The Pain of Disappointment, Part 5 (Pagan Christianity)

And so, we can perceive a flavor of paganism in some our Christian practices. It’s not surprising. After all, Christianity arose against a pagan background. And the early Christian church sometimes deliberately adopted and Christianized pagan practices to make Christianity more attractive to people who’d grown up pagan.

That’s an interesting and important story in its own right, but for the moment, I’m more concerned with what are entirely unconscious syncreticisms. A religion is “syncretic” if it absorbs practices and beliefs from the culture that were originally foreign to the religion.

Now, it’s not entirely obvious how an American church might accidentally pick up pagan or magical elements from the surrounding culture — especially if these elements were picked over 100 years ago, long before there were any Wiccans or other intentionally pagan groups around.

The reality is, I think, that it’s not so much that paganism was picked up from the surrounding culture but that some denominations picked up pagan elements from within the Christian community itself. You see, the Catholic, the Orthodox, and many others Christianized certain pagan attitudes — and the Protestants kept some of them. Indeed, to many of us, the pagan elements seem the most “religious” because we unconsciously associate ritual with religion with Christianity. Does that make sense?

You see, it’s remarkably easy to see the assembly as all about ritual, since the natural human tendency is to regularize and ritualize something we do every single week. We’ve all heard stories of practices that began as a convenience and ultimately became doctrine just because the repetition for decades made the practice feel like the very essence of Christianity.

Let me take you to the time of my childhood. I grew up in North Alabama, notorious for Churches of Christ that divide, fuss, and fight. In my hometown of 6,679, we had four Churches of Christ, and there were probably another dozen small congregations in the surrounding county of less than 10,000 people total.

Critical mass was about 150 to 200 members. Churches that grew larger would split over something.

My church was the “liberal” one — “liberal” because we believed that God gives permission to support orphanages out of the church treasury. We didn’t actually do that. Rather, we had a separate contribution once a month for the nearby Church of Christ orphanage, keeping the money separate from our congregational general fund — for the sake of the scruples of our members and the other Churches in town.

We had a new family join our congregation, and soon found that the opening prayer had been moved until after the announcements. You see, they complained because it was only permissible to have “five acts of worship” between the opening and closing prayer. Since the announcements were not on the list of approved acts of worship, the opening prayer had to be afterwards. Really.

We all had to wear suits to church, even the kids. In those days, God insisted on our “Sunday best.” Oh, and the girls had to wear dresses or, later, pantsuits. For girls to wear jeans was to cross-dress — to dress like a man — and a great sin. Except somewhere other than church, where the dress code differed. Because God was more concerned with how we dressed at church than elsewhere. This is, after all, the nature of religious ritual. Ritual is about entering God’s presence, as though he might be less present at home. (Pagans believe in holy places where the gods have a special presence. Christians believe God is everywhere.)

Indeed, a major concern of many at church was that the children be quiet — “reverent” — before services began. In fact, even the adults were urged to speak in low, solemn tones. The point was made that the building is no sense “holy” but we can make it “unholy” by being irreverent. “Irreverent” meant “talking to friends.” (You can see how confusing the rules might be to the non-expert.)

Early in my childhood, the women and girls all wore hats in church, because 1 Corinthians 11 unambiguously required women to have covered heads. By the time I graduated from high school, God had changed his mind — largely because it was no longer possible to shop for hats, which had gone entirely out of fashion and could not be had in the local stores.

Our church services had at least 6 prayers — opening, “main,” bless the cup, bless the fruit of the vine, bless the offering, closing. Each prayer included a request for forgiveness of sin. The closing prayer always asked that God overlook any error should our services not have been conducted “decently and in order.”

Indeed, the mantra “decently and in order,” borrowed from 1 Cor 14:40, permeated the assembly. We were all about being decent and orderly because we were terrified that we might have gotten the ritual wrong.

What if we’d taken an action that might be considered an “act of worship” not on the approved list of five acts? What if we got the Lord’s Supper ritual wrong? What if the prayers were for some reason unacceptable?

We prayed and begged throughout the service that God find our actions “acceptable.”

(Psa 19:14 KJV) ¹⁴ Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.

We were terrified that they might not be. What if the elders spent the contribution in an unauthorized way? What if we’d allowed someone to serve as elder who had the wrong number of children? Or whose children walked “unruly” (Tit. 1:6)? Being the child and grandchild of elders, I was well aware that unruliness might not only disqualify my father and grandfather from being elders, but might damn the entire congregation for having appointed a man with unruly children! We would not be “scripturally organized.” And that means damned.

And so, some of the old rules — such the ones requiring dresses and hats on women — were repealed, and yet new rules were constantly being discovered. We were taught one Sunday that we should not dare take communion if anyone “hath ought against thee” (Mat 5:23 KJV). If someone had not been reconciled to his brother, then he “eateth and drinketh damnation to himself” (1Co 11:29 KJV). Really.

