Getting back to paradise

I've read the book Saving Paradise by Brock & Parker and even wrote several pages of notes from it. Naturally, after going through that much work I'd like to share. The book explains why modern Christianity is so messed up. It also sheds new light on key early events in American history. Christianity started with creating paradise, then threw it away. We've been trying to get back to it ever since. That's the short version. The rest of this posting is long because the book is long.

The authors toured many places of Christian art of the first millennium. They were surprised to discover this art never depicted the dead Jesus. That's in contrast to modern Catholicism where a dead Jesus hangs from the cross in every church. Instead, this ancient art usually depicts a paradise. So the two authors did several years of research into the beliefs and practices of Christians over two millennia. They found that indeed the emphasis of the first millennium is on paradise, creating a heaven on earth now, rather than waiting for heaven until after death. Even though life was pretty good (for the times) Christian leaders didn't get everything right. The men rather liked the Roman notion that women should be submissive and bent theology to explain why they were right.

That all changed with Charlemagne. Christianity changed from a religion of life to one of death (details below). We haven't recovered yet.

These are passages and their ideas from the book that caught my attention. Quote marks mean I have taken the passage straight out of the book.

Part 1, Paradise on earth

While the description of how ancients viewed paradise is fascinating I'm more interested in what went wrong. So I have few notes on ancient paradise.

Paradise is a way of life. Member's strengths, weaknesses, needs, and contributions complemented each other. Life is a shared accomplishment. Actions of one matter to others. Members learn to negotiate power and responsibility for the whole. Talents bless many, burdens shared by many.

When the Eucharist, the central rite of Christianity, focuses on the death of Jesus it also focuses blame on who killed him. It separates the forgiven from the guilty, the absolved from unrepentant killers, those who deserve life from those who deserve to die. How can Christians memorialize the crucifixion without being hostile to those of another faith?

In paradise the process of becoming divine was done by the group. There was no individual salvation.

Prior to the 4th Century wisdom was highly prized. However, the definition of martyrdom changed with the emphasis on the innocence of the victims. That idea spread beyond martyrdom. Any power or decision-making ability was corrupting. Innocence was prized. Powerful could only be good if it was used in the benefit of the powerless. The powerful became the kindly helper, the innocent the grateful victims. People were not expected to take charge of their own lives and live in dignity. The powerful no longer needed to create social conditions so that all could live equally. The powerful needed to have a victim.

Icons or other religious imagery were suspect and forbidden. That's because images evoked passionate feelings, including hatred and violence. In other words, propaganda. Images could be used unethically and the community could be led astray. Veneration of icons took the place of actually building community.

Part 2, What went wrong

The Saxons had been harassing Charlemagne's eastern border. For 33 years around 800 CE. Charlemagne terrorized the Saxons and forced religious conformity as a means of making treaties binding. He was annoyed that Christian theology had been freely mingled with pagan ideas by the Saxons. Charlemagne's treatment of the Saxons was both a security issue and an expanding empire issue.

Charlemagne destroyed the Saxon's holy sites -- sacred springs, trees, etc. -- as part of his effort to convert them. That caused Charlemagne and his army to reject the Christian idea of the time that the earth is infused with divine presence. That opened the ecosystem to exploitation.

The Eucharist shifted from a celebration of the resurrection to a reenactment of the crucifixion. The purpose of Christ shifted from redemption and love to judgment. Death was not defeated, but became eternal. Death haunted the West European imagination leading to wide and diffuse anxiety. To be human was to suffer and die. Each man was a killer of Christ and condemned unless he performed sufficient penance, but it was impossible to know how much penance was sufficient. Carolingians used violence to convert pagans, then taught the victims such violence was justified and sanctified.

In 1095 Pope Urban II called a "Peace Council" to call for the First Crusade. As part of his call to arms, he said "Whoever goes on the journey to free the church of God in Jerusalem … can substitute the journey for all penance of sin." (ellipsis in the original) This reversed a thousand years of Christian teaching. War was no longer a sin, but a way to absolve sin, a way to paradise. The penance was so complete a crusader could erase all previous, current, and future sins.

According to Anselm, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, the greatest gift the Christ gave us is his death (not the resurrection). Therefore God took pleasure in that death and the best way for a person to honor that death and to honor God is to die in a Christian cause. This justified holy war and the Crusades.

The First Crusade spurred the creation of holy fighting knights, such as the Templars. These were knights who killed for God. While Jews and Muslims also shared ideas of holy war, the Christian version mixed adoration of the crucifixion, the gift of death, expectation of judgment, and the inability to distinguish between defeat and death or victory and life. Earthly paradise -- the Holy Land -- became a place to conquer and colonize.

