Stephen C. Rose

This is not a review of The Da Vinci Code. It is a comment on the underlying thinking that appears to dominate the film.

The great theologian Karl Barth goes ignored in our time and the void has been filled by everything from Mel Gibson’s gruesome evocation of a conservative Roman Catholic declension of religion, The Passion of Christ, to Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code. The latter is a stalwart effort to give credence to a pop modernity with nods toward codes and symbols; but it falls back finally on the premises of religion.

Barth took the tenable position that the gospel Jesus spread was not religion at all. Religion is a human construct that, at worst, plays to the lower end of the human spectrum of consciousness where superstition and infantile understandings reside.

It is ironical that Barth wrote in opposition to religion at a time when fundamentalism was emerging as the very vanguard of deleterious religion worldwide. Barth probably did more to base conclusions on a stringent reading of Scripture than anyone since the Reformation.

He offered in Church Dogmatics and other works a damning refutation of what I have no hesitation in calling the Religion Code — an immature and mindless formula which believes particular actions will bring particular rewards, that certain objects have supernatural power and that among religions of the world there is one that is true above all others. Mine.

In Barth’s universe it is nonsensical to base any supposition on such premises.The Christian gospel was to him a flat-out rejection of the belief that blood lines have to do with anything. Jesus stood against all forms of exclusivism and put no human boundaries on grace or salvation as he understood it.

For Barth, religious inferences in the Bible are trumped by prophetic proclamations of universal love which make religion itself, with its protagionist-antagonist dynamics, a code for the very history the gospel judges and seeks to transform.

If we reject exclusive, blood-line understandings, we have no basis for aggressive and nativist forms of religion in today’s world.

Yet media too often join religionists in helping to reduce prophetic Christian understanding to “documentary” pap about Jesus offered on various cable channels, often utilizing the comments of unaccountably uncritical religious academics. Perhaps they are bemused by prospects of Warhol fame.

The Religion Code accepts and propagates the very idolatries Jesus himself opposed. Holy Grails. Crusades. Blood lines. Chosen persons. Yet under the umbrella of diversity and tolerance, the Religion Code gives credence to the worst aspects of religion: superstition, authoritarianism, intolerance, warfare and idolatry.

The Religion Code espouses what Dostoevsky derisively called mystery, miracle and authority. Christianity remains an understanding that continues to elude the world.

Only when we reject the notion of religion itself, as Barth did, can can begin to move toward an era of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “religionless Christianity”. And have done with the hoary premises of the Religion Code.