Here's The Deal

This morning while I was having breakfast I was listening to a daily feature on CHML, the local all-news radio station, called "Roy Green's Comment." Roy's comments are usually interesting and they frequently have an edge to them that is intended to be somewhat provocative, but today I thought they bordered on the truly ridiculous. He was talking about the Da Vinci Code and expressing surprise that the Christian church was outraged at this work of fiction. It was something he said that he did not understand. He even quoted a poll of some sort that said that a majority of "Christians" who had read the book had found their faith strengthened. "So what's the big deal?" he asked. "What are all these conservative Christians upset about?"

Assuming that Mr. Green is sincerely bewildered, let me spell it out for him and for anyone else who does not grasp what is going on here. The fact that Dan Brown has attached the label "fiction" to his work the Da Vinci Code does not make it any less offensive to Christians who have sworn allegience to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Would Mr. Green be surprised if the Jewish people were outraged at a "fictional" work claiming that the holocaust never happened? Would he be surprised if the Muslim people were outraged at a "fictional" work portraying Mohammad in a way that went completely contrary to long-standing Islamic teaching? Would he be suprised if Canada's native population were outraged at a "fictional" work which revised their history in such a way that everything they had come to believe about the center of their identity was now revealed to be a fraud and a lie? When it is put in this way I suspect that even Mr. Green, like so many other media magpies, might begin to understand what all the fuss is about!

My question is this: Why must conservative Christians who take the Bible at face value have to endure "fictional" attacks on their faith? By asking such a question I'm not suggesting that us Christians be granted immunity from scrutiny. In fact, Christians welcome real, non-fictional questions because we believe that we are holding the truth and the truth by definition is not afraid of examination because it can do nothing but confirm and refine our understanding of it. Historic Christianity has never ducked the hard questions. We believe that the claims we are making are objectively true. So much so, that if it could be proven that Jesus was just a man and that he married and produced children and eventually he died and is buried somewhere in this world... then we would repudiate "the faith" as a tragic mistake of monumental proportions and we would eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die!

But this is not the way it is! Jesus died and rose again according to the Scriptures. And because he did, Dan Brown's fictional account is more than just an harmless tale to people escape the monotony of their lives. It is a distortion of reality, a deliberate lie and falsification of history; of important history that should not be distorted because there are eternal consequences at stake. When the apostles Peter and John were here on earth they told the religious but unbelieving sceptics of their day that: "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). The name these early Christians are talking about is the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who was crucified but whom God raised from the dead. They are certainly not talking about Dan Brown's Jesus who is not capable of saving anyone. They were proclaiming the same Jesus that conservative Christians proclaim today. The Jesus whom we love and serve. And the Jesus whose glory and honor we are committed to uphold. Mr. Green, this is why there is such a fuss. This is why we will not sit idly by while he who loved us and gave himself for us is attacked. When all is said and done, it is really just as simple as that.