[Oe List ...] 1/30/20, Progressing Spirit: Matthew Fox: Progressive Christianity, Earth Survival and the Wisdom of Thomas Aquinas; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Jan 30 07:57:04 PST 2020
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.yiv9482967504mcnTextContent, #yiv9482967504 #yiv9482967504templateHeader .yiv9482967504mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv9482967504 #yiv9482967504templateBody .yiv9482967504mcnTextContent, #yiv9482967504 #yiv9482967504templateBody .yiv9482967504mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv9482967504 #yiv9482967504templateFooter .yiv9482967504mcnTextContent, #yiv9482967504 #yiv9482967504templateFooter .yiv9482967504mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } Thomas Aquinas offers a grounded and substantive spirituality that is Earth based
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Progressive Christianity, Earth Survival
and the Wisdom of Thomas Aquinas
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| Essay by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
January 30, 2020Many people, if they hear the name Thomas Aquinas at all, may not feel that he has anything to say to today’s “progressive” religious and post-religious movement. They would be wrong; dead wrong.
For one reason, post-modern times require pre-modern wisdom. The modern era was useful for many things but no one could accuse it of having, for example, put forth wisdom to match the knowledge that it championed. We are short on wisdom; we are afraid of the mystics; we are beginning to acknowledge that the indigenous peoples and other pre-modern peoples have much to teach us at this time. The deepest thinkers of the middle ages (also pre-modern) have copious wisdom to teach us and Aquinas stands tallest among them all.
First of these is our moving from our modern enrapture with ourselves—our anthropocentrism (what Pope Francis accurately calls our “narcissism”) is killing the Earth as we know it. Not so the medieval consciousness that began, not with us, but with the universe as do all indigenous peoples. Said Aquinas: “The most excellent thing in the universe is not the human but the universe itself.” Endorsing cosmology he also said: “The greatest thing about the human person is that we are capable of the universe.” Consider how cosmology and ecology are related in Thomas Berry’s observation that “ecology is functional cosmology.”
Thomas Aquinas offers a grounded and substantive spirituality that is Earth based and that holds the power to rattle our personal and collective cages and wake us up in this critical decade that faces us. Whether we call it Extinction Rebellion or Climate Emergency or Apocalypse, whatever nomenclature we assign to it, there is no question that the next decade is going to be demanding of us all, a time for “all hands on deck” and all hearts and minds also. Earth is undergoing an extinction spasm that is unprecedented since sixty-five billion years ago when the dinosaurs (and many other species) went extinct. Vast migrations to escape rising seas and floods and drought-filled areas are sure to follow - unless we respond generously to change our ways in the next ten years.
We who now live in a post-modern world may boast of the accomplishments in the modern era that included the printing press, liberal distribution of the Scriptures and other written materials, liberal democracies, the more recent revolution of social media and internet; critical biblical exegesis that is able to tell us what were the true words of Jesus in the Gospels and what words have been put into his mouth by the larger community, etc. We can brag about the advances of science and knowledge of the cosmos and our bodies and minds and the rest. All that is to the good. And Aquinas, who spent his entire life bringing science and religion together, would rejoice.
His life-long effort to bring Aristotle, the “new” scientist of his day being furiously translated into Latin by Muslim scribes, was not met with clapping and rejoicing, but with scowls and eventually (shortly after his death) three very public condemnations by bishops in Oxford and Paris. His was a risky endeavor for Aristotle had three strikes against him:
1. He was a scientist—and “Who needs science?” exclaimed the fundamentalists of his day (as ours). “We have all the answers in our Bible book” (and all the questions too apparently).
2. He was a “pagan.”
3. He came by way of Islam
But Aquinas stood up and took the heat. “A mistake about creation results in a mistake about God” said he—and this was 800 years before the religious homophobes of our day turn their back on scientific conclusions about homosexuality established in the 1970’s. As for being a “pagan,” Aquinas said that “all truth—whoever utters it—comes from the holy Spirit” and that “pagans possessed genuine virtues” and that all cultures have their prophets. Scientists are surely included in the “all truth” reference and the truths they uncover are also born of the Holy Spirit.
