Hong Kong Liberal Religious Forum

Christianity Without the Cross
By Rosemary Ganley
July 30, 2009
religion dispatches
www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rdbook/1562/

A new book investigates the history of the crucifix in early Christianity and develops a political theology of this-worldly salvation.

Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire
By Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker
Beacon Press, 2008

Rita Nakashima Brock, a Disciple of Christ minister and Director of Faith Voices for the Common Good, and her writing partner, Rebecca Ann Parker, who is president of the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California have, with passion, scholarship and clear writing, laid out a fascinating thesis. It is also a stylish and readable book.

"This is," said Diarmuid O' Murchu, the Irish psychologist-priest-writer, and no slouch himself, "the best book of theology I have read in 20 years."

After finishing Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us in 2001, the two writers spent five years sniffing out evidence that the cruciform symbol, the central image of Christianity, arrived very late on the scene. Indeed, it was not important during the first millennium of Christian history.