Spirit in Action
Saving Paradise - Reclaiming Christianity from Empire
(upbeat guitar music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be listening to a presentation by Rita Nakashima Brock from the recent conference on Christian non-violence sponsored by friends for non-violent world. Rita is co-author of a book, Saving Paradise, How Christianity Trated Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire. As you'll hear, she exposes the corruption of the original Christian theology, which was radically non-violent into an empire serving justification of and motivation for violence. And just to give you an idea of how good and threatening Saving Paradise is, the book received high praise of the backhanded compliment variety on a right-wing evangelical website. They wrote that these feminist nostic heretics have done their homework, and they went on to encourage folks to read the book and figure out some way to refute it. Rita is co-director of Faith Voices for the Common Good and served four years at Harvard University as part of a think tank for women. Let's listen in now to Rita Nakashima Brock's presentation at the recent Ways of Peace Conference on Non-Violence this past October. - So what I'm gonna talk about today is this book that everybody must read, especially if you're an evangelical. In fact, I have to say some of my best friends are evangelicals and they're not all right-wing, so I don't wanna cast this version on all of the evangelicals and some of them are reading my book with enthusiasm. - I'm gonna refer back to what Walter and June did this morning because actually it's a real interesting convergence at the first chapter of our book deals with these ancient early myths. So for 4,000 years in Mesopotamia, which we call the Middle East, beginning with the ancient land called Sumer, which is in today's Iraq. The idea of paradise in this world has been a counter-imperial strategy. The Sumerian paradise called Dilman, D-I-L-M-U-N, Dilman, existed just like the Eden Genesis to the East, somewhere nearby. And some scholars think it's a reference to India 'cause they traded with India. Because it could not be clearly located, it could not be conquered or destroyed. Instead, it was always there as a real place so that humanity could remember the ethical requirements of living in paradise, and so that those requirements would hold accountable those who threatened it, especially the empires. Hence, paradise function not only to describe life honor at its best, but also to provide the ethical measure of how to behave in that life. Sumerian stories of paradise are accompanied by stories of what can go wrong. And the myths that they wrote were began to be written down as they were being conquered by Semitic people. So they were losing their civilization and began to record their myths at the very end of that time. They are not as Semitic people, nobody really knows who they were, their language is completely unrelated to Semitic languages or to Indo-European languages, its own language, family. And the reason we can translate it, you'll see in a minute. So they talk about what can go wrong. Violence, competition, greed, war, empires and environmental catastrophes. All of these things are described in their stories. For subsequent cultures, like Assyria, Babylon and Persia, Sumerian was the equivalent of Greek in Roman society or Latin in medieval Europe, the much admired classical language and culture of antiquity. There are bilingual versions of Assyrian and Babylonian stories and ethics. So that's how it's possible even to translate Sumerian 'cause it's such an odd language. It has a separate language for men and women. And so it's a real art form trying to figure out what it's saying. The empires that conquered Sumer and adapted their stories to create their own myths and used its scripts to write their language, used it even was used to write Persian and unrelated languages, just like we write English with Latin script, just like Japanese is written with Chinese script. Japanese and Chinese are completely unrelated languages but Japanese use Chinese script. So these ancient cultures also use cuneiform which was invented by the Sumerians to write their own languages. What I'm saying is this is a very primal Ur culture that deeply influenced everything that came after. The Bible itself indicates the primacy and importance of Sumer by placing Abraham and Sarah in Ur which was a great Sumerian city-state. So in effect Abraham and Sarah were illegal aliens in Israel and they had migrated there for the Sumer. They were rich illegal aliens though. Let's get that straight food. The stories in Genesis as we have them, Genesis both one and two are much closer to the Sumerian versions of creation than the Babylonian one we heard read this morning with the patricide and mantricide. There's none of this slaughter in the Sumerian stories or actually kind of fun and joyful. Long before Genesis came to speak of the spirit hovering over the deep, the Sumerians spoke of Namu, the goddess of the watery abyss or the primeval salt sea and she was the mother of all the gods. So out of her debt she creates the heavens and the earth as one giant cosmic mountain called Anki, which is the two names of the heavens and the earth combined into one name, Anki. The base of Anki, the bottom was the underworld of the dead and the top was in the heavens with the gods. Another god, Anlil, E-N-L-I-L, God of air, separated the sapphire dome of the heavens from the flat disk