"In seeing Christ's suffering on the cross, Abelard felt, people should be moved in pity to blame themselves, entreat forgiveness, and promise to make amends." Peter Abelard lived 1079-1142.

"Abelard confused innocence and impotence with love and implied that no use of power could ever be loving. … His emphasis on selfless love also meant that his total love for Christ the victim of sin involved embracing Christ's suffering without thought of himself. Abelard takes on Christ's pain. Now, instead of a victim of pain and someone to help him, there are two helpless victims of pain, Christ and Abelard. Abelard's love is the compassionate absorption and multiplication of suffering, not its alleviation. Abelard offers no ethical way to use power to stop harm."

"Christianity moved increasingly towards love that was submissive, brokenhearted, and perpetually unrequited, always longing for final fulfillment, The church in western Europe had once been in love with the risen Christ, who joined his bride in the earthly garden of delight and helped her tend it. Beginning in the ninth century, she began to doubt her lover and took a violent Lord into her bed, lay with him, blessed him, and finally took him into the Christian family by marrying him. Erotically enthralled by her seductive abuser, the church spawned devotional pieties of fear, sorrow, torture, and death, whose progeny journeyed into the world determined to destroy their own shadows and neighbors. To solidify this unholy union, the church sacrificed her former love by killing him repeatedly and partaking of his mutilated body. She told herself that conquest, genocide, and the colonization of Jerusalem were God's will, a holy pilgrimage that would someday, if she sacrificed and suffered enough, deliver salvation, end the violence, and restore her to her first love. This delusional pattern would later carry conquistadors and pilgrims to America and leave Jerusalem as one of the most contested cities on the planet. To assuage her broken heart and bleeding body, she told herself that such a marriage was good and pleasing to God. She hung, suspended in eschatological terror and hope, longing elusively for release, relief, and love's fulfillment. They did not come."

In the 14th Century a series of calamities hit Europe. The biggest was the plague, but there were various other devastating diseases. There was also drought and famine and the Hundred Year's War. Wars, epidemics, and disasters killed perhaps 20 million people, half the population. Christianity was no longer built on hope and was not up to the task of being a religion for the people. If such a horror was part of the divine plan for salvation, humans could not find the hope. If God's wrath caused the faithful to suffer so much, divine power was indistinguishable from evil. But if these calamities were outside of God's control, no one was in charge of history and God was irrelevant.

Of course, there were the voices who proclaimed all this suffering was a result of human sin and we only need to return to God's laws. Some even called for another crusade.

Europe's people needed an escape, a way back to paradise. They found it in 4 ways: the legend of Prester John (I won't elaborate), worldwide exploration for the actual Garden of Eden, the Protestant Reformation, and Calvin's resurrection of Eden through Puritanism.

Cristobal Colon (who we know as Christopher Columbus) set sail looking for paradise (which he thought was in India). He found it in the New World. But his heart was too cold to be able to set up a paradise community. Instead, he turned paradise into a way of generating cold cash.

The rallying cry of the Protestants was Sola Sciptura, which translates as Scripture alone. It was a call to return to unsullied Christianity, to be found not in interpretations, but in the pages of the bible. The church had banned bibles in the vernacular, which required the priests to interpret the bible for the people and impose their own meaning on it. With the bible in the hands of the people (thanks to Gutenberg) and in a language they understood they could read and interpret it for themselves. Sermons changed to explain the meaning of the text. Churches were designed around making sure everyone could hear the sermon.

The Puritans came to New England not only for religious freedom, but to create a new Eden out of the wilderness. Their Calvinist faith taught that the world was filled with deceptive images and decoys of the devil. Thus senses were not to be trusted. They could not rely on astute observation to understand the world around them. Instead they relied on biblical interpretation as a guide to the truth. This baffled the natives, who used observation to understand their place in the world.

The natives were sometimes seen as original inhabitants of Eden and thus innocent children. Sometimes they were viewed as Canaanites, the illegitimate inhabitants of the Promised Land, to be rooted out. Mostly they were viewed as agents of Satan, demons in the shape of humans.

"The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience."

In 1679 King Philip, a native, unleashed war on the Puritans. The Puritans did not examine how their treatment of the natives prompted the attack. Instead, they viewed the war as God's punishment for straying away from proper observance of their faith. The response to divine punishment was to be stoic endurance. In inflicting horror God proved his love. One should be grateful for such divine attention. The punishing pain led to later glory. The proper response was stricter control over the community. One must be ever vigilant because a tiny thread of hope was all that kept them from the horror of Hell.

