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Voices of Sophia

Author tells how Christians can reclaim paradise on earth

by Mike Ferguson

BIRMINGHAM, June 19 — Rita Nakashima Brock is using a study of early Mediterranean-area Christian art, poetry, music and dance to teach modern-day Christians how to reclaim paradise. Not the pie-in-the-sky variety, but paradise right here on Earth.

Brock was the keynote speaker Monday at a breakfast for Voices of Sophia, a group of about 600 members working "toward the reformation of the church into a discipleship of equals."

What Brock and her writing partner, Rebecca Parker, learned while researching their upcoming book Saving Paradise is that for the first thousand years after Jesus' death and resurrection, artists did not depict the crucified Jesus — only the risen one.

For those early Christians, paradise was not an "imagined, idealized afterlife," but instead was "homely and ordinary in its loveliness," Brock said. "It was this world, permeated and blessed by the presence of God. Paradise is not heaven — don't get them confused. The church was the place where paradise was most real."

Christians in those days held each other accountable. When they sinned, they did public penance with other sinners. They were singled out in the assembly — not to shame them, but so that others could collectively pray for them. "Penitence was medicine for sick souls," Brock said.

Playing detective, Brock and Parker looked harder and finally "turned up Jesus' body" in a crucifix carved by a Saxon artist in 965 — a century after Emperor Charlemagne "invented death by the sword as a missionizing tool." The first Crusade began another century later, and within three years Anselm of Canterbury had created the first doctrine of atonement. The crusaders used the new doctrine as war propaganda, she said, and "kill or be killed for God became the fastest way to paradise."

Colonizing the New World — with Christopher Columbus leading the way, having discovered "earthly paradise" in Venezuela — was done in part out of a renewed search for paradise, Brock said. This has "informed our history in the United States," including Americans' romance with wilderness and our "hunger for peace, but our faith in violence."

These days, whatever paradise our ancestors built on Earth is "at enormous risk," and the task is to "construct a path for Christianity adequate for the Third Millennium."