of the earth and in the space of air created the world. Air. Genesis says Ruach, breath, wind, spirit creates. So a wind from God swept over the face of the water. It sounds suspiciously like Anlil to me. Anlil then mated with his wife, Ninlil, the goddess goddess of air. It's a god and goddess of air. I guess they didn't think you could produce anything without two of them. She gives birth to all the celestial gods of the sky like the moon and the sun. So it's very interesting how you have this quality of wind or breath or air in the Sumerian epics as a creative principle that reappears again in Genesis 1. The Sumerian paradise, Dilmung, was on the earth and it was described as without war or conflict. It was blessed with abundant fresh water as a god of fresh water named Enki who goes about spraying things with a certain kind of hose. (audience laughing) Fresh water, thick forest and gardens. Well, Namu's son, Enki, god of sweet water, mates with her daughter, Ninhursag is another name for the earth, so water and earth mate and Genesis we have clay moistened. And they mate and they create the other deities of the earth that heal and make the kind of tea and all these other things. So the description of Dilmung, this is a very, think Isaiah when you hear this. This is the Sumerian description of Dilmung. The land Dilmung is a pure place. The place after Enki had laid himself by his wife. That place is clean, that place is bright. In Dilmung, the raven uttered no cries, the lion killed not, the wolf snatched not the lamb. Unknown was the kid killing dog. Unknown was the grain devouring boar. The singer utters no whale. By the side of the city, he utters no lament. There are interesting echoes in Isaiah of this lion and the lamb and that image of what pieces. Dilmung is also without disease, hunger, war, death or sorrow. And Dilmung, as I said, wasn't Sumer itself, but it was close by somewhere on a sacred mountain. This combination of specificity of description and vagueness of location gave it both a sense of reality and of sort of inaccessibility so that it could belong to not be owned or possessed by any person. It was there for everyone. Dilmung continued to be that word Dilmung continued to be a synonym for the Persian word paradise, which was picked up in Greek and Latin as paradise. Dilmung continued to be a synonym for paradise all the way into the New Testament period. That's how influential these ideas are. Sumer's stories and art celebrated the goodness of ordinary life in ways we can still understand as activities of paradise. There are myths tell of gods enjoying sexual pleasure, making music, dancing, traveling about and having adventures and encouraging the fertility of the land and eating well. They also waged wars in defense of the land against their enemies and warned the deaths of those they loved. A lot of the ancient cylinder seals you find from Mesopotamia have images of these early Sumerian gods on them. And you know, it's very hot in Iraq. It's like incredibly brutally hot. So even the sun god wears a sun hat. [LAUGHTER] And Enki, the god of fresh water, is recognizable on the cylinder seals because water cascades off his shoulders and fissures swimming in the cascades of water. That's his coat. It's a cascade of water. Early Christians were one strand of this influential Mesopotamian understanding of paradise. Because the serpent was in the garden before the fall, Christians believed that paradise was not utopia, but it was a pretty good place. It was a place of struggle, but also of beauty, love, and care, and abundant life. Bishop Irenaeus says, the church is the paradise in this world. And Augustine says God in his third commentary on Genesis. He said, God made the creation first. God made everything. And then God took from creation the trees and the waters that make the garden for human habitation, the place of paradise. And he says, therefore, the whole earth shares in the essential qualities of paradise. For nearly a millennium of Christian history, therefore, churches were filled with images of paradise and had none of crucifixion. Just before he died, Jesus had said to the thief in Luke 23, today you will be with me in paradise. The key word is today. In Luke 4, Jesus defined his ministry by reading from the beginning of 11 verse chapter in Isaiah 61 that begins, the spirit of the Lord is upon me. The Isaiah passage begins with this good news of comfort and justice and says the faithful are like oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord to display his glory. Then the last verse of this chapter in Isaiah says, as the earth brings forth its shoots and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations. If you go back to the classical prophets, you see over and over these motifs of garden and water and all these things associated with Genesis 2. Amos says like, "Just as you're all down my rivers." And the early church constantly showed images of abundant life and beauty with the four rivers of paradise. You see, and I'm sad I don't have, this is not a good room to show a PowerPoint, but I usually show images when I do this talk. So in the talk back later, I've got them in my computer if you wanna see them, they're amazing. So many of these early church apps images have the four rivers there. So you know that you're looking at paradise, no doubt. So Jesus says after he reads this text from Isaiah, "Today, in chapter four, today this scripture "is fulfilled in your hearing." So here at the beginning of his