Tikkun Magazine, July/August 2009

This article is based on Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Boston: Beacon Press, 2008, a best book of the year at Publishers Weekly. For more information, including many more art works, see www.savingparadise.net. 

by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker

It took Jesus a thousand years to die. Images of his corpse did not appear in churches until the tenth century. Why not? This question set us off on a five-year pilgrimage to ancient sites throughout the Mediterranean world. What we discovered is that during their first millennium, Christians filled their sanctuaries with images of Christ as living presence in a world ablaze with beauty. The spaces placed Christians in a lush visual environment: a cosmos of stars in midnight skies, golden sunlight, sparkling waters teeming with fish, exuberant fauna, and verdant meadows filled with flowers and fruit trees. Punctuating such scenes were images of the great cloud of witnesses. 

Paradise, we realized, was the dominant image of early Christian sanctuaries. This both disconcerted and intrigued us. On the one hand, we were dismayed to think that early Christians appeared to be obsessed with the afterlife. On the other hand, we wondered why they covered every inch of church walls with such images. As we investigated further, studying sacred texts and rituals as well as images, we came to understand that paradise was not an other-worldly or post-mortem realm. Paradise was this world-permeated and blessed by the presence of God-and it was the counter-realm to empire. As feminists, long concerned with the problems created by crucifixion-centered forms of Christianity, we decided to explore this ancient vision of paradise to illuminate the struggles and possibilities in our own time.

Many scriptures picture a lush garden, a safe and beautiful dwelling place for humanity, watered by a river that assures abundance for all. The prophets of the Bible invoked the story of creation and of the garden in Genesis to judge and condemn unjust, unwise kings, their oppressive policies, and their wars. The prophet Amos used images of paradise to call for justice. "Let justice roll down," he said, "like rivers." Like the rivers of paradise. The prophet Isaiah promised paradise here and now to those who share earth's wealth justly: "Share your bread with the hungry, open your house to the poor ... You shall be like a watered garden, whose springs never run dry."

The Christian gospels echo prophetic uses of paradise and justice. In Luke, for example, Jesus announces his mission in the world by reading from the book of Isaiah.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor (Luke 4:18-19 and Isaiah 61:1-2).

Jesus quotes from a chapter in Isaiah that begins with creation's goodness and concludes with the earth flourishing as a renewed garden. With the arrival of the year of the Lord's favor-a jubilee year of justice-Isaiah says God will cause "what is sown in [the garden] to spring up ... [and] righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations." Isaiah wrote his words to exiles suffering under the Babylonian empire. In Luke, Jesus reads these words to the poor of Galilee who were struggling with a new empire. "Today," Jesus announces to them, "this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." (Luke 4:21) In echoing the vision of Isaiah, Jesus says the Spirit of God in the world is already at work to encourage a fuller flowering of righteousness-today, not tomorrow, not later, but now. And later in the same gospel, Jesus says, "Today, you will be with me in paradise." Not later in the afterlife, but today, here on earth.

Paradise in the Bible is blessed, but it also poses dangers. As Genesis makes clear, the serpent was in the garden before the fall. So the garden of God is not an ideal utopia without challenges. Its inhabitants must exercise wisdom and astute judgment if they are to avoid the traps that evil sets before them. And difference and struggle-tension and disputation-are hallmarks of life in the garden.

The Paradise in This World

Paradise on earth dominated early Christian understandings of salvation. Many early leaders called the church "the paradise in this world." Christianity in this form shared much with Judaism, which began in the Second Temple period to identify Mt. Zion with the paradise mountain, the Jordan as the great river of paradise, and the Temple as its focus, a cosmology found in the book of Ezekiel.

The maintenance of paradise required people of faith to work to alleviate suffering, to appreciate the spirit of God in all creation, to love beauty as a blessing of creation, to avoid the use of violence, and to care for each other as friends of God. Sinning was inevitable; even the wise were not innocent of all sins, but had learned through trial and error how to be more effective at resisting the principalities and powers of the world. Not all sins were equal, however. The worst, which required special handling, were adultery, apostasy, and the shedding of human blood-even pagan blood. Each of these indicated a deep sickness in the soul that destroyed the health of human community centered in compassion, care, trust, and the respectful honoring of the spirit of God in all humanity-- and  in all creation.

