[Oe List ...] 4/28/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev Dr Matthew Fox: “Do you Create or do you Destroy?” Evil at Our Doors; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Apr 28 05:57:47 PDT 2022
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“Do you Create or do you Destroy?” Evil at Our Doors
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| Essay by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
April 28, 2022This probing question was posed by the second secretary of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold. Hammarskjold was a bona fide mystic as well as a peace maker and world leader who died in a mysterious plane crash while in office in 1961. Evil is very much in the news these days. George Floyd being slowly choked to death by police officers in Minneapolis; Black Lives Matter reminding us of the burdens of slavery that still haunt us; the “me 2” movement naming the reality of sexism; Pope Francis recently asking forgiveness for the church boarding schools that violated children of First People Nations. There are the scandals of priestly pedophilia and its cover up in the highest ecclesial places; there is the ongoing attempt to destroy a dying democracy in America by a former president and his party epitomized by the January 6 insurrection and obstructing voting rights wherever possible; there is the complete betrayal of the Supreme Court’s ideals by the utter politicization of the court and its decisions to allow dark money to flood political campaigns, dismantling the Voting Rights Act on two occasions and recent revelations of far right wing activism by the wife of a supreme court judge who alone voted against allowing presidential papers to be seen by the January 6 congressional committee.AND, of course, there is our ongoing war against Mother Earth which scientists tell us we have seven years left to turn back before extinction of our species and millions of others becomes irreversible. AND, we have live streaming on our televisions sets daily, a gruesome war for no apparent reason other than to satisfy a lust for power by Mr. Putin who, we are told, wants to be remembered as another Peter the Great. But who more likely will be remembered as Putin the Terrible a la Ivan the Terrible. AND the ever-present threat of nuclear destruction.It is enough to applaud Thomas Aquinas who, eight centuries ago, said “one human being can do more evil than all the other species put together.” I marvel at this prognostication—how did he know this 700 years before Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Putin? He knew it because he recognized the immense creativity and intellectual acumen of our species and thus anticipated Hammarskjold’s question: “Do you create or Do you destroy?” What do we chose to do with our vast knowledge and intelligence and creativity?”Not only does our species do great evil with our vast creativity and intelligence, we also do amazing positive things as well. We are capable of the Awesome as well as the Awful. We build bridges and airplanes and communities and rituals and healing centers and vaccines. We create stories and novels and paintings and movies and music and dance and a Webb Telescope that will soon be sending us pictures of Light from the earliest era of the universe and much, much more. Yes, we know evil but we also know about compassion and justice and, sometimes, democracy.One lesson being driven home today by all this unveiling of evil in our midst is this: That Evil exists and is very active, very smart, and omnipresent. It is not just in that individual or this individual--we are all subject to it, we all have decisions to make, we all participate or choose not to. Shadow is present among and within us. It is present like a spirit is present, it is not mortal, it keeps returning with every generation. We don’t have to call it Satan or Beelzebub or Lucifer or the Anti-Christ. We might call it more contemporary names such as Racism; Sexism; Narcissism; Militarism; Patriarchy; the Reptilian Brain unleashed; Injustice; Capitalism unbridled, Matricide, the killing of Mother Earth.A second lesson about Evil is that it is far bigger than sin. By reducing evil to “sin,” religion has left us bereft of 1) a language to deal with Evil and 2) ways to combat Evil. Indeed, to trivialize Evil easily serves the purposes of Evil.A friend and colleague of mine, Lakota teacher Buck Ghosthorse, once said to me, “in our tradition, fear is the door in the heart that lets evil spirits in.” Evil is a spirit, it appears as numerous spirits, such as Fear, Hatred; Envy; Lust for power; Power-over; Greed; Arrogance, etc. Indeed, all seven “capital sins” or “sins of the spirit” name the doors that, like Fear, “let evil spirits in.” Paul alerted us to how our struggle is against “powers and principalities,” i.e. spirits, since powers and principalities are angels or spirit beings. This is another way of talking of Evil as a force among us.In my major study on Evil, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society, I devote a large section to comparing the seven capital sins of the West to the seven Chakras of the East in order to develop a new language born of both East and West for disempowering Evil. In a recent Forward to that book, Deepak Chopra makes an important point when he says the number one spiritual issue of the 21st century will be Evil.A chakra represents a center of energy in our physiological, psychological and spiritual bodies and when healthy is a very powerful reality. What about when it is unhealthy or off-center? Aquinas defines sin as “misdirected love”—in doing so he is echoing the Jewish understanding of sin as “missing the mark” or bullseye. What is the misdirected love in each of the seven chakras? By understanding this question we come face to face with medicine for redirecting our species’ proneness to bad choices that in turn put us in league with evil.Let me briefly summarize the seven chakras and the seven “misdirected” or off-centered chakras we know as the capital sins. This may provide some needed insight and imagination to wrestle more effectively with Evil.The first chakra is found at the tailbone (interestingly, we call it the sacrum or “holy bone) and connects to a sub chakra in the knee and the foot. It connects us to the earth therefore, and we can engage it by dancing, and its essence is vibration. We now know that all atoms in the universe are vibrating so it follows that the first chakra connects us also to the cosmos itself. When it is off-center, we are cut off from the cosmos and the earth. The result