2nd man united

The Church Building is Pagan? - Part 1

Continue following along our journey through the book Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna.  Here's the first two posts in the series:

Introduction to Pagan Christianity

Traditions Passed Off as "Christian"

The edifice complex is so ingrained in our thinking that if a group of believers begins to meet together, their first thoughts are toward securing a building.  For how can a group of Christians be a church without a building?  Just listen to our vocabulary.  “Church” stands for a place of brick and mortar that you physically travel to.  We use phrases like “It’s so good to be in the house of God today!” and “I’m going to church Sunday morning.”  You cannot go to something you are!

 

Mindsets and thoughts that have anything to do with the church being a building or any special reverence for brick and mortar have nothing to do with New Testament Christianity.  Rather they reflect the thinking of other religions – primarily Judaism and paganism.  Both have the three elements of the Temple, the priesthood, and the sacrifice.  When Jesus came, He ended all three, fulfilling them in Himself and establishing a living, breathing organism as the temple of God in which He dwells.  Therefore, the early Christians did away with all of these elements.  You won’t find one reference in your New Testament that links the terms church, temple, or house of God to a building.  You won’t find a special priestly caste that was set apart to serve God.  And you won’t find special sacrifices except for that of thanksgiving and praise (Hebrews 13:15 and I Peter 1:5).  Christianity was the first non-temple-based religion ever to emerge.  Calling the Church a building would be like calling your wife a condominium or your mother a skyscraper!  Most Christians understand this in theory, but lack it in practice.  

 

But, we see throughout history how the Christians mistakenly have absorbed practices that had been destroyed by Jesus.  The first major shift occurred in the late second and third centuries.  Christians mistakenly began to absorb pagan practices and a magical mindset and label them with a Christian theme.  This would set the stage for the man responsible for creating church buildings: the emperor Constantine.   . 

 

Whether or not Constantine truly converted to Christianity is debatable, but one thing is for sure: his thinking was dominated by superstition and pagan magic.  Almost to his dying day, Constantine “still functioned as the high priest of paganism.”  In fact, he retained the pagan title Pontifex Maximus, which means chief of the pagan priests.  He was responsible for granting Christians freedom of worship and expanding their privileges and simply thought that Christians should have their own sacred buildings like the Jews and pagans.  So, he followed the path of the pagans in constructing temples to honor the Christian God along with all the other gods that were being honored (AD 327).  They imitated the structure of pagan temples.  They were constructed to seat passive and docile crowds to watch a performance, had an elevated platform where a special priestly caste (the clergy) ministered, and a special place from where a sermon was preached.  This architecture, along with most of the practices that went with it, were pagan to the core and would profoundly re-shape the way Christians would meet.  The upshot of it all was that there was a loss of intimacy and open participation.  The professional clergy performed the acts of worship while the laity looked on as spectators.  They even were named after saints, just like pagan temples were.  

 

The Christian building was a demonstration of the Christians' tragic entrance into a close alliance with pagan culture.  They embraced the concept that there exists a special physical space where God dwells in a special way.  And that place is made “with hands”(2 Cor. 5:1, Hebrews 9:11, among many others).  The first-century Christians were opposed to the world’s systems.  But, this all changed during the fourth century when the church emerged as a public institution in the world and began to Christianize pagan ideas and practices.  As with other pagan customs, third and fourth century Christians incorrectly attributed and justified the origin of the church building to the Old Testament.  To use the Old Testament as a justification for the church building is not only inaccurate, but it is self-defeating.  The old Mosaic economy of sacred priests, sacred buildings, sacred rituals, and sacred objects has been forever destroyed by the cross of Jesus Christ.  God moved on from those 2000 years ago.  In addition, it has been replaced by a nonhierarchical, nonritualistic, nonliturgical organism called the ekklesia (church).

