Book Review: Pagan Christianity

Now I understand.

Whenever I saw people review or even mention Frank Viola and George Barna's book Pagan Christianity, the reaction was pretty visceral. Having just finished it, now I understand. I can think of nothing more threatening to the churchy status quo than a book that tears apart piece by piece our most sacred traditions and exposes them as inventions of man that not only are not Biblical but actually hinder Biblical community and ministry.

What Barna and Viola have to say is nothing new to me and in many ways echoes what I have been thinking the last few years. They just put it more concisely and clearly and with a great deal more research than I do. I imagine that a lot of people will be put off by the title. What do you mean, pagan Christianity! This is how we do church and it is by the Bible! We follow the Regulative Principle of Worship after all! The reality is jarringly different, even for someone who long ago came to see institutionalized Christianity as what can only be called a perversion of the Biblical model of the church. The title is provocative but intentionally so and for a purpose.

I can hardly be effusive enough in my praise for this book. Barna and Viola go step by step through all of the traditions that we associate with "church" and dismantle the flimsy excuses for why we do what we do. Very little escapes their pen, from the oxymoronic "Christian tithing" to pews & pulpits to the entire clergy system. It is helpful to look at these trappings of "church" to see that they don't appear in Scripture, show where they came from and how they are culturally derived and finally why they impede Christian community.

There are some negatives. They use some of the same phrases over and over again ( ex. "knew nothing of"). They are smart guys, I am sure they could come up with some different ways to express their thoughts. Some of the footnotes were a little sketchy. I am a little leery of making bold statements footnoted by an email as the source. There are some pretty sweeping generalizations of things like vivid depictions of how the church met even though we have some pretty vague descriptions of the church meeting in Scripture. I found the weakest chapter near the end of the book, Reapproaching the New Testament: The Bible is not a jigsaw puzzle. I found the tone to be a bit haughty as if these two had figured out the key that has eluded Biblical interpreters through the centuries. I agree with some of their assessments but ironically one of their main beefs, i.e. proof-texting, happens a lot in the book with broad statements supported by a couple of parenthetical references to Scripture. I just found the tone to be a bit off-putting and the implications troubling. I will concede that the letters of Paul are only one side of the conversation but I think it is dangerous to try to "fill in the blanks" and make doctrinal statements based on what we think was going on. I am confident that the God who created all things ex nihilo is capable of preserving what we needed to have and He saw fit to not preserve the "other half" of the conversations of Paul with the various churches. I can see some people using these principles to chuck all sorts of Biblical truths in the name of cultural or situational anomalies that don't apply today.

The big question this book should leave the reader with is a simple one, but important. What do you do with this information? Do you seek a more faithful expression of the church, seek to live more like the first century church (not in terms of dressing in togas but in terms of living in a community of intentional witness to the world)? Or do you toss up your hands and go back to the Scripturally unsupportable model of church that dominates our cultural landscape? I am not sure what I would have done a few years ago (besides not read this book in the first place!). I really wonder what men who have invested enormous time and money into vocational ministry who read this with an open mind do with it. Do they leave "the ministry"? Do they explain it away or compartmentalize it and go on as before?

I would encourage, even challenge, those who are defenders of traditional church structures to read Pagan Christianity and see if our most cherished traditions have any basis in Scripture at all or if they are, as argued in this book, inventions of a pagan culture that sought to Christianize their pagan practices.

What if you found out that the most cherished traditions of your church were actually working against being faithful to the Bible? What would you do?

Ministry was never intended to be a one man show

Viola and Barna understand the source of pastoral stress and burnout, i.e. that ministry was never intended to fall on one man alone. From Pagan Christianity:

Unfortunately, few pastors have connected the dots to discover that it is their office that causes this underlying turbulence. Simply put: Jesus Christ never intended any person to sport all the hats a present-day pastor is expected to wear. He never intended any one person to bear such a load. (Pagan Christianity, pg. 139)

Tomorrow morning I plan on publishing my review of Pagan Christianity.

Unreformed

Another great quote, albeit a pretty lengthy one...

Unfortunately, however, the Reformers carried the Roman Catholic clergy/laity distinction straight into the Protestant movement. They also kept the Catholic idea of ordination. Although the abolished the office of the bishop, they resurrected the one=bishop rule, clothing it in new garb.

The rallying cry of the Reformation was the restoration of the priesthood of all believers. However, this restoration was only partial. Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli affirmed the believing priesthood with respect to one's individual relationship to God. They rightly taught that every Christian as direct access to God without the need of a human mediator. This was a wonderful restoration. But it was one-sided.
What the Reformers failed to do was recover the corporate dimension of the believing priesthood. They restored the doctrine of the believing priesthood soteriologically - i.e., as it related to salvation. But they failed to restore it ecclesiologically, i.e. as it related to the church.

