
In order for it to be a "heresy", it has to be a sect of Christianity that denies the fundamental truths of Christianity then breaks off. Gnosticism in that sense isn't really heretical in the same way as say the Cathars or the Monophysites are.
Gnosticism is more an errant philosophy (I'd hate to call it theology) of life than anything else.
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