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Traditions Passed Off as "Christian"

Post 2 of the Pagan Christianity series.  Previous Posts are below:

Introduction to Pagan Christianity

Historians have long held that if we do not remember the past, we are doomed to repeat it.  Yet, we often persist in our well-intentioned but ignorant efforts to refine life.  A revolution of faith is occurring that is resulting in forms of church (house church, intentional communities, cell church, etc.) that are all intriguing, but do they really represent a meaningful step toward God’s highest purpose?  We will grapple with this issue and others as we learn from the history of the church and get challenged in the practice of our faith. 

 

There were three historical periods when a bevy of changes were made in common Christian practices: the era of Constantine, the decades surrounding the Protestant Reformation, and the Revivalist period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Those changes were the result of passionate, though often ill-informed followers of Christ.  Many of these changes have come to be accepted as biblical in origin, although they are not.  Support for them has been built through proof-texting.  Proof-texting is the practice of taking disparate, unrelated verses of Scripture, often out of context, to “prove” that our position squares with the Bible. 

 

The practices we will look at hinder the development of our faith and the functioning of the body of Christ.  Does that mean we must go back to the Bible and do everything exactly as the disciples did between AD 30 and 60?  No. Adhering to the principles of the New Testament does not mean reenacting the events of the first-century church.  We live in a different world.  Our cultural influences will have an effect on the practice of our faith, but we need to be sure that they do not add to or detract from it.  Sadly, this is the case with the practices we will be looking at.  So, let’s understand how we got from the early church to the contemporary church and figure out what we are going to do about it. 

 

As pastors preach from the pulpits about being “biblical” and following the “pure Word of God,” their words betray them.  The truth is that precious little that is observed today in contemporary Christianity maps to anything found in the Bible and the experience of the people in the Bible story.  But for some reason, most people never think to ask why they do what they do.  And those that do, tend to get persecuted (Socrates, Isaiah, John the Baptist, Jesus, etc.).

 

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.  If they did, they could not in good conscience continue doing much of what they are doing.  The fact is, contemporary church thought and practice have been influenced far more by postbiblical historical events than by New Testament imperatives and examples.  This has created humanly devised traditions that are routinely passed off to us as “Christian.”  But, much of it was lifted directly out of pagan culture in the postapostolic period.

 

We will go through a series of accepted traditional church practices and tell the story of where the practice came from.  Then, it will be explained how the practice stifles the practical headship of Jesus Christ and hampers the functioning of His body.  This may lead to a crisis of conscience and change your life forever.

Introduction to Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna

The winner of the vote for the next book discussion was Pagan Christianity: exploring the roots of our church practices by Frank Viola.  Here's the synopsis of the preface to the book.  Hope this series will be very constructive.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees were the two leading religious parties of the culture in which Jesus lived.  The basic error of the Pharisees is that they invented traditions and laws and added them to the Scriptures.  The basic error of the Sadducees was that they subtracted from the Scriptures.  Contemporary Christianity has fallen into the errors of both camps.  It has adopted traditions that have suppressed the living, breathing, functional headship of Jesus Christ in His church; and it has removed much of true Christianity from the Christian landscape. 

 

Most would agree that we find our practices for the Christian life in the life of Jesus Christ and that the Church is now Jesus Christ in a different form; “the body of Christ,” which is an organic entity alive with the life of God that indwells its parts and the whole.  But the fact is, much of what we practice today is borrowed from somewhere else and stands in conflict with biblical principles and teachings, thus choking the life out of the organism and turning it into an inanimate object.

 

So, where did these practices come from?  The unmovable, historical fact is that most of them were borrowed from pagan culture.  These are not practices that differ because of the culture in which people live.  These are practices addressed in this book that, if the Church is following the life of God that indwells it organically, will never be produced because they are not programmed into the DNA of God.  They are practices that God’s people have picked up from their pagan neighbors as far back as the fourth century.  They were embraced and labeled “Christian” in whatever cultural form they are found, although at the roots they are not. 

 

The proposal of this book is that the contemporary, institutional form of church has neither a biblical or historical right to function as it does.  This book is not exhaustive, but focuses on the central practices that define mainstream Christianity today.  So, let’s identify the errors of the Pharisees and Sadducees that we’ve fallen into and remove them to make room for the Lord to be the fully functional Head of His Church.