Stumble it!
Western spirituality has two basic traditions–that which starts with the experience of sin and develops a fall/redemption spiritual motif; and that which starts with the experience of Life and blessing and develops a Creator centered spirituality…the evidence is overwhelming evidence is that the fall/redemption motif, so often championed by dualists like Augustine…has held over powering sway–it condemned Pelagius and Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart, and it platonized and thus neutralized Francis of Assisi. It practically wrote off women from the spiritual map, locking them whenever possible, virtually ignoring their experience and their writings with only a few possible exceptions. It has put the body down and called this repression holy; it has encouraged private conversions and sentimental pieties that have nothing to do with what the great revivalist John Wesley called “the full gospel, a social gospel” and thus it renders sacraments, ritual, and symbol trivial and useless. It has substituted a private “righteousness” for true biblical justice; it has taught sin-consciousness rather than people’s capacity for the divine; it has more often fostered curses than blessings. It isolatesl it isolates individuals from themselves, for example as regards their own passions and creativities, and it isolates individuals from one another [having created the church of the individual, the community of the alone]. It thus very readily has become a tool for dividing and conquering and legitimizes those who lord themselves over others, whether in state or church. It has remained silent about that ultimate way of life that Jesus taught and died for–namely compassion, and when it has consented to include compassion as a virtue, it does so in the most watered down way possible–not the divine fact of setting the captives free. It has failed to resist the dehumanizing of Jesus and the Incarnate God event. In its dualistic view of the world it has pitted salvation history against history, supernature against nature, spirit against body [and mind], redemption against creation, artist against intellectual, heaven (and hell) against earth, the sensual against the spiritual, man against woman, individual against society and condemns all those who disagree with such dualism–Matthew Fox, Western Spirituality
And that is what I like to call a mouth full…to me, it says a lot…but most importantly it expresses (though through a negative lens) the positive reality of my own discovery of a Lord who is truly Lord over all, in all and through all…a Lord who’s heart is burning with compassion for the creation…who is actively engaged in recovery all things to Himself (Acts 3:19).
And most of all it describes (again, in a negative way) the Lord I am falling in love with…a Lord who is worth it…worthy is the Lamb.
Filed under: Wholeness, kingdom | Tagged: augustine, christian worldview, creation spirituality, dualism, emergence, emergent, emerging, kingdom of God, matthew fox, platonism, the senses, western christianity
‘Tis a mouthful! And one which, to be fair to Fox, he develops proactively in his many books. I don’t agree with every jott and tittle of the Matt-ster, but he does make me rethink church history and the essence of Christian spirituality–for this, I really appreciate him.
Techno-Cosmic Mass, anyone?
As much as I agree with your sentiments below the quote, I think the quote itself is a bit reductionist of a more complex reality. It is easy to gather up every aspect of 2000 years of Christianity that we don’t like and call it all one thing and all one tendency, but I don’t think that is true. Dualism isn’t to blame for people ignoring the heart of Christianity and embracing the trivia, that is good old fashioned sin.
Moreover, without understanding that we ARE fallen, we have lost the vital connection with God, we can never return to His grace in which all those good things that you mention can happen. We cannot reconnect with God until we realize that we don’t have that connection from the outset.
The things you say after the quote are good and true… but they do not follow from the quote. God is burning with compassion for the Creation… and it is a fallen one. God is burning with compassion for people… who have fallen into darkness.
Whether you believe the literal story of Adam and Eve in the garden or not, the estrangement of Man from his God is utterly central to Christianity, without which Christ died in vain. I know that He did not die in vain, and while in Christ our death and condemnation died, this doesn’t mean that we weren’t living the way of Death beforehand. We were.
To be a branch cut off from the Living Vine of God is to be kindling. This is the inheritance of the World into which we were born. Yes, a fallen world. Does God long continuously and urgently that everyone be rescued from Death? Absolutely. Will they be? Not for me to say, but not necessarily.
Hey Robert,
I can totally see what you mean about a disconnect from the quote to my thoughts…that makes sense. And I also hate to be reductionistic about anything–usually the reasons for any one problem are much more complex than any of us care to admit.
That having been said…I do believe that Platonic/Greek dualism is the prevalent translator we use to hear the words of Gospel in the west. This colors not only our view of God, but also of our own falleness and God’s plan of redemption. We need to recognize that deep bias and move to a posture that finds itself more capable of receiving the vantage which the writers of the scriptures truly wrote from and to, which I would characterize as Hebrew/Judiaistic in nature, as opposed to hellenistic.
I would offer that while this quote (and maybe even the initial outworkings of creation/liberation theology) is unbalanced in with respect to paying it’s dues to the falleness of humanity, it is unbalanced in a calculated way as a response to hundreds of years of imbalance on the part of the other view. It is trying to clearly articulate a true alternative, not merely an outgrowth of…
though in all honesty I think that usually evolutionary progress “transcends but also includes” (as Ken Wilber says) rather than simply discounting. So I get what your saying.
I also am an advocate of recognizing the extent to which we are fallen…it is only from that reality that we can proceed in the process of “theosis”, as the Orthodox call it, “transformed into His image”…we must first recognize that we are NOT in His image and must be transfered, transformed, and transubstantiated into His likeness.
So yeah…
I guess I would argue in favor of focusing the target a bit more. Was St. Francis really rebelling against a historical bias, or actual people who regarded money as more important than beings? Plato didn’t make the Catholic Church depict Jesus on the cross with a pouch of gold, the Church did that for very logically greedy reasons – to excuse their own wealth. Descartes may have solidified the Western disregard for the Creation, but probably more through self-interest than historical precedent. What you de-spiritualize you are justified in destroying, which carries us from the rampant mistreatment of animals to the destruction of whole ecosystems for money. Philosophy followed power and money, as it often does (Nietzsche was more honest at least when he based his whole philosophy ON power). The fundamental revolution in the West is seizing power in ways that were never imagined or contemplated before, and whatever would further that aim was considered good.
Socrates was not the most truthful philosopher of Western thinking Nietzsche was. What did he say? The world is the Will to Power and nothing besides.
Other societies loved money and power, we made a science of it. We perfected it. And power is the key to the “bad tidings”, the malignant gospel that we see both in history and today as well. Wickedness drives the philosophy, it hires it out like casinos hire shills. It buys and sells philosophy, except for a few honest and usually disregarded souls. The World operates on principles of force and money. God operates on love. Same as it was in Judea, same as it ever was.