Vol. 39, No. 4 ✞                      April 2008

    Frank Viola’s Pagan Christianity was originally published in 2003 by Present Testimony Ministry, with Viola as the sole author. However, this year largely the same book has been republished, but with the well-known researcher George Barna as co- author. What’s going on?

    The 2003 book’s full title was Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices. The 2008 book’s full title is Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices. There are also changes in the way the chapters are laid out. For example, in Viola’s original book, the introduction was entitled, “Have We Really Been Doing It By the Book?” In the Viola-Barna edition, this is the title of the first chapter. The initial chapters in the original are “The Order of Worship,” followed by “The Sermon,” and “The Church Building.” In the new version the initial chapters are “Have We Really Been Doing It By the Book?,” “The Church Building,” and “The Order of Worship.” There are additional changes in the chapter order, such as chapter ten in the original, “A Second Glance at the Savior,” being chapter twelve in the new edition. Both editions have a “Summary of Origins,” but the new edition has the following appendices and indices:

     •    Afterword: The Next Step

     •    Final Thoughts: Q&A with Frank Viola and George Barna

     •    Summary of Origins

     •    Key Figures in Church History

     •    Bibliography

     •    About the Authors

House church leader Gene Edwards said of Viola’s original book:

Viola has done us a great service by tracing the origin of all we Protestants practice. My one regret is that this book will be only one out of 10,000 Christian books issued in the year it was printed. Three hundred years ago - or even two hundred years ago - Pagan Christianity would have been one of only a few hundred books...and therefore, read by a large portion of Christians. You can help remedy this by telling all your friends about this book (Gene Edwards, editorial reviews of the title, at www.amazon.com).

Like Frank Viola, Edwards is a well-known leader in the house church movement. His titles include The Divine Romance (Tyndale, 1993), The Beginning (Chronicles of Heaven series, Seedsowers, 2003), and Why You Should Consider Leaving the Pastorate: Issues We Dare Not Face (Seedsowers, 2007). In the latter work, not unlike Viola and Barna, Edwards challenges “the very concept of today’s practice of the pastor.” He does so by “disclosing the historical origins of the pastor” (back cover). Much of what Edwards says in his brief book is noted and expanded upon in Pagan Christianity?. For example, Viola and Barna write:

Remove the pastor and most Protestant churches would be thrown into a panic. Remove the pastor, and Protestant-ism as we know it would die. The pastor is the dominating focal point, mainstay, and centerpiece of the contemporary church. He is the embodiment of Protestant Christianity.

But here is the profound irony. There is not a single verse in the entire New Testament that supports the existence of the modern-day pastor! He simply did not exist in the early church.

Note that we are using the term pastor throughout this chapter to depict the contemporary pastoral office and role, not the specific individual who fills this role. By and large, those who serve in the office of pastor are wonderful people. They are honorable, decent, and very often gifted Christians who love God and have a zeal to serve His people. But it is the role they fill that both Scripture and church history are opposed to (Viola and Barna, Pagan Christianity, Tyndale, 106, emphasis on role found only in first edition).

    After stating that the New Testament does not support the existence of the modern-day pastor, the authors list several observations concerning Ephesians 4:11:

•    This is the only verse in the entire NT where the word pastor is used. One solitary verse is a mighty scanty piece of evidence on which to hang the Protestant faith! In this regard, there seems to be more biblical authority for snake handling (see Mark 16:18 and Acts 28:3-6) than there is for the present-day pastor. Roman Catholics have made the same error with the word priest. You can find the word priest used in the NT three times. In every case, it refers to all Christians.

•    The word is used in the plural. It is pastors. This is significant. For whoever these “pastors” are, they are plural in the church, not singular. Consequently, there is no biblical support for the practice of sola pastora (single pastor).

•    The Greek word translated pastors is poimen. It means shepherds. (Pastor is the Latin word for shepherd.) Pastor, then, is a metaphor to describe a particular function in the church. It is not an office or a title. A first-century shepherd had nothing to do with the specialized and professional sense it has come to have in contemporary Christianity. Therefore, Ephesians 4:11 does not envision a pastoral office, but merely one of many functions in the church. Shepherds are those who naturally provide nurture and care for God’s sheep. It is a profound error, therefore, to confuse shepherds with an office or title as is commonly conceived today.

•    At best, Ephesians 4:11 is oblique. It offers absolutely no definition or description of who pastors are. It simply mentions them. Regrettably, we have filled this word with our own Western concept of what a pastor is. We have read our idea of the contemporary pastor back into the NT. Never would any first-century Christian have conceived of the contemporary pastoral office! (Viola and Barna, 106-107).

