e of monastic paganism. Kelley is surely correct, therefore, in labeling monasticism "a false Christianity" given virtually free reign until the Protestant Reformation (pp. 82-83).
In what is surely one of the most valuable features of the book, Kelley outlines the provenance of ecclesiocentrism, the notion that the institutional church should govern and dominate all of life. Like others before him, he recognizes that the idea of the church in the West was patterned largely after imperial Rome and that, therefore, its origin is not Biblical but pagan (p. 116). In addition, however, Kelley discloses that this imperial institutionalization of the church is essentially an ideology of power. The architects of patristic and medieval ecclesiocentrism were interested in employing the
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