Words to ponder from Luke Timothy Johnson, whom I heard this morning on a syndicated public radio program called Speaking of Faith.

The subject was The Da Vinci Code, and the host interviewed Johnson (and later another, feminist scholar whom I did not hear. Had to work) on the formation of the canon, which is one of the underlying issues in the novel – the assumption that the canon is the work of Constantine who wanted to impose his arbitrarily-selected group of favorite books on the world. Yeah, I know.

But – almost 6 million copies in print. Someone’s got to say something.

Anyway, I was really taken, as I often am, by Johnson’s emphasis on the organic role of the Scriptures in Christian life. He deplored the modern approach, which emphasizes Scripture as something picked apart by individuals, in the mode of the scholar, cut off from the Church, the body which developed the canon as it sought to establish those works which presented the clearest picture of Jesus, not for the sake of individuals, but for the entire Body. He remembered his life as a Benedictine, in which Scripture was read, listened to and prayed with five times a day, which made it absolutely impossible for him to consider Scripture as most scholars do today – as a cadaver to picked over and dissected. Rather, it is alive, an portal through which encounter with the living, self-disclosing God who lives.

And what does that have to do with the heading of this post? Well, church leaders and teachers are trained in seminaries and divinity schools where they learn Scripture from scholars trained to see the Scriptures as cadavers. And it all trickles down to us, so that, in regard to nonsense like DVC, there are 6 million copies sold and the people who should be responding can’t:

“What can the Church offer in response if the Church refuses to be Church?”