I’ve recently finished reading through the revised and updated version of Frank Viola and George Barna’s, Pagan Christianity?. This book is a very interesting, compelling, enlightening read. Many of you already know Barna- the father of the Church growth movement- who later discerned a new move in western Christianity that spurred the writing of his book, Revolution. Frank Viola may be a slightly less known name, but he is a major voice in the house church movement who has penned works such as God's Ultimate Passion and The Untold Story of the New Testament Church. Considering their recent histories, it’s not surprising that these two would team up to write, Pagan Christianity- which details the a-scriptural tendencies of western Christianity in its contemporary form.
Specifically, the aim of this book is to demonstrate how many- perhaps the majority even – of current western church practices are actually rooted in sources other than that of the early Christian Church. Hence the book’s title- Pagan Christianity: which touches on the idea that much of contemporary church practice is actually taken from pagan, Graeco-Roman sources. The preface of the book states:

The practices of the first-century church were the natural and spontaneous expression of the divine life that indwelt the early Christians. And those practices were solidly grounded in the timeless principles and teaching of the New Testament. By contrast, a great number of the practices of contemporary churches are in conflict with those biblical principles and teachings. When we dig deeper, we are compelled to ask: Where did the practices of the contemporary church come from? The answer is disturbing: Most of them were borrowed from pagan culture. Such a statement short-circuits the minds of many Christians when they hear it. But it is unmovable, historical fact, as this book will demonstrate.

And Viola and Barna make quick work of this task. As point after historical point is brought to light, one cannot but conclude that their thesis is correct: much current practice is pagan in origin. Even Protestants – who perhaps would like to cry foul, arguing that it was the Roman Catholic Church alone that was corrupted by these sources – are held under a telling microscope. Viola and Barna compellingly argue that all Luther, Calvin and others early Protestants did, was take the centrality of the Eucharist in the Christian church service, and replace it with the centrality of preaching. Everything else stayed largely the same. Of course this should be no great surprise considering Luther’s goal was to reform, not transform- the Church. But these forms were much more pagan than they were Christian in origin.

I, like Viola and Barna, hope that many a Protestant will read this book, in order to come to terms with just how much of what passes for Orthodox Christianity today is merely tradition borne from pagan sources. There seems to be something in our human nature that makes us beholden to what has been passed on “from ages to ages” – regardless of ultimate origins. If we are immersed in something for long enough, we grow to assume its value and transcendence. Barna and Viola do an excellent job of pointing out just how misleading and foolhardy such a tendency can be.

This reminds me of the true story of the woman who, every year, cooks her ham in the oven- only after cutting off a little bit from both ends. One day her daughter asks, “Hey Mom, how come you cut of the ends of the ham before cooking it?” The mother, of course, doesn’t really know that answer. She’s just doing what was passed on to her from her mother. So she calls up her mother and asks the same question. The answer? Her mother used to do this simply because the ham wouldn’t otherwise fit in her 1950’s era oven. Oops- talk about your meaningless exercise!

While there is much I applaud Viola and Barna for in Pagan Christianity- there are a few points of disagreement I’d like to touch upon. First, it seems like a glaring oversight for these two well-schooled gentlemen to not do more to discuss Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy alongside the Protestant wing of the Church. One actually has to chase a footnote to find a disclaimer mentioning that this book focuses on Protestant Christianity alone. But by not making that point in the body of the book, I think Viola and Barna only serve to entrench naïve Protestants in their assumption that Protestantism is the only valid and compelling form of Christianity worth discussing. If you’re going to call out misconceptions- please, don’t leave this one out! History demands you don’t.

Secondly, both Viola and Barna seem to presuppose that the life of the earliest Christians is the one we should forevermore try to emulate. This argument is not subtle. The introduction says as much.

So we would argue that on theological grounds, historical grounds, and pragmatic grounds, the first-century church best represents the dream of God… the beloved community that He intends to create and re-create in every chapter of the human story. The first-century church teaches us how the life of God is expressed when a group of people begin to live by it together.

I think that many of us interested in the issue of the contextualization of the gospel within culture would take issue with this assumption. More to the point: we would argue that the early church simply represented one of many incarnations of Christian living and understanding worked out in the lives of an enculturated people. Considering our culture is not that of the early church, I question whether such an emphasis on these “glory days” is warranted. This same hyper-emphasis on early church living has led others to suggest we should offer holy hugs and kisses among both genders, in every gathering- simply because this is what the early Christians did.

Thirdly, while I applaud Barna and Viola for their suggestion that the contemporary Protestant view of the central importance of one person preaching at others is misguided and atypical of the early church, I wish they would have gone one step further and asked whether or not the Bible itself has not become an idol of sorts for contemporary Protestants (specifically evangelicals)- when compared with how faith and practice tended to develop and flourish in the early church.

Viola and Barna do us a great favor by exposing as misleading and ahistorical, the recent Protestant method of cutting and pasting various Scripture passages together, merely to support a pre-existing belief- which may of may not be actually supported from Scripture, when read in its proper context. Viola and Barna's concern that careful attention be paid to the issues of genre, cultural context, and the specificity of some biblical teachings (attested to in some of Paul's letters), is a welcome critique of what often passes as "being biblical" in contemporary Protestant (specifically evangelical) circles.

However, there still seems to be this sense, in Viola and Barna's thinking, that there was some magic to the early practices of the earliest Christians, and that if we can just use these tools (mentioned above) to recapture those early practices, that we too will inherit the Wind of the Spirit in the same way those early believers did. While Viola and Barna are careful to point out that it is the movement of the Spirit that gives life to the practice (whatever it may be), I still sometimes sense a nostalgia for those specific early practices- as if they, in themselves, hold some eternal value.

Put another way, the way I see things, Paul was primarily a worshipper and follower of Jesus, not his interpreter. And yet, our contemporary approach to the New Testament almost puts it the other way around. And I sometimes feel that Viola and Barna's approach still tends to encourage this confusion.

No doubt this is an important book; one that I hope many Protestants (and specifically evangelicals) will read. If nothing else, this book is useful in demonstrating how many contemporary practices and beliefs derive from roots that are, in reality, only a few centuries old. And even then, these roots can be demonstrated to be only slightly mutated versions of Roman Catholic practices that grew right out of the popular pagan practices of the Roman Empire, and not of the early Church.

However, that being said, I hope that those that read this book will go one step further- asking what kind of presuppositions led us down this path to begin with? Is the key, as Viola and Barna would have us believe, to return to one form of enculturated Christianity? Or is the goal to find a meaningful nexus between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, for each generation? Radical contextualization: this is what I would lobby for.

As I and others have pointed out beforehand, what church history really tells us, and Viola and Barna’s research for Pagan Christianity supports this, is that contextualization has always happened. It’s just part of the enterprise. Truth, as they say, does not exist in a vacuum. The key, it seems to me, is to make each incarnation as meaningful and impacting as would be fitting for the revolution that Jesus of Nazareth inaugurated some two millennia ago.