One of the most challenging and rewarding books I have read for a long time, and keep on returning to, is my next Terrific Tome: it’s a big book and worth spending a lot of time with.
Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Anne Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).
This extraordinary study suggests that the central focus of much of Christian theology and spirituality upon the atoning death of Jesus was actually a development that took place almost one thousand years after the event.
In the opening words of this study, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker say, ‘It took Jesus a thousand years to die.’
To explain: Brock and Parker argue that late in the first Christian millennium the focus of spirituality and theology shifted from celebration of life with God in the present world, itself created and redeemed by God through the death and resurrection of Jesus, to a much more specific focus upon the death of Jesus as a source of atonement.
It is noteworthy that all the models of atonement widely known today were articulated after the first millennium, though of course there were such ideas much earlier. The question really is about how these ideas were expressed and the use to which they were and are put.
Brock and Parker suggest that the Black Death plagues and the Crusades had a crucial part to play in the need for a different theology of death, offering meaning to the early and gruesome deaths experienced in the plague and providing a spiritual significance to the sacrificial deaths of Christians in the Crusades.[1] In effect, these soldiers of Christ were entering into his death and receiving salvation through that sacrifice.
Brock and Parker undertook extensive research into Christian art throughout all of Christian Europe and found that there are virtually no representations of the cross prior to this period. On the other hand, with the development of this new emphasis on atonement theology, an impressive number of works were created, feeding the imagination of the faithful.
Furthermore, it was at this time that new liturgies for the Eucharist were written and mandated, expressing this theology, with a stress upon the death of Jesus as a victim, ‘a pure victim, a holy victim, an unspotted victim’, as the Carolingian liturgy stated, inviting believers to hope and pray that their own lives and deaths might also have such significance.[2] So faith is primarily about a worthy death.
While these were the predominant forms, there were some other voices. By contrast, for example, they cite a ninth century series of songs and poems, renditions of the Gospels, written in German, not Latin, and which celebrate Christ as life-giver, ‘the one who created everything—the world and its happiness’. The body and blood have a ‘making-power’: this is the vision of paradise not as something lost in the pre-historic past, nor as something in another world to which we might hope to escape, but as the continuous re-creation of God’s world, here and now, made possible and effective through the resurrection of Christ. Eucharistic participation is our engagement with this re-creating making-power. This is not the sombre, funereal atmosphere of so many of the ‘communion’ services I have known. It is an occasion of joy, hope and vigorous anticipation of new creation.
The mediaeval Church, however, developed other strategies. Brock and Parker explain the two key moves of the Church in the face of the violence and turmoil that threatened its peace and power. The first of these they call ‘confining paradise’—establishing special communities, ‘walled havens of paradise’. The atrium of monastery churches, they note, was described with the architectural term ‘paradise’. In effect, paradise was confined in miniature and exclusive places, where the majority of people might perhaps visit for some sweet but very temporary solace.
The other defensive strategy of the Church was a series of ‘peace councils’, where clear definitions of who belonged, who was ‘in’ and who was excluded were developed. Physically and conceptually, the Christian community closed the circles around itself.
Brock and Parker have made a strong case for re-considering the way atonement theology has claimed a central place for the death of Jesus, sometimes with little reference to his life and his message of creative life with God in the present, against the powers of ‘empire’. Their understanding of the Christian faith as grounded in the resurrection of Jesus and a much more developed affirmation of God’s creation invites us to re-consider the nature and foundation of our life with God and therefore the nature and meaning of salvation. It really does push back against those concerns to define who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, as if the Church or anyone else has that right or place. A creation-centred theology might just be the theology and ethic that can save is from cosmic climate annihilation.
In responding to this ‘terrific tome’, which has so much more than I have sketched above, I am mindful of the recent work by Stephen Patterson, The Forgotten Creed, which argues for a truly primitive or foundational Christian creed, a baptismal creed, so simple and yet so profound:
‘You are a child of God. There is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female.’
The idea that this credo, evident in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, is the most fundamental but largely ‘forgotten’ Christian creed, also forms the basis for the narrative in Christos Tsiolkas’s latest novel, Damascus. There, in bold and sometimes brutal relief, the life of the earliest Christians is presented as shaped by the conviction that ‘the Saviour’ will soon return and that his Gospel ethic makes them all sisters and brothers. They are all children of God and no other status applies at all.
What these works invite us to consider is the way in which all kinds of cultural demands, conceptual frameworks and community norms have shaped the tradition of the faith, so much perhaps that its life-affirming and world-transforming potential has been lost, or blunted, even whilst being passed on.
In this time of Covid-19, a modern plague, it is worth considering whether we too have a sufficiently life-affirming, creation-centred vision of salvation. We may not have the idea of a ‘worthy death’ and Christ as a victim, but we can easily envisage ‘salvation’ as an escape from this world and this life and ‘paradise’, the arena of God’s saving activity, as somewhere else.
None of this suggests we should abandon the message of Christian faith. On the contrary, it urges us to peel back some of the layers of intellectual and cultural traditions, to discover afresh what it might be to belong, not by merit or birth or act of believing, but rather simply to accept that we already belong to the community of God, the family of faith, living in the world which God created and sustains—a saving paradise.
[1] Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Anne Parker, Saving Paradise, Chapters 10 – 12.
[2] Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Anne Parker, Saving Paradise. See particularly 233 – 253.
I have just started reading Saving Paradise. The Prologue has whetted my appetite to keep reading.
However, can’t resist commenting on your statement about the funereal atmosphere of so many of the communion services I have known. I have been there too. I think of communion as a celebration of the ordinary, bread, wine and people.