ministry, today already paradise is fulfilled. And then as he's dying on the cross today, you will be with me in paradise. So the book of Luke begins and ends with today. It's very interesting. The church believed he meant today. And they believe that you got to today by walking through the baptismal font. And when you came out of the baptismal font, you had stepped through the doors of paradise. And you knew it because in the baptismal font, you got the spirit with the eyes to see it. It always been there, you just couldn't see it. Gratitude for the blessings of creation and care of humanity's special home in the garden of God dominated early Christian understandings of salvation. And they understood that the resurrection of Jesus had reopened the closed doors of Genesis 3. When he was resurrected, there are wonderful images in the early church of Jesus reaching down. He's standing alive in front of the cross, and he's either reaching down or just looking down and belonging from the ground. Adam and Eve are rising up out of the grave to enter paradise right after him. So the dead also get to go to paradise, it just have a different neighborhood than we do. It's their place, Satan couldn't follow, so you could rest, sort of like living in New York as paradise and working all your life in the retirement to a gated community in Florida. So death was retirement. But you were nearby, so people could pray to you and you could visit and dream and all the dead came to the Eucharist. Origin says it did come first 'cause they traveled the fastest. So the spirit of God and Jesus in human form, the incarnation sanctified human life and delivered the same spirit to humanity. Now today most liberal Christians really don't know what to make of these arguments about was Jesus divine or not, and what does it mean to say Jesus was God? It's a little bit odd sounding to many of us because we're so used to a sort of secular way of seeing the world. I think we don't understand the arguments about the divinity of Jesus because we don't understand what it means to say humanity is divine. The early insistence on Jesus' divinity long before Constantine forced the issue at Nicaea was about his equality with God rather than with the emperor who was a son of God. And his divinity as equality with the highest possible God whom the emperor had to serve, his divinity was not about his unique and exclusive power, but about the power of God in human flesh. Imago day, humanity male and female made in God's image as Genesis one and two say. So the incarnation in Jesus of divine wisdom or Sophia or Logos, the descent of that divine spirit, there's in all the religious language in early churches, up down, not temporal. So the descent of this spirit, it came through Jesus to the whole church so that all humanity could dwell together in the same spirit. This theology affirmed that Christians had received, these are words early, early church theologians, boldness of spirit, generosity of heart, wisdom of mind, strength of body, a stuteness of judgment, humility of love, beauty of life. And we were expected to use all these powers together and use them well. So baptism was the granting of great spiritual power to the whole community as the body of Christ. So getting baptized in your church was no easy project. You had to apply with character references. And if you had a bad occupation that wasn't allowed you to change jobs, you couldn't be a Roman official, you couldn't be a brothel owner, you couldn't be a gladiator. There were all these occupations, you couldn't join the church. They were clear that these were not ethical occupations. So they would say, well, we'll change your job and come back. But if you got accepted, if you were okay and your character references gave you a clean references, then you went through the training process of being a catacuman and usually people did this for several years because you had to learn the theology, you had to learn the hymns, you had to learn the stories, you had to become acquainted with what it was you were joining. Then if you wanted finally, after you went through all that, you decided you really wanted to be baptized, you had to make application again with new character references and make sure the bishop would let you go through the process of six weeks of Lent, which was the most intense training. And there were exorcisms, which was like good therapy, you had to get control. If you couldn't control your own behavior, how could you be moral? You had to know what your own demons were, you had to get them under control, you had to understand how to fight the demons. So we call this psychotherapy now, but exorcism was a really important part of getting ready to be baptized. And then when you finally got baptized, you went through a cold water in the middle of the night on Saturday at Naked and came out the other side and got away from the glory, which symbolized the Holy Spirit. We describe this process of baptism as like having to apply to get through and graduate from college while training for an Olympic team sport and undergoing group therapy. They made you a home the person. This is what the spirit can do. The collective Christian community then incarnated the third person of the Trinity. And all the early images of the Trinity show all three persons of the Trinity as identical, 20-something, androgynously beautiful figures because they are the beauty of humanity, three and one. So that's to gaze on the beauty and equality of these human images was