Put this on your list of things to worry about: There’s a movement called Oneness Pentecostalism which denies the doctrine of the Trinity. Don’t confuse it with regular Pentecostalism, which is trinitarian. A new online journal, the Countercult Apologetics Journal, recently published a piece I wrote last year called “A Theological Analysis of Oneness Pentecostalism.” Read it here, or check out the whole journal here.

Hot off the art pad, by Freddy age 5. “I am friendly,” his winning smile seems to say, but the way he brandishes those claws is reason enough to stay back a few paces. And all his weight is coming down on one toe: is he landing, leaping, shifting, running? You know what I love about kids drawings? I love the way they draw arms and legs without undue concern for symmetry. The 4 limbs portrayed here are barely in the same family of shapes; and the ears: transcendent.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is rightly famous for diagnosing God as deceased, for taking the project of human self-overcoming onto his own shoulders, for praying for the advent of the Antichrist/Antinihilist, and conjuring a new post-Judaeo-Christian religion made out of eternal recurrence, the will to power, and Zarathustra yea-saying to Life, Life, Life.

Whooo! A thick German beer with a head on it.

He was also a boy genius with early academic achievements and a professorate in philology before his doctorate (other famous philologists: Tolkien and the Ransom of Lewis’ space trilogy). And as late as age 18, he was writing things like this:

Thou hast called me:
Lord, I hasten to thy throne and there remain.
Blazing with love to thy compassionate eyes
Gaze sorrowfully into my heart:
Lord, I come.

I was lost, perplexed and dejected,
Destined for Hell and torment.
But I saw thee from afar,
And thy glance, intense with life,
Lighted constantly upon me:
Now I come gladly to thee.

I am filled with horror at the dark power of sin,
And I cannot look back.
I must not lose thee,
At night, terrified and oppressed, I see thee,
I see thee and I cannot let thee go.

Thou art so gentle, true and kind,
So loving, thou dear Saviour of sinners!
Appease my longing,
Let my soul and my thoughts rest in thy love
And remain forever with thee.

(From Nietzsche’s Wereke und Briefe: Historisch-kiritsche Gesamtausgabe, volume II, p. 80.)

What happened to young Fritz Nietzsche? “I must not lose thee… I cannot let thee go.” What did the young man see of the “horror at the dark power of sin” and the “glance, intense with life,” of the “gentle, true and kind … dear Saviour of sinners!” How did he become incapable of seeing either as he emerged into adulthood? If anyone’s de-conversion from Christian faith ever set off seismic disturbances, Nietzsche’s did. The trouble he caused is still with us, gaining momentum. The forces that found their voice through his work are mighty principalities, with powers of persuasion still mounting all the time.

I knew of Nietzsche’s youthful devotion and mature atheism. What surprised me when I found this poem is its late date: age eighteen!

It’s hard for me to avoid the theological elements of the book, but I will exercise restraint and limit myself here to nine things that bugged me about how Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code handled the art and the career of Leonardo DaVinci. These are minor irritants compared to his handling of things like the history of Christ and his early followers, but since I spotted them, here they are.

1. It’s Leonardo, not DaVinci. He’s one-name famous, like Elvis and Cher. “Da Vinci” means “the guy from Vinci.” He signed his work “Leonardo,” not “DaVinci.” I admit this complaint is a little snobby, sort of like insisting that Aquinas isn’t named Aquinas, he’s Thomas, from Aquino. On one hand, everybody knows who you’re talking about if you use the faux last name –partly because the towns of Vinci and Aquino aren’t exactly swarming with superfamous citizens. On the other hand, if you’ve done extensive research, you’d be pretty likely to have read a few books and articles by experts, who invariably, exclusively, habitually call the guy Leonardo and wouldn’t be caught dead calling him DaVinci.

2. Leonardo didn’t have “numerous Vatican commissions” and paint gobs and gobs of art for churches. I think art historians can prove one Vatican commission. And as artists go, Leonardo was kind of an underachiever who didn’t leave us a lot of work to hold on to. Don’t get me wrong, he was inventing flying machines and stuff, so I’m not saying he was lazy.

3. The Mona Lisa didn’t go by that name. We don’t know what name it went by during Leonardo’s lifetime, but it was the biographer Vasari who called it Mona Lisa long after Leonardo’s death, and the name didn’t really stick as definitive until the 19th century. This only matters if, following “symbologist” Robert Langdon’s lead, you’re supposed to re-arrange the letters to spell Amon L’Isa. Not a challenging anagram, exactly, and not very enlightening at that. But the point is that if you did this, you’d be re-arranging letters Leonardo didn’t arrange in the first place, which would be silly.

4. The Mona Lisa is just not a self-portrait of Leonardo with a wig and a push-up bra. Forget it. The attempted proofs of this are predicated on the idea that we have a good idea of what Leonardo looked like, or that we have sufficient grounds to claim that there’s a self-portrait sketch by Leonardo to compare it to. Unfortunately, neither is true, so extrapolating further is arguing that “if A is true, and also B, and also C, then maybe D, in which case possibly E, and then you might say F…”

5. The Madonna of the Rocks is a big painting on wood, which makes it hard to imagine how the petite Sophie Neveu can hold it between herself and the Louvre guard, and how it manages to bend as she puts pressure on it. Art historian Bruce Boucher points this out. Hmm, they’ll have to fix this one in the movie somehow. Speaking of the movie, the letters of Madonna of the Rocks can be re-arranged to whisper the cryptic message, TOM HANKS FED RACCOON!!! A word to the wise is sufficient…

6. The Last Supper is not a fresco. It’s a mural. Fresco is a special technique of painting directly onto fresh (fresco, not secco) plaster. A mural is any painting on the wall. And unfortunately, Leonardo used any old paint (tempera) on any old wall (stone), so it’s in awful shape like a fresco wouldn’t be.

