A while back I read Frank Viola and George Barna’s controversial-in-Christian-circles book, Pagan Christianity?  I thoroughly enjoyed the text.  Why?  Because the authors critically historicized many taken for granted practices that are familiar in churches on Sunday morning (e.g. the church building, the sermon, the pastor, the music, and dress of practitioners on days of worship, and so on).  Most controversially, they argued and convincingly (in my view) showed that many of these practices were originally developed in Pagan and Jewish traditions.  They argued that Christians, especially after the 1^st century, adopted practices from foreign traditions.  This means that practices like building churches and dressing up in special attire for worship are not internal to Christianity.  Basically, Viola and Barna argue, synthesis between Christian and non-Christian practices has been the norm and the problem from very early on in the history of the faith.

I would agree that synthesis has been occurring since early on in the history of the Christian faith.  Viola and Barna, however, pull up short in their historicizing attitude.  In the “Preface” and developed throughout the book is the thesis: “the first century church was the church in its purest form, before it was tainted or corrupted”; the “normative practices of the first-century church were the natural and spontaneous expression of the divine life that indwelt the early Christians.   And those practices were solidly grounded in the timeless principles and teachings of the New Testament” (xviii- xix).  The 1^st century church, which they really don’t talk a whole about since the focus is on the 2^nd century and beyond, is represented by Viola and Barna in a romanticized and thoroughly de-historicized and de-contextualized form.  It think that is one disappointing note about the book.

To be clear, I don’t have a lot of data on hand.  But it seems pretty clear to me that the early followers of Jesus in the 1^st century were not living in a vacuum and that they developed their unique practices in relation to people who were often very, very different.  Pagan and Jewish traditions were everywhere and were dominantly positioned in relation to upstart religions—like the early followers of Jesus.  In this important way, then, the Pagan and Jewish traditions played a logically integral role in the early formation of Christian practice: it was often in a relation of opposition to many Pagan and Jewish practices that Christians formed their selves into a community.  For instance, it was against polygamy that monogamy was put into practice; similarly, 1^st century faithful met in the homes of their practitioners, which was a practice developed in opposition to the Pagan and Jewish practice of building, maintaining, and meeting in a separate structure.   

A comprehensibly relational view of Christianity must let go of the notion of a pure and untainted origin separate from history and context.  If we are formed in relation to God, neighbor, and enemy, then even at the moment of origin we are defined in close and harmonious relation to some things and oppositional relations to some other things.  Those relations were fundamental then and those relations continue to be fundamental now.  There was never a moment at which time followers of Jesus were outside and unrelated to their fundamental relations between God, neighbor, and enemy.  Indeed, it is these fundamental relations, I would argue, that make their faith practices’ existence possible from the very start.