Ben Witherington rips "Pagan Christianity" from page to page

A few days ago I was sent a note about a series of posts written by Ben Witherington III, who is an Evangelical scholar and professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, as well as author of numerous scholarly and more popular books on Jesus, the early Church, and the Bible. (Full disclaimer: Witherington has appeared in a couple of recent DVDs co-produced by Ignatius Press: Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? and Lost Gospels or False Gospels?). He has, shall we say, some serious credentials when it comes to the subjects he writes and talks about.

The same cannot be said for the authors of the book, Pagan Christianity?, which is the focus of Witherington's posts (four and counting). They are Frank Viola, who has a background in social science education and "church planting," and George Barna, who is the founder of the Barna Research Group. This is not a knock on their character or intelligence, but merely points out the obvious: they aren't historians or biblical scholars. (And, needless to say, this doesn't mean they shouldn't write about history or the Bible. It does mean that their strong claims deserved to be analyzed carefully by those who know a lot about the topics involved.)

The book is marketed as a strong critique of the "institutional church." From the book's website:

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.

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.

I've not read the book, but Witherington's posts indicate that it is, in some ways, simply a more sophisticated variation of the anti-Catholicism (and anti-mainline Protestantism) that has been part and parcel of a Fundamentalist viewpoint for many decades. Witherington writes:

And of course the big bad guy in Pagan Christianity is not going to be sin, suffering, the Devil, or any of those things. The big bad guy is going to be what is loosely called the Institutional Church and that other famous whipping boy—‘church tradition’ and oh yes--- Greek philosophy. The particular animus is against the Roman Catholic Church for paganizing Christianity. Dan Brown would have liked this book.

But frankly there are no such thing as ‘institutional churches’. Churches have institutions of various sorts, they aren’t institutions. Furthermore, the Bible is full of traditions and many of those developed after NT times are perfectly Biblical. It’s not really possible to draw a line in the sand between ‘Biblical principles’ and traditions. The question is which traditions comport with Biblical tradition and which do not. And there is a further problem. It is ever so dangerous to take what was normal in early Christianity as a practice, and conclude that therefore it must be normative. It may have been normal in the NT era for non-theological reasons, for example for practical reasons.

To tell us that the church is really people, people united in Christ and serving the Lord, is to say nothing for or against the ‘institutional church’, or for that matter its institutions. Everyone agrees that the church is people, more specifically people gathered for worship, fellowship, and service. Everyone agrees that the church is a living thing and organism, not an organization. So what’s the beef here, and where is the real thrust of the critique?

Let us begin with a historical point made on p. 6 on the basis of old and weak evidence. The idea is that Christianity had become overwhelming Gentile and already was adopting numerous pagan practices in the last third of the first century A.D. Frankly, this is historically false. Not only did Jewish Christianity continue well into the fifth century in many forms and places and in considerable numbers, including in the Diaspora and not just in Israel and Syria, in fact all of our NT was written by Jewish Christians with the possible exception of Luke's works, but he seems however to have been a god-fearer. And in fact many of the NT documents were written for Jewish Christians including Matthew, Hebrews, James, Jude,1 Peter, and probably John, the Johannine Epistles, Revelation.

If you are wrong about the history of the early church, and wrong about the character of the canon as well, then it is no wonder you will make mistakes in your argumentation. It is interesting that documents like the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Protoevangelium of James, and other documents which came out of largely Jewish Christian circles are just ignored as well. These folks need to read a book like Oscar Skarsaune’s edited volume on Jewish Believers in Jesus. They will discover it is not possible to say either that Jewish Christianity waned after 70 A.D. nor is it possible to say that the dominate practice of the church was pagan, and became increasingly pagan in the first, second, third centuries--- wrong, and wrong.

