[Dialogue] 2/11/2021, Progresssing Spirit: Matthew Fox: What Is Patriarchy, anyway?; Spong Revisited

Thu Feb 11 07:42:45 PST 2021

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What Is Patriarchy, anyway?
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|  Essay by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
February 11, 2021
There is - and ought to be - plenty of criticism of Patriarchy at this time in history.  But for that very reason there needs to be a critical understanding of what it is - and is not.

A year ago I was part of a conference held in Florida where I interacted over a weekend with  a scientist, theologian and Franciscan sister who specializes in Teilhard de Chardin, Ilia Delio.  Often during our interactions she brought up the term “patriarchy,” never in a positive way.  I understood what she was saying and did not bat an eye.  But after our last interaction on Sunday afternoon, when the program ended and the auditorium, which held about 1000 persons was emptied out, a man came up to me.  He was about forty years old and he was beside himself - the top of his head coming off - as he screamed at me.

His first words went something like this: “Who does that lady think she is, putting down patriarchy all the time.  I am a good and faithful husband.  I work hard to support my family, etc., etc.”  After listening for a while, and being ignored trying to respond to his rant, I screamed back at him something like: “Shut up!  Do you want a reply or not?”  I was very aware that I was returning shouting for shouting, yelling for yelling, reptilian brain for reptilian brain.  It was the only way to get a word in edgewise.

My response went something like this: “Patriarchy is not something personal that she is accusing you of.  Not all men are patriarchal and not all women are exempt from it.  The word “patriarchy” names a particular philosophy or way of seeing the world.  It names a set of values that many men have profited from over the centuries.  If you subscribe to it, then you are part of it.  If you do not and if you stand for other values, then she is not talking about you. You have taken her criticism far too personally.”

He seemed to calm down a bit and we talked (in normal language, no more shouting).  After a while he walked away somewhat calmed it seemed.  I then went on to lead a spiral dance closing ceremony outdoors.

But I have never forgotten this exchange. I have tried to learn from it and keep my ears open.  It is true that people - good people and smart people - often throw the term “patriarchy” around very freely (and very disapprovingly) without taking time to define one’s terms.  In my general circles of interacting, living as I do in the Bay Area, it is not a loaded term.  But I learned that day that in Florida, it is a super loaded term that had the effect on this fellow of setting his hair on fire.

Patriarchy is not necessarily the same as “masculine.”  When the masculine is toxic and un-thought-out however, which happens readily in a culture where masculinity is presumed and privileged, then masculinity can readily become Patriarchy and be its agent.

What I call the “sacred masculine” or “healthy masculine” in my book on The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine is in many respects the opposite of Patriarchy, which is why I end the book with the “sacred marriage” of the divine feminine and the sacred masculine.  The ten archetypes laid out in that book help us to reimagine the masculine employing deep images and lessons of our ancestors.

I think it is safe to say that we witnessed an Epiphany of Patriarchy, on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 2021.  Instead of honoring the divine in every child, as the gentile magi did, we saw a theater of Might Makes Right.  Piles of lies/Lady Justice cries/democracy dies.  What we saw on that day was patriarchy out of control, patriarchy unleashed.  Toxic masculine philosophy was on display on Epiphany.  Patriarchy ruled.

After those events President Trump was quoted as saying that the reason he did not apologize or speak out against it was that “it makes me look weak.”  Patriarchy’s deepest fear.

When people ask me for an understanding of Patriarchy vs. Feminism, I invariably steer them to a poem written by M. C. Richards the morning after she was told that she was going to die.  In that poem, called “I am dying,” she first lists understandings of death that certain men have come up with over the years such as “death be not proud,” etc. and she comments, “Such a masculine presence - part of our paternalistic culture - and religion.” Then she offers her own understanding of death which includes “relaxing into someone’s arms,” feeling “a softness as of sleep, a gentleness that is friendly.”  And culminating in “backpacking in the hereafter.”*

That poem is a perfect way of grasping the feminine philosophy of life (that includes death) vs. the patriarchal philosophy of life (that sees death as an enemy).  Dualism in other words.  Theologian Rosemary Ruether taught that dualism is the foundation of patriarchal thinking.

