More on Pagan Christianity
I think I need to go back and explain in (more) depth my disagreement with Viola and Barna (V/B) and some of the tone laid out in Pagan Christianity. As I said before, the tone seemed to be one of “Unless things are like they were in the Early Church, they should not be in practice today.” While in some cases, our lost “sight” of “the way things were” has indeed hurt us, so will doing things simply because they “were.”
I’m reminded of the story that Pete Rollins tells in one of his books (I think it’s Fidelity of Betrayal, but it could be How (not) to Speak of God), about the Rabbi who ties the cat to the tree because the cat screeches while the Rabbi is trying to teach. After the Rabbi dies the community continues to tie the cat to the tree, as the act has now become habit. That cat dies and the community, now having moved habit into tradition finds another cat to replace the original, and the line continues until the tying of a cat to a tree becomes orthodoxical for services. What was once done out of the expediency of the moment has become a cumbersome system complete with it’s own rituals and requirements.
In this same way, if we were to do certain things simply because they Early Church did them that way (I guess I should state I’m speaking only in regards to how we conduct our assemblies services) then we fill ourselves with cumbersome material which actually inhibits our understanding. For example, the practice of only meeting in the homes of other members is nowhere mandated by the Bible, yet it was a practice committed (According to V/B) during the Early Church years. (On a side note, I have heard it also stated that early assemblies met in catacombs and in synagogues, so I’m not sure about V/B’s historical account here). If we were to only hold our assemblies in the homes of members today, when other space is available more suiting to the needs of the community, then we encumber ourselves with needless ritual.
On the other hand, with a practice such as the Lords Supper, an embrace of Early Church forms and rituals would be most beneficial. As V/B state, the historical Lords Supper, or at least during the Early Church years, was actually a feast in which the poor and the rich would dine together in a common bond of Christ. Having forgotten that the Bible is in fact a book written for the oppressed and (**mostly) by the oppressed, the insistence that the Lords Feast be shared by all would likely do the Church a fair amount of good.
The largest issue we’re presented with is a cultural chage from the first several centuries AD (or CE if you’d prefer) to the current age. While practices committed in the Early Church indeed made sense for them, in many cases blindly clinging to such practices today would be detrimental to the health of the Church. The key is not in simply doing things the way the Early Church did them, but instead understanding why the Early Church did them in such ways.
This same understanding should in turn be applied to each incarnation of the church throughout the centuries. A fundamentalist would do well in understanding why (s)he does things the way (s)he does, instead of simply doing them because that is how they have been done. In that same way, those who would state that we must do things the way the Early Church did them should take a look at the whys, lest they practice a form of fundamentalism themselves. A decent heaping of deconstruction would do us all a fair load of good when it comes to the way we do things, as well as a cultural understanding of how things need to be tweaked in order to better affect the world in which we find ourselves.
The understanding of cultural shifts, and the need to adjust in order to best work (both) within (and without) those shifts is imperative to the effectiveness of the Church. It is this same thought process in which Emergent (and to a larger extent the emerging church) must operate. So, again, I am lead to disagree with the underlying statement in Pagan Christianity which would lead us to this quasi-fundamentalism.
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