A Response to “Pagan Christianity?”
3. Chapter-by-Chapter Response
3.1 Preface and Introduction Review
Pagan Christianity begins with a preface from the main author, Frank Viola. Viola states his major premises from the start. First, he believes “…the first-century church was the church in its purest form.” His picture of the first century church is that it was a “living, breathing organism”, whose “normative practices” sprung naturally from the “divine life” granted to believers and were grounded in New Testament principles. Those principles, he says, conflict with the practices of the majority of modern churches, which he claims are “borrowed from pagan culture”. He is quick to point out that this does not automatically make those practices wrong, but that on “theological”, “historical” and “pragmatic” grounds, he believes these supposedly pagan practices fail to meet God’s intention for the church. His proposal is that “…the church in its contemporary, institutional form has neither a biblical nor a historical right to function as it does.” He understands this will sound like an outrageous proposal, and indeed it is. This is no small accusation. If Viola is correct, we are in terrible sin. If Viola is wrong, he is guilty of slandering the vast majority of Christians who have ever lived. A reader of this book would be right to expect such a bold accusation to be supported by very clear, rigorous argumentation, but that reader would be sorely disappointed, as we shall see.
Co-author George Barna follows with an introduction in a similar vein. The most useful part of the introduction is the “Delving Deeper” section at the end, where key terms are defined. He says the word, pagan, simply describes “…those practices and principles that are not Christian or biblical in origin.” He insists the word is not being used to mean “bad” or “wrong” and admits that only some practices he calls “pagan” actually conflict with biblical teaching. Similarly, he says the words “biblical” or “scriptural” are used primarily “as source statements” (i.e., whether a practice originates in Scripture), and are used only “secondarily as value judgements.” This broad, ambiguous, usage of words like “pagan” and “biblical” is not helpful for the clarity of the book. The authors should understand that ordinary Christians use both terms primarily as value judgements, and that despite the occasional disclaimer, most Christian readers will default to understanding these words according to their accustomed usage. I cannot help but suspect that this ambiguity is intentional. It gives the authors freedom to make some very forceful claims, that will sound very strong in Christian ears, but that can be backtracked to a milder position if pressed by a critic.
It is my opinion that the whole framing of the book is wrong from the start. The book sets out to show us that various modern church practices contradict the teachings of Scripture, and that we must abandon them. The vast majority of the book, however, is occupied with tracing the development of certain practices in the modern church to analogues found in pagan culture. This is strange, given that the authors admit that merely proving a ‘pagan’ origin proves very little! At best, such an argument could only show that a given practice was not required by Scripture, but further argument would be needed to show that it contradicts Scripture, as they claim. In reality, the historical content of the book serves only to cast suspicion on traditional church practices, as a kind of guilt-by-association tactic. This is not a serious argument. The real substance of the argument lies in showing us that modern church practices are actually contrary to Scripture, and this gets comparatively little attention.
Next Section: 3.2 Chapter 1 Review – Have We Really Been Doing It by the Book?
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