There is a lot of great stuff, but rather than give quote after quote, take a moment to look through the four posts:

• Pagan Christianity: by George Barna and Frank Viola (June 30, 2008)

• Pagan Christianity, Part Two (July 1, 2008. Okay, one more quote: "In the second main chapter of Barna and Viola’s book Pagan Christianity, we are given a brief history of some forms and orders of worship, with perhaps a special emphasis on low church Protestant worship. Missing is a discussion of Catholic worship, various forms of Orthodox worship and Anglican worship. I suppose it is just assumed that these forms of worship are so unBiblical, that don’t even warrant discussion." This is a fascinating post.)

• Pagan Christianity, Part Three (July 2, 2008)

• Pagan Christianity, Part Four (July 3, 2008)

Much more could be said, but the over-arching reason I find this interesting is how it highlights what I think is a rapidly growing chasm within American Evangelicalism, between those in the "emergent church" movement (and in related movements) who makes feints toward taking Church history seriously but usually only end plundering it (and misrepresenting it) for their own 21st century purposes, and those who take seriously the need to study early Church history and patristics, and who end up with a much more Catholic vision of things (and who, in many cases, do become Catholic or Eastern Orthodox). Yes, that's simplistic, but I think it captures the basic issues at hand, which are primarily historical and theological, with ecclesiology holding a central place in both of those arenas.

Comments

[MMajor Fan]

Thanks for the links and I'll definitely read them. I'm so glad that scholars are dedicating the time (and the strong stomachs) to challenging these types of misguided publications, to be charitable.

Two quick points. It's not a secret that there are a lot of books in the pipeline that are part of a concerted effort to attack the body of the institutional churches. These books don't just "pop up," they are released according to an overall interest by those behind the media in eroding the faith in the institutional churches. I'm not a tin foil hat wearer but it's become almost boringly obvious watching the cycle of these media outputs.

Second, I don't know if they trumpet the old tired example of Christian feast and holy days being placed on pagan days (and then claiming one comes from the other) but I'm tired of seeing that one so I'd like to address it using a modern example. Scholars know that far from celebrating the pagan day, Christians superimposed their holy days on pagan days as a deliberate statement of replacement. The endurance of folk and cultural celebratory events does not mean that the Christian holy day "came from" the pagan day.

Here's a modern example. Saddam Hussein's birthday was April 28, according to Wikipedia. Suppose that this new Iraqi government had decided to hold annual elections on April 28? Would people be writing in the future, "Oh, they deliberately placed the election day on SH's birthday because he still had a secret national cult following and one came from the other?" No, hopefully they would recognize that the "winner" often imposes "their" day on the past ideologue's "day" in order to break from the past, not claim or maintain continuity or descendency.

[Sandra Miesel]

I want to see a pagan temple sometime, somewhere, that had pews. Just one?

Last night I was looking at a 15th C painting of people in a church and lo! pews and kneelers before the Reformation. (pews are also mentioned by Langland in the 14th C) So much for pew-hating Catholic wreckovators, too.

[Thomas]

here's a great refutation of witherington's review.
http://www.paganchristianity.org/zensresponds1.htm, there's more coming apparently.

[Carl E. Olson]

I see that the "great refutation" relies, in part, on Catholic scholars such as William Bausch and Herbert Haag, who are well-known for their open dissent from Catholic teaching. And yet they are portrayed as being Catholic scholars of good repute. Haag, for example, denied that there was any need for an ordained priesthood; in other words, he was advocating a view that was Protestant, not Catholic. Bausch is known for his dissent against Humanae Vitae and his advocacy of ordaining women.

As for some of the other points, I'm sure Witherington will address them. Not that I agree with Witherington on every point; I have no need to be a Witherington apologist. He can take care of himself. But I do find Zens' refutation to be seriously lacking, and his use of very questionable Catholic sources is a practice that is often taken up by those wishing to criticize Catholicism without really dealing with legitimate, authentic Catholic teaching.

