[Oe List ...] 5/04/17, Matthew Fox: Earth Day 2017: The Return of Healthy Religion?; Spong Revisited: The Terrible Texts II...

Thu May 4 07:08:52 PDT 2017

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Earth Day 2017: The Return of Healthy Religion?
By Matthew Fox

There is such a thing as “fake news”; and “fake science;” and there is also, we must make clear, such a thing as “fake religion” and certainly of “fake Christianity.” I would maintain that all those persons and institutions political and corporate that are in purposeful denial about climate change are in direct contradiction to everything Jesus taught and tried to teach.(1)
As John’s epistle says, how is it possible to love God if you hate your neighbor? The Gospel celebrates the Good Samaritan who cared about his suffering neighbor. Our neighbor is not just our two-legged neighbor but other neighbors as well who face extinction today and who bear names we have assigned to them such as “elephants;” “tigers;” “polar bears;” “rainforests” and much more. If we are waging war against them by our narcissistic life-styles and anthropocentric agendas and are busy committing ecocide we are hating them. And of course in hating them and destroying them we are hating our own descendants, our own great grandchildren and many more humans not yet born.
When will the nonsense stop? When will the denial stop?
The nonsense will stop when religion wakes up to what its real job is. The real job of religion is this: To give thanks. To teach gratitude, a gratitude that is born of Awe, of what rabbi Heschel calls “radical amazement.” Were you radically amazed this summer to learn that science has now moved on from understanding the universe is several hundred billion galaxies big to being two trillion galaxies large? Isn’t that cause enough for awe and wonder? Heshcel reminds us that “the universe is not just here; it shocks us into amazement.”(2) Are you shocked everyday by the wonders of our existence, the beauty of Mother Earth and her generous bestowing of diverse beings with which we humans are invited to play and learn and delight and sometimes use wisely? Heschel teaches that there are three ways to respond to creation: 1. Exploit it. (We’ve been pretty adapt at that the past 300 years and we are now paying the price). 2. Enjoy it. 3. Accept it with awe.
It is this last option that is the spiritual option. You do not have to be a believer to travel that deep route. Many atheists have found this truth out on their own. But no religion is worthy of the name if it is not actively engaged in instructing its followers that this—accepting with awe—is the heart of what constitutes mysticism and healthy religion. As Mary Oliver put it in a recent talk in San Francisco: “I have learned three things about life and want to share them now that I am in my 80’s and an elder: First, pay attention. Second: Be astonished. Third: Share your astonishment.”
Some twenty years ago I was invited to deliver a talk at the Schumacher Lecture Series in Bristol, England. Preceding my talk Lester Brown, who was then head of Worldwatch Institute, spoke. He ended his talk by declaring that we had twenty years left to change our ways as a species or the planet would not recover from the damage we were doing. And he added: “The Number One obstacle to an Environmental Revolution was: Apathy.”
I was very struck by this statement since apathy is a spiritual problem. Indeed, it is one of the capital sins, what our ancestors called “acedia” which was far too narrowly defined during the industrial revolution as “sloth.” It is much more than sloth. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century defined acedia this way: “The lack of energy to begin new things.” This lack of energy has many names today; among them are: boredom; inertia; depression; despair; not-caring; indifference; apathy; and even “couchpotatoitis” (A word invented in our time because the sickness is so prevalent). Aquinas also offered the medicine for this sickness when he said “zeal comes from the intense experience of the beauty of things.” You can see here the deep connection between cosmology—an invitation to re-experience the deep beauty of things—and survival. Between cosmology and ecology (Thomas Berry says “ecology is functional cosmology.”)
Albert Einstein wrote that we are entering a third phase of religion and that is a cosmic religion. It is only this awakening, he felt, that would bring peace between nations and peace in our relationship to nature, a relationship that takes us beyond nationalisms and sectarianisms and anthropocentric projections onto Divinity. This is one reason the archetype of the Cosmic Christ is returning in our time—or ought to be.(3) A Cosmic Christ is a Green Christ just as certain as “ecology is functional cosmology.” Carl Jung says that archetypes return when they are needed.
