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

Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker are coauthors of Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us. Parker is president of and professor of theology at the Starr King School for the Ministry. Brock is director of Faith Voices for the Common Good and a minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

During their first millennium, Christians filled their sanctuaries with images of Christ as a living presence—as a shepherd, teacher, healer, or an enthroned god. But he is never dead. When he appears with the cross, he stands in front of it, serene, resurrected in a world ablaze, in this world as paradise. But once he perished, dying was virtually all Jesus seemed able to do. Saving Paradise offers a fascinating new lens on the history of Christianity, from its first centuries to the present day, asking how its early vision of beauty evolved into a vision of torture, and what changes in society and theology marked that evolution.

 

Publishers Weekly

Why are images of the crucified Jesus absent from early Christian art? When Brock and Parker, theologians and coauthors of Proverbs of Ashes, investigated representations of Christ in Italy and Turkey's first millennium of public art, they found pictured not death but earthly joy. Descriptions of this art (with sparse b&w photographs), quotes from early Christian writers and strong analyses reveal a powerful "genealogy of paradise" in this life focusing on the "ethical grace" at the heart of Jesus' message. Explorations of baptism, the Eucharist, beauty, martyrdom and human divinity (theosis) show an early Christian world where the resurrection had more hold on the imagination than the crucifixion. Brock and Parker locate the paradigmatic shift toward suffering, judgment and atonement in the bloody forced conversion of the Northern European Saxons by Charlemagne. The book's second half describes the harrowing adoption of "redemptive violence" in medieval Europe and the New World's Eden, built on genocide and slavery. This humane and often beautiful study of faith, loss and hope straddles the boundary between historical discovery and spiritual writing. (July)

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Part One

Ch. 1 In the Beginning ... Paradise on the Earth 3

Ch. 2 In the Beginning ... God So Generously Loved 28

Ch. 3 So Great a Cloud 56

Ch. 4 The Church as Paradise in This World 84

Ch. 5 The Portal to Paradise 115

Ch. 6 The Beautiful Feast of Life 141

Ch. 7 Gods Seeing God 169

Ch. 8 Hidden Treasures of Wisdom 203

Part Two

Ch. 9 The Expulsion of Paradise 223

Ch. 10 Peace by the Blood of the Cross 254

Ch. 11 Dying for Love 279

Ch. 12 Escape Routes 307

Ch. 13 Weeping Encounters 342

Ch. 14 The Struggle for Paradise 377

Epilogue 411

Acknowledgments 421

Notes 425

Index 517