That Other Code

The combination of The Da Vinci Code and September 11 has played out in interesting ways on the book bestselling lists. Sometime after Da Vinci was released I noticed a marked interest in books about Mary Magdalene and the apocryphal gospels. Although most of these books are, like Da Vinci, sensational in the extreme, there are a few serious scholars who have capitalized on the phenomenon. Bart Ehrmann a New Testament scholar from University of North Carolina, has written a cluster of books that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the aggregate. Their jackets carry provocative titles such as Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew; Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make it into the New Testament; Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine. But the big surprise has been Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why which cracked the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list and even today after 10 months is still tracking at #382 on amazon. Note the conspiratorial sounding titles. I’m sure Regent’s Gordon Fee, one of the world’s foremost NT textual scholars, must be shaking his head in disbelief at this book, which is mainly about textual criticism, gracing the bestselling lists. I am myself not a NT scholar but am fascinated by Ehman’s brief consideration of the very early “proto-orthodox” documents such as the Didache (ca. 100) and 1 Clement (ca. 96) and the way he seeks to maximize the diversity of the early church by focusing on later Gnostic writings.

What has really caught my attention about the Ehrman phenomena is his personal story. In an interview with the Washington Post he called himself a “happy agnostic (although a colleague of mine heard him describe himself as a “Protestant atheist”) and described his understanding of life after death: “I think you just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted yesterday.” Ehrmann studied at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and Wheaton College in the late 1970s and gradually found himself moving away from faith during this time. (Interestingly I was working as an intern in a church office at the same time about 100 yards away from Moody, and was in the process of moving back towards Christian faith after a time of intense intellectual doubt. As I write this I just nailed a mosquito!)

Books by atheists seem to be making a comeback and this I would attribute largely to September 11 and the polarization of politics in the U.S. Many have come to view religious beliefs as uniformly dangerous with evangelicals becoming the equivalent of militant Islamists. Combine this with Da Vinci, evangelical opposition to certain types of stem cell research and the aggressive promotion of Intelligent Design and we get the biggest market for atheist books since Bertrand Russell. Richard Dawkin’s, The God Delusion is already clocking at #325 on amazon and it isn’t due for another two months. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris arrives next month and is already #125 while his The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Religion still sits at #205 two years after being published.

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by the Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett has attracted a good bit of attention from the reviewers. Interestingly enough both the TLS and the NY Review of Books ran with critical reviews by scientists who describe themselves as Christians (Freeman Dyson in the NYRB calls himself a skeptical Christian.) At one time reading a book such as Dennett’s would cause me to literally stiffen with fear as I took it off the shelf to risk a glance at the contents. As an undergrad university student in the sciences my Christian faith would fluctuate weekly, depending on the books I had read, from a despairing atheism to a faint flicker of Christian faith. Today I don’t find a book like Dennett’s very persuasive and I hope this is not simply a result of being a stuck-in-a-rut middle-aged male. The spell that Dennett seeks to break is “the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.” Certainly he causes the Christian to think about all the suffering in the world and God’s apparent absence in the face of it. I remember thinking, when confronted with a relative in deep pain in a hospital burn unit, about why God doesn’t instantly heal these severe burn cases. Dennett certainly pushes one on this. It is not enough for the Christian to simply say “we can’t measure a sunbeam with a ruler.”

A new book, entitled The Language of God, by Francis Collins who is the head of the recently completed Human Genome Project, takes a crack at a personal, contemporary, and scientific argument for the truth of Christianity. Probably not since C.S. Lewis has an orthodox Christian academic hit the bestselling list in the way that Collins has. I noticed him at the #2 position on at least 2 days and he was in the top ten for at least a couple of weeks. Several days ago the publisher, Simon & Shuster’s Free Press imprint, announced 90,000 copies already in print. I found the book a good read, quite inspiring, and persuasive. It also has a wonderful description of DNA and the successful hunt that he was involved in to find the abnormal gene that causes cystic fibrosis. At the conclusion of the book Collins calls for a truce between science and faith as the two are entirely harmonious and the two centuries old conflict between the two entirely unnecessary. Alister McGrath echoes this viewpoint in his recent Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Blackwell, 2004). I do largely agree with Collins and McGrath but the accommodation of Christianity and science has understandably been more than a small hiccup.

Without getting into the issue of human origins, we now know that human beings have been living for at least 100-200,000 years. Archaeology is showing us today how brutal human life has been in the past. One book in particular has given me an entirely new perspective on this subject; Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization (Oxford, 1993). Imagine life for, say, a woman in Africa 60,000 years ago; a teenager coming of age in Eurasia 12,000 years ago; or a young Mayan warrior 1,200 years back? Life was no doubt, on average, short and marked by constant low-intensity internecine warfare. I do believe that Christianity with the Incarnation makes the best sense of this human past but still we are up against the deep mystery of human existence and suffering that Collins and McGrath are somewhat prone to paper over. In the end we as Christians simply fall upon the grace of God. Non-Christians tend not to see the harmony between science and faith. Kurt Kleiner, a science writer illustrates this in his review of Collins in the August 19^th Globe & Mail:

Collins berates atheists who argue that science leaves no room for God. Logically, he’s right-if you propose a God who lives completely outside time and space, then yes, science can not beused to disprove God. But neither does science give any reason to believe . . . . Science offers a consistent and satisfying world view in which God is completely unnecessary. Right or wrong, Collins proves by example that it is possible for an intelligent person with a deep understanding of science to believe in God. Whether he can argue anyone into that belief is a different question.

Even if Kleiner has got Collins wrong he illustrates the need for God to draw us to himself. Of late I’ve been listening to “Cash” by Johnny Cash. Recorded in his home during the last few weeks of his life it is a powerful testimony of faith in a time of deep suffering. I’ll give the last word to John Cash.

I Came To Believe
I couldn’t manage the problems I laid in myself
And it just made them worse when I laid them on somebody else
So I finally surrendered it all brought down in despair
I cried out for help and I felt a warm comforter there
And I came to believe in a power much higher than I
I came to believe that I needed help to get by
In childlike faith I gave in and gave him a try
And I came to believe in a power much higher than I
-Johnny Cash

Bill Reimer

PS For an excellent lecture by Francis Collins, “Are We More than our Genes,” check out http://gfcf-ubc.ca/archive_2003_2004.htm. An outstanding lecture by Alister McGrath, entitled “Has Science Killed God” is available for download purchase at regentaudio.com