To accept membership into the church as paradise meant taking responsibility for sustaining paradise in this world. It meant appreciating, celebrating, and maintaining a salvation already given to the whole community, which, in gratitude, offered food, healing, and shelter to any who needed them. The historian Peter Brown, in summarizing early Christianity, calls it a life-affirming, this-worldly, optimistic faith.

The Imperial Turn to Christ's Tortured Corpse

What happened to this life-affirming Christianity? The first images of Jesus dead appeared in the late tenth century, in Northern Europe. Crucifixion images emerged only after the Christian West saw dramatic changes that began with the Emperor Charlemagne around the year 800. The emergence of such images marked a turn in Christianity toward violence and away from the humane values of compassion, justice, and love for life. Charlemagne, modeling himself on his image of Constantine, ruthlessly forced conversion of his enemies at the point of a sword, breaking the ban on bloodshed. He used his version of Christianity as the propaganda arm of his empire. His clerics insisted that the sins of the empire's pagan enemies had crucified Christ. Instead of Christ being a spirit-inspired model for humanity in paradise, Charlemagne's court theologians made Christ a fierce, wrathful judge who condemned all sinners to hell-especially those who rebelled against imperial rule.

Instead of the church as paradise where the risen Christ and humanity communed in joy, love, and glory, the church became the place of judgment, riddled with fear. Christ crucified, the terrible judge, lorded it over lowly sinners who feared for their lives. As the distance between Christ and humanity grew, the church as paradise in this world became increasingly difficult to imagine, and paradise receded into the distant afterlife. It became so unimaginable that purgatory had to be invented to take care of residual sin, even in the afterlife. The proper piety was abject terror of hell and fervent hope of heaven. Christians longed to be restored to a sinless, pure, and innocent state, as the only refuge from the judgment of God. To suffer punishment and to be completely absolved of sin became the only possible way to enter paradise in the next life, after suffering in purgatory. The more one suffered in this life to atone for one's sins, the closer one came to being absolved and saved.

In the late eleventh century, a theology emerged that said the only reason God took on human flesh in Jesus Christ was to die to save sinners from eternal damnation. Apocalyptic predictions of the world's end escalated during the same period. If God could sanction torture and murder, and seek to destroy the world, holy war for the sake of God became thinkable. Christians began to believe they could be saved through killing those they marked as enemies of God-Jews, Muslims, and heretics. As crusading fever took hold, Christians turned erotic desire not on beauty and creation but on pain, suffering, and death.

Paradise became an idealized, unreal, utopian ideal that could only arrive after the apocalypse, and Christian piety focused on extreme suffering as noble and good. Love of the tortured, murdered corpse became the heart of faith, and self-sacrifice became the highest form of love. Instead of working to alleviate human suffering, Christians began to think of suffering as a sacred calling. Present time became a place of sorrow and sin-Christians were to live in hyper-vigilant suspicion of its dangers and toils, relying only on divine mercy to be delivered from this world of woe.

The vision of life as paradise in this life would not die, however. In the medieval period, dissenting Christian movements such as the Waldensians rejected violence and promoted justice for the poor. In the seventeenth century, Quakers preached that paradise is accessible now through spiritual awakening. In the nineteenth century, Christians whose gender, race, or class had acquainted them firsthand with state-sanctioned oppressions troubled the waters of their faith traditions. Rejecting the pieties of anti-worldly Christianity, they turned to the Jesus of the gospels and generated diverse movements that sought to realize the Kingdom of God "on earth as it is in heaven."

Reformers emerged from oppressed groups themselves to forge vigorous and varied movements that upheld the dignity and worth of all human beings and that worked for justice and equality. They generated new visions for community in North America. Their efforts helped fuel the abolitionist movement, women's suffrage, labor movements, and anti-lynching campaigns.

