Review of ‘Pagan Christianity’ at Amazon

I have finally written a short review for Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices at Amazon. It is published in full below:

Good Summary but needs to Look Deeper and Wider!

This book is a good resource for anyone who wonders why and how some of the current practices in the church which are not directly mentioned in the New Testament have into being. This book is arranged systematically and in general clear and well written. However, it is still lacking in a number of ways.

Firstly, the author(s) seems to be judging these so-called pagan practices without taken into consideration of biblical theology. For example, one would wonder if Old Testament metaphor of the shepherd can be totally neglected as the role of the modern pastor is examined. The author has completely disregard the above when he criticises the modern role of the pastor, taking into consideration only the New Testament text. (A helpful book to compensate this is Shepherds After My Own Heart: Pastoral Traditions and Leadership in the Bible (New Studies in Biblical Theology)).

Secondly, the book fails to take into consideration of the fact that contextualisation of the Christian faith is ‘the way it has always been’ in the course of history. A casual study on Bosch’s Transforming Mission or Lesslie Newbigin will help to inform us this. Though not perfect, but the following quote more or less capture the missional dimension that is missing in this book – ‘Christianity is, sociologically speaking, certainly one religion; it is the ancient paganism or, to be more precise, the complex Hebrew-Hellenic-Greco-Latin-Celtic-Gothic-Modern religion converted to Christ more or less successfully.’ (Elwood, ed. What Asian Christians are thinking, 361 as quoted in Jones, Wainwright, Yarnold.Sj, (eds) The Study of Spirituality OUP, 1986, 555). The author fails to see that New Testament was not written in a cultural vacuum and we today cannot live apart from our culture.

Thirdly, limited by his own preferred ecclesiology and background, the author writes with much in favour of the Anabaptist and home church tradition (which are also cultures). Though he has by at large kept the balance he has occasionally allowed this bias to cloud his judgement. Thus some of his conclusions are harsh. For example, he has maintained that churches are not supposed to have a large building but has not consider the paradigm shift typical of the modern cell church where the large building is never considered ‘the church’ but a gathering of all home cell group (churches).

So although the author’s points are clear he would have done better by highlighting the dangers of some of these practices in diluting true Christian values without making harsh but inaccurate criticism of others. Nevertheless I have enjoyed reading this book and find it helpful as a general resource for anyone who is interested in critically evaluating church practices of today. If you would like to have a list of allegedly ‘pagan practices’ in the church look no further. However, I would recommend it only to those who are already aware of the shortcomings I mentioned above. If you have no idea about the three weaknesses above I suggest you look them up before reading this book.