[JessiPollo]

Dear Antonios, I appreciate your recent post (#15 in this thread), as well as Byron's response. I do not agree with some of it, mind you; but this is a matter much to the heart and mind (and needs and situation) of each. I do wish, though, to offer a few thoughts in reaction.

No one, I think, questions the fact that such a film can cause damage to certain individuals - those who are easily led astray by a good story or nice screen effects, etc. I do not think anyone in this community has suggested that this is not a possibility, nor a reality to be ignored. No one is suggesting that Christians should indescriminately flock to the cinemas to see the film version (Bogdan remarked specifically on this in his post). One must exercise discernment, in this as in all things.

Further, I don't see anyone arguing that heresy ought be called anything other than heresy, or stood up against when encountered.

What has happened on this thread is that certain people (certainly me, in my first reply) have suggested that a blanket protest against the book and film, a kind of Christian 'fatwah', is not an appropriate globalised reaction for Christianity. As has been discussed many times in many contexts in this community, a blind shutting up of one's eyes and ears to the 'ways of the world' is not - at least it seems to me - sufficient to the pastoral responsibility of the Church in the world. Some Christian persons will require it, need it, no doubt; in some contexts it must be the norm. But the Church sojourns in the world, is the spiritual hospital to those of this world, who exercises her priestly office to humanity after the example of Christ who did not shun, yet did not succumb, to the degeneracy of the world around him. I cannot help but hear the voice of 'the scribes and pharisees' shouting 'He sits and eats with sinners!' when I hear what at times amounts nearly to a condemnation of any Christian who would read this book or see this film.

Christ entered into the world and into the context of the most appalling realities of what we now call - precisely because he entered into it - the 'first century'. He befriended and visited prostitutes, liars, thieves, heathen, pagans, adulterers, murderers, and, not least, those religious who perverted religion to their own ends. 'It is not those who are well who need a physician, but the sick'.

We live now in the twenty-first century. The world is still sick, and in many ways with the same illnesses Christ encountered in Galilee. There are still murderers, still adulterers. And there are still those who would pervert religion - even now Christ's own body - to their own ends, or to the ends of the social morays of the day. One of the great spiritual struggles of these decades in which we live is precisely the type of neo-gnosticism that inspired the film Stigmata, and now The Da Vinci Code. It's everywhere, all pervasive. The only reason Mr Brown's book has had such success is because it feeds directly into a kind of gnosticisation of popular 'religious' sentiment that's been at work at least since the 1960s.

One can react in any number of ways. Surely what is untrue should be condemned as untrue, and exposed for what it is. Of course. But standing on one's pulpit and shouting to the world, 'You brood of vipers' is only part of the Church's witness. John the Baptist spoke to mobs, to crowds; by and large, Christ spoke to persons. He spoke to what ailed the person before him, often to a degree far deeper than anything they had expected, but to them, of them. Christ spoke out against adultery ('He who lusts in his heart... has already committed adultery...'), but when it came to his response to the adulterous woman, engaged with her. He did not shame those who would engage with sinners; he shamed only those who would have prevented him from doing so.

Is our mission simply to tell the world how fallen and wrong it is? I see no precedent for this, in the life of Christ and the history of the Church, as a sole responsibility. We must never shirk it, but we must never think that shunning wrong and those who are touched by it is the fullness of Christian responsibility. The Church is the body of Christ to a sick and suffering world, and must be prepared to engage with that world in all its deficiencies and wrongs - precisely in its deficiencies and wrongs - if it is to fulfil its priestly and pastoral duty to offer the healing of Christ not simply to some generic concept of humanity, but to actual human persons, concrete people with concrete problems. We are called to be 'in the world, not of it'; it's not an either-or position from which one gets to choose.

I fully intend to see the film when it comes out next month. I fully intend to call heresy heresy (and have done so already on television and radio numerous times), but I intend to see it. I intend to see it precisely because I also, like you, know individuals who have been swayed by it's story; or if not its story precisely, the general religious ethos it perpetuates. I'll see it because seeing what it is that captures the hearts of a generation is a necessary part - part, not whole - of responding to those individuals whose hearts are so captured.

INXC, Matthew