As for Islam, Aquinas knew theirs was a superior culture in his day to the Christian West. After all, the invention of the University was their idea and Aquinas was awakened as a sixteen year old on visiting the University of Naples. There he discovered Aristotle as well as the new upstart Dominican Order that his mother found so radical that she had his brothers kidnap Thomas when she learned that he wanted to join them. Aquinas spent valuable years teaching at the mother of the Universities, the University of Paris which, we should remember, grounded its theology in the Scriptures. Aquinas was very adept at employing the scholastic methodology which also came from Islam and was considered so radical because it sought objective answers in preference to simply quoting figures from the past.
In my major book on Aquinas, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, that I published twenty-six years ago and that is appearing from a new publisher in May, 2020, I translated many of Aquinas’ works that have never before been in English, French, German or Italian, and especially his Biblical commentaries where he is often at his freest and most creative. I employ many of those translations in my current book, The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times.
Each chapter title in this new book is a sentence from Aquinas’ teaching. Following are a few of them, provocative, demanding and capable of turning a culture upside down and inside out:
The experience of God must not be restricted to the few or to the old.
’They shall get drunk on the beauty of thy house,’ i.e. the Universe.
Revelation comes in two volumes: Nature and the Bible.
Sheer Joy is God’s and this demands companionship.
Joy is the human’s noblest act.
Religion is supreme thankfulness or gratitude.
The first and primary meaning of salvation is this: To preserve things in the good.
The same Spirit who hovered over the waters at the beginning of creation hovers
over the mind of the artist at work.
We ought to cherish the body and celebrate the wonderful communion of body and soul.
Every truth without exception--and whoever may utter it—is from the Holy Spirit.
Revelation has been made to many pagans.
We are united to God as to One Unknown.
The greatest accomplishment of the human mind is to know that it does not know who God is.
It is a great thing to do miracles. But it is a greater thing to live virtuously.
The proper objects of the heart are truth and justice.
The vision of God is arrived at through Justice.
Compassion is the fire that Jesus came to set on the earth.
A trustworthy person is angry at the right people, for the right reasons, expresses
it in the appropriate manner and for an appropriate length of time.
There is a double Resurrection.
God is a fountain of total Beauty, the most beautiful and the super beautiful.
Christ is a dew for cooling; rain for making fruitful; a seed for bringing forth
the fruit of justice.”
My primary audience for this book is the younger generation—those who face a coming decade that will be filled with profound challenges and demands as the seas rise, droughts increase, floods and hurricanes get more fierce and migration explodes. The young deserve a substantive spiritual grounding for the prophetic work calling them. Aquinas offers it.
In this vein I invited a 26 year old activist priest, Jerry Maynard, to write the Afterword to the book. Here are some of his thoughts in response to encountering Aquinas.
“Fox has revived Aquinas for our time and given him a framework that allows all of us to recognize that this message is the instrument that will give our weary world a new song of liberation.
I experienced a deep sense of being affirmed while reading through this book. I realized that through the words of Aquinas, my generation (Millennials) was being granted permission (by a saint!) not only to claim our rightful place as prophets but also to wholeheartedly embrace our identities as the beloved of God.
Aquinas is testifying to life expressions of many young adults all over this world who have been acting upon the inner tug of Spirit to move forward in daring to build a radically different world where justice is the foundation, elitism is no more, and tenderness is our culture.
Who knew Thomas Aquinas, a medieval theologian and philosopher, was such a revolutionary! Can we also dare to dwell in our innate goodness and demand that we be treated as the beloved children of God?
Our marching orders are clear and the path has been set for us. We do not have the luxury of time to allow external forces to keep us from giving birth to new realities of global justice and cosmic oneness. We must embrace the beautiful wisdom in this book and get to work!”
