In my last post, I made a sort of unfriendly comment about my Zoroastrian reading, which did not acknowledge how much I have enjoyed learning about Zoroastrian cosmology these last few months. There are a few things I want to tell you about it, because I think they are really compelling ideas.

I should say really clearly that I am not a theologian (by any stretch of imagination!) or a historian or anything else like that, so you may very likely read things here that are plain out wrong or just foolish. (And please correct me when you do!) I read all this stuff because it helps me sort out my own beliefs and faith and doubt and confusion, and because it gives me ideas for music I want to write, and because I find it fun. So I hope you will read what I write with the constant awareness that I am no expert on much of anything at all…

Scholars claim that many of the ideas embedded in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- ideas like individual judgment, heaven and hell, the last judgment, the resurrection of the body, and eternal life -- all originated in Zoroastrianism.

Basically, the core vision of Zoroastrianism is that there are two powers in the world, God (who is wholly good), and Evil. The two are in a battle to the end of the world, and God is going to win. God created the world, and human beings in particular, as a way of fighting Evil. So every good thing we do is an incremental defeat of Evil, and eventually Evil will be wholly vanquished and the world will no longer need to exist.

What really delights me about this vision is that we human beings are asked to do good, not so much for our own individual salvation, but more for the incremental salvation of the whole world. In a sense, we are all Jesus, we are all part of a larger picture, and every good thought, good word, and good deed (the trinity of Zoroastrian ethics) is hastening the moment when the final Restoration will take place.

While I think the idea that we are all working together for the arrival of the Kingdom of God is certainly embedded in Christianity, I don’t know where it appears in such a clear form, and if you can think of a NT reference that really embodies that idea, I’d really love to know about it.

Here’s another idea I like a lot: heaven and hell exist in a very similar way to the orthodox Christian heaven and hell, but at the last judgment, they cease to exist. Souls that have been languishing in hell since death go through a final cleansing, and then EVERYONE joins in eternal life with God. Zoroastrians could not conceive that a good God would punish creation for eternity, so that’s how they make sense of it. Pretty cool, no?!

Manichaeanism is actually a heresy of Zoroastrianism, which also infected Christianity (mostly through Augustine), and led to all the troubles that grow from equating Evil with Matter and Good with Spirit. All that body-hating and asceticism and (I would claim) woman-hating, grows out of that simplistic equation. For a Zoroastrian, Matter can not at all be inherently evil, because God CREATED matter, and in fact, is depending on the created world to restore Good for eternity.

Orthodox Zoroastrianism seems to be oddly silent about how Evil came to exist in the first place, but there is a heresy called Zurvanism that explains it with a really cool and beautiful story. I’ll tell you about that next time.