7. There’s not a disembodied knife-hand floating menacingly in the composition. It’s Peter’s hand. Leonardo’s sketches make this clear. And he’s got a knife because there’s a Bible story about that. Wow, a little bit of research could have saved a couple of pages of mystery mongering.

8. The person to Jesus’ right in the Last Supper is not a woman. It’s John the Evangelist, and if you look at a handful of disciple paintings from the centuries around Leonardo, you’ll see he’s always portrayed young and pretty. That may say something about Renaissance Italy’s standards of male beauty, but it doesn’t say anything at all about Leonardo hiding secret messages about Mary Magdalene in his painting. Brown gets a lot of mileage out of the “dude look like a lady” routine, but what it reveals is that he’s not spending enough time in the Renaissance room at the Louvre or anywhere else.

9. Leonardo DaVinci didn’t have a code. It was just allergies. Get it? Hahahahaha. But seriously. Brown says that Leonardo was “A prankster and genius … widely believed to have hidden secret messages within much of his artwork. Most scholars agree that even Da Vinci’s most famous pieces—works like The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and Madonna of the Rocks—contain startling anomalies that all seem to be whispering the same cryptic message…” Well, no, most scholars do not agree with that. Genius, sure; prankster, yes. Cryptic messages, no, nobody’s arguing that.

But the fact that I have nine items in this list is highly significant, and the symbologists among you should begin dissecting this triple triad for the secrets it contains.

“It is not enough to teach the truth; it should be taught in Scripture proportions.”

I spend a lot of time reading evangelicals from about 100 years ago. These people are the generation that is just getting over the death of D. L. Moody, and picking a strategy for the global, interdenominational movement of conservative theology and practice which would come to be called fundamentalism. Disinformation and false stereotypes about these people are so pervasive that I never know where to start debunking. I should probably do an “Everything You Know about the Founders of Fundamentalism is Wrong” post. The catalog is far too long for just a Top 10 list.

The best antidote is immersion in primary text. It doesn’t free you from all generalizations, but it does give you a chance to coin a few of your own fresh generalizations, instead of generalizing from other peoples’ worn out generalizations — what an escalating spiral of abstraction that has become!

For me, the tide started turning when I discovered Biola’s own The King’s Business, a monthly journal published from 1910-1970. The first decade is available online here. Just try dipping into an issue at random. It’s like a time machine to a young Los Angeles with starry-eyed zealous evangelicals who had a vision for “this great metropolis on Asia’s rim.”

R. A. Torrey, then world famous but now less so, was the editor for several years, and provided a great deal off content. One of his regular columns was a “Problem Passages” Bible question feature. In a January 1916 edition of the journal, a reader asked why Methodists are so opposed to the doctrine that Christ will return before the millenium. Torrey’s somewhat leisurely answer covered a lot of ground (go ahead, click through and read it for yourself), including the observation that a lot of Pre-millenarians are nutjobs who don’t know which end of the Bible to point at the future (that’s a rough paraphrase). But he warmed to his subject with this section:

Doubtless another thing that causes very determined opposition to Pre-millenarian teaching and Pre-millenarian teachers, is that so many Pre-millenarians make a hobby of their doctrine. The truth of the Pre-millenarian position is precious to the writer of this editorial, but there are many other things taught in the Bible beside thePre-millenial Coming of our Lord, and it is not enough to teach the truth; it should be taught in Scripture proportions; and to be everlastingly harping on just one truth, no matter how true it is, and no matter how precious it is, does harm and not good and even serves to bring that truth into reproach and disrepute.

Teaching truth in Scripture proportions means you need to have a command of the whole system of Christian truth. With a sense of the whole firmly in mind, you are equipped to recognize when one element of it is taking up too much of your time, attention, and affection.

In these days when the very foundations of faith are being undermined, even in professedly Christian circles, true Christians certainly cannot afford to divide on a question so secondary as the exact time of our Lord’s return. … We cannot afford to divide from brethren on secondary questions.

Here Torrey waves the flag for ecumenical cooperation in the form of co-belligerence against a common foe. That foe is what the early fundamentalist movement (The Fundy Foundin’ Fathers!) identified as the main danger of the day: liberal denials of primary Christian doctrines. So the Methodists don’t agree with Torrey’s eschatology? Fine, that eschatology is not the main thing (or, frankly, the plain thing) in Scripture.

What false stereotypes about early fundamentalism does this editorial debunk?

1. They had no sense of proportion in their doctrine
2. They obsessed on eschatological correctness
3. They were divisive and willing to break fellowship over any doctrinal disagreement

Freddy continues his tireless pursuit of his current favorite subject. Here is another knight, this one reaching up to lower his visor.