I’ve recently seen a lot of buzz around blogs regarding Barna and Viola’s new book Pagan Christianity. I haven’t read the book yet, but I am intrigued by the topics it seems to address. With quotes such as, “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,” the book raises some serious questions about the purpose and nature of church as well as about Biblical interpretation.
At the heart of the controversy surrounding this book is the question of if we should read the Bible prescriptively, descriptively, or some combination of the two. We actually addressed this issue at church this past week as we started our study of the book of Acts. It seemed prudent to discuss our assumptions about how we read and apply scripture before we examine the stories of the early church. In essence we asked if what we read in Acts is prescriptive (giving us the guidelines for how we should do church forever and ever amen) or descriptive (just an historical picture of how things were done in one particular culture in one particular era). We of course came down on the both/and middle ground. Yes, there are aspects of scripture that are instructive for us today that we should follow; but, there are also cultural elements portrayed that reflect Biblical culture, but don’t translate well today.
Barna and Viola seem to be taking the approach that claims culture doesn’t matter. A perfect system was created once upon a time and must not be deviated from. We must just repeat exactly those things which were done 2000 years ago and discard any practices that have been introduced since then (you know evil things, like pastors). I personally find this view as disturbing as the opposite extreme that sees the early church as just a cute historical vignette – meaningless for our lives today. Not only do such dichotomous views put God in a box, they have the potential to lead to serious misunderstanding and abuses.
I prefer instead the approach often mentioned by N.T. Wright – that of seeing ourselves existing in God’s unfolding story. If the story of the church is the story of God working in the world, then the early church represents say chapter 9 of that tale. Much has come before and those stories play a pivotal role in the unfolding tale. We then find ourselves living today in Chapter 20, not the final chapter, but still significant to what God is doing. As this chapter gets written it would be silly and really poor writing to merely copy exactly what was written in chapter 9 over again. To do so would ignore all intervening chapters and would imply that God is not big enough to work in the world today. But on the other hand it would be equally silly to make chapter 20 utterly unrelated to all the preceding chapters or to ignore the character development that was established in chapter 9. Chapter 20 must be informed by (and in ways constrained by Chapter 9), but it must also allow the story to be told.
So when I read some of the extreme statements from Barna and Viola, I cringe at the disregard for God’s unfolding story. Having just read excerpts I can’t comment on the whole of their argument. But I can’t help but find the “let’s just get back to the early church” stance a bit simplistic and naive. We are not the early church and no matter how hard we try we Westerners are not pre-industrial people living in an occupied territory. It may be easy to blame all the problems in the church on systems and traditions that were not present in the early church and I fully agree that many of those systems need to be re-evaluated, but the issues are more complex than that. And I for one am not willing (or think it is truly possible) to recapture the ethos and social mores that defined the early church. I am not interested in repeating that chapter in history, but I am interested in learning from and being inspired by it.