A clear message was sent to his fellow Athenians: All who question the established customs will meet the same fate! His incessant questioning of tightly held traditions provoked the leaders of Athens to charge him with “corrupting the youth.” As a result, they put Socrates to death. Socrates’ habit of pelting people with searching questions and roping them into critical dialogues about their accepted customs eventually got him killed. This method is known as dialectic or “the Socratic method.” He thought freely on matters that his fellow Athenians felt were closed for discussion.
Socrates believed that truth is found by dialoguing extensively about an issue and relentlessly questioning it. Born and raised in Athens, his custom was to go about the town relentlessly raising questions and analyzing the popular views of his day. Socrates (470–399 BC) is considered by some historians to be the father of philosophy. The truth is that precious little that is observed today in contemporary Christianity maps to anything found in the first-century church. As pastors preach from their pulpits about being “biblical” and following the “pure Word of God,” their words betray them. Questions like: Is sitting in this uncushioned pew, staring at the back of twelve rows of heads for forty-five minutes, doing things by the Book? Why do we spend so much money to maintain this building when we’re here only twice a week for a few hours? Why is half the congregation barely awake when Pastor Farley preaches? Why do my kids hate Sunday school? Why do we go through this same predictable, yawn-inspiring ritual every Sunday morning? Why am I going to church when it bores me to tears and does nothing for me spiritually? Why do I wear this uncomfortable necktie every Sunday morning when all it seems to do is cut off blood circulation to my brain?Īs startling as it may sound, almost everything that is done in our contemporary churches has no basis in the Bible. Questions that no Christian is supposed to ask. As scores of frozen pew sitters filled his horizon, Winchester continued to ponder similar new questions. This single thought unleashed a torrent of other barbed questions. Suddenly Winchester had a new thought: I don’t remember reading anywhere in the Bible that Christians are supposed to dress up to go to church. Winchester Spudchecker, a member of Pastor Farley’s church, had heard them dozens of times before.
These were the words that thundered forth from the mouth of Pastor Farley as he delivered his Sunday morning sermon. “We do everything by the Word of God! The New Testament is our guide for faith and practice! We live … and we die … by this Book!” “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Have We Really Been Doing It by the Book?
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an excerpt from Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and Geroge Barna (Tyndale House Publishers).
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