also to gaze on the beauty of God in three persons. Human life was guided by the spark of the spirit and humanity as the church lived within the radiant holy fires of Trinitarian grace. Salvation then was life together in this spirit in paradise. And a risen Christ came to every Eucharist feast to host it. That was who was at the table. And there's a wonderful silver plate at Dunbar notes in Washington DC. I think it's from the sixth century. It's a Eucharist plate. And it has a relief sculpture on it. And Jesus is shown serving first the wine, a bread, and then the wine to the apostles. So you have an image of who is hosting the feast. And who's there? The apostles are there too. Everybody dead is at the Eucharist feast. They've come back from paradise. So salvation together, it was never individual. It always had a personal responsibility to mention that it was never individual salvation. You couldn't, there's no such thing. It was salvation in the body of Christ, living in paradise in this world. So in the feast of the Eucharist was the most joyous place. This capacity of the church to be paradise was celebrated. And the primary text used to describe and theologize the Eucharist was not from the passion stories, but from the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the miracle of feeding and abundant life. And a lot of the first one in many of the early images of the last supper, which you think would reference the passion, show bread and fish on the table. To make clear that this is a reference to defeat the miracle of the feeding. So the Garden of God in this theology of the early church was a robust, contested space, not an ideal utopia. Because of course the serpent is always around. The serpent wasn't created by the fall of serpent cause the fall. So the serpent is in the Garden. And the church understood itself as a place with many flaws, suffering and struggle. And in fact, the first time I read that phrase from Irenaeus, the church is the paradise in this world like that. Has he ever been to a church board meeting? (audience laughing) Our general assembly here. Well the church understood, all these things as it's impossible to live without sinning. That's why we have a confession of sins in the service. So they're really pretty realistic of that. But the point of having the spirit was to engage the struggle to live by the spirit, to engage the struggle with the principalities and powers of this world. And maintaining the spirit's power required constant education, experience, astute judgment and community collaboration to hold each other accountable to avoid the traps that evil set before the inhabitants of paradise. Ambrose has a wonderful section when he's talking about Genesis 3 and how Adam and Eve got into trouble. He says they were naive. And Irenaeus also says that he says they were like children. It's not that knowledge is bad. It's that you can take on more than you know how to handle. And Adam and Eve didn't have help. And Satan trapped them into taking on a kind of knowledge. They didn't know how to handle and they got into trouble. So Ambrose says it's a bad thing to be not even innocent. Because you might commit evil and if you don't know what it is, you won't be able to detect that you're doing this. So the church valued the process of becoming experienced about understanding evil and being wise about it. Which is why so many churches were called Hagia Sophia's Holy Wisdom. And Jesus was often talked about as Holy Wisdom. Because the wise knew how to alleviate suffering. The wise knew how to appreciate the spirit of God in creation, to love beauty and to care for each other as friends of God. And the church has tended to elect their bishops on this basis. I hope you're enjoying this spirit and action presentation by Rita Nakashima Brock at the recent Ways of Peace Conference sponsored by FNVW. That's Friends for Nonviolent World. I'm your host for spirit and action, Mark Helpsmeet. And this is a Northern spirit radio production. Originating from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. And our home radio station is WHYS LP in Eau Claire. And also carried by a number of other stations nationwide. You can also listen via iTunes or, of course, via our website, northernspiritradio.org. Drop us a comment when you visit and help make this a two way communication. Today's guest, Rita Nakashima Brock, is an author, a feminist, a professor of theology. And Rita is co-director of Faith Voices for the Common Good. She's an active member of the Christian church, mostly known as the Disciples of Christ. Her presentation today covers materials from a book she co-authored with Rebecca Parker, saving paradise. How Christianity traded love of this world for crucifixion and empire. Saving Paradise exposes the manipulation of Christian beliefs that turned the faith from a near universal non-violent peacemaking norm in the direction of support for empire and violence. Exposing the twisted theology promises to undercut the forces that buttress militarism within Christian circles and to return Christianity to the peacemaking norm of the first eight centuries. We'll go back now to the FNVW conference on non-violence in the Christian tradition, the presentation by Rita Nakashima Brock. The historian Peter Brown caused this first millennium Christianity, a life affirming, this worldly, optimistic faith. Those are his words. So, what led Western Christianity to place a course at the center of Christian ritual and to affirm death as