January 10, 2008

wisdom for bloggers...

"Don't sin by letting anger control you.
Think about it overnight and remain silent."

-Psalm 4:4

i

Jan 10, 2008 5:37:59 AM | wisdom

1 Comment

Sarah

My most recent blog-reading wisdom: If reading a blog seems to consistently make you angry, and its contents don't have any redeeming value and sound like a banging gong or a clashing cymbal, go ahead and delete it from your RSS feed. :)

Posted by: Sarah | January 10, 2008 at 09:00 AM

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So call me a pagan... 2 A number of people have commented here and elsewhere, that you have to look past the "overstatements" in "Pagan Christianity" and once you do that, there really are some good ideas in the book. Well... I'm certainly going to try. No, really! But here's the thing. What if the whole premise of the book is not just an "overstatement"... but a kind of big, huge, whopping over-reach of such grand proportions and sheer arrogance that whatever good is said later is completely eclipsed by the magnitude and complete nerve it takes to open one's mouth (or type on one's keyboard) and make such an Al-Gorsian I-Invented-The-Internet kind of statement? You know... what if? Before we go chapter-by-chapter, I just wanted to deal with a couple of key statements. The first is arguably the central tenet, the supporting pillar of the whole book. It's found on page xx of the intro, written by Frank Viola, and it says this: "We are also making an outrageous proposal: that the church in its contemporary, institutional form has neither a biblical nor a historical right to exist." Again, I'll give you a moment to go back and read that again. Slowly. Okay- got it?...
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So call me a pagan... 3 Let's get into the main parts of "Pagan Christianity?," starting with chpt 3: The Church Building. Here, Viola does have some good things to say, and some challenges, particularly as regards how much is spent on buildings and structures by the Church in the West. But as is quickly being seen here as SOP (standard operating procedure) he buries all the good points he makes under an almost intolerable load of garbage- overstatements, mis-implications and outright non sequiturs. The basic premise of the chapter is this: "Meeting in homes was a conscious choice of the early Christians." Well, sure. But so was meeting in the synagogue (Acts 9:2) and at the Temple (Acts 2:46). Right? At least up and until they were thrown out, just as Jesus said would happen. The next bit goes on to describe Constantine as "the father of the church building." We're given a tour as to the shortcomings of Constantine's character, including his persistence in pagan worship and "the fact that he is reported to have had his eldest son, his nephew, and his brother-in-law executed." Apparently, us worshiping on Sunday is a result of Constantine's decree (no mention of Acts 20:7, 1 Cor 16:1-2)...

bobhyatt

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