Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices

PAGAN CHRISTIANITY
by Frank Viola and George Barna

Have you ever wondered why we Christians do what we do for church every Sunday morning? Why do we "dress up" for church? Why does the pastor preach a sermon each week? Why do we have pews, steeples, choirs, and seminaries? This volume reveals the startling truth: most of what Christians do in present-day churches is not rooted in the New Testament, but in pagan culture and rituals developed long after the death of the apostles. Coauthors Frank Viola and George Barna support their thesis with compelling historical evidence in the first-ever book to document the full story of modern Christian church practices.

Sorting Out Truth From Tradition
Many Christians take for granted that their church’s practices are rooted in Scripture. Yet those practices look very different from those of the first-century church. The New Testament is not silent on how the early church freely expressed the reality of Christ’s indwelling in ways that rocked the first-century world.

Times have changed. Pagan Christianity leads us on a fascinating tour through church history, revealing this startling and unsettling truth: Many cherished church traditions embraced today originated not out of the New Testament, but out of pagan practices. One of the most troubling outcomes has been the effect on average believers: turning them from living expressions of Christ’s glory and power to passive observers. If you want to see that trend reversed, turn to Pagan Christianity . . . a book that examines and challenges every aspect of our contemporary church experience.

Are We Really Doing Church “By the Book?”
Why does the pastor preach a sermon at every service? Why do our church services seem so similar week after week? Why does the congregation sit passively in pews?

Not sure? Pagan Christianity makes an unsettling proposal: Most of what present-day Christians do in church each Sunday is rooted not in the New Testament, but in pagan culture and rituals developed long after the death of the apostles. Authors Frank Viola and George Barna support their thesis with compelling historical evidence and extensive footnotes that document the origins of our modern Christian church practices.

In the process, the authors uncover the problems that emerge when the church functions like a business organization rather than the living organism it was created to be. As you reconsider Christ’s revolutionary plan for His church—to be the head of a fully functioning body in which all believers play an active role—you’ll be challenged to decide whether you can ever do church the same way again.

Click HERE for details or go to http://www.ptmin.org/pagan.htm
Read a sample chapter of Pagan Christianity ( http://www.ptmin.org/books/pc.pdf )
For review of this book go to www.amazon.com

QUESTIONS WE NEVER THINK TO ASK
Socrates (470–399 BC)1 is considered by some historians to be the
father of philosophy. Born and raised in Athens, his custom was to
go about the town relentlessly raising questions and analyzing the
popular views of his day. Socrates believed that truth is found by
dialoguing extensively about an issue and relentlessly questioning
it. This method is known as dialectic or “the Socratic method.” He
thought freely on matters that his fellow Athenians felt were closed
for discussion.
Socrates’ habit of pelting people with searching questions and
roping them into critical dialogues about their accepted customs
eventually got him killed. His incessant questioning of tightly held
traditions provoked the leaders of Athens to charge him with “corrupting
the youth.” As a result, they put Socrates to death. A clear
message was sent to his fellow Athenians: All who question the established
customs will meet the same fate!2
Socrates was not the only provocateur to reap severe reprisal for his
nonconformity: Isaiah was sawn in half, John the Baptist was beheaded,
and Jesus was crucified. Not to mention the thousands of Christians
who have been tortured and martyred through the centuries by the
institutional church because they dared to challenge its teachings.3
As Christians, we are taught by our leaders to believe certain
ideas and behave in certain ways. We are also encouraged to read our
Bibles. But we are conditioned to read the Bible with the lens handed
to us by the Christian tradition to which we belong. We are taught to
obey our denomination (or movement) and never to challenge what
it teaches.
(At this moment, all the rebellious hearts are applauding and
are plotting to wield the above paragraphs to wreak havoc in their
churches. If that is you, dear rebellious heart, you have missed our
point by a considerable distance. We do not stand with you. Our
advice: Either leave your church quietly, refusing to cause division, or
be at peace with it. There is a vast gulf between rebellion and taking
a stand for what is true.)
If the truth be told, we Christians never seem to ask why we do
what we do. Instead, we blithely carry out our religious traditions
without asking where they came from. Most Christians who claim to
uphold the integrity of God’s Word have never sought to see if what
they do every Sunday has any scriptural backing. How do we know
this? Because if they did, it would lead them to some very disturbing
conclusions that would compel them by conscience to forever abandon
what they are doing.
Strikingly, contemporary church thought and practice have been
influenced far more by postbiblical historical events than by New
Testament imperatives and examples. Yet most Christians are not conscious
of this influence. Nor are they aware that it has created a slew
of cherished, calcified, humanly devised traditions4—all of which are
routinely passed off to us as “Christian.”
have never entered your conscious thoughts. Tough questions. Nagging
questions. Even frightening questions. And you will be faced
squarely with the disturbing answers. Yet those answers will lead you
face-to-face with some of the richest truths a Christian can discover.
As you read through the following pages, you may be surprised
to discover that a great deal of what we Christians do for Sunday
morning church did not come from Jesus Christ, the apostles, or
the Scriptures. Nor did it come from Judaism. After the Romans
destroyed Jerusa lem in AD 70, Judaic Christianity waned in numbers
and power. Gentile Christianity dominated, and the new faith began
to absorb Greco-Roman philosophy and ritual. Judaic Chris tianity
survived for five centuries in the little group of Syriac Christians
called Ebionim, but their influence was not very widespread. According
to Shirley J. Case, “Not only was the social environment of the
Christian movement largely Gentile well before the end of the first
century, but it had severed almost any earlier bonds of social contact
with the Jewish Christians of Palestine. . . . By the year 100, Christianity
is mainly a Gentile religious movement . . . living together in
a common Gentile social environment.”6
Strikingly, much of what we do for “church” was lifted directly
out of pagan culture in the postapostolic period. (Legend tells us the
last surviving apostle, John, died around AD 100.) According to Paul
F. Bradshaw, fourth-century Christianity “absorbed and Christianized
pagan religious ideas and practices, seeing itself as the fulfillment to
which earlier religions had dimly pointed.”7 While today we often use
the word pagan to describe those who claim no religion whatsoever, to
the early Christians, pagans were those polytheists who followed the
gods of the Roman Empire. Paganism dominated the Roman Empire
until the fourth century, and many of its elements were absorbed by
Christians in the first half of the first millennium, particularly during
the Constantinian and early post-Constantinian eras (324 to 600).8
Two other significant periods from which many of our current church
practices originate were the Reformation era (sixteenth century) and
the Revivalist era (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).
Chapters 2 through 10 each trace an accepted traditional church
practice. Each chapter tells the story of where this practice came from.
But more importantly, it explains how this practice stifles the practical
headship of Jesus Christ and hampers the functioning of His body.
Warning: If you are unwilling to have your Christianity seriously
examined, do not read beyond this page. Give this book to Goodwill
immediately! Spare yourself the trouble of having your Christian life
turned upside down.
However, if you choose to “take the red pill” and be shown “how
deep the rabbit hole goes”9 . . . if you want to learn the true story of
where your Christian practices came from . . . if you are willing to
have the curtain pulled back on the contemporary church and its traditional
presuppositions fiercely challenged . . . then you will find this
work to be disturbing, enlightening, and possibly life changing.
Put another way, if you are a Christian in the institutional church
who takes the New Testament seriously, what you are about to read
may lead to a crisis of conscience. For you will be confronted by
unmovable historical fact.
On the other hand, if you happen to be one of those people who
gathers with other Christians outside the pale of institutional Christianity,
you will discover afresh that not only is Scripture on your
side—but history stands with you as well.