I greatly appreciate your insight and feel that you've made good points in your statement. I suppose I'm just a little lost/confused right now. I'm not sure where my journey is going to end, but I'll definitely take in account your thoughts.
However, I do have a question, if being Christian-Pagan isn't a realistic goal to have, what would your thoughts be on being a witchcraft practicing Christian?
I don't think it's a very good idea, but rather than just leaving it at that I'd ask you (rhetorically, of course) what it is in the practice of magic that you feel would need to be retained or continued in your practice of Christianity.
In my Church in particular (the Egyptian Church), our historical authorities do testify that for the first 2-3 centuries, during the process of active Christianization of the native Egyptians, there was a sort of admixture of paganism and Christianity, as more and more practitioners of traditional Egyptian paganism converted to Christianity. This is hypothesized by some in relevant fields to account for the uniqueness of Egyptian Christian chant (which is sometimes hypothesized to date back to the times of the Pharaohs), Egyptian Christian theology as expressed in Coptic rather than in Greek (not that there's anything wrong with Greek; we've always used both, as the earliest bilingual Greek-Coptic Biblical texts are dated to about 150 AD, +/- 90 years from the martyrdom of St. Mark in 68 AD), etc., etc.
So some people, looking at this history, would say that the Coptic Orthodox Church in particular didn't get rid of enough of its supposedly 'pagan' practices in the conversion of Egypt to Christianity. That's pretty silly to people actually in the Church, though, who have made the point to me that each one of these things we retained as part of the indigenous religious culture were things that
strengthened our Christianity: that the people would chant the way that they always had since that was the Egyptian way of praying to God already; that they would pray in their traditional language because that's what they find most spiritually fulfilling; and so on. You can even find the pre-Christian Egyptian ankh symbol (the cross with the little circular handle at the top) in Christian art and textiles produced in Egypt in the late Roman period. As friends of mine have put it, their ancestors were the ones who made the connection between the ankh as the symbol of eternal life and the cross as the symbol of eternal life, so in that way the pre-Christian religion of Egypt prepared their ancestors to see the coming of Christ as the fulfillment of what they had always done and believed. (Similar to how the Jews of the holy land joined Christianity in the context of a messianic movement, not necessarily as a 'new' religion separate from Judaism, even though that line would definitely be drawn at some point in early Christianity.)
Anyway, I provide this example to show that the question of what to incorporate from one's previous religious life (whether pagan or not) is one that the Church has had to deal with many times over the centuries, and in each case what was acceptable was baptized into Christian practice by the Church (i.e., now we still sing the 'Egyptian way', but to Christ our God, instead of Toth or Anubis or whoever), meaning that what was not acceptable was discarded, because Christianity did not and does not lack anything to be 'filled in' with paganism. Christianity is whole and complete as it is, in this view.
