No, feel free to quote liberal proponents of, e.g., women's ordination here if you like. Just don't expect many of us to give them much credibility.
BTW, he's more or less paraphrasing a quotation from Cardinal Newman. Newman included "the giving of the ring in marriage" as one of the Christianized pagan customs in his list. Y'all better get rid of those wedding rings. ;-)
Oddly, women's ordination doesn't bother me. In any case, you're simply poisoning the well, not giving us any reason to discount Bokenkotter's specific claims in this area. Are you actually denying that when the pagans were forced into the Church that they brought many of their traditions with them? How do you, within a Biblical context, explain not only Easter eggs and rabbits, but mistletoe, Yule logs and Christmas Trees? And those are just the easy-to-point-out ones.
The fact is that there is no real debate on whether there are pagan influences on common Church tradition, but rather on how deep do those influences go. That is, are they only seen in a few odd customs that we keep around the holidays but don't really influence our theology, or do they actually (and erroneously) affect our understanding of the Bible and Christian theology?
That's a much deeper question than we can go into on this thread in full detail. However, the fact remains that there was a distinct change in the Ekklesia's practice of keeping the Passover according to the Jewish calendar that is well-documented in the early Church fathers, and that we have numerous odd rituals in our current holidays that make no sense from a Biblical standpoint, but which are consistent with pagan beliefs and practices about the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.
You've still not even attempted to argue those two points.
Newman included "the giving of the ring in marriage" as one of the Christianized pagan customs in his list. Y'all better get rid of those wedding rings. ;-)
Nah, the Jews do that too, and the wedding ring--plain or adorned with a single stone--is about as neutral a symbol of union as one could ever imagine. Now, if we customarily decorated our rings with rabbits and eggs to symbolize the hope for a fruitful union, we might begin to wonder.