{"id":130,"date":"2009-05-20T11:09:09","date_gmt":"2009-05-20T17:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/?p=130"},"modified":"2009-07-15T13:20:36","modified_gmt":"2009-07-15T19:20:36","slug":"a-review-of-pagan-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/2009\/05\/a-review-of-pagan-christianity\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Pagan Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--StartFragment--><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNoSpacing\">This isn&#8217;t exactly new-news, but it&#8217;s possible that some of you are just now hearing about or reading Barna and Viola, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Pagan-Christianity-Exploring-Church-Practices\/dp\/141431485X\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1242838372&amp;sr=8-1\">Pagan Christianity: Exploring the Roots of our Church Practices<\/a><\/em>, which argues against the <em>institution<\/em> of the church (e.g., its worship service, the sermon, the pastor, clergy salaries, etc.).<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNoSpacing\">Ben Witherington has an excellent and thorough four-part review of this unfortunate-but-influential book:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/benwitherington.blogspot.com\/2008\/06\/pagan-christianty-by-george-barna-and.html\">Part 1<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/benwitherington.blogspot.com\/2008\/07\/pagan-christianityreview-part-two.html\">Part 2<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/benwitherington.blogspot.com\/2008\/07\/pagan-christianityreview-part-three.html\">Part 3<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/benwitherington.blogspot.com\/2008\/07\/pagan-christianityreview-part-four.html\">Part 4<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There&#8217;s also <a href=\"http:\/\/trevinwax.com\/2008\/01\/02\/book-review-pagan-christianity\/\">this review by Trevin Wax<\/a>, which offers basically the same conclusions as Witherington&#8217;s but without the length and depth.<\/p>\n<p><!--EndFragment--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This isn&#8217;t exactly new-news, but it&#8217;s possible that some of you are just now hearing about or reading&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/2009\/05\/a-review-of-pagan-christianity\/\">Continue Reading &rsaquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertspringschurch.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}