Allow me to lay out some of the values involved in this philosophy or way of looking at the world that we call Patriarchy in contrast to those we call Feminism, which is another philosophy or way of seeing the world holding alternative values.  I count 37 contrasts in this list. 

Patriarchy                                                         Feminism

Men and women can be or choose to be in both columns or parts of both columns.  This is NOT about women and men but about contrasting philosophies.

~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox

*For the complete and marvelous poem see Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Post-denominational Priest (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2015), 361f.  Or Julia Connor, ed., Backpacking in the Hereafter: Poems by M. C. Richards (Asheville, NC: Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, 2015), 19.

Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 35 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 74 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship (called The Cosmic Mass). His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. Among his books are A Way To God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spirituality Journey; Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times; Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; Order of the Sacred Earth; The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times; and Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic – And Beyond. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox - See Welcome from Matthew Fox.

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Question & Answer

Q: By John

In my studies of the ancient Israelites, I am learning that the Israelites were very possibly Canaanites broken away from the various sites of Canaanite cities and that the DNA test of Canaanites skeletons reveals that the Israelites did not kill off the Canaanites but rather the Canaanites moved to Lebanon. The relationship of these two groups were much the same in language and even worshipping practices. The movement to a single God “Yahweh” only took place after the Babylon exile ended - not with Moses. The question I would like to ask is why this information isn’t known to the majority of Christians?

A: By Dr. Carl Krieg

Dear John,

Thank you for your question, for it is one that speaks directly to the survival of the church. I have been asking this very same question for a very long time, and refer you to an article I wrote for Progressivechristianity.org, For Mainline Christian Clergy. I have read that the original Israelites were Canaanite hill people who moved down onto the fertile plains, but never about the DNA study. So thank you for that! We all need to keep on learning, and sharing that knowledge.

The problem of ignorance in the modern church, and I use that word simply to mean without knowledge, began with the Enlightenment. There were those who wanted to apply the new tools of literary criticism to the Bible, and those who believed that such study would be sacrilegious. The latter, of course, are the fundamentalists who continue even today to refuse scholarly critique and who read the Bible literally. But what of the leadership in the mainline Protestant denominations? I have met so many pastors and preachers who speak as though biblical scholarship did not exist. I suspect that the cause of that neglect is the fear of offending the more conservative members of the congregation, who could leave and take their money with them. That fear creates an atmosphere that approaches fundamentalism even in liberal churches. The denominations will fight for justice and gay rights, but are shy about biblical critique. Consequently, the fundamentalist evangelicals have been able to define for the public what it means to be a “Christian”. As a result, society at large increasingly sees all church-goers as fundamentalists and disparages them as less than rational. It also makes it difficult for more open-minded folks in the pews to feel at ease, both in the church and on the street. It’s gotten to the point where one is almost embarrassed to admit that one goes to church on Sunday morning.

Beside the alienation of secular culture and the failure to recognize the progressives in the congregations, the promulgation of non-critical “biblical” theology is confusing and detrimental to the faith formation of everyone. A few examples. You mention Moses. Must we believe that Israelites were slaves in Egypt? That God parted the Red Sea for them to escape? That Moses ever existed? That he really received all those laws from God while in the desert? Is that what our faith is all about?

Most people suffer some tragedy in life, and some look to Job for an answer. How many are aware that the prologue and epilogue, wherein the patient Job is rewarded tenfold for his faith, is an addition that is separate and distinct from the main body of the poem, wherein Job is not patient and angrily shakes his fist at God. If I am suffering and angry, I might find it comforting to know that Job also was angry.

I don’t know how many Pentecost services I have attended where the preacher spoke of the great miracle of the many tongues and how everyone heard the story in their own language. As if that really happened! Would it not be more helpful to recognize and relish the small moments of spiritual community that we experience every day?

The list goes on, but the point is made. A deeper knowledge of the biblical material would enlighten folks in the pews, would make the gospel story much more understandable to the general public, and would shed light on the travails of life. I hate to say this, but I think that many clergy are doing a disservice to a lot of people. 