In other words, the Reformers only recovered the priesthood of the believer (singluar). They reminded us that every Christian has individual and immediate access to God. As wonderful as that is, they did not recover the priesthood of all believers (collective plural). This is the blessed truth that every Christian is part of a clan that shares God's Word one with another. (It was the Anabaptists who recovered this practice. Regrettably, this recovery was one of the reasons why Protestant and Catholic swords were red with Anabaptist blood.)

While the Reformers opposed the pope and his religious hierarchy, they still held to the narrow view of ministry that they inherited. They believed that "ministry" was an institution that was closeted among the few who were "called" and "ordained". Thus the Reformers still affirmed the clergy-laity split. Only in rhetoric did they state that all believers were priests and ministers. In their practice they denied it. So after the smoke cleared from the Reformation, we ended up with the same thing that the Catholics gave us - a selective priesthood! (Pagan Christianity, pp 128-129)

It is verbotten among many of my brothers to speak ill of the Reformers but they were just men and made mistakes like any other men. Nowhere is this more true than in the doctrines of the church. The Reformation changed the message but it kept the method and that has crippled community and discipleship for five hundred years.

A lifetime of sermons

Great quote from a highly quotable book:

Let's be honest. There are scores of Christians who have been sermonized for decades, and they are still babes in Christ. We Christians are not transformed simply by hearing sermons week after week. We are transformed by regular encounters with the Lord Jesus Christ. (Pagan Christianity, pp 99-100)

Quite right. I can attest to this, having spent a few years both giving and receiving sermons and at the same time meeting many a senior saint who had spent a lifetime in conservative, Bible believin' and Bible preachin' churches that were spiritual infants. The solution is not more preaching or even better preaching. It is an atmosphere of every member ministry that takes seriously the priesthood of all believers.

The cost of doing business

I have been putting off reading some of the standard works for doubters of institutional Christianity but I am finally getting around to reading Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna.

Near the end of the chapter on the origins of the church building was a troubling statistic. According to the authors, Christians donate 50 to 60 billion annually to local churches which is a very big but very realistic figure. That is a huge number and according to Viola & Barna, 18% of that goes to maintaining the structures and servicing the debt on church buildings. By my estimates, 18% of 60 billion is 10.8 billion. Let me write that out for effect:

$10,800,000,000

That is a huge number. A HUGE number by any standard and even more so when you consider how infrequently the church building is occupied by anyone other than the staff. At $5 each, that would buy 2 billion Bibles. At the rate of $50,000/year, that would fully support over 200,000 missionaries. How many orphans could be clothed and fed? How many widows cared for? How many who are starving could have a hot meal?

There is vast wealth tied up in small plots of real estate, little bunkers of Christendom scattered across the landscape of America that compete with one another to get their share of that $60,000,000,000 in annual giving. Worse, it is wealth that we feel justified in accumulating and holding because by golly it is God’s house after all! We somehow think that we serve God more faithfully by building and maintaining “churches” than by caring for those who are without the basic essentials. Odd that so many churches claim to be faithful to the Word of God and yet they spend their money on things that the Bible doesn’t command (buildings that sit empty all week) and not on things it does command (caring for the poor). That is not to say that traditional churches don't care for the poor but it is an afterthought in most of them when compared to paying for the building. After all, how can you have a church without a church building to meet in?

How have we gotten so far astray that we consider a “church” building to be the cost of doing business for the Gospel? Sure we may not say it that way but everyone knows that the goal of every church plant is to get their own building to prove that they have arrived. Meeting in homes is fine for starters but you have to grow up sometime and the sign that a church is all grown up is a building and a mortgage to go along with it. We find signs of God’s favor in debt!

At your next church business meeting, take a look at the budget and figure out how much of the budget goes to paying for the building: debt service, utilities, maintenance. Ask yourself if your giving is going toward the Gospel ministry or if it is going to prop up the machinery of Christendom and institutionalism. The Gospel is still the Good News whether it is delivered from a pulpit on a stage or on a street corner or over lunch. The church gathering is every bit as legitimate when it occurs in a home or a rented school as it is when it happens in a “church” with seating for 1000.

The chapter on church buildings was disturbing, even for someone like me who has no use for them. I am both looking forward to and dreading the rest of the book.

by the way I am still working my way through the biography on Bonhoeffer, it is just going kind of slowly and it is a huge book)