delivering salvation? Charlemagne, in short. There were, Charlemagne, the Western Empire collapsed and Europe fell into a bunch of invasions and problems and then the Carolingian Empire, Charlemagne's grandfather, Charles Martell defeated the Muslims and started a new empire and then Charlemagne, sort of the epitome of that empire, was crowned emperor of the West by the Pope in the year 800 and he decided Latin Christianity would be the propaganda arm of his empire. He forced his enemies to convert at the point of the sword breaking a millennia, almost a millennium long ban on violence by the church. The church didn't tell you you couldn't do violence, but if you did, you had to do a lot of penance because it hurt you to do the violence. They understood penance as therapy and it hurt your soul to do something that serious so you had to go through therapy, you couldn't just come back at church like nothing had happened. Well, Charlemagne decided, no, no, no, no, no, we're just gonna kill people who don't get rebackaged into our version of Christianity and he did this especially to the Northern Saxons who were as big as problem. The Carolingian missionaries then in the early 9th century start telling the Saxons that Christ crucified, was an ever-present judge confronting their sins and that their sins had killed him. Now, Charlemagne's killing them, but now he's blaming them for killing Christ, so the victims of Charlemagne become the perpetrators. The cross was not resurrection or victory for them, but crucifixion and his theologians drew this message home by insisting that the Christ that was dead was what was on their Eucharist table as a form of judgment against their sins. So they had to repent of their sins against the empire, only then would they be safe from eternal damnation in partaking of the Eucharist's because they were consuming the dead body, of course. The Carolingian Archbishop Hinkmark took this one level further by saying the Eucharist was itself a reenactment of the crucifixion declaring and killed an offering to be sacrificed, he says. So consuming the flesh and blood of the crucifixion then conferred on Christians the benefit of Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross. So these innovations, these new ideas that were imposed on the sacraments, they fought back. They didn't like these ideas and their theologians were imprisoned, their texts were burned. This was an imperial terror campaign. This new Eucharist places ritual murder and consumption of the corpse at the core meaning of Christianity's central ritual, it becomes the Latin mass. There's 200 years of fierce and violent debate about whether it was the dead corpse or the risen price that presided at the Eucharist's feast. Imperial persecution assured that ritual murder and consumption of the corpse prevailed. It became heresy not to believe it by the middle of the eighth century. Instead of salvation through resurrected life now, Western Christianity started offering salvation through execution. The Eucharist became riddled with the youth. As the distance between the risen Christ and sinful humanity and the idea of original sin really takes hold in this period, the distance between Christ and humanity grew. So that eventually the church as the paradise in this world became unimaginable and paradise remained only in the afterlife. With the momentum of these shifts, Pope Urban II could promise in 1095 when he launched the first crusade that all who joined the Holy Word could count their duty as penance for their sins. And the Pope also promised that if the crusaders died, their death, the cuniary and penitential would be forgiven. And we would immediately enter a post-mortem paradise. So paradise, instead of being the earthly abode of Christians to be loved and maintained, became instead promised payment for hate and violence. Killing instead of requiring penance became an act of penance. A holy ritual of pilgrimage to and pillage of Jerusalem. And waging war became the fastest route to paradise and dislanced 500 years of crusading in Western Europe. The crucifixion of Jesus became an eternal dying that justified violence, especially against his enemies, the Jews and the Muslim infidels had occupied Jerusalem. Given that Jews were forced to be the bankers for Christians, it's probably no accident that the crusaders first went north to the Rhineland and slaughtered 10,000 Jews on Good Friday before heading east. You know, these two politicians in South Carolina called Jews Penny Pinterest. This is the history. Three years after his friend, the Pope, launched the first crusade and some of Canterbury wrote, "Why God became human?" And he argued that humans in a dishonored God and ascended him and that somebody had to pay a debt. We weren't good enough. So Jesus came incarnate in human form in order to pay our debt for us. He says, "The only reason for the incarnation, "the only reason for Jesus to be on earth was to die." That's it. And doesn't even mention the resurrection. Completely falls out of his scheme of salvation. Anselm's younger critic, Peter Abelard, starts by saying, "Who's gonna forgive God "for killing his own son?" It isn't feminine as the call of God, a child abuser and child murderer. Peter Abelard said that. Abelard said, "No, this is a big picture of God." Like he's got some lack and he needs us to fill up like him and Jesus, uh-uh, bad idea. So he says, "No, it's human sin that killed Christ." And the extent at which he suffered and died is a testimony to