~ Dr. Carl Krieg

Read and share online here

About the Author
Dr. Carl Krieg received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC and PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith and The Void and the Vision. As professor and pastor, Dr. Krieg has taught innumerable classes and led many discussion groups. He lives with his wife Margaret in Norwich, VT.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Origins of the New Testament
Part XXVIII: Acts III -- The Story of Paul

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
July 8, 2010
When the book of Acts moves beyond the conflict that set Jewish Christians against Greek Christians, it is ready to chronicle the story of how Christianity became a universal human religion. From the capital of Judaism to the capital of the Roman Empire is the story line that the book of Acts follows. The hero of this phase of the Christian movement is Saul of Tarsus, who would come to be known as Paul the Apostle. We have previously examined the content of his epistles, but now in the book of Acts, Luke begins to flesh out the portrait of his life and his personality as others experienced him. How much of this portrait is historical and how much is the product of Luke’ fertile imagination is often hard to determine. Luke writes the book of Acts some forty years or two generations after the death of Paul and legends about heroes do tend to grow after they have died. This fate may well have befallen Paul in the book of Acts. My rule for interpreting Paul is to follow the actual writings of Paul wherever they conflict with the much later narrative of Acts. This rule will place all of the details of Paul’s conversion story on the road to Damascus into doubt as something that actually happened in history. It is worth noting that Paul never writes about his conversion. He assumes a conversion from the role of the prosecutor of Christians, but he gives us no details, making Acts seem dramatically unhistorical.

Acts does give us, however, the only cohesive picture we have of Paul’s adventurous missionary journeys, which correlates well with corroborative details in the Pauline epistles. This sense is strengthened when Acts introduces in Acts 16:10, and then continues through most of the rest of the book, a section of his travel narrative that does not use the descriptive pronoun “they,” but rather the autobiographical pronoun “we.” It is as if Luke found a diary of the journeys of Paul written by one of Paul’s companions and simply incorporated this diary into his larger work. These “we” sections of the book of Acts are accorded by many, but certainly not by all New Testament scholars, a place of greater significance and greater authority than any other part of the book of Acts so I simply call these passages to you for your attention and further study.

When I try to flesh out the portrait of the Paul of history as we have received it from ancient times, I always find the “personal notes” dropped almost accidentally into the text of the book of Acts to be enormously helpful. These notes offer a kind of unplanned access to the person. I think, for example, of that tale in Acts about an event that occurred on his first missionary journey, during which he was the number two person to Barnabas on the missionary team. In this story, the two missionaries were in the city of Lystra (Acts 14:6ff) and it gives us an insight into Paul’s physical appearance. Barnabas and Paul were both mistaken for Gods visiting from Mt. Olympus. The people, looking at the two of them, began to refer to Barnabas as Zeus, the king of the Gods, and to Paul as Hermes, the messenger God. In the cultural patterns of that day, the tradition defined Zeus as tall and commanding in stature. We can, properly, I assume, suggest that Barnabas must have himself been a person of imposing size to have been mistaken for Zeus. Hermes, the messenger God, was portrayed as small and wiry and as constantly speaking. For Paul to have been thought of as Hermes he must have been similar in stature and above all talkative. Clearly Paul elicited that kind of image in the minds of his hearers. Paul is described in one other 2nd century apocalyptic source as thin, with dark connecting eyebrows stretched across the entirety of his face. There is some similarity in these two descriptions.

In chapter 13:13-15, Barnabas and Paul were in the town of Perga in Pamphylia and the liturgical practice of the 1st century synagogue was described just by chance, giving us the best insight we have of how the synagogue functioned on the Sabbath in the 1st century. There we learn of the priority of the reading of the Torah, which contains the books Genesis through Deuteronomy, which were attributed to Moses. In the more traditional synagogues, the Torah was required to be read in its entirety on the Sabbaths of a single year. In some less traditional synagogues, a three-year cycle was followed, but the centrality of the law, the Torah, in both was crucial. Following the Torah came readings from the prophets. The Jewish tradition meant two things by the phrase “the prophets.” First, there were the “early prophets,” that is the biblical books of Joshua through II Kings, which told us, as I have previously noted, the history of the Jewish people after the death of their founder, Moses. Second, they meant the “latter prophets,” that is, those books attributed to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the book the Jews referred to as “the Book of the Twelve.” This volume contained on one scroll what we call today the Minor Prophets or the books from Hosea through Malachi. Please note that Daniel was not one of the prophets since Daniel was not written until about 168 BCE and had not yet been incorporated into the sacred text. Readings from either the early or the latter prophets did not have the same gravitas associated with the law, so those lessons were read in much smaller portions over an indeterminate amount of time. Next, the members of the congregation would be invited to speak, relating their own insights gained from these readings. I am now convinced that this is where the disciples of Jesus began the process of attempting to demonstrate that the Jewish Scriptures pointed to Jesus in almost every verse. By the time the gospels are written, this interpretative pattern is both assumed and operative. The author of Acts relates Paul’s sermon in 13:16-41 and provides us with dramatic insights into the way Christians employed the Jewish Scriptures and the way that Christianity emerged in the synagogue.

