10AR15-41

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Apologia Report 15:41 (1,046)

November 26, 2010

Subject: The Church found to be wrong about Christ's crucifixion

In this issue:

CHURCH HISTORY - revisionists Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker come up with yet another inventive approach

NEOPAGANISM - "the most comprehensive overview of the movement's historical sources and contemporary features yet published"

PSYCHICS - Sylvia Browne shows that she's still on top of her game

SATANISM - its "common threads of belief and practice" and "the differences and schisims that have divided the movement"

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CHURCH HISTORY

Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire, by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker [1] -- Amazon.com includes the following from Bryce Christensen in Booklist: "Brock and Parker begin their research perplexed by a riddle: Why are images of the crucified Christ absent from early Christian art? After visiting Mediterranean and European sites sacred to early Christians, Brock and Parker formulate a provocative answer: the dying Christ never appears in early Christian art because early Christians did not believe Christ’s redemptive death had opened a heavenly afterlife for the faithful. Rather, Brock and Parker assert, early Christians looked to Jesus as the exemplar who showed how to defy injustice by creating paradise on Earth in a loving community. In this theory, images of Christ’s passion and death invaded Christian art only when the Church started using a theology of otherworldly salvation to recruit the forces necessary to build a Christian empire. Skeptics may view with suspicion the authors’ willingness to substitute conjectural interpretations of art and heretical Gnostic texts for plain readings of the orthodox biblical canon. However, as the response to The Da Vinci Code (2003) established, highly speculative retellings of Christian history attract readers."

David A. Brondos opens his review (Dialog, 49:3 - 2010, pp249–252) by summarizing that "Saving Paradise is an attempt to recover a vision of salvation that values life in this world as essentially good. ...

"The second part of Saving Paradise argues that a radical shift took place in the Christian West in the second millennium - 'the Crucifixion expelled paradise from earth,' and Christians turned 'from a vision of paradise in this life to a focus on the Crucifixion and final judgment. ...

"While written for a broad audience rather than merely for academic contexts, Saving Paradise will challenge readers at any level to rethink their understanding of the Christian message of salvation and its relation to the cross. ...

"The authors demonstrate successfully not only how the concept of paradise was used by Christians throughout the church's first centuries to promote an alternative vision of the life in this world, but how images and interpretations of Jesus' death on the cross have been used by many to advance the notion that suffering, violence, torture and death are somehow holy and God-pleasing."

Brondos adds that "In general, the authors seem to regard any type of focus on Jesus' suffering and death as something to be resisted and avoided as 'dangerous.' In the entire book, virtually no positive significance is ascribed to the cross...."

Keith Watkins's review (Encounter, 71:2 - 2010, pp69-80) relays the thinking of Brock and Parker this way: "Despite their efforts to locate paradise in this world, Calvin and his American descendants failed for 'as long as such efforts imagine paradise as purification and salvation as the ultimate and final separation of the pristine from the corrupt and the wild from the civilized, visions of paradise will foster disassociation from the present in all its complex demands.'

"More successful efforts to recover an authentic Christian vision of paradise, the authors report, were made by writers representing a tradition they name Christian Universalism and other church leaders in the Unitarian tradition."

(Not coincidentally, the book was produced by Beacon Press, a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association.)

POSTSCRIPT (Jul 4 '18): The New York Times Magazine (Jun 11 '17, p8) noted that 35% of its readers who responded to the question: "If you could go back in time, would you try to save Jesus from being crucified?" ... answered in the affirmative.

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NEOPAGANISM

Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, James R. Lewis and Murphy Pizza, eds. [2] -- in her review, Sara M. Pike finds that Lewis and Pizza's new collection "offers readers the most comprehensive overview of the historical sources and contemporary features of the broad Neopagan movement that has yet been published.... The editors have also included less familiar topics [besides witchcraft] such as Druids, Heathens, and Ecopagans, and discussions of contentious issues concerning race and reburial." Add to the above, chapters on neo-shamanism, "Neopaganism's relationship with popular media," and a "theoretically rich analysis of teen Witch literature." Nova Religio,

Nov '10, pp124-126.

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PSYCHICS

In more ways than one, "We should have seen this coming." According to Wikipedia, Sylvia Browne "is an American author on the subject of spirituality who describes herself as a psychic and spiritual medium. She has made several appearances on Larry King Live, was a weekly guest on The Montel Williams Show, and hosts her own hour-long show on Hay House Radio, discussing paranormal issues and giving callers advice in her role as a psychic." Amazon.com includes the remark from Booklist that "Browne, a household name in the psychic world, has published so many books, it's hard to believe that she has anything left to write about." (That sounds kinda punny to us.) "Hard to believe" as it may be, her newest title is ... <drum roll> ... Afterlives of the Rich and Famous [3] - which purportedly "provides a rare and riveting look at the lives of some of our favorite celebrities after their deaths."

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SATANISM

Jean La Fontaine uses her review of Contemporary Religious Satanism, edited by Jesper Aagaard Petersen [4], to announce that "anyone who wants to know what Satanism was like up to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century could do no better than to read Petersen's account." For besides the requisite dispelling of "teenage antics" and the "fantasies of extreme Christian fundamentalists" on the topic, Petersen "draws out the common threads of belief and practice that characterize Satanism and clarifies the differences and schisims that have divided the movement." Nova Religio, Nov '10, pp129-131.

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire,by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker (Beacon Prs, 2009, paperback, 576 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/273flpk>

2 - Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, James R. Lewis and Murphy Pizza, eds. (Brill, 2009, hardcover, 649 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/24nl8y2>

3 - Afterlives of the Rich and Famous, by Sylvia Browne (HarperOne, 2011, hardcover, 256 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/2f4nnpy>

4 - Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology, Jesper Aagaard Petersen, ed. (Ashgate, 2009, hardcover, 277 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/26h9o3x>

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