‘This present paradise’ by Rita Nakashima Brock, Rebecca Parker
For almost 1,000 years, the Christian church emphasized paradise, not Crucifixion. How Christianity took a disastrous turn, and how we can rediscover paradise today.
They distort the Gospel to a message of self-actualization, self-divinization.
Nearly everything we had previously understood about Christian history, theology, and ritual began to shift as we delved deeper into the meaning of paradise. Our new book, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, reaches back nearly four thousand years to explore how the ancient people of West Asia imagined paradise. It shows how the Bible’s Hebrew prophets invoked the Garden of Eden to challenge the exploitation and carnage of empires. It shows how Jesus’s teachings and the practices of the early church affirmed life in this world as the place of salvation. Within their church communities, Christians in the first millennium sought to help life flourish in the face of imperial power, violence, and death.
The Kingdom is at hand. But this world is not the Kingdom. The Kingdom replaces this world.
What led Western Christianity to replace resurrection and life with a Crucifixion-centered salvation and to relegate paradise to a distant afterlife?
Even Latin Christianity still affirms life; orthodox Christianity recognizes that Christ gives life by destroying death with the cross, but it also recognizes that the waves of sin is death. Do the Unitarians have any understanding of sin? Or of a God who is distinct from us? While some Latins may think of heaven as a completely separate reality, not all do.
If they think that popular Latin Christianity has been wrong, then they should look to other forms of Apostolic Christianity. But they're more interested in "debunking" Christianity in favor of their man-made religion than in Christ, who was just another wise human teacher anyways.
No comments:
Post a Comment