As a result, we had members who went years without taking communion — violating one command in a desperate effort to obey another — and desperately uncertain whether they were doing the right thing — getting the ritual right. Were they winning God’s favor or earning his wrath? It’s was hard to know these things for sure.

In short, we weren’t practicing Christianity. We were practicing paganism blended with Christianity. Rather than salvation by faith in Jesus and having a personal relationship with the God of the universe as our Abba, we were seeking to gain God’s numen, his goodwill, by scrupulous obedience to the rules of how to offer service and sacrifice.

For some reason, the God of the Universe wanted a cappella singing and only a cappella singing, and so, to avoid the fires of hell, we gave him a cappella singing. When he wanted hats and dresses and suits and coats and ties, that’s what he got. He’s God — and a truly fearsome God at that.

Now, the danger of a graceless religion is that you must either be in constant fear of getting the rules wrong — making the Christian miserable — or else persuade yourself that you in fact are sufficiently expert to have gotten them all right — which often leads to a certain arrogance.

Some of us imagined ourselves as the true priesthood of God — the experts in the prescribed ritual observations that separate the damned from the saved. No one could find God except through us, because we knew the secrets of the silences. We’d found the principles by which the proper rites could be discerned and the Ancient Order restored.

The congregations that confused “aids” with “additions” and “expedients” with “acts of worship,” well, they were going to hell because they got the ritual wrong. And God would not be pleased with anything less than exactly, punctiliously performed rites. It was truly a matter of salvation.

That’s right. Speak an announcement after the opening prayer, and the entire service would not be done decently and in order. The service wouldn’t be acceptable. And there’d be no numen, only wrath.

Grace? Well, grace is what the Baptists preached on and the sure sign of a liberal. “Salvation by faith”? Again, the mark of heresy. A damnable lie.

Sure, faith was essential, but it was faith plus scrupulous adherence to the rules. Faith got you far enough to be taught the rules. But the rules took you the rest of the way to heaven. Get the rules — the Pattern — wrong and you’d no longer be a Christian, sound, faithful, or part of the “brotherhood” or “the Lord’s church.”

Even today, there are Churches of Christ, universities, professors, and preachers wrangling over whether clapping in church, to the beat of the music, is an “aid” or an “addition.” It’s considered a salvation issue by many. Churches are dividing and damning one another over this issue. (Most of the Churches of Christ in my hometown will declare those congregations that clap during the service damned for their error.)

Other churches are presently being torn up over elder reaffirmation, the theory being that reaffirming elders is not found in scripture, an unauthorized practice, and therefore damning. Really.

The notion that errors of this type necessarily damn is pagan. That attitude toward God and scriptures does not come from the Bible. It’s not remotely “New Testament Christianity.” It’s magic. It’s to lower the God of the Universe to the level of Zeus — a demon. It’s to paganize Christianity. It’s to give paganism the victory over Jesus — nullifying his death on the cross. It destroys grace.

Should we obey God’s commands? Of course. Should we imagine that God is grading our worship with a scorecard ready to damn us to hell for any mistake? No.

Notice the verse the precedes Psalm 19:14 —

(Psa 19:13 NIV) Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. Then I will be blameless, innocent of great transgression.

Even the Old Testament distinguishes honest mistakes from “willful sins.” David declared himself blameless and innocent if only he could avoid willfully sinning. That’s the difference. Paganism has no grace for innocent error.

None of this is to say that those who’ve taught these falsehoods about God are wicked people. Not the victims of such teaching. Most are genuinely good people trying their best to honor God. It’s not their fault that they’ve been deceived about the character of the God they worship.

But that doesn’t change the fact that they’ve been taught something very, very far removed from New Testament Christianity.

The solution, of course, is not to damn and demonize those who’ve been deceived. It’s to teach a better, truer gospel. And this is where syncreticism comes in. We desperately want to blend grace and love and the Spirit with a doctrine that damns people who clap or worship to a guitar. And it can’t be done.

It can’t be done because it requires two different understandings of who God is. God can’t be both a demanding deity ready to damn all who worship contrary to the silences — even in perfect good faith and innocence — and the God revealed in Jesus.

“God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” and then hid the rules of salvation in the silences of the sentences. It just doesn’t fit. Why die for us and then make the rules so unclear that even our conservative Church of Christ college professors can’t agree on whether clapping damns?

One last point: This approach to Christianity crosses over to paganism when the interpretation of these rules becomes a salvation issue or a fellowship issue. Merely disagreeing with me or someone else about how to dress for church or how best to worship is not, itself, pagan. It becomes pagan when such questions define the boundaries of salvation, when “the issues” define the borders of the Kingdom, because we then leave behind Christianity — filled with grace, faith, love, Spirit, and relationship — and turn it into test of rite-keeping.