The word “return” is significant in this context because for decades lazy thinkers have been saying that a “Cosmic Christ” is something “New Age.” I beg your pardon! The teaching of the Cosmic Christ is found in the earliest Christian writings, namely in St Paul’s letters and in the Gospel of Thomas as well as other places and in all the most powerful events in the Gospels that early Christian movement enshrined into its biggest Feast Days. Think the Nativity, the Baptism of Jesus (after all the “sky opened up”), the Transfiguration, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost — all these moments are set in a cosmological context. Far too often they have been interpreted in a narrow and narcissistic sense of “Am I saved?” How easily we have reduced religion to mere psychology when in fact it is essentially about cosmology (creation) and the sacred.
A number of years ago the great Biblical scholar Krister Stendahl came up to me during a workshop I was leading on Creation Spirituality and said, “Remember: The word basileia (which we translate as “kingdom of God”—a term that all agree lies at the heart of Jesus’ message and that carries deep political implications since it contrasts to the Empire of Caesar in his day) can be perfectly well translated as creation.” The Kingdom/Queendom of God is creation itself; and creation is the Kingdom/Queendom of God. Pre-modern thinkers like St Francis, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas knew this but few modern theologians have understood this. It was Aquinas who said Revelation comes in two volumes: Nature and the Bible. Nature is being despoiled today because religion has wrapped itself up in a Bible book and ignored the Nature book which of course we need scientists, not exegetes, to properly translate for us.
A year ago last January I was invited to be part of a gathering in Florida about climate change and the rising of the seas. It began with a presentation by a scientist who showed slides of Florida today; then ten years from now; then twenty years and thirty years from now. With each slide a whole section of Florida was chopped off. Chop/chop/chop. I was left with the distinct impression that one ought not to invest in real estate in Florida. Rubber boots? Yes! And lots of rubber dingys too.
At the very time our conference was meeting Florida boasted TWO candidates for President of the United States who were in denial about climate change—Senator Marco Rubio and former governor Jeb Bush—as well as their sitting governor who has forbidden any state employee to use the term “climate change” in his or her communications (a warning recently released by our federal government as well).
Meanwhile, in Southern Miami, you walk down the street and there is six inches of water on the sidewalk! Climate change is not just about getting your feet wet; it’s about what happens when sea water overruns our fresh water aquifers. When that happens crops die and humans cannot survive. Climate change is not a Republican vs Democrat issue. Nor is Ecology. Or it should not be. To have an entire political party adopt Denial constitutes a Scandal of the First Magnitude.
Thomas Aquinas teaches that to choose to be ignorant of what one ought to know about is a deadly (or “mortal”) sin. Meister Eckhart declares that: “God is the denial of denial.” What this means is that if we or our institutions—including political, media or religious institutions—traffic in denial God is absent. Truth is absent when denial reigns. And the sacred is no place to be found.
In my book on Evil, recently released with a new preface and a forward by Deepak Chopra, I make the point that the opposite of evil is not the good. The bad is the opposite of the good. The opposite of Evil is: The Sacred.(4) A society or religion that has lost its way because it is distancing itself from the Kingdom of God, from Sacred Creation, is complicit in Evil. The good news is that a time like ours is a time to awaken us to the revelation of the Sacred once again. To see every creature as another Christ. As Thomas Merton put it, “Everything that is is holy.”
A New Reformation invites the church to shed its anthropocentrism and narcissism in favor of the true Kingdom/Queendom of God, sacred creation. In times like these our varied vocations take on special meaning. True religion’s task is not just to wake up to the Sacred but also to defend it. That is why an authentic spiritual adult today is both a mystic (lover) and a warrior (or prophet) who defends what one cherishes and stands up to Evil.
May this Earth Day 2017 give birth to many such mystics and prophets.
~ Matthew Fox

