I was also taken by the linkage of paradisal imagery with what seems to have been early Christian experience of nature and beauty as partaking in paradise in some way. This is intriguing because, for me and I suspect many coming into Christian faith, part of the experience of entry into faith is of a greater subjective sense of the aliveness and blessedness of the world of nature (including human beings). I find CS Lewis making a similar observation in his account of conversion. I'm intrigued doubly because this seems to have been part of the experience of many people of early Charismatic renewal in the 1970's. For example, much material used in worship by Anglican Churches touched deeply by Renewal at that time seems to have quite a lot of appreciation for nature and reveling in the glory of God as experienced in Creation. In addition the churches of Christ the Redeemer (?) in Texas where Betty Pulkingham worshipped, St Michael-le-Belfry in York (under David Watson, then) and groups such as the Post Green Community in Dorset also developed quite a folk arts emphasis in their common life and mission as well as a social-change (justice and integrity of creation) edge to their life.
I'd be interested to know if anyone else sufficiently long-memoried or with salient recent experience or research can add, confirm, nuance or better-inform that? It seems worthy of further research, though I'm not sure I'm the one to do it ...What happened to all of that? Have we, in the last 30 years seen a compressed-time reprise of the loss of paradise to a sacred-violence, somewhat neo-platonic (?) account of Christian faith? I suspect that there may be something in this: the Evangelical fear of illuminism along with an unreflective and sometimes (often?) too-simplified proclamation of a particular kind of atonement theory may well have severed or de-emphasised a Spiritual experience of the Spirit of God in creation in favour of something more ecclesiocentric, more culturally churchy. I think we may have lost some important mission opportunities in so doing
Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire: Amazon.co.uk: Rita Nakashima Brock, Rebecca Ann Parker: Books"
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Maybe it's just because it's new, but I'm seeing no reviews at that Amazon link at the moment. I bought this book after being amazed by her talks at Greenbelt. I really must get around to reading it. From what I head it sounded like she had some fantasticly exciting things to say, but that were also some serious questions to ask before taking it all on board. Of course, six months on, I struggle to recall what those questions were...
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