his love for us and taking this human sin and still forgiving and loving us. And if we know this, our hearts will be changed and we will turn to love him and want to be like him. The more Christ suffered, the more human sin was exposed and greater the pure love of self-sacrifice was revealed. So then we could repent and learn to love others as he loved us through selfless love. Then the safe sinner could imitate self-sacrificing love, which Abelard admitted meant true love was helpless and weak because it was a total act of sacrifice. Just like Anselm, Abelard has no space or resurrection, he just doesn't figure into his theology. But in both cases, the divinity of humanity was inconceivable. Rather than drawing Christ in humanity together into a Trinitarian community of moral virtue and love, a tone of theologies separated them further and further apart through judgment of sin. Anselm held that distance through stark terror of hell. He taught piety of stark terror. All his prayers are about, oh my God, I'm frightened. Abelard kept the distance through guilt piety. With the threat of judgment always present, Christians then began for long to be restored to a sinless, pure and innocent state as the only refuge from God's wrath. If you knew evil, you were gonna get punished. So let's just pretend we don't, let's be innocent. And Paradise became so unimaginable that it became this perfect ideal utopia and it had to be really great because you had to kill for it. So Paradise becomes unreal in, it was a real place. It becomes unimaginable that this earth could be paradise because it's not good enough. So as the crucified Christ and holy work prevailed, then Christians became obsessed with suffering in this life for all their sins and atoning now so that they wouldn't go to hell when they died. And Purgatory had to be invented because what if you forgot his sin? So Paradise actually gets jettisoned into a post-apocalyptic future because the world's too sinful, people are gonna die, they're still gonna be in sin, it's just not, you can't go directly to paradise, you gotta wait. A long time for this sinful world to be cleaned up. Love of the tortured murdered corpse became the erotic ideal of Christian piety. And Bernardo Clervo does the most to eroticized violence by preaching 67 of sermons on the song of songs. Why, you may wonder, did he focus so much on the song of songs when nobody in today preaches on his book? Hardly at all, right. I've heard a sermon or two of "The Spirit of the Lakes" but "The Spirit of the Lakes" is a log. (audience laughing) I used to live in Minnesota. Well, as it turns out, until the enlightenment, the song of songs was one of the most commented upon books in the entire Bible. Most of the ancient rabbis and theologians of the church wrote commentaries on it or parts of it. An ancient bishop used phrases from the song of songs in baptismal liturgies to describe love between God and sanctified humanity. God was our beloved, we are God's beloved. David Cara, even in theological seminary, believes that song of songs may be the oldest book in the Bible. And he thinks it's because the closest ancient parallel to the same literary form of love poetry is found in middle kingdom Egypt, which predates the Bible. The longevity of the song may explain why I think you're so prominently in the history of biblical commentary until the 17th century. It just disappears as an important book after the enlightenment. Cara suggests that we read, this is an interesting exercise. We read everything else in the Bible as a response to the song of songs. Genesis tells us how the garden was created and now humanity lost it. Once we lost paradise, humanity wanders through Mesopotamia and search of a new place, turning to conquest, colonization, slavery, empire, war and injustice. The prophets remind us that justice is crucial to peace and they return to the garden images a lot. Ezekiel, especially in Isaiah. The Jewish order of biblical books begins with Genesis and the garden and ends with the song of song, the garden restored. The Christian order puts the prophetic books last, which delays the restoration of the garden to the resurrection in John, perhaps, or Revelation 22, post Armageddon. Yet still, in either order, the garden is not lost forever. And until the middle of the 16th century, medieval navigation maps had an island usually off the coast of China with a naked man and a woman and a tree and a serpent around it and an X mark through it marked forbidden. So they actually believed the paradise was still on the earth somewhere, you just couldn't get in anymore. And they put it near China because the most common guests for the fourth river of paradise, when you have the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Geon was usually the Nile, but the Pichon was a bit mysterious. So the best guess was it was the Ganges, which is why they put the island off the coast of China. North America figures prominently into the search for paradise through Calvin and the Puritans, because Calvin, the map members started taking paradise off the maps when the terrain grew over, the new world was discovered, but Calvin in 1650 published a commentary on Genesis in which he drew a map with paradise on it in Iraq. So the Calvinists believed that there was still this trace of the earthy paradise, and if they tried to create it anew, then God would bring the end of the world, the apocalypse and the paradise garden could be reopened and reclaimed. So the Puritans project