Bringing in the Commonwealth of God

In the early twentieth century, "Social Gospel" Christians believed the purpose of Christian life was to "bring in the Commonwealth of God"-to fulfill the prophetic vision that "earth might be fair and all people glad and wise." At the end of World War I, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), a German Baptist minister who ministered among the urban poor, published A Theology for the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel inspired many Christians to work for two decades to create the New Deal, the commonwealth that has taken half a century to dismantle and now lies in shambles amid the worthless paper of Wall Street and massive ponzi schemes.

Rauschenbusch had a keen capacity to identify how evil and sin operated in social and political systems, even in the guise of religion. He rejected the typical Christian teaching that sin was rooted in individual rebellion against God's will. Rauschenbusch observed that "in actual life such titanic rebellion against the Almighty is rare.... We do not rebel: we dodge and evade. We kneel in lowly submission and kick our duty under the bed while God is not looking."

Sin mattered, not because it disappointed, offended, or alienated God, but because it disrupted relationships of love and justice in human affairs. Rauschenbusch said:

We rarely sin ... alone. Science supplies the means of killing, finance the methods of stealing, the newspapers have learned how to bear false witness artistically to a globeful of people daily, and covetousness is the moral basis of our civilization.

Rauschenbusch insisted that the death of Jesus did not redeem humanity from its sins. Rather, it revealed the character of transpersonal evil-collective sins of empire and militarism that continue to put earth and its peoples at risk of crucifixion.

Rauschenbusch objected to narrow forms of Christianity. To counteract the sins of nationalism, racial categorization, religious chauvinism, and economic exploitation, God must be conceived as "the all-pervading life ... the ground of ... spiritual oneness," and those who worship God must recognize "the consciousness of solidarity" to be of the essence of religion. Social Gospel theology has, ever since, inspired many Christians to work tirelessly for justice.

Paradise Left Behind

At the dawn of this new century, America's Christians are engaged in deep conflicts generated by the struggle to define and claim paradise. Near the end of the last century, a Christianity that embraces redemptive violence and looks to salvation in a world to come became a major public and political voice for Christians. Re-inscribing imperial Christianity, they bless conquest and colonization, privilege those with wealth and status, sanction war, and exploit the environment. In popular books such as the "Left Behind" series, they offer a paradise that is on the other side of the end of the world, after God destroys this earth.

"Today you will be with me in paradise," Jesus said. But when Christians seek to destroy paradise today, they force people to live in exile, homeless, and always in search of paradise somewhere else. Preoccupied with being lost, people become anxious for home, for escape from present life, which can never measure up to an idealized, imaginary idea of salvation. They turn, instead, to individual salvation in consumerist alternatives, grounded in a deep, hidden despair and profound spiritual loneliness. They are easily manipulated by false "gurus" who scold them and then offer them canned answers, another version of hellfire, judgment, and grace.

People so lost, so self-obsessed, and so hungry for spiritual grounding do not know how to shelter others from the storms of life. Their inability to see paradise here produces an eager greed for what others have, and an insatiable desire for goods. Avarice motivates large-scale programs of economic aggrandizement, military domination, and environmental exploitation.

Paradise Here, Today

We know that another world and another society are possible. They begin when we understand that paradise is already present, and all our faiths can affirm it. What we need now is a religious perspective that does not locate salvation in a future end point in time, a transcendent realm, or a zone after death. Paradise is not withheld, closed, or removed from us. Realizing this requires us to let go of the notion that paradise is life without struggle, life free from wrestling with legacies of injustice and current forces of evil.

Our dangerous opportunity today is to live facing into this reality: histories of harm are all around us, current forces of evil operate within and among us, and yet everywhere the bushes are on fire, the rivers of paradise circle the earth, the Spirit rises in the wind, and the fountain of wisdom springs up from the earth we walk on, from this holy ground, a ground on which we create shelter for each other, even now, even in the storms of today.

We re-commit ourselves to this world as holy ground when we remember the fullness of life that is possible through our communities, our life-affirming work, and our love of each other. We give thanks for gifts of love that have been ours all along, an ever-widening circle of beauty, the Spirit in life, the Spirit in us and in this paradise on earth.