At the Myth and Magic museum tour thing, Lucas spoke on the force. He was trying to not make a religious statement but wanted religiousity in it, so he tried to make something that drew on everything, sort of an everyman's spirituality without embracing or excluding any one system of beliefs. So you have strains of Shinto (binding all living things together with a "force"), Christianity (a conscious, purposeful power greater than us that works through us to accomplish its own good will when we surrender to it), a bit of Hinduism with the whole fate/destiny/karma thing (I may be off on that one, feel free to correct me), Buddhism (becoming one with the force through meditation and concentration, with force visions and stuff), the occult of the Dark Side (bending a power greater than yourself to your own will, but ultimately being broken by it and accomplishing that greater power's evil ends rather than your own), and hard-core science (by which I mean believing scientific laws account for the totality of the universe - in this case included by midichlorians).
So it's not surprising to find Christian references in there. I feel the PT has replaced the Shinto edge of the OT with the hard-core science view, but still allows for some sort of spiritual reality behind the science. And I guess it did center more on the Christian/Occult portion of the force... Anakin's bad dreams seemed to come from the Buddhist facet.
But I'm no expert on world religions, I've just had a little exposure to most of them and somewhere heard GL's intention in creating the Force.