in North America was to come to this pristine land which they defined as uninhabited and create Eden anew across the waters of the Atlantic 'cause Europe was a mess. They taught an intense iconoclasm of suspicion of their senses so they couldn't receive the world in North America as a gift of God. They saw it with all this suspicion as a place of sin and fallenness that they were gonna fix. The related to the Native Americans, mostly as agents of Satan, they had to kill. The Puritans were thus hermetically sealed within a covenantal community whose source of peace was outside of time and not of this world. They constructed a world of hard group lines, strict ideologies and suspicion of difference. Their habits of mind divided life into good or evil, sacred or profane, salvation or sin, a lacked or damned, an authority and obedience or rebellion and punishment. Their theology included war as a way to destroy evil and to fulfill God's purpose. Long endured to violence and its religious and revolutionary uses in Europe, Puritans lived by what historian Richard Slott can cause the myth of regeneration through violence. This is the great American myth. They related to the world in present time as a means to an end which required identifying evil and denouncing and overcoming it. Now in the 19th century, we get a return of Christians going back to a sensibility about salvation in this world. We see it in a reclamation of the Amago Day. There was a great Amago Day movement in the 19th century that led to women's suffrage that was part of the abolition movement. There was a whole anti-lynching movement. There was a whole energy beginning again in the 19th century around on earth as it is in heaven, the justice of God. And it continues in the early 19th century through those movements as well as a social gospel movement that resulted in a new deal. Walter Rouschenbuch was one of the theologians of that social gospel movement. And he rejected the idea of individual salvation and individual sin. He returns to this what he calls a commonwealth of God idea and a collective sensibility. And he rejected the idea that sin was individual rebellion against God's will. And I love what he says about this. This is an actual life. Such titanic rebellion against the Almighty is rare. We do not rebel. We dodge any vade. We kneel and lowly submission and kick our duty under the bed while God is not looking. (audience laughing) He believes sin mattered not because it disappointed or offended God, but because it disrupted the relationships of love and justice that humanity had to have. And he noted, now remember he wrote this a hundred years ago. We rarely sin among. Science supplies the means of killing. Finance, the methods of stealing. The newspapers have learned how to bear false witness artistically to a flow full of people daily. And covetousness is the moral basis of our civilization. A hundred years ago, he wrote that. When Western Christianity removed paradise from this time and this space, placing salvation beyond, behind or ahead of us, but not here and now, it disconnected life from full engagement in the present. The real messy ambiguous world can never measure up to our nostalgic past or idealized hopes and goals. And so we invent and perpetuate our own loneliness and alienation. This alienation and the unhappy narcissism that it produces feed and eager greed for what others have, needing hungers for affirmation and obsession with our own goodness and an insatiable desire for goods that prove our worth. Nostalgic visions of the past also translate into idealizations of things like nature, segregated from ordinary life. And the American idea of wilderness is a completely artificial construction. The Indians managed to land for centuries before any Europeans got here. And they were forcibly removed so that we could have our romance of uninhabited wilderness to create our national parks. We romantically long for nature and flee to the wilderness to purge ourselves of civilization. We do not immediately face the destructive consequences of the everyday consumerism that causes us to do cumulative harm to the environments we inhabit. We continue to avoid creating technologies, economic practices and cities that are integrated, sustainable, humane environments that overcome racism, sexism and poverty. To be a redeeming force in life requires us to create the kinds of rituals and ways of thinking that teach us to love the world and each other and help us see and feel what we love so deeply that we do all we can to avoid further harm. At the core of every community's life are rituals that shape what we know as true and guide perception. They are like the bones of a body skeleton, the ritual frameworks that hold things in place, giving form to a community's values and relationships at levels below conscious thought, deeper than conscious thought. Rituals guide us to the storm's tosses of the world. The familiarity, structure and rhythm of rituals create a container and teach us patterns that can hold the conflicts and tragedies that touch every life and in every community. Century rituals full of life orient us to material and spiritual beauties. They embed us in a deeper love for the world and the many dimensions of paradise in all their tragedy and beauty. The fourth century bishop, Cyril, one of the instructions he gives people at the Eucharist is to take the wine on their lips and anoint their eyes and ears and all of their senses to sanctify the capacity of the senses to love