Read the essay online here.
About the Author
Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 32 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 60 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. 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 Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the FleshTransforming Evil in Soul and Society, The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved and Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest
Footnotes:
(1) As an example of politicians being hypocritical, see my “Is Ryan a Religious Hypocrite? A Priestly Letter to Speaker Paul Ryan from Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox” in www.tikkun.org.
(2) Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 1965), 87.
(3) For a spiritual exercise to hasten the return of the Cosmic Christ see Bishop Marc Andrus and Matthew Fox, Stations of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: Tayen Lane Publishing, 2016).
(4) Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society (Berkeley, CA: North American Press, 2016).

Question & Answer

Reader from the Internet writes:

Question:
What does progressive Christianity have to say about the concept of hell that seems so central to so many other forms of historic and current Christianity?

Answer: By Roger Wolsey

Dear Reader,
That is an excellent question and we progressive Christians really would do well to have some thought out responses when our more evangelical friends ask us about these matters – as well as our agnostic, atheist, and spiritual but not religious friends ask us this same question. As with so many things, progressive Christianity doesn’t have any official stance about this, but it does seem to be the case that most progressive Christians do not have a concept of hell as part of their faith and practice. I cannot speak for all of progressive Christianity, but I can share how this progressive Christian understands things – hell isn’t even part of the Bible and shouldn’t be a part of Christianity. To be blunt about it, let me repeat, Hell isn’t Christian – or Jewish. It’s pagan.
“The modern English word Hell is derived from Old English hel, helle (about 725 AD to refer to a nether world of the dead) reaching into the Anglo-Saxon pagan period, and ultimately from Proto-Germanic *halja, meaning “one who covers up or hides something”.[2] The word has cognates in related Germanic languages such as Old Frisian helle, hille, Old Saxon hellja, Middle Dutch helle (modern Dutch hel), Old High German helle (Modern German Hölle), Danish, Norwegian and Swedish helvede/helvete (hel + Old Norse vitti, “punishment” whence the Icelandic víti “hell”), and Gothic halja.[2] Subsequently, the word was used to transfer a pagan concept to Christian theology and its vocabulary[2] (however, for the Judeo-Christian origin of the concept see Gehenna). Some have theorized that English word hell is derived from Old Norse hel.[2] However, this is very unlikely as hel appears in Old English before the Viking invasions. Furthermore, the word has cognates in all the other Germanic languages and has a Proto-Germanic origin.[3] Among other sources, the Poetic Edda, compiled from earlier traditional sources in the 13th century, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, provide information regarding the beliefs of the Norse pagans, including a being named Hel, who is described as ruling over an underworld location of the same name.”
Jesus didn’t speak of Hell, but rather, of Gehenna, as a potential punishing realm for those deemed unworthy. Gehenna was the name of the burning garbage pits outside of Jerusalem. Jesus was speaking in hyperbole in such instances – as a teaching tool to help some people be motivated to do right in this life; i.e., as a metaphorical stick. That said, he rarely spoke about “the stick” and spent far more time offering “the carrot” – describing the kingdom of God/Heaven and the merits and blessings of living in godly ways that demonstrate we’re living “kingdom lives” in God’s beloved community and realm.
“The truth of the matter is that there is not one single word in the Hebrew and Greek Manuscripts of the Bible that means hell. …hell is a man-invented, pagan, unchristian, heretical belief that was first embraced and christianised by Roman Catholicism, and incorporated into the Bible by Jerome through his Latin Vulgate in the early history of Christianity.“
As a Jew, Jesus likely believed that human souls go to “sheol” – a nebulous, ethereal, and neutral realm that is thought to lie beneath the surface of the earth. Sheol being the place where all souls reside/rest/sleep until the judgment day where, in the Christian case, “Jesus returns to judge the quick and the dead.” But even those who go to hades, according to Revelation, don’t experience “eternal suffering” as “hell” itself becomes swallowed up and obliterated".
That said, I – along with many other Christians – am agnostic about the afterlife. I don’t know if there’s a heaven or a hell. I rather suspect that the only hells that exist are the ones that we create and allow at this time – and there are far too many of those.
I don’t follow Jesus in order to go to heaven when I die -- or conversely, to avoid going to hell. That’s a cheap form of faith that is really nothing more than fire insurance. I follow Jesus here and now for the sake of experiencing salvation (which means “wholeness” and “healing”) here and now – and to help others do the same.
To the extent that I think that salvation has anything to do with what happens after we die, I believe in universal salvation. William Barclay wrote a classic essay arguing for this showing how this is biblically based. See: “Why I am a Convicted Universalist”
For many progressive Christians, going to heaven after we die, isn’t the cake, it’s merely the icing on the marvelous cake that is life’s majestic pageant here and now. We’re called to live “kingdom lives” (lives in sync with and that reflect God’s Beloved Community) – now – trusting that whatever happens afterward will take care of itself.
To those who say that it’s important to hold fast to Jesus’ teaching about “eternal” life. It is my understanding that the koine Greek words “perisson/perissos” that are often translated as “eternal” in English also mean “abundant/full” and so it’s as much about a state and quality of being here and now as it is about infinite perpetual time. With this in mind, I tend to emphasize our invitation to experience abundant life by following the way and teachings of Jesus.
~ Roger Wolsey

Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Roger Wolsey is an ordained United Methodist pastor who directs the Wesley Foundation at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is author of Kissing Fish: christianity for people who don’t like christianity

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Terrible Texts: Be Fruitful and Multiply and Subdue the Earth – Part II

For most of Western history, our attention has been given primarily to the task of maintaining the growing human population. Only in relatively modern times, has our focus begun to turn to giving some attention to the process of slowing down the birth rate. That would prove to be a new and very different battleground.

One of the reasons that birth control had trouble gaining traction was that it confronted a major enemy in organized religion. The leadership of the Christian Church attacked vigorously any procedure that separated sexuality from procreation, arguing that this would lead only to moral anarchy. Having claimed for itself the right to define and to defend public morality, the Church’s very self-image was at stake. The lines of battle were thus drawn between new moral issues that resulted from an exploding population and traditional moral issues that emerged when sex was separated from procreation.

Sex has always been feared by organized religion. Great efforts have been exerted by religious traditions to keep this powerful force under control. Ancient religious systems, especially those shaped by the cycle of agriculture, tried to co-opt sex to serve its fertility needs. Temple prostitutes, both male and female, became part of their liturgies. The Western Catholic tradition made the suppression of sex a prerequisite for the holy life of both the ordained and the Religious. The implication was that bodies were unclean, even loathsome, and physical desire was called the mark of the evil one.

Marriage itself was regarded as a compromise with sin while virginity was installed as the highest virtue. It was St. Paul who proclaimed that ‘sin dwells in my members, making me do what I do not want to do.’ He spoke of a war that went on inside him with his mind following one law and his body another. “O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death,” he asked. That plea was later used to equate celibacy with holiness.

The Church had come a long way from the Creation Story in which God was portrayed as creating ex nihilo – out of nothing, and calling good all that God had made, including bodies with their sexual desires. The battle in religious circles over birth control was, therefore, a battle that pitted a religion of control and repression against a religion that celebrated the goodness of creation. It was not between morality and the breakdown of morality, as many religious spokespersons even today like to assert. That battle is now entering its final stages. Does a universal and morally required birth control mean that organized religion, which has historically opposed it, has to die? That is the anxiety that underlies the sexuality debate going on in religious circles today.

First, a very brief history is essential. Primitive attempts at birth control have been around since the dawn of time, motivated primarily by the inconvenience of an unwanted pregnancy. There is even a biblical story about a man named Onan who did not want to produce an heir by his deceased brother’s widow, so he practiced what came to be called ‘coitus interruptus’ and, as the Bible said, “spilled his seed on the ground (Gen. 38).” This ‘seed’ was thought of as the ‘source of life’ and its ‘holiness’ was not to be wasted. Religious negativity toward masturbation finds some of its roots here.

Before DNA evidence could trace parenthood so precisely, the only way a man could guarantee the legitimacy of his own offspring was to keep his wife confined in a place where no opportunity for indiscretion existed. That too was a form of birth control. There were also techniques developed to produce a “spontaneous abortion” but none of them was particularly satisfactory or safe. The only sure method of birth control in those days was abstinence and the primary force undergirding abstinence was public opinion, enforced by the moral pronouncements of ecclesiastical leaders. Hence in the Western world, the Christian Church staked its claim to being the guardian of this powerful sexual force, which they believed had to be controlled, or public morality be doomed. Birth control was, therefore, the implacable enemy of the church. But when human circumstances changed, each of these claims was called into serious question.

Before the defeat of most of humanity’s natural enemies our human future required a high birth rate. Given the casualties among young males in both war and the hunt, the excessive number of women in the tribe could be cared for only with a system of multiple wives, so polygamy was not only encouraged it was said to have been blessed by God. The Bible is, of course, filled with stories that illustrate this principle. The patriarchs of Israel’s history, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, all had numerous wives.