The book of Acts also chronicles in some detail the hostility that broke out over Paul and his teaching on the part of the Orthodox Jewish world. On his journeys in whatever city he visited Paul always went to the synagogue first. He never thought of himself as anything but a Jew. In these synagogues, which were always outside of the Jewish homeland, there were three distinct groups gathered for worship: the orthodox, traditional Jews who believed that the entire truth of God was embodied in the Torah and who were not therefore prepared to welcome any deviations from or additions to the traditional text; the liberal-leaning Jews dispersed, from their homeland and more and more interacting with their Gentile neighbors; and finally those people known as “Gentile proselytes,” who were people drawn to the synagogue by the ethical monotheism of Judaism, but were unwilling to adopt and, some were even repelled by, the cultic practices of circumcision, kosher dietary laws and Sabbath day observance.

Paul’s message appealed to these Gentile proselytes and significantly to the liberal Jews of the Diaspora, but he drew little more than hostility from those identified as the Orthodox party for whom any change threatened their security. So they were the primary source of the hostility toward Paul, which plagued him everywhere he went. Acts 15 describes a council of church leaders gathered to deal with this tension and, according to this Acts account, a compromise was worked out by James, the Lord’s brother, who appears to have headed the Jerusalem community of Jewish believers in Jesus. In this compromise, Paul was given carte blanche to continue his work among the Gentiles and was assured that his converts did not have to comply with Jewish ritual practices. The converts were asked, however, to agree to three things: to abstain from eating meat that had been offered to idols, from unchastity and from blood from any animal that had been strangled and was thus not ceremonially clean. Whether the details of this council are accurate is hard to say, but it did serve to set the Christian movement free from the constraints of those Jewish practices, and began its separation from Judaism which had birthed Christianity.

When Paul and Barnabas prepared for their second journey, a dispute broke out leading to a split between the two. The issue, according to Acts, was whether to take John Mark with them. Mark appears to have abandoned them on the first journey to return home. Paul then became the senior member of a second missionary team and chose Silas to accompany him. Barnabas took Mark and in this manner the movement spread.

On this second tour we learn that Paul had a dream of a Macedonian imploring him to come to Macedonia. Paul obeyed the vision and Christianity moved into what is now Europe. Paul had adventures in Greece including a debate in Athens that he clearly did not win. Paul’s direction was now set and he turned his efforts toward the vast Gentile world, which increasingly aroused the hostility of the Orthodox Jews.

Paul returned to Jerusalem to bring money for the relief of the Jewish followers of Jesus there and his journey back to this holy city. His condemnation by the Orthodox party of Judaism, his appeal to Rome under his privilege as a Roman citizen and his subsequent journey to Rome by ship make up the bulk of the remainder of this book. On both the trip to Jerusalem and the trip to Rome, the book of Acts becomes an exciting adventure story. On one occasion, Paul began a sermon at midnight and preached so long that a young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in a window, went to sleep and fell to the floor as if dead. Paul revived him, but the admonition against long sermons found a scriptural basis. On his trip to Rome, we read of storms, shipwrecks at sea, surviving the bite of a poisonous viper and many other adventures. In verse 16 of the final chapter 28 Paul finally arrives in Rome and there the book of Acts closes rather abruptly saying that Paul lived there at his own expense for two years under very loose arrangements, welcoming all who came to him.

While the story of Paul’s death is not told, Luke’s purpose has been achieved. The Christian message has traveled from Galilee to Jerusalem to Rome and was now planted firmly in the capitol of the known world. As we say, “The rest is history.” Is Acts accurate history? We can never be sure. The Church did, however, move with Paul into all the world.

~  John Shelby Spong
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