Some reasons Aquinas is speaking to all ages today are the following: He is eager to relate science to spirituality; he is interfaith and deeply ecumenical; his insistence on non-dualism (the reason he chose Aristotle over Plato and the reason for his being condemned three times) renders him a proto-feminist (Rosemary Ruther declares that non-dualism lies at the heart of the feminist philosophy); he was a great writer about the prophetic and was himself prophetic; he was, while possessing a genius intellect, a profound mystic.
These are elements we all need as we face the twenty-first century challenges that await us no matter what our religion or lack thereof.~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
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 Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society; 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; Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; Order of the Sacred Earth; and Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Name for God...Including the Unnameable God |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Glenda
Beliefs: So, I have come to a point in my life where I no longer have a belief in a higher power. I was raised Southern Baptist and radiated to Methodist as an adult. After reading several of Dr. Sponge’s books and essays I feel that what I had come to suspect is now true. Now I am lost, its as if there is not a Santa Claus. No being to look after me or my loved ones and perhaps no afterlife either. It’s not as if I am crushed but is it weird that I am still seeking “something”?. What now? On the other hand, there is relief that there is not a God that only favors some, all the contradicting rhetoric in the Bible now doesn’t have to make sense to me. Please help.
A: By Rev. Matthew Syrdal
Dear Glenda,As a soul guide and human development coach I work with people of many different experiences and backgrounds. From my training and perspective I am hearing someone who is undergoing what might be called a spiritual ‘molt.’ A ‘shedding of the skin’ that no longer fits can be disorienting; and many people that tread this path describe it as being ‘lost.’
There are two primary stages of development that this lostness occurs in. The first is a deconstruction of one’s personal beliefs (theology, religion), the old paradigm and worldview no longer fits one’s experience of the world. The second is a deeper shift in one’s psychospiritual center of gravity. Here, cultural ways and often even religious beliefs are left behind in order to explore the deeper mysteries of nature and the soul. The problem is that our culture and religious institutions typically do not know how to support the journey of the Wanderer (the archetype representing a similar stage of development).
There are two primary tasks of these two stages (which may or may not resonate with you). The first is to cultivate deeper personal authenticity and sense of belonging in your life. Who are you really, in relation to your family, friends, church or culture? How do you make choices in support of your new authentic way of being in the world? What relationships will you need to say goodbye to, or habits will you need to end or change, in order to support your most authentic development moving forward? The task for the other stage of faith assumes your life and relationships already reflect your authenticity, that you have cultivated a good degree of personal wholeness, and now (in the language of myth) you are ready to sever from a life oriented around culture and religion even, and the path before you might be a plunge into the mysteries of nature and the soul. Many religions including Christianity give us images and stories of this journey that are rich in the perennial wisdom tradition, but in practice it is lost on western society.
You say that you are ‘not crushed’ and that you are ‘still seeking something.’ Feeling and experiencing, rather than merely thinking, are other windows of discovery, assisting us to deepen into any grief we might feel with the loss of our old identity/beliefs, and also amplify any longing we may feel that is inviting us into the unknown. There are a few ‘schools’ and ‘training programs’ out there, including my own work, that assist in the journey of individuation and psycho-spiritual growth through life stages that most churches and retreat centers aren’t designed to address. I would suggest giving yourself the permission and freedom of spiritual exploration, and finding a community that is healthy and resourced enough to assist you in your exploration. Blessings on your journey!~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Matthew Syrdal M.Div., lives in the front range of Colorado with his beautiful family. Matt is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian church (USA), founder and lead guide of WilderSoul and Church of Lost Walls and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country. In his years of studying ancient Christian Rites of Initiation, world religions, anthropology, rites-of-passage and eco- psychology Matt seeks to re-wild what it means to be human. His work weaves in myth and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world in which they are a part. Matt’s passion is guiding others in the discovery of “treasure hidden in the field” of their deepest lives cultivating deep wholeness and re-enchantment of the natural world to apprentice fully and dangerously to the kingdom of god. Matt has been coaching, and guiding since becoming a certified Wild Mind nature-based human development guide through the Animas Valley Institute and is currently training to become a soul initiation guide through the SAIP program. |
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| Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together. Thank you for being a part of this community! |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origins of the Bible, Part XVI: Daniel
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
November 27, 2008History is not well served by the way the Bible is organized. For example, the Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy), which seems to tell a continuous story, was actually written over a period of about five hundred years and describes events that occurred over as long a time frame as fourteen hundred years. Yet it is always read in worship as if it is a single story, which makes some of its described events little more than historical nonsense. To take another illustration, a book like Isaiah was written in three parts. The first, roughly chapters 1-39, was composed in the 8th century BCE; the second part, roughly chapters 40-55, was written some two centuries later in the late 6th century BCE; and the third, chapters 56-66, is the work of a 5th century BCE author. Yet for most of both Jewish and Christian history this book has been read as a single cohesive work, making a proper interpretation of its pages all but impossible.