The great split in Jewish history between the Kingdom of Judah and the Northern Kingdom called Israel was explained by the fact that Jacob had two wives, Leah and Rachel. Since women were considered to be the property of men multiple wives were a sign of wealth and power. Alliances were frequently sealed when one king gave his daughter to the harem of another king. The Bible tells us of Solomon’s 1000 wives and concubines. The day had not yet dawned when the male imposed stereotype of the female was thought of as immoral. Women’s feelings were given no consideration since controlling the woman’s body for the sexual benefit of the male was the only priority.

When monogamy, reflecting an increasing appreciation of women, became the norm the growing sense of a woman’s worth made family planning even more important. Some natural processes of birth control were called moral by the Church. These included the fact that pregnancies were thought to be less probable while the mother was nursing so postponing the weaning process resulted in better spacing for the children. Then religious institutions began to encourage couples to practice periodic sexual withdrawal for pious reasons. A couple might give themselves to prayer and abstinence for the forty days of Lent, for example, which would, not coincidentally, take the woman out of production temporarily. There was also a widespread use of mistresses, especially post-menopausal mistresses, who posed no threat of pregnancy and whose presence meant that wives could be spared the regular risk of childbirth.

The double standard of morality allowed this and no word of disapproval from the Church was forthcoming. None of these practices committed the cardinal sin of separating sexuality from procreation.
In the 20th century, however, many things coalesced to produce a dramatic sexual revolution. There was first the development of the sanitary napkin, which did more to free women than has yet been fully understood. The inhibiting bustle was replaced by form fitting dresses worn by the “flappers” of the 1920s when they did “the Charleston.” Next there was the rise in various emancipating forces: the suffragette movement, the opening of the doors of higher education to women and their subsequent entry into the work force. These new freedoms led to new career opportunities for women that made family planning increasingly necessary. The need for effective birth control grew. A safe, relatively efficient condom was developed. This was by every measure the most successful method of birth control yet devised and one is not surprised to discover that condoms are still today readily available through dispensers in almost every public rest room in America.

World War II’s male shortage greatly expanded women’s role in the work place from which they would never depart. Finally, ‘the pill’ was developed and birth control was now convenient, safe and fully effective. These were the forces that created the era of sexual freedom that appeared to justify the worst fears of the most righteous moralists. The 60’s were a decade of rampant sexual experimentation. The pill separated women once and for all from their male imposed biological definitions. The pill also began finally to affect population growth. Every nation in the developed Western world today has slowed its birth rate substantially with some nations like Italy no longer even reproducing their present population.

The people of the Western world simply threw off the repression of Western religion. The Protestant churches, by and large, adapted to these new realities and no longer condemned “family planning.” The Roman Catholic Church held firm to its condemnation of all “unnatural” means of birth control only to see its constituency abandon the church’s teaching on this subject almost totally. Polls indicate that Roman Catholic women in the developed nations practice birth control in exactly the same percentages (90% +), as do Protestant women, Jewish women and non-religious women. Papal teaching on this subject is simply ignored.

The only place where the traditional sexual teaching of the Church fuels emotion today is on abortion, which I regard as nothing more than the last gasp of the birth control battle. Abortion would be minimal today if sex education and birth control were available to all of our citizens. But, of course, conservative Catholic and Protestant Churches would never allow that.

The population of the world continues to explode today only in the third world where poverty, ignorance and traditional religious teachings combine to produce a senselessly high birth rate that results in starvation and shocking infant mortality. Relief efforts to feed these children, without a corresponding program of education and birth control, will only guarantee a population explosion in the next generation that will make infant mortality even worse.

The time has come for the Christian Church in all of its forms to recognize that its traditional negativity to birth control has itself become immoral and that limiting births has become a new virtue. Religious teaching must turn from its fear driven moralism and concentrate on deepening relationships, articulating a new responsible human maturity and recovering the essential goodness of life. The day has come when people no longer believe that God commands them to “be fruitful and multiply.” This ‘terrible’ text must be named for what it is and the literal understanding of the Bible that gave this verse such force be jettisoned.
Human survival means that we must cease our outrageous over-breeding, and learn to live in harmony with this world, not as the dominators of life but as an essential part of a fragile ecosystem. To examine the origins of that sense that human beings were meant to have dominion over all the world will be my topic next week as we continue to examine this particular ‘terrible text.’

~ John Shelby Spong
Originally published September 3, 2003

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