Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire

577 Pages·2008·7.26 MB·English

by  Rita Nakashima Brock

 

     
       
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How Christianity Traded
Love of This World for
Crucifixion and Empire
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                
              
Beacon Press

 
Beacon Street
Boston,Massachusetts -
www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
           
Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services
All photographs by the authors
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets
the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brock,Rita Nakashima.
Saving paradise : how Christianity traded love of this world for crucifixion and empire /
Rita Nakashima Brock,Rebecca Ann Parker.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
----(alk.paper)
.Theology—History—Early church,ca.‒. .Theology—History—Middle Ages,
‒. .Paradise—Christianity—History of doctrines. .Nature—Religious aspects—
Christianity. 5.Creation. I.Parker,Rebecca Ann. II.Title.
. 
.—dc 
Grateful acknowledgment is made to translators and publishers for kind permission to reproduce
material in this book.Samuel Kramer,Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary
Achievement,,reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press,Philadelphia;
Sebastian Brock,translator and editor,Saint Ephrem:Hymns on Paradise,,reprinted by per-
mission of St Vladimir’s Seminary Press,Crestwood,NY ,www.svspress.com; Sebastian
Brock,The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem,,reprinted by permis-
sion of Cistercian Publications,Kalamazoo,MI; Kathleen E.McVey,Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns,
,reprinted by permission of Paulist Press,New York; Stephen Cox,The New Testament and
Literature: A Guide to Literary Patterns,,reprinted by permission of Carus Publishing Com-
pany,Chicago; Ronald Murphy,The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel,,reprinted by permission of
Oxford University Press,New York; Peter Dronke,Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study
of Texts from Perpetua (d.) to Marguerite Porete (d.),,reprinted by permission of Cam-
bridge University Press,New York; and Dhuoda,Liber Manualis: Handbook for her Warrior Son,
Cambridge Medieval Classics ,ed.and trans.Marcelle Thiébaux,,reprinted by permission
of Cambridge University Press,New York.
In Memoriam
Dorothy Eleanore Cooper Hartshorne
–

       
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 
 
  
In the Beginning ...
Paradise on the Earth
  
In the Beginning ...
God So Generously Loved
  
So Great a Cloud
  
The Church as Paradise in This World
  
The Portal to Paradise
  
The Beautiful Feast of Life
  
Gods Seeing God
  
Hidden Treasures of Wisdom
 
  
The Expulsion of Paradise
  
Peace by the Blood of the Cross
  
Dying for Love
  
Escape Routes
  
Weeping Encounters
  
The Struggle for Paradise
 
 
 
 
Prologue
I
t took Jesus a thousand years to die.Images of his corpse did not ap-
pear in churches until the tenth century.Why not? This question set us
off on a five-year pilgrimage that led to this book.
Initially,we didn’t believe it could be true.Surely the art historians
were wrong.The crucified Christ was too important to Western Chris-
tianity.How could it be that images of Jesus’s suffering and death were
absent from early churches? We had to see for ourselves and consider
what this might mean.
In July ,we traveled to the Mediterranean in search of the dead
body of Jesus.We began in Rome,descending from the blaze of the
summer sun into the catacombs where underground tunnels and
tombs are carved into soft tufa rock.The earliest surviving Christian art
is painted onto the plaster-lined walls of tombs or carved onto marble
sarcophagi as memorials to the interred.
In the cool,dimly lit caverns,we saw a variety of biblical images.
Many of them suggested rescue from danger.For example,Abraham and
Isaac stood side by side in prayer with a ram bound next to them.
Jonah,the recalcitrant prophet who was swallowed and coughed up by
a sea monster,reclined peacefully beneath the shade of a vine.Daniel
stood alive and well between two pacified lions. Other images sug-
gested baptism and healing,such as the Samaritan woman drawing wa-
ter from a well,John the Baptist dousingJesus,depicted as a child,and
ix