is two capital sins: Arrogance (Pride is not a sin but arrogance is); and Acedia or the “lack of energy to begin new things.” (Aquinas)The second chakra is our sexuality. When off center it is about power-over rather than healthy power with. Lust is not a sin—none of us would be here sans lust—power-over dynamics or lust for power is a door that lets evil spirits in.The third chakra is in our gut where we experience moral outrage and, when healthy, compassion kicks in. Off-center is violence. Anger is not a sin, violence is.The fourth chakra is the heart. Not only fear but hatred too is the door that lets evil spirits into the heart. Compassion is the healthy heart chakra.The fifth chakra is the throat. When healthy, the throat is a birth canal for sharing our wisdom and for this reason is located between the mind and heart chakras, for wisdom is a combination of both heart and mind. When off center, the throat chakra is about gluttony (which comes from gluttus, the Latin word for throat) and gluttony is not just about too much food or drink but too much of anything. It is greed and avarice and consumerism unbridled and also the gagging of the throat or allowing one’s voice to be gagged. A healthy fifth chakra occurs when one finds one’s voice. The prophet speaks out (pro-pheto).The sixth chakra is about our minds including both left and right hemisphere of our brains. When it is healthy, we talk about the “third eye” located in the center of our forehead, a naming of a healthy and holy balance of left and right brains, of the rational and the intuitive (or mystical). When unbalanced, we have the (new) capital sin of Rationalism which plays so big a role in Patriarchy and patriarchal education and for which reason Albert Einstein complained that he “abhorred” American education. Why? Because, he insisted, values do not come from the rational brain but from the “intuitive brain” which is so often ignored in American education. In the seventh chakra all the light and kundalini energy that travels up the spine and through the other six chakras comes to a kind of culmination. From the crown chakra we send our light out to link up with other light beings whether they be ancestors or angels or other light-filled people committed to making community and wellness happen. An off-centered seventh chakra would be Envy. Envy acknowledges the light in other beings but instead of linking up with it to do good things together, wants to shoot it down. Envy is at the heart of patriarchal interaction and surely at the heart of wars including Putin’s current barbarous war. He envies a budding democratic state adjacent to his empire.To render war (and other atrocities) obsolete we need to build up our seven positive powers that the chakras name. This work of biophilia displaces necrophilia which is Erich Fromm’s definition for evil. “Necrophilia grows when biophilia is stunted,” he warns us.~ 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 40 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 78 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; 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, Original Blessing; The Coming of the Cosmic Christ; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; A Spirituality Named Compassion. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Larry
Why do fundamentalist believers take every word of the Bible as totally correct, when no one, to my observation, has an answer to the exact quotes of Jesus, Moses, Samuel, etc. Do you remember the game where a conversation was started about a subject, and then passed on to others until it came full circle and related back to the originator. Usually, not the same. I think the Bible accounts such as the creation story exemplifies that game!
A: By Brian D. McLaren
Dear Larry,Thanks so much for this question. I grew up in a strict fundamentalist sect of Christianity, so I’m in a pretty good position to try to answer it.Your question is why, and I think there are at least three answers: historical, psychological, and social. Some other time we could look at the psychological and social reasons for biblical literalism and inerrancy. For now, it makes sense to begin with history.In the 1400’s the Christian countries of Europe found themselves in a series of wars with Islam. As a result, the Pope found himself in a situation of mutual dependence with the kings of Europe: if they prospered, the Church prospered. If they were defeated, the Church would share in the defeat. So here’s what he did: he gave the kings of Europe a carte blanche or blank check to colonize the world, to enslave all nonChristian nations and expropriate their wealth. That wealth would help them win their wars in Europe, and it would put Europe, and Christianity, in the global drivers’ seat. (The proclamations that gave permission for this global colonization are known collectively as The Doctrine of Discovery. You’ll find a good introduction here: https://wirelesshogan.com/doctrine-of-discovery/, and here: https://www.amazon.com/Unsettling-Truths-Dehumanizing-Doctrine-Discovery/dp/0830845259, and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFinFW3_shs. I also give a short overview in Chapter 3 of my upcoming book, Do I Stay Christian?)The church thus helped give birth to the era of Christian conquistadors, slavery, genocide, and European empires.Right around the same time, the Reformation happened. In addition to the theological arguments northern Europeans had with the Catholic church, there was a financial advantage to schism: if the contemporary counterparts of England, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and other Northern European countries used the Doctrine of Discovery’s permission slip for colonization, they wouldn’t have to share profits with Rome.But for the Reformation to work, it needed to justify its existence apart from the Catholic hierarchy. It did so by appealing to the Bible. The Bible alone (sola scriptura) became the rallying cry of the Reformers. We don’t need the Pope or Cardinals to legitimize us, they said. We are legitimate if we can defend our actions based on the Bible alone. About a century after the Reformation was up and rolling, a new movement swept across Europe: the Enlightenment. The leaders of the Enlightenment realized that people quoting the Bible could do a lot of harm — burning witches, launching wars, and the like. So they said, You Protestants don’t need the Pope, and we Enlightenment Rationalists don’t need the Bible! Reason alone is sufficient to guide us and give us legitimacy!Suddenly, the Protestants were left vulnerable. Since