Mississauga church cracks fraudlent message of Da Vinci Code
MISSISSAUGA, ON-At West Edge Community Church, when it comes to confronting matters of cultural speculation about the Christian faith, the best defence is a good offence.
The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada affiliated church recently invited its worshippers and members of the community to read a controversial new novel called The Da Vinci Code-which makes destructive claims about Christianity-then devoted a Sunday morning service, pizza luncheon and afternoon seminar to discussing it.
"We've encouraged people to read it," says the senior pastor of the four-year-old church, Jon Osmond, "because a healthy dose of doubt is a good thing when you really, truly try to find the answers to the questions that are raised.
"A lot of people believe things about Christianity," he adds, "but they don't even know why they believe them. This kind of book creates questions for them to really get to the bottom of why they believe what they believe."
For more than a year, the novel by Dan Brown has occupied The New York Times bestseller list for fiction hardcover books. A fast-paced thriller, which has sold more than six million copies, the story is creating a stir; but perhaps nowhere more so than within the Christian community, where reactions to many of the book's claims are raising eyebrows.
Nothing in Christianity is original; Jesus married and impregnated Mary Magdalene; and a pagan Roman emperor motivated purely by politics collated the Bible-these are among so-called "facts" presented in Brown's novel.
It was in an attempt to help people address such claims, says Osmond, that West Edge sponsored the "Cracking The Da Vinci Code," seminar last month, presented by biblical scholar Ward Gasque.
Gasque is founder of the Centre for Innovation in Theological Education in Seattle, Washington, and teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary and Seattle Pacific University. His Mississauga seminar was one of four Canadian engagements in a North American tour.
Gasque says he created the seminar to give people tools to evaluate the book using critical thinking skills.
"You wouldn't think that people would be believing this because it's a work of fiction," says Gasque. "But it's being assumed to be a work of history and historical research.
"So I thought it was worth doing."
During a presentation that included photographs of many of the locations and artistic works referred to in the novel, Gasque told a crowd of more than 100 that there was "no historical basis" for many of the book's claims.
However, he said Christians can learn things from the book, including, "the power of literature to communicate," "the need to read and think critically," and "the importance of historical research and understanding."
Gasque concluded his presentation quoting G.K. Chesterton, "When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything."
Cathy Hetherman describes herself as a fairly "new Christian," and says that after reading the book, she was glad she went to the seminar. "There were a lot of things I was a little confused about. There were a lot of [areas in the book] where I didn't know truth from fiction, and this cleared up those myths for me."
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