Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Jon Rowe has an excellent post comparing D. James Kennedy's statements about the DaVinci Code with statements by the founding fathers that agreed with the DaVinci code. In a show attempting to debunk the DaVinci code (which shouldn't be hard in and of itself, since much of the material in the book is utter nonsense), Kennedy calls the position that Jesus never claimed to be divine but was voted to be so by the Council of Nicea "one of the most pernicious" aspects of the book (view video here). Yet as Jon points out, this was a position taken quite explicitly by John Adams:

"The Trinity was carried in a general council by one vote against a quaternity; the Virgin Mary lost an equality with the Father, Son, and Spirit only by a single suffrage."

- John Adams to Benjamin Rush, June 12, 1812.

And:

"An incarnate God!!! An eternal, self-existent, omnipresent omniscient Author of this stupendous Universe, suffering on a Cross!!! My Soul starts with horror, at the Idea, and it has stupified the Christian World. It has been the Source of almost all of the Corruptions of Christianity."

- John Adams to John Quincy Adams, March 28, 1816.

"If I understand the Doctrine, it is, that if God the first second or third or all three together are united with or in a Man, the whole Animal becomes a God and his Mother is the Mother of God.

"It grieves me: it shocks me to write in this stile upon a subject the most adorable that any finite Intelligence can contemplate or embrace: but if ever Mankind are to be superior to the Brutes, sacerdotal Impostures must be exposed."

- John Adams to Francis van der Kemp, October 23, 1816.

He was joined in this belief by Jefferson, who argued quite clearly that Jesus never claimed to be divine at all but that this was invented by those who wrote the gospels. Jefferson repeatedly savaged the gospel writers as liars and frauds and the texts they produced as "a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications." The notion of the trinity, of a divine Jesus, he listed as one of the "metaphysical insanities of Athanasius."

This position was also taken by Ben Franklin and almost certainly by James Madison, as Jon points out, as well as by many prominent ministers during the revolutionary war period. And he concludes with this:

If the orthodox of today like the late D. James Kennedy truly appreciated what George Washington, John Adams, et al. really believed, they'd term it a false cult, just like they do Mormonism.

This is absolutely correct. I have always found it amusing that Kennedy and other religious right ministers go to such great lengths to argue that these key men were Christians when it is quite clear that if those men were alive today and their private views on religion (as clearly expressed in their letters) were known, they could condemn those men as heretics at best, infidels at worst.

Imagine Thomas Jefferson appearing before a collection of Christian evangelists and telling them the views he clearly expresses in his letters about the Bible and about Jesus. Imagine him telling them that Jesus not only was not divine but that he never claimed to be divine; that Paul was "the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus"; that the apostles who allegedly wrote the gospels were liars and fraud; that all of the miracles attributed to Jesus were inventions and fabrications; that the notion of the virgin birth is absurd; that the notion of the trinity is "the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus." Would they laud Jefferson as a Christian or condemn him as a heathen? Clearly the latter.