Pumpkins, Pew-Sitters & Paganism

It's late October again and you know what that means....more preachers bashing halloween!:) I was driving home last night, listening to good ole' Christian radio and hearing the ever-so-familiar "pagan roots of Halloween" talk. According to this radio personality, the celebration of halloween should be avoided at all costs due to it's evil connection to pagan roots. Don't send your kids "trick or treating", send them to the "harvest festival" instead!:) (You can laugh there!):)

Now, I am in no way defending the demonic symbolisms, etc. that are attached to halloween. I just think that the whole thing is a bit paradoxical. After all, pagan traditions are pretty common throughout the institutional church system. Much of what we have come to expect from our Sunday services actually finds it's roots in pagan culture and ritual. Everything from the Aristotelian three-point sermon to the elegant chairs on the stage demonstrates the willingness of the traditional church to embrace pagan traditions and ideas.

Many believers go from service to service without ever stopping to think about what they are doing. While being scared to question or simply failing to do so, many believers simply partake of whatever the system serves up. Eventually, someone stops to ask why. Oftentimes, this person is neither popular nor welcome.

One such person was Martin Luther. It just happens that on October 31st (of all days), Luther nailed his "95 Theses" to the door of the church at Wittenberg, thus declaring his distaste for and disagreement with the "system" of his time, the Roman Catholic Church. At the time, Martin Luther confronted a machine that had been steadily rolling downhill for over one-thousand years. Of course, the cry of the institutional church of his time was "How dare you?", or "This is the way we have always done it!". But, for Luther, tradition was simply not enough. He had tried everything from performing acts of penance to worshipping relics, but nothing seemed to cleanse his conscious. Finally, he discovered that wonderful passage from the book of Romans, "the just shall live by faith", and thus was the formal beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

Think of it. The Reformers were willing to stand against long-held traditions and practices that had preceded their own lives by a multitude of years. I feel that in many cases, we should do the same.

What bothers me about many of our current church practices is really not so much that they are steeped in paganism. Rather, it is the inability of believers to distinguish such from biblical teaching. Instead of simply recognizing a tradition for what it is--either a past way in which the church tried to contextualize a biblical teaching or simply a case of getting it wrong--, we use "proof texts" from the Bible in order to read our practice(s) back into the Scripture. The danger in this is apparent; one can no longer distinguish between biblical teaching and someone's continued misapplication thereof.

Which is worse, someone's participation in a purely pagan custom with full acknowledgment of it as such, or the church trying to pass off long-held pagan traditions as sacred? What do you think?