Saving Paradise: Explaining the theme
A short test. Without the use of new media or old friends, in what years did Greenbelt feature the following straplines?:
- Wrestling With Angels
- Rumours of Glory
- Kiss of Life
- Dreams of Home
- Art and Soul
(Turn your computer upside down to read the answers at the bottom of this article).
Greenbelt’s 15th festival in 1988 was imaginatively billed ‘The Fifteen Year Special’ but the feeling emerged that this kind of approach could be improved upon. Since the sixteenth we’ve coined an allusive phrase to hang around the neck of each festival – a non-prescriptive line for creatives and participants to play with. This year, with Saving Paradise, it’s not just a snappy soundbite but the title of a book by two American theologians, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker.
A few years ago Rita and Rebecca took their holidays in Europe, touring the Mediterranean world in search of the earliest Christian art. But as they wandered through ancient churches and catacombs, they discovered that it took Jesus Christ a thousand years to die.
Or, to put it another way, in the first thousand years after he lived on earth, his followers filled their sanctuaries with images of Christ as a living being in a world blessed with the divine presence. Shepherd, teacher, healer, enthroned god. Infant, youth and bearded elder. ‘When Jesus appears with the cross he is in front of it, serene resurrected. The world around him ablaze with beauty.’
In early Christian art they didn’t find Jesus’ dead body but his Risen body… and it was in this world not the next one.
They found Paradise close to home – until Paradise was expelled. Slowly but surely as the millennium turned, argue the two authors, the imagery changed. Now the images of the resurrected Jesus were replaced by those of a crucified, tortured Jesus. The crucifix became the primary icon, wars were blessed as holy and crusaders were promised Paradise – after death.
Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker, who join us at Greenbelt in August, argue that their findings in the art of Christian history help explain why the last millennium saw Christianity so often associated with violence and conflict, with torture and guilt. But the arrival of a new millennium is a moment to return to the way of peace, to friendship with the good earth and to a faith community which models paradise in this world. A time to save paradise.
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Answers: Wrestling With Angels (1991); Rumours of Glory (1990); Kiss of Life (2002); Dreams of Home (2011)); Art and Soul (1989)
