A Response to “Pagan Christianity?”
3.3 Chapter 2 Review – The Church Building: Inheriting the Edifice Complex
In the second chapter, the authors take aim at the church building. From the perspective of the regulative principle, the particular meeting place the church uses would be understood as a matter of the circumstances of worship. Meeting together as a church is a clear biblical mandate (Hebrews 10:24-25), with the obvious implication that we must meet somewhere. The conventional understanding is that the New Testament does not prescribe a particular location for the church to meet, and so the church is free to choose any suitable venue. Interestingly, Pagan Christianity? does not, in the end, offer any real argument to dispute this view. The point of disagreement is ultimately over what makes a venue suitable for church meetings.
The bulk of the chapter is concerned with a historical survey. I am much tempted to pick apart the (often questionable) historical claims here, but that will take a lot of our time, and in the end, this is all largely irrelevant to the final argument. The real argument comes at the end of the chapter. The authors do not claim that using a dedicated church building is inherently wrong, only that using a building has problematic consequences. After wading through a lot of inflammatory rhetoric, this is a surprisingly weak claim. The authors write “…the church building has taught us badly about what church is and what it does.” We can certainly have a conversation about those concerns, but a debate over merely prudential concerns about possible implications of church practice seems hardly to justify the absolutist language used elsewhere.
Let’s address a few of these concerns. First, they have a problem with the use of words like “church”, “the house of God” or “temple” to refer to church buildings. They are perfectly correct to insist that these terms in the New Testament properly refer to the people of God, not to any physical structure. But it’s also overly pedantic. No biblically literate Christian would be confused on this point.[1] In reality, calling a building “a church” is just a convenient simplification of language (an example of metonymy[2]). It is perfectly natural, if a group always meets in a particular place, for that place to be called by the name of the group. For example, a club of some sort might start meeting in a dedicated building (the club house), and by shorthand the members might refer to the building as “the club”. In no way is anyone in danger of confusing the members of the club with the building!
Next, Viola and Barna argue that typical church architecture “hinders the church from having open-participatory meetings.” This seems to be their central concern with church buildings. Pews don’t allow us to have “face-to-face fellowship” and the pulpit “elevates the clergy”. And yet, if we are not persuaded that the New Testament requires us to hold “open-participatory” meetings of the sort that Viola and Barna prefer, this is hardly a problem for us. For instance, I am not persuaded that Christian fellowship is limited by the seating arrangement in a traditional church building. Indeed, perhaps the sweetest kind of fellowship is had with the fellow believers when, rather than looking at each other, we together as a body “look” to our common Lord, by faith, through the Word that is read, sung, preached, and (in the sacraments) tangibly pictured for us. Consider the picture of heavenly worship given to us in Revelation 7:
9 After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, 10 and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” 11 And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
Are the worshippers in heaven looking at each other, or looking to God? Are they for that reason missing out on fellowship with one another? Or does their fellowship consist in their collective praise of their God? True worship is face-to-face fellowship with God, and through this we have fellowship with one another. Viola and Barna want this order reversed, and I think that is an error. And because of this, the architectural centrality of the pulpit makes perfect sense. It signifies the centrality of the Word of God, not the preacher. This is the means by which Christ himself instructs his people. The elevated position of the pulpit in many buildings is borne of practical concerns (so the Word can be heard by the congregation), not an attempt to exult a man. We will further evaluate the concept of an “open-participatory” meeting in the next chapter on liturgy.
Viola and Barna also object to the concept that the church building is sacred. I don’t fundamentally dispute this, if they only mean to deny that God dwells specially in the church building like he did in the Old Testament Tabernacle and Temple. Yes, the New Testament temple is the believer, where God in the person of the Holy Spirit dwells (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Christians have no need to find a sacred space to legitimise our worship (John 4:21). We can meet anywhere, and trust that God will be with us. But my concern is that Viola and Barna seem to reject the concept of sacredness in Christian worship altogether. The church is the community of saints (holy ones), sanctified by the presence of God who indwells them. Our worship is holy. The sacrifice (of praise – Hebrews 13:15) that we offer to God is holy. The Word that is proclaimed and received by faith is holy. These things are holy because they are commanded by God, blessed by God, tend to the glory of God, and used by God to bless his people. Viola and Barna think we should not create a “disjunction between worship and everyday life”. In the sense that our everyday life should be filled with worship, and done to the glory of God, I agree. But I do not agree that there is nothing especially sacred about the gathering of the church for worship. In rejecting the sacred/secular divide, I fear that Viola and Barna are making church more like everyday life: casual and stripped of anything transcendent. Whereas, if anything, perhaps we should be seeking to make everyday life more like church!
[1] Now, Viola and Barna may well object by pointing out that many professing Christians are, in fact, biblically illiterate and are as a result confused by the terminology. But there we find the real issue, and it has nothing to do with the terminology surrounding church buildings!
[2] Metonymy is defined as “the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the turf for horse racing.” (Oxford Dictionary of English)
Next Section: 3.4 Chapter 3 Review – Sunday Mornings Set in Concrete
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