Paradise Christianity (Saving Paradise)

Paradise Christianity is the name this wiki gives to the lost theological world reconstructed by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker in Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (2008). Their opening datum: “It took Jesus a thousand years to die.” Images of Christ’s corpse do not appear in churches until the tenth century. For its first millennium, Christianity’s sanctuaries were decorated with gardens, rivers, feasts, the good shepherd, and the risen Christ — not the dying one. Paradise, in this early frame, “first and foremost—was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God.” The crucifixion-centered faith familiar to the modern West was, on their account, a medieval invention entangled with empire.¹

The iconographic argument

The book’s method is to read early Christianity “not as the literate few knew it but as the visually literate many knew it” — art, liturgy, and architecture as primary theological evidence:

• What dominates (2nd–6th c.): catacomb and mosaic imagery of rescue (Jonah at rest, Daniel among pacified lions), healing, baptism, banquets (“Bring it warm!”), the good shepherd “like Orpheus,” and above all the garden — meadows, peacocks, the four rivers of Genesis 2 flowing through church apses (St. Giovanni in Laterano, St. Vitale in Ravenna).
• What’s absent: the Crucifixion. Even the rare early exceptions show Christ alive — the cypress doors of Santa Sabina (c. 425) show three robust, unwounded figures in prayer posture, crosses barely visible: “Jesus was definitely not dead.”
• When it appears: life-size dead-Christ crucifixes are carved first in tenth-century Saxony — the Gero Cross (c. 965, Cologne) is the oldest surviving — in precisely the region where Charlemagne’s armies had converted the Saxons at sword-point a century earlier. The corpse of Jesus enters Christian art where Christianity itself had been imposed by imperial violence.

The weak link, honestly stated: the argument runs from public iconography to theological centrality, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Paul preached “Christ crucified,” the Passion narratives exist, the creeds mention the cross. The authors’ defense — that public monumental art indexes what ordinary worshippers absorbed, and that liturgy read resurrection accounts weekly while commemorating the crucifixion once a year — is plausible but not airtight. Confidence here is medium: a powerful reframing, not settled history.

Paradise theology (Part One)

What the thousand years actually contained:

• Baptism as the portal to paradise — immersion as rebirth into Eden; neophytes clothed in “the robe of glory that had belonged to Adam and Eve.” Ephrem of Syria: “In baptism did Adam find that glory which had been his among the trees of paradise.”
• Eucharist as “the beautiful feast of life” — a thanksgiving for creation (prayers retell Genesis 1–3, celebrate the goodness of the cosmos), a bloodless sacrifice of praise, not a reenactment of execution. Early Eucharistic prayers often lack the institution narrative entirely.
• Church as paradise in this world — Irenaeus’s phrase; the building itself a garden into which worshippers stepped.
• Deification — Athanasius: “God became man so that man might become god.” Salvation as the transformation and restoration of creation, centered on the Incarnation rather than the cross.
• Paradise as ethical measure — not a static perfect state but the standard against which empires and behavior are judged; Ambrose excommunicated an emperor over it.
• Nonviolence — the early church prohibited Christians from executing; shedding blood was sin. Paradise had rules.

The turn (Part Two)

The expulsion of paradise, step by step:

1. Constantine (4th c.) — not a simple fall, but the door opens: Eusebius equates Christ’s victory with military victory; anti-Jewish legislation begins.
2. Augustine (c. 400) — a paradise-affirmer who nonetheless bequeaths original sin (sin as inherited debt requiring payment) and just-war logic.
3. The Carolingians (9th c.) — forced conversion of the Saxons; the Mass reconceived (Paschasius Radbertus) as the real-presence reenactment of the crucified body; the Heliand’s warrior Christ; the first crucifixes in Saxon wood.
4. Anselm (1098) — Cur Deus Homo: sin dishonors God, creating infinite debt; God becomes man to die; “the gift of death, not the gift of life, was the greatest gift that God could give.” Anselm never mentions the Resurrection. Salvation becomes transactional; paradise becomes postmortem.
5. The Crusades (1095) — Urban II declares war “not only just, it was holy”; killing becomes a route to paradise. Peter the Hermit preaches the First Crusade in Cologne Cathedral, under the Gero Cross.
6. Bernard of Clairvaux (12th c.) — “joined love and crucifixion completely”: erotic mysticism fused with torture; “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded”; a defense of the Templars. “In the twelfth century, true love died.”
7. Francis & the stigmata (13th c.) — the self as the site of crucifixion; desire for martyrdom displacing desire for paradise.
8. The Black Death (14th c.) — a church whose only spiritual resource was sacralized suffering proved “impotent to help”; the piety of suffering collapses into flagellant movements and apocalyptic escape.

The downstream consequences they trace — Rhineland pogroms (1096) through colonialism, slavery (Elmina’s chapel built over the women’s dungeon), the Pequot massacre, and lynching — are presented not as inevitable products of atonement theology, but as atrocities that theology made thinkable as holy work.

What they want recovered

Not nostalgia but a working alternative: ethical grace (the core goodness of earthly life plus human responsibility for sustaining it); the Eucharist as feast again; beauty as an objective, ethically binding quality of creation (“He made us”); church as mutual-care community (“heavy burdens… borne on the shoulders of many”); justice as paradise’s fruit; structural distance from empire. Their lineage of partial recoveries: Universalism’s rejection of payment-atonement, the Social Gospel’s “socially organized sin,” abolition, the Black Church’s alternative witness.

Why this page matters to the rest of the wiki

The book functions in this wiki as the historical-evidentiary case that redemptive suffering was a development, not the foundation — which makes it a direct interlocutor for tragic-optimism. Frankl insists avoidable suffering should be removed and calls unnecessary suffering “masochistic rather than heroic”; Brock & Parker document an institution that spent eight centuries making the masochistic error sacred. Frankl finds meaning in spite of suffering; the crucifixion piety they describe finds meaning in it. Two incompatible grammars of the same human problem.

Cross-domain connections

• tragic-optimism / logotherapy / viktor-frankl — rival grammars of suffering (above)
• teilhard-de-chardin / noosphere — the other great this-worldly Christianity of the 20th century: evolution as the medium of the divine, work as co-creation. Teilhard’s “divine milieu” is what paradise theology looks like rebuilt on a cosmic-evolutionary base instead of a patristic one. Both were suppressed by the same institutional church.
• mutual-aid — the early church as a mutual-aid institution (shared burdens, common purse, famine relief); Brock & Parker’s “church as paradise” and Kropotkin’s guild/commune are the same institutional species at different scales
• bullshit-jobs — Graeber’s “spiritual violence” of pointless work rhymes with their critique of a piety that teaches people to accept suffering as holy rather than change its conditions
• impartial-spectator / sympathy — their beauty-as-ethical-perception thesis has a Smithian analog: moral perception trained through practice, communal and embodied rather than rule-derived
• romes-age-of-revolution — sibling revisionism with a valence tension: Whitmarsh (2026) argues Christianity was empire-shaped from the Augustan start (Rome as enabling substrate), while Brock & Parker argue imperial entanglement corrupted a this-worldly paradise faith (Rome as poison). Both reject the popular “Christians vs Rome” frame.

Sources

• 2008 — CONTENTS

See Also

• tragic-optimism
• noosphere
• mutual-aid
• sympathy
• romes-age-of-revolution

Footnotes

1. 2008 — CONTENTS ↩