Dan Brown is a Foraging Carpenter Ant

In a few hours, an exterminator will show up at my house, and I’ll pay him a lot of money to find and destroy two carpenter ant colonies that have infested my house. I know they’re here and a problem, because last weekend, when my wife and I spent all day catching up on the past seasons of 24, we killed about 30 carpenter ant “scouts,” the poor little guys they send out all alone to forage for food.

Dealing with something like The Da Vinci Code is like trying to kill a carpenter ant colony by waiting for the foragers and killing them one at a time. By the time you’ve wasted all your energy on the scouts, the whole structure is collapsing.

Put very plainly, The Da Vinci Code is not difficult to debunk, because it’s built on pretty much no historical evidence whatsoever, lots of mere speculation, and plenty of “facts” that are nothing of the sort. The greater questions are (1) Why would anyone want to believe in this conspiracy theory? and (2) What should the church being doing, if not wasting all its energy trying to “de-bunk” the code? There are a few more fundamental issues involved here that need exploration and understanding if we’re going to do more than kill the lone carpenter ant.

The Bible
In the first place, this whole controversy should cause us to re-think how we understand the Scriptures. I’d argue that it is a fundamentally modernist and scientific view of biblical inspiration and interpretation that causes so much of the problem. “The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven,” says Sir Leigh Teabing to Sophie Neveau. And it is one of the rare places that Teabing says something worth repeating. We’ve spent far too much time being as worried about and making up ridiculous explanations for the biblical “contradictions” as the rest of the world. I line right up with those in the blogosphere who have been complaining about the word “inerrancy” for the last year or so. It’s a bad word, because it carries with it all sorts of connotations of scientific precision, and the Scriptures just plain weren’t written that way. It’s time for us to get over it. Let the Scriptures be what they are, not what the modernist’s explanations for truth (precise and correct facts) claim it must be.

Gnostic Spirituality
N.T. Wright has correctly observed that the deeper issue contributing to the popularity of The Da Vinci Code is its alignment with hyper-individualistic spirituality. We’ve all heard it a thousand times: “I’m in favor of spirituality, but I’m against organized religion.” We saw this moreso in the film than in the book. Langdon says to Sophie after a touching story about praying to Jesus when he was trapped in a well, “What matters most is what you believe.”

The problem this presents for us Christians is that Jesus founded an organized religion. (Or perhaps it’s better to say He was the fulfillment and the Final Word of an organized religion). It’s more than just a “religion,” of course – it’s a kingdom, a holy nation, a community of the covenant people of God. But contrary to the way Christianity is presented in a good many evangelical circles today, it’s the church/covenant community that is central to the experience, not my “personal decision to make Jesus Lord and Savior.” This leads us to the third issue raised by our little ant infestation problem.

The Church
Much of the Christian church has gone radically individualistic. I blame the Radical Reformers. The Radical Reformers gave us some really important contributions like, you know, not drowning or burning people who disagree with you. But I, having been raised as an heir of the Radical Reformation (as a Baptist), have come to conclude that the Reformation got pushed too far into hyper-individualism. And in case you haven’t noticed, the Radical Reformation won in America (largely as a result of the “Great Awakenings” as well as the strong Enlightenment principles upon which we were founded). In Radical Reformation America, my personal “decision,” relationship, and quiet times are the priority. My individual experience is the key to my salvation. Being “born again” has become equated with having a conversion experience. It’s something I felt, and I know the exact time it happened.

All the while, God’s saving activity through His church (Word and Sacrament) has been lost. Where preaching is emphasized, it has more to do with life coping skills or learning to “be good” than it does the saving work of Jesus. Where regular practice of communion has been revived, the theology of God’s saving grace through the meal has often yet to be recovered. And I’ve looked in vain for an emphasis on the daily reality of living out our baptism in Radical Reformation America. The only place I’ve been able to find it is the Lutheran Book of Prayer.

Glenn Lucke has written a two part series called Must I Care About the Da Vinci Code? (part one and part two). His concluding paragraph sums it up beautifully:

I still think that Life Together, lived as the New Humanity of Christ, living the Kingdom as a loving but stark counter-culture, that includes God-honoring worship among the ecclesia on the Lord’s Day, the fervent and accurate preaching of the Word, the administration of Sacraments and Discipline, the communal life of the Church during the week, the excellence we pursue in our God-given vocations, our ministries of mercy, our calling of idols into question and our heralding the Gospel of the Kingdom as the answer to those idols….this is “the incredible opportunity” that we have each week. This vision of living the Kingdom doesn’t exclude taking advantage of DVC opportunities, but this vision means that not all of us need to have our lives structured by the trend du jour in pop culture.

In short, better that we turn our attention to being the church Jesus intended us to be and to live out that Life Together as God’s people always have than to capitulate to the hyper-individualism of gnostic spirituality and fads like The Da Vinci Code. We’ve got repairs to make on our own building so that the carpenter ant colonies can’t get in and erode the structure in the first place.