"The restless Puritan impulse to build paradise and their obsession with their own piety and redemption remain in white supremacist culture in the United States. Preoccupied with its own needs an anxieties, it tends to regard those it opposes and exploits as important only insofar as they can play a role in a script in which whites are the main characters. Locked within a biblically based master narrative, white society embraces African, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Native Americans as instruments of judgment and as agents of absolution. However, those shaped by such a culture tend to be primarily concerned with the state of their own souls -- their guilt and their longing to be restored to innocence and their need to believe in their own goodness."

Can we create paradise here and now? We yearn for what we had and hope for what we might create. Thus we do not live in the present. We ache for paradise and the ache drives consumerism, the unquenchable need for the unnecessary. This ache for idealized wilderness perversely leads us to harm the environment. This American romanticism is based on the Puritan habit of dividing life. The "good" is to be preserved and the "evil" destroyed. Not surprisingly, snakes are described as evil. But life is sustained by integration and living in the present.

Hosea Ballou (1771-1852) promoted the idea of Christian Universalism. This is the idea that everyone will get to Heaven, not just the ones who believe in God. Some of the other ideas that Ballou promoted: If one believes in a violent God one will imitate that violence and feel justified. If God condemns some to Hell then one human torturing another is acceptable. It makes no sense to attribute to God behaviors we would regard as immoral when a human does them. Violence cannot beget peace.

Some said that without punishment for sin and incentives to be moral why would anyone avoid sin? Ballou responded with a story: Your child has fallen and become dirty and you wash it and give it clean clothes. Do you love it because you washed it or did you wash it because you loved it?

God's love and beauty is what draws people to acts of justice and mercy and draws them to happiness. Loving God does not require enduring misery in this life for happiness in the next. True happiness lay in seeking it for every human being. It requires promoting common good, justice, and well-being for all, including the poor, outcast, imprisoned, and injured. Loving relationships are available here and now. Hell is what people create through cruelty and greed, it isn't eternal punishment after death. Paradise is also available here and now.

Calvinist Puritans saw social justice as a prelude to apocalyptic end times with purifying violence. Universalists worked for reform to fulfill the prayer, "Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven."

Though many white elites supported the abolition of slavery they balked at reforms that would disrupt their privileged status of true Americans. Others troubled by slavery still didn't want to let go of the economic advantages.

Theologies that emphasize how the other is like oneself don’t get very far. A community must see people as both kin and other, as a celebration of difference. The work of justice is in paying attention on how difference is used to justify privilege or oppression and to challenge it.

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) lists six kinds of community sins that combined to kill Jesus: religious bigotry, political power used for private profit instead of public good, a corrupt legal system, mob spirit and mob action which can include whole countries (a well dressed mob is more dangerous than a ragged one because it is more efficient), militarism, and class contempt and class division.

After American slaves were freed lynching was a way for Christian white supremacists to reassert themselves. These were not done by outlaws but were community events with people coming in their Sunday best and holding a picnic. This shows how deeply Christian notions of redemptive violence are ingrained in the American psyche. Such violence benefits from those who teach that selfless love acquiesces to violence.

Strong grief is not something a person can handle alone. Those who are alone survive only by clamping down on all feeling. Within a protecting community grief can lead to restoration and injustice can fuel creative action.

Paradise is for the broken. Within a community shattered lives can recover. Paradise does not mean conflict, despair, and injustice are eliminated, but it means being present, fully feeling, and passionately engaged in the struggle for life.

It is difficult to keep open to human horrors, especially for one who is privileged. It is easy to deny or at least turn away from an injustice that happens to someone else. Simple condemnation can become a dodge. One can become an immune participant to injustice. What is needed is working towards restorative action. A deep affirmation of life's goodness, beauty, love, and grace -- knowing paradise -- allows one to protest injustice. It is living life here and now rather than waiting for an afterlife.

We Christians long for a pristine past and future. We judge this age to be corrupt -- we look for the problems and are suspicious of the rest. But we don't actually pay much attention to the time in which we live. We seek paradise elsewhere. We look for happiness in separation, free from conscience. We get hostility to obligation and limits of what we can consume. Avarice motivates economic aggrandizement, military domination, environmental exploitation, violence, and colonization.

What we should develop instead is salvation that depends on paradise as now. It is based on mutual responsibility and knowing, Paradise does not mean no more struggle, but does mean wrestling with legacies of injustice to bring our culture into accord with paradise. We are to live in ethical grace with strong communities, rituals to train perception, and beauty to give us joy. Ethical grace requires us to share responsibility, act generously, and resist dominating forces. We are to value the distinct gifts of individuals. Beauty calls us to be fully in the world, attentive to details around us, emotionally alive, open to grace, and responsive to injustice.