the world and to love beauty. And Augustine refers to God as beauty. Beauty bids us to be fully in the world, attentive to particularities, emotionally alive, open to grace and responsive to injustice. Beauty is a key to ethical commitments and moral training. Its ethical power is its ability to elicit a loving orientation toward the world. It assembles all the fragments of life that the powers of this world tried to tear us under and reassembles them in a life getting whole. It depends on our sense of the interconnected, complex sense of life and a commitment to a good beyond ourselves because more than any other thing in life, beauty has the power to draw us out of ourselves and make us want to love the world. Through it, we love our senses and what they offer at us and it holds complex tensions and forces together. The ancients call the power of beauty eros or love, yerning. The soul's response of delight and pleasure at beauty generated the urge toward right relationship with God and all of God's creation. Another translation for the Greek word "doxa" is beauty or shining radiance. Try reading beauty or shining radiance, wherever the English says "glory". Paul is translated to saying the glory of God, the glory that... Try putting beauty in there or shining radiance. It has a whole different feel. We re-enter this world as sacred space when we love life scarcely and in the name of love, protect the goodness of our intricate web of life and all its manifold forms. "Today you will be with me in paradise," Jesus said. "But when Western Christianity removed paradise from today, placing salvation beyond behind or ahead of us, not here and now, it disconnects life from full engagement in the present and exile faithful to a dangerous razor's edge between nostalgia and hope, always unrequited in love and desperately seeking peace." The church in Western Europe was once in love with the beautiful risen Christ, who joined his bride in the earthly garden of delight and helped her tend it. However, beginning in the ninth century, she began to doubt her love and took a violent lord into her bed, lay with him, blessed him, and finally married him. Erotically enthralled by her seductive abuser, the church spawned emotional 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 or God's will, a holy pilgrimage that would, if she sacrificed and suffered enough, someday, to deliver salvation and the violence and restore her to her first love. This delusional pattern would carry conquistadors and pilgrims to the Americas 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, helplessly longing illusively for relief and love's fulfillment. They did not come. Let us leave behind forever this violent murderous marriage and forever unrequited, unfulfilled longing and returned to our true love, the one who showed us how to live, how to resist injustice, how to love our neighbor, how to feed the hungry, how to heal the sick, how to teach the ignorant, how to care for each other, and how to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength in this blessed, achingly beautiful, earthly home, the paradise in this world. [Applause] That was Rita Naximabrak, co-author of Saving Paradise, how Christiana detrated love of this world for crucifixion and empire, speaking at FNVW's first in a series of conferences on nonviolence. This one on nonviolence in the Christian tradition, with the next installation probably to be on nonviolence in the Muslim tradition. Let's end this episode of "Spirit in Action" with a song that kind of captures some of the view that Rita was talking about, about paradise that's performed by John McCutchen. The song is "The Great Storm is Over." It's actually written by Bob Frankie. [Music] ♪ The thunder and lightning gave voice to the night ♪ ♪ The little small child cried aloud in her fright ♪ ♪ Hosh, little baby, the story I will tell ♪ ♪ Of a love that has vanquished the powers of hell ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ ♪ Lift up your wings and fly ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ ♪ Lift up your wings and fly ♪ ♪ Sweetness in the air and justice on the wind ♪ ♪ Laughter in the house where the mourners had been ♪ ♪ The depths shall have music blind as you wise ♪ ♪ The standards of death taken down by your surprise ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ ♪ Lift up your wings and fly ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ ♪ Lift up your wings and fly ♪ [Music] ♪ Free lease for the captives ♪ ♪ Then through the wars, streams in the desert ♪ ♪ New hope for the poor ♪ ♪ Little small children shall dance as they sing ♪ ♪ And play with the bears and the lions in the spring ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ ♪ Lift up your wings and fly ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ ♪ Lift up your wings and fly ♪ [Music] ♪ Hush little baby, let go of your fears ♪ ♪ Lord loves his own and your mother is here ♪ ♪ The baby fell asleep as the lantern did burn ♪ ♪ The mother sang on till her bright brooms returned ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ ♪ Lift up your wings and fly ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ ♪ Lift up your wings and fly ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ ♪ Lift up your wings and fly ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ ♪ Lift up your wings and fly ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, the great storm is over ♪ The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.