Pagan Christianity?
Pagan Christianity? Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices
Revised and Updated
By Frank Viola and George Barna
Carol Stream, IL: Barna (An Imprint of Tyndale House Publishers), 2008
Review by Carl McColman
For years now, Neopagans have been joking (and griping) about how Christianity often appears as little more than a pagan ripoff. To find support for this claim, one need look no further than the marked similarity between many Catholic saints and pre-Christian deities (such as the Celtic goddess Brigit and her Irish namesake, St. Brigid) or indeed the uncanny correlation between the liturgical year and ancient pagan holidays (for example, Christmas corresponds with the Roman Saturnalia; Candlemas and All Saints with the Gaelic festivals of Imbolc and Samhain, etc.).
Of course, part of the joke (or frustration) in the minds of many Neopagans has been how willfully blind Christians seem to be in regard to the pagan influence on their faith. “We know that Easter is really a festival in honor of the spring goddess Eostara, no matter what the Christians might think or say” is practically a proverbial saying among pagans, who go on to note that colored eggs and rabbits were particularly sacred to this Germanic deity!
Now along comes Frank Viola, a leader in the burgeoning house church movement, who has teamed up with evangelical marketing guru George Barna to educate Christians on just how “pagan” their religion really is. Reading Pagan Christianity? is certainly an eye-opener; the authors don’t even bother with such issues as saints or holy days (although they never explicitly say so, it’s clear that they are writing for evangelical Protestants and certainly not for Catholics). Rather, they go after a number of issues that even Neopagans don’t typically concern themselves with: public church buildings, professional clergy, clergy vestments, professional music directors and choirs, even the ordinary order of worship (whether in the Catholic mass or the Protestant service) — these, and other, commonplace aspects of contemporary mainstream Christianity are all dissected, one by one, with virtually always the same verdict: these practices are rooted in Greek, Roman, or other pagan cultures, with little or no support in the Bible or the earliest Christian writings. The others go on to editorialize about how all these unscriptural, “pagan” practices are in their opinion harmful to the Body of Christ.
Needless to say, I have profoundly mixed feelings about this book. (more…)
Celtic Christian Texts Online
I’m on the email list of an independent Celtic Church and recently members have posted links to Celtic Christian resources online. Both of these look particularly promising:
The University of Wales, Lampeter’s Celtic Christianity e-Library
University College Cork’s CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts
Happy reading!