The same distortion of history is found in the lineup of the prophets. The four so-called major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, are placed in that order in the Bible. Yet Isaiah is written time-wise on both sides of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Daniel is in fact a work of the 2nd century BCE but, just to confuse things, purports to be written at the time of the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BCE. Someone who seeks literal truth or literal history in these pages of the Bible will be quite frustrated.
When I began this series of columns on the origins of the Bible early this year, I knew that I would at some point have to make a decision on what order I would follow. I could treat the books of the Bible as they are written or I could reorganize the entire text on the basis of history and their time of writing. I decided to do both. I have thus far treated the Old Testament in the order that it appears in our printed Bible. I started with the documents behind the Torah that produced the books from Genesis to Deuteronomy, then turned to the prophetic movement, dealing with the books of Joshua through II Kings. Even there, however, to make a continuous story I had to skip over such books as Job, The Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and even the tiny but significant book of Ruth, in order to deal with the prophets as they appear in the Bible. I will go back to these books later. When I come to the New Testament I will treat it in the order that it was written, not the order in which it appears in the Bible. This means that I will begin with Paul and then move to the gospels. That way everyone becomes confused but I think truth will be better served.
The timing problem becomes most apparent this week when I reach the book of Daniel, which is a piece of mythological, allegorical writing designed to strengthen Jewish resistance to the Seleucid king, Antiochus Epiphanes, during the period of the Maccebean revolution in the 160’s BCE. This means that the book of Daniel should not time-wise even be in the Bible at all. It should be part of the Apocrypha, that group of inter-testament books that are no longer considered a constituent part of the Old Testament, at least in Protestant Christianity. It is also true that several stories that were originally additions to the book of Daniel, like “Bel and the Dragon,” the “Prayer of Azarias and the Song of the Three Young Men” and “Susanna,” were in fact taken out of Daniel and placed into the Apocrypha by later biblical editors, but the book of Daniel itself was kept in the canon of the Old Testament despite not belonging there. This act of inclusion means that the stories left in Daniel have become far better known in the Christian world than those relegated to the Apocrypha. We are generally familiar with Daniel in the Lion’s Den and with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. Familiar phrases from Daniel have also enriched our language, like calling God “The Ancient of Days,” referring to some impending doom as “the handwriting on the wall,” a fatal weakness as possessing “feet of clay,” or taking on strong opponents as “entering the lion’s den.” It is also a fact that Daniel in the Old Testament and the book of Revelation in the New Testament are the two biblical works that are quoted most frequently by those who like to predict the end of the world. We have happily passed through many such projected dates in western history, yet predictions still come from the loony fringe of religion. I do not think they are worth much consideration.
My favorite end of the world story came when I received a warning letter from a priest that the world was about to come to an end. He had a specific date and time on which he seemed sure that this would happen. He quoted a number of biblical sources, including Daniel, to prove his point. I must say that I did not begin to make preparations. A few days later I received an invitation from the wife of this priest inviting me to his 50th birthday celebration. The party was scheduled for about ten days after the end of the world. What a relief! Not even his wife believed his theory.
