That book

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La Shawn Barber is blogging about The Da Vinci Code. The book has been making quite a stir in popular culture and sending many a Christian into a tizzy over its claims about Jesus and Christianity.
The Da Vinci Code movie is on its way. Are you ready to blog knowledgeably about it?

Unbelievers (and not a few Christians) may scoff at us for taking The Da Vinci Code phenomenon so seriously. But pop culture is powerful, and although we surely have more productive things to do, setting the record straight and offering a reasoned defense for the faith and correcting historical inaccuracies are also important, even when the subject is fiction.

Being one of the scoffers (I scoff at the book more than people making a big deal about it) my eyes went into automatic glaze over right around "pop culture is powerful" but I pulled them back long enough to read the rest of the post. It is a crying shame that Christians abandoned academia so long ago after such a good start (all of the ivies were founded to turn out Christian scholars who could no doubt run rings around Mr. Brown). The Da Vinci Code, and the reaction to it, is but one of the results of that abandonment.

I freely admit to not reading the book and I don't have any intention to read it. By all accounts Brown cobbles together just about every disproven theory put forth by biblical scholars (and not a few hacks with axes to grind) in the last century. Been there, done that, and moving right along. Dude is not getting any of my time or money for a rehashing of bad scholarship.

It's interesting that it took this book to get so many churches and individual Christians to do what they should have been doing already, studying church history, learning sound doctrine, and training Christians in apologetics. I guess The Da Vinci Code is the wake up call to American Christians that we can no longer allow our brains to stew in the mush of touchy feely, feel good, self centered faith.

Update: Joshua Claybourn blogs on The Code.

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