[Charles E Flynn]

Go to http://www.cimmay.us/middleton.html and then click the link to the pdf of Middleton's text, with the amusing title:

DR. MIDDLETON’S
LETTER FROM ROME,
SHOWING AN EXACT CONFORMITY BETWEEN
POPERY AND PAGANISM;
OR,
THE RELIGION OF THE PRESENT ROMANS DERIVED
FROM THAT OF THEIR HEATHEN ANCESTORS,
WITH
THE AUTHOR’S DEFENCE
AGAINST A ROMAN CATHOLIC OPPONENT

From page 7, the introduction by John Dowling, D. D.:

The scholar, familiar as he is with the classic descriptions of ancient mythology, when
like the learned author of the “Letter from Rome” he becomes an eye-witness to the
ceremonies of Papal worship, cannot avoid recognizing their close resemblance, if not their
absolute identity. The temples of Jupiter, Diana, Venus, or Apollo; their altars smoking with
incense; their boys in sacred habits, holding the incense box, and attending upon the priests;
their holy water at the entrance of the temples, with their aspergilla or sprinkling brushes;
their thuribula, or vessels of incense; their ever-burning lamps before the statues of their
deities; are irresistibly brought before his mind, whenever he visits a Roman Catholic place
of worship, and witnesses precisely the same things.
If a Roman scholar of the age of the Cæsars, who, previous to his death, had formed some
acquaintance with the religion of the despised Nazarene, had in the seventh or eighth century
arisen from his grave in the Campus Martins, and wandered into the spacious church of
Constantine at Rome, which then stood on the spot now occupied by Saint Peter’s; if he had
there witnessed these institutions of Paganism, which were then, and ever since have been,
incorporated with the worship of Rome, would he not have come to the conclusion that he
had found his way into some temple dedicated to Diana, Venus, or Apollo, rather than into
a Christian place of worship, where the successors of Peter the fisherman, or Paul the
tent-maker, had met for the worship of Jesus of Nazareth?

[LJ]

Loraine Boettner refined and rehashed?

[Telemachus]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong: Christianity was founded by Jews, but was adopted by Jews and Gentiles alike from the earliest times (1st and 2nd Century A.D.) onwards. How could there have ever been a *purist* Christianity that didn't in some way resemble the practices of Jews and Gentiles alike? Furthermore, if it never existed, why should it now, and why should we look upon the development of the Church as inherently false because it doesn't resemble this fictious pure Christianity?

This is all it comes down to for me: that the Church *adapted* the traditional practices of pagans (e.g. Celtic Ireland) to Christianity is one of the reasons I'm a Catholic, i.e. because it rarely tried to impose practices completely foreign on others, thereby destroying the continuum of the beliefs of a converted people. That we as Christians still retain some of these practices bothers me not in the least, and we are better off for having such a rich cultural heritage.

[David]

I read the book and thought it was compelling. Ben Witherington's review didn't hold water. Another scholar exposed the logical and factual fallacies in it. http://www.paganchristianity.org/zensresponds1.htm
The book is much better than L.B.'s handling of it.

[Mark Brumley]

Pagans pray, I pray, therefore I am a pagan. QED.

[Melanie Stephan]

Is the Catholic Church a mixture of Pagan beliefs and Christain teaching? Amoung many of the similarities of the two, one stands out. Pagans worshiped, sacrificed, and gave blood offerings. Blood offerings are animal and human sacrifice. The Church says that Jesus died for our sins. That is human sacrifice. Jesus was sacrificed just like a lamb. That screams "Pagan worship". Now my next question is, Is the Catholic Church really just a newly revised pagan religion? I don't think Jesus died for us. I think he died because the Romans were cruel. Melanie Stephan

[Melanie Stephan]

Despite what I wrote above, there is a God. God does exist.

[Jill]

The sequel to “Pagan Christianity?” is out now. It’s called “Reimagining Church”. It picks up where “Pagan Christianity” left off and continues the conversation. (“Pagan Christianity” was never meant to be a stand alone book; it’s part one of the conversation.) “Reimagining Church” is endorsed by Leonard Sweet, Shane Claiborne, Alan Hirsch, and many others. You can read a sample chapter at http://www.ReimaginingChurch.org. It’s also available on Amazon.com. Frank is also blogging now at http://frankviola.wordpress.com/