Although there is truth in what Viola and Barna say about the formation of paid or salaried clergy, they ignore passages like 1 Thessalonians 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 16:15-16 and those who were in charge of churches, who at first had no title . They move on to argue that the pastor’s sermon is directly...

borrowed from the Greek sophists, who were masters at oratory and rhetoric. John Chrysostom and Augustine popularized the Greco-Roman homily (sermon) and made it a central part of the Christian faith” (Viola and Barna, Pagan Christianity?, “Summary of Origins,” 273).

The implication is the modern sermon did not originate from New Testament Christianity. Rather, such a practice, one among many in the modern church, is in conflict with “biblical principles and teachings,” most borrowed from “pagan culture” (Viola and Barna, xix).

    As many reviewers have already pointed out, one of the major issues in such a book is whether the form which the early church adopted (house churches) were intended to be for that time only or historically and culturally transcendent. This is not to suggest that there is not much valuable information in the book, and much that is on target. At the same time, some of what Viola and Barna argue is very debatable.

    For example, when it comes to thinking about the back-ground of the modern sermon, Dr. Everett Ferguson, professor emeritus of church history at Abilene Christian University, provides a somewhat different perspective in his book, Early Christians Speak: Faith and Life in the First Three Centuries (3^rd ed., ACU Press, 1999). Concerning preaching in the early church in the late second-century A.D., Ferguson states:

The preaching was based on the Scriptures read in the assembly. Synagogue preaching was either expository or took the reading of the day as a basis for a topical address. Early Christian preaching seems to have been predominantly expository. Thus the surviving homilies of Origen are expository in nature. So are most of the sermons from some of the great fourth- and fifth-century preachers - John Chrysostom and Augustine. It so happens that the few surviving second-century sermons are more topical in nature, but they are still closely based on the Scripture reading (Ferguson, Early Christians Speak, 85).

    Notice Ferguson suggests “preaching” in the early church followed the Old Testament or Jewish custom followed in the synagogue services. Exactly what was this custom? E. P. Sanders writes:

...study of the Scripture was for most people probably confined to the Sabbath, but then it did take place. Jews were generally well educated in the Bible, and this is attributable to the practice of attending the synagogue, where the Scripture was read and expounded. As Philo put it, on the seventh day Jews gave “their time to the one sole object of philosophy with a view to the improvement of character and submission to the scrutiny of conscience.” He saw the pursuit of the Jewish “philosophy” on the Sabbath as being a Mosaic commandment. Josephus was of the same view: Moses had decreed that once every week people should “assemble to listen to the Law and to obtain a thorough and accurate knowledge of it.” In Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities (first-century A.D.), the requirement to assemble on the Sabbath “to praise the Lord” and “to glorify the Mighty One” is made part of the Ten Commandments.” The assumption that Moses ordained Sabbath assembly, like Josephus’ view that he commanded twice-daily prayers, shows how common the practice was - as common as if it had been in the written law. The Bible (Deut. 31:10) requires the public reading of the law once every seven years, at the Feast of Booths, but by the first-century the practice was to read portions of it weekly in the synagogue. It was there that people assembled to hear it read and expounded (Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE-66CE, SCM/ Trinity Press, 1992, 197-198, emphasis mine).

The early Christian believers, in a relatively short time, were soon barred from worshiping Jesus in the local synagogues. Since they had no public meeting places of their own, they met in private homes. But was the meeting of the church in homes God’s plan for the church throughout the centuries? Is there something inherently evil in a building built especially for the worship of God and study of His word, such as the Jewish synagogue? Viola and Barna seem to imply there is something divinely special about the house church that has been lost today. In his review of the book, Darren King comments:

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 or 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...to recapture those early practices, that we too will inherit the Wind of the Spirit in the same way those early believers did....I hope that those who 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 genera-tion?...contextualization has always happened. It is just part of the enterprise. Truth, as they say, does not exist in a vacuum (Darren King, “Following the Root, Wherever It May Lead: A Review of Viola and Barna’s Pagan Christianity, http://www.precipicemagazine.com/review-pagan-christianity.html).

     We know from the New Testament that both Jesus and Paul found the opportunity to speak and teach in synagogues (e.g., Mark 1:21; Acts 13:15), buildings constructed for the gathering, education, and worship of God by Jews. Further, concerning the size of such specialized worship edifices, Josephus observed the Jewish “house of prayer” in Tiberias was a place that would accommodate large crowds. Sanders concludes that “if there was a large building for prayer and study in Tiberias - a city that was permanently impure - we may assume that there were such buildings elsewhere in Palestine (see Sanders, 199).

    Viola and Barna quote church historian Philip Schaff as writing:

As the Savior of the world was born in a stable, and ascended into heaven from a mountain, so His apostles and their successors down to the third-century, preached in the streets, the markets, on mountains, in ships, sepulchers, eaves [sic, caves], and deserts, and in the homes of their converts. But how many thousands of costly churches and chapels have since been built and are constantly being built in all parts of the world to the honor of the crucified Redeemer, who in the days of His humiliation had no place of His own to rest His head! (Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Eerdmans, 1988 reprint, I:475).