"a liberating antidote to close-minded dogmatism"

This post is mostly for Qahal. I thought he should be alerted to this article. Qahal is more qualified to talk about the merits of these types of articles -- he once killed a heritic at 200 yards using nothing but mind-bullets. But I can at least point out the amusing pro-heretic language that the article.

First we start out with the requisite comparison between The Da Vinci Code and actual scholarship:

What does The Da Vinci Code have to do with a letter written by the archbishop of Alexandria in the year 367? As it turns out, quite a lot.

It's just fiction right? Funny how so many people consider it Gospel.* Then he talks about the struggle in the early church

"waged by self-styled correct believers against so-called heretics."

So-called heretics? Even if you take their side, they are still--by definition--heretics. Just because I don't like John Kerry doesn't mean I should refer to him as a "so-called" senator, implying that he is not actually a senator. The poor so-called heretics lost the battle (unjustly for sure), but luckily the moderns are more open than those bigots of the past:

Today, there are many scholars, theologians, and popular writers who promote the Gnostic perspective as a liberating antidote to close-minded dogmatism, but there are also many others who denounce it as a pernicious and destructive influence.

Those who disavow the liberating Gnostic perspective apparently only do it because of the danger it poses to their close-minded dogmatism. I would have guessed that some folks, especially those self-styled believers of the early Church, disavowed these heresies because they were false. Yes, that's right - the absurd view that there is one single Truth and people are actually seeking it. But it is clear that the idea of an absolute truth is absolutely not true:

Emory University biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson may be right in saying that a new Gnosticism once again "threatens the shape of Christian faith." But the return of Gnostic ideas has also contributed to a larger debate between progressives and traditionalists that goes beyond the strict concerns of one religious tradition.

Heresy does not threaten the shape of Christian faith. Jesus will still be co-eternal with God no matter how many Arian books and articles are written. Even when Winston Smith finally knew that two plus two equals five, two plus two still actually equalled four! And as far as Gnostic ideas contributing to the larger debate on faith, perhaps they do in some way -- the same way that NAMBLA contributes to the larger debate on the definition of a proper relationship.

To be fair, that is as much of the article as I have read. Perhaps it ends with a flourish of popery and right reason. One can hope . . . but then again, expecting good theology from the U.S. News and World report is probably a bit like supposing that those "facts" from The Da Vinci Code actually have some basis in reality.

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*Actually, this is not that funny at all. In many ways fiction (pre-postmodern fiction, that is) is just as real as nonfiction (I don't have my copy of Technopoly handy, so I can't offer you some Postman brilliance on the topic). That said, The Da Vinci Code is a completly different story. No matter how well Dan Brown translates the Gospel of Phillip from Aramaic doesn't change the fact that it was written in Coptic.