A Tuesday Visit and The Da Vinci Code
On Tuesday, Sergiy and I visited BTI--the Bureau of Technical Inventory. It is most likely a level of purgatory Dante forgot. Oddly, it's located between the new St. Michael's Church and monastery and the Catholic church which used to be the Museum of Atheism. BTI is where the government oversees a kind of bureaucratic torture for anyone who wants to do anything with property in the city. If you want to change a wall in your apartment, you must visit BTI. If you want to sell a building, visit BTI. If you need to combine two apartments, visit BTI. Sergiy, the UEC's manager, has been working on a mistake in the UEC's documents for almost 3 years and this visit to BTI on Tuesday signals the nearing end of this process.
What was the mistake that provoked such a saga? When we remodeled the two UEC apartments, we combined the balcony space with the regular space (we got rid of the balconies, in other words). On our renovation plans that were approved by all necessary agencies, these changes were on the drawings that were approved. The changes were not, however, included in the written description of the remodeling. When we finished the remodeling and went to pick up all our final documents (our approved floor plans and document that shows the changes we made to the apartments), we couldn't get it because someone somewhere caught this little tiny mistake. From that ensued almost three years of a mind-boggling maze of visiting offices, filing papers, being yelled at, being given contradictory information, etc. It has been an enormous waste of human resource and a frustrating process. It's one reason so many people still want to leave Ukraine. A small mistake a government agency made created a nightmare in several other agencies and we were the ones who had to face this, as if we had committed the crime of the century.
It's possible that the nightmare will end by the end of the year. Pray toward that end.
I finished reading The Da Vinci Code last night. I decided to read it since we've had some questions about it with the Russian translation growing in popularity. In case you've been unconscious or trapped on a deserted island for the last two years, this controversial and best-selling thriller has raised some eyebrows among Christians. Though the novel itself is somewhat riddled with historical error unrelated to its primary thesis, that thesis is what has brought it so much attention. And is probably why it's being turned into a Ron Howard movie starring Tom Hanks. Controversy often means profit. The thesis--the Catholic Church has covered up the fact that Jesus Christ had children with Mary Magdalene and she is the goddess of the divine feminine that the all-male church needed to eradicate. Of course, the author also enjoys playing with the age-old theory that the church councils "created" the divine Jesus and that faith is simply for the purpose of the comfort of the faithful and has nothing to do with any kind of objective truth. Dan Brown, the author, doesn't pull the post-modern punch completely, though. His characters believe that the truth is out there and basically they find it. So he enjoys playing with postmodern thought but in the end, he remains a foundationalist. But since he remains a foundationalist, it means his novel is suspect to the same rigorous historical scrutiny he (or his characters) uses to supposedly debunk Christianity. Click for a little taste of that.
I'll leave the scrutiny to those who care more about that than I do. Certainly, none of the claims are original with Brown, new, or let alone argued for in the text.
If someone read the book knowing nothing at all about history (e.g. that the Vatican existed in the third century as Brown's text claims) and thought all this detail sure sounds convincing, then we have a problem. Because the detail is suspect. And since the book has sold more than 20 million copies, I understand why many Christian leaders are concerned about its impact. It popularizes what we call heresy.
The book itself is just a thriller. No special literary merits and will be forgotten in a few years, like all the rest of the books that are written mostly for the purposes of making money. There is almost no creative use of language, the characters are tired and limp. It is a cookie-cutter thriller, written with the hopes of being made into a movie because that's where the money is.
It does, however, raise a concern that most Christian leaders have ignored, which is actually the primary thesis of the book. The primary notion is not that Jesus had children. The primary notion is that Mary Magdalene is an expression of the divine feminine and the church has suppressed that truth. Thus, Christ, instead of being "human" is more Christ the male with Mary as the divine female. And these two together create fullness and truth. Unfortunately for Christians, the church has too often thought of Christ as male, rather than human. Jesus too often in the history of Christendom has become primarily "male" rather than the Lord simply being the God-human. His maleness has become a part of his divinity and this distorted gendering of God has manifested itself in numerous destructive ways for women.
What was the mistake that provoked such a saga? When we remodeled the two UEC apartments, we combined the balcony space with the regular space (we got rid of the balconies, in other words). On our renovation plans that were approved by all necessary agencies, these changes were on the drawings that were approved. The changes were not, however, included in the written description of the remodeling. When we finished the remodeling and went to pick up all our final documents (our approved floor plans and document that shows the changes we made to the apartments), we couldn't get it because someone somewhere caught this little tiny mistake. From that ensued almost three years of a mind-boggling maze of visiting offices, filing papers, being yelled at, being given contradictory information, etc. It has been an enormous waste of human resource and a frustrating process. It's one reason so many people still want to leave Ukraine. A small mistake a government agency made created a nightmare in several other agencies and we were the ones who had to face this, as if we had committed the crime of the century.
It's possible that the nightmare will end by the end of the year. Pray toward that end.
I finished reading The Da Vinci Code last night. I decided to read it since we've had some questions about it with the Russian translation growing in popularity. In case you've been unconscious or trapped on a deserted island for the last two years, this controversial and best-selling thriller has raised some eyebrows among Christians. Though the novel itself is somewhat riddled with historical error unrelated to its primary thesis, that thesis is what has brought it so much attention. And is probably why it's being turned into a Ron Howard movie starring Tom Hanks. Controversy often means profit. The thesis--the Catholic Church has covered up the fact that Jesus Christ had children with Mary Magdalene and she is the goddess of the divine feminine that the all-male church needed to eradicate. Of course, the author also enjoys playing with the age-old theory that the church councils "created" the divine Jesus and that faith is simply for the purpose of the comfort of the faithful and has nothing to do with any kind of objective truth. Dan Brown, the author, doesn't pull the post-modern punch completely, though. His characters believe that the truth is out there and basically they find it. So he enjoys playing with postmodern thought but in the end, he remains a foundationalist. But since he remains a foundationalist, it means his novel is suspect to the same rigorous historical scrutiny he (or his characters) uses to supposedly debunk Christianity. Click for a little taste of that.
I'll leave the scrutiny to those who care more about that than I do. Certainly, none of the claims are original with Brown, new, or let alone argued for in the text.
If someone read the book knowing nothing at all about history (e.g. that the Vatican existed in the third century as Brown's text claims) and thought all this detail sure sounds convincing, then we have a problem. Because the detail is suspect. And since the book has sold more than 20 million copies, I understand why many Christian leaders are concerned about its impact. It popularizes what we call heresy.
The book itself is just a thriller. No special literary merits and will be forgotten in a few years, like all the rest of the books that are written mostly for the purposes of making money. There is almost no creative use of language, the characters are tired and limp. It is a cookie-cutter thriller, written with the hopes of being made into a movie because that's where the money is.
It does, however, raise a concern that most Christian leaders have ignored, which is actually the primary thesis of the book. The primary notion is not that Jesus had children. The primary notion is that Mary Magdalene is an expression of the divine feminine and the church has suppressed that truth. Thus, Christ, instead of being "human" is more Christ the male with Mary as the divine female. And these two together create fullness and truth. Unfortunately for Christians, the church has too often thought of Christ as male, rather than human. Jesus too often in the history of Christendom has become primarily "male" rather than the Lord simply being the God-human. His maleness has become a part of his divinity and this distorted gendering of God has manifested itself in numerous destructive ways for women.
posted by Kyivmission at 12:14 PM
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