Myths of Paradise and Orientalism
Concurrent Session C1 / Bauer South, Room 34 / Saturday.2009.Aug.8 / 11:00 AM
Rita Brock, Faith Voices for the Common Good: ritabrock@sbcglobal.net
This paper is an initial foray into a book-length theological project on the role of paradise in the colonization of Asia and in the romanticizing of Asian religions, lands, and women. It expands one underdeveloped aspect of a larger project, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Beacon 2008).
The earliest Mesopotamian myths of paradise identified its location as vaguely in the east. Early Christianity, following Jewish ideas,expanded this location into a general, this-worldly soteriology of the whole earth as paradise, concentrated in religious communities. With the rise in medieval Europe of crucifixion-centered Christian atonement theology and holy war, paradise was closed on earth and also jettisoned into the afterlife, and soteriology hinged on the destruction of this world. As a way to hasten the apocalypse andto steal the wealth flowing out of the locked doors of paradise via its rivers, Western Christians began to seek the original location of paradise in the east, goaded by illusions of eternal youth, grandeur, and messianic status. This obsession with finding paradise-lost inspired the conquest and colonization of the Americas and contributed to the idealization of South and East Asia in Western Christianity as a source for the spiritual enlightenment of the Western soul, especially exemplified in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and new age “spirituality.” This project deconstructs this 4,000 year trajectory and proposes a different soteriology of paradise.