When we turn to the content of the book of Daniel, we discover that it is divided into two primary sections. The first is a series of stories about Daniel which fills chapter 1-6. The second section is a series of visions that have played a role in the development of Christian history. The first vision has a character in it known as the “Son of Man.” It was Ezekiel who first introduced this phrase to our religious vocabulary. When Ezekiel used it, however, it was just a title by which God called Ezekiel, simply Ezekiel’s name. It designated him only as a human being. It had no divine connotations. When Jesus used that title many years later, however, it had a much more dramatic meaning. It was in fact a claim of divinity. That title had to have made quite a journey for its meaning to have been transformed that dramatically from Ezekiel to Jesus. It did, and it was in one of the visions of Daniel that it was transformed. “Son of Man” in Daniel was the name of an apocalyptic supernatural divine figure who would usher in the Kingdom of God and put an end to the persecution of the faithful. The “Son of Man” in Daniel traveled on the clouds of heaven and was given dominion, glory and kingship. All the nations of the world would serve him. His throne would be everlasting and of his kingdom there would be no end. We become aware, when we read the New Testament, that these images were attached to the Jesus story, first by Matthew in his parable of the Judgment, when the Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats and, second, in Matthew’s account of Jesus appearing as the resurrected one to the disciples out of the sky on a mountain top in Galilee. In that narrative he came on the clouds clothed with the authority of heaven and earth to send the disciples out on a mission “to all the world.” Luke also borrows Daniel’s imagery when he told the story of Jesus’ ascension.
Daniel was also a pivotal book in the Jewish development of ideas about life after death. In the last chapter of Daniel the author refers to the time at the end of the world when the great deliverance would come. “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth,” says Daniel, “shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting shame and contempt.” Reward and punishment from this time on became the major feature of life after death.
Prior to the 2nd century BCE, the Jewish people spoke little about life after death. The only concept generally abroad was that of “Sheol.” Sheol was located in the “middle of the earth.” It was not a place of reward or punishment, it was simply the abode of the dead. No one looked forward to it. No one was comforted by it. Everyone who died went to it. If it was described at all, it was described as shadowy or as shades of life, ghostlike with no sense of joy.
When Daniel was written, however, religious persecution against the Jews had reached horrendous proportions. The Jews were forced by their enemies to eat food they regarded as unclean. The Temple was itself polluted with the installation of the head of a swine in the “Holy of Holies,” an unclean animal in the very dwelling place of God. The Jews called it “the abomination of desolation.” Those Jews who refused to violate their religious practices were summarily executed. The book we call II Macabees, written at the same time the book of Daniel was written, tells the story of seven brothers who, along with their mother, were arrested and were compelled to eat the flesh of a swine. The oldest brother refused and his tongue was cut out. Then he was scalped and his hands and feet were chopped off. Finally, he was taken, still breathing, to a fire and burned up. With this vision still vivid, the next brother was told he should eat the flesh of the swine or suffer the same fate. He refused and was similarly disposed of. This procedure continued until all seven brothers had been murdered. Then the mother died. It is a dreadful story.
That story, however, became a powerful instrument in giving birth to a new concept and a new passion among the Jews for life after death. That is what finds expression in the 12th and final chapter of Daniel. The driving theme was that without life after death for these faithful martyrs the very justice of God was at stake. If faithfulness to God is not rewarded beyond this life then God cannot be just. Then evil does in fact triumph over God. So heaven and hell became the categories of divine justice and the afterlife was employed to make fair this unfair world. The book of Daniel was pivotal in this transformation and, as such, exercised an enormous influence on the development of Christianity as the afterlife became crucial to the human sense of justice in both the crucifixion of Jesus and the later persecution of the Christians in loyalty to their Christ. The Book of Daniel is not a profound book, but one wonders what Christianity might have looked like if it had not been for this book. For me, however, to think of the afterlife as a place of reward or punishment distorts that concept completely. That, however, is the subject for a future column, perhaps a future book.~ John Shelby Spong |
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