they had used the Bible to legitimize their break from Rome, many of them doubled down on the Bible when they were threatened by the Enlightenment rationalists. This tradition, of doubling down on the Bible as a sole source of authority, is the lineage of fundamentalism today.When Charles Darwin and Karl Marx raised uncomfortable scientific and economic questions in the 19 Century, they answered them by doubling down on the Bible even more. When Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein raised uncomfortable questions of psychology and physics in the 20th Century, they did the same. When Walter Rauschenbusch and Martin Luther King, Jr. raised uncomfortable questions about poverty and race, they did the same. In my upcoming book, Do I Stay Christian?, I describe this use of the Bible not simply as anti-intellectualism, but as constricted intellectualism, an engagement of the intellect in the service of confirmation bias (and related biases).Again, this isn’t the whole story. But it’s a start, and it leads to many other important and fascinating conversations. I hope that helps, Larry!~ Brian D. McLaren
Read and share online here
About the Author
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a leader in the Convergence Network, through which he is developing an innovative training/mentoring program for pastors, church planters, and lay leaders called Convergence Leadership Project. He works closely with the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. His most recent book is Faith After Doubt. He is the author of the illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story, The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Brian's next book, Do I Stay Christian?, will be available May 24, 2022 (https://read.macmillan.com/lp/do-i-stay-christian/). He is a popular conference speaker, a frequent guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings, has written for or contributed interviews to many periodicals, including Leadership, Sojourners, Tikkun, Worship Leader, and Conversations, and is a frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs. |
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Saving the Earth with Good Theology
April 22nd was Earth Day and something profound struck me… Christianity has played a major role in the climate crisis. Unfortunately, bad theology that focuses on “subduing the earth” or preparation of one’s soul for the end times has caused Christians to neglect the earth at best, or to actively harm it with the hope of hastening the end times at worst.
Here’s the Good News: you can help save the earth with good theology! One of our 8 Points of Progressive Christianity is that we “strive to protect and restore the integrity of the earth.” That’s because we believe that the earth is sacred, it is our common home, and it is the source of life that connects us. Moreover, we know that climate change disproportionately affects those who are already marginalized, that environmental racism is very real, and that we must take every possible step to confront climate change and the ways that this earth can be exploited to oppress others.
At ProgressiveChristianity.org, we strive to confront bad theology at every turn and to help people embrace good theology that not only helps us to live more authentic lives, but in the case of environmental stewardship, can literally save the earth. You might want to check out a few of our environmental resources here.
We need you to be a part of our movement. Could you donate $20 today to help save the earth [and all of us who live here!] with good theology?
Thank you for your generosity!
Rev. Dr. Caleb J. Lines
Co-Executive Director, ProgressiveChristianity.org
Help keep ProgressiveChristianity.org online and going strong - click here to donate today!
* Another way to support us is to leave a bequest in your Will and/or Trust designating us a beneficiary. |
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| Don't miss the next Episode of PC.org's Executive Directors Mark and Caleb on:
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
"Think Different - Accept Uncertainty" Part X:
The Christ - He Is Not the Savior of the Fallen
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
May 24, 2012In my studies of the origins of life and its evolution, I have become convinced that the traditional and primitive claim that involves the concept of “original sin” has got to go! This mythological misunderstanding was based on the assumption that human life began perfect, but that we had our perfection destroyed by our disobedience, which left us separated from God. This was our “original sin” and no human life escapes its effects. In the light of all we know about the origins of life “original sin” has first become quaint, then bankrupt and finally harmful and destructive of our humanity. The Christianity of the future must jettison this outdated idea if it intends to live and to participate in the world that is emerging in the 21st century.This will not be an easy transition for the Christian Church or for individual Christians to make. The concept of “original sin” has been so deeply instilled into the heart of the way that Christianity has defined itself, that for many people abandoning “original sin” feels like abandoning Christianity itself. The task before Christian leaders is therefore the task of developing a compelling new understanding of Christianity that can provide an alternative to this former understanding. This alternative will have to be far more radical and far more extensive than most people in the church can now even imagine. It will also have to be positive and in touch with what we know of the origins of life.One aspect of this alternative Christianity will be that we must see that the word “savior” is no longer a title that we can use for Jesus. Think of what that title assumes. One cannot be the “savior” unless there is something or someone who is in need of salvation. One cannot see Jesus as the “savior” unless one believes oneself to have fallen from an original perfection into the mire of “original sin.” Since that is not the way we now understand human life, what content is left in the title “savior?” What do evangelists mean when they ask: “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” What is the meaning of either the Protestant mantra: “Jesus died to save me from my sins” or the Catholic mantra which describes the Eucharist is the “Sacrifice of the Mass,” that is, a liturgical reenactment of the cross on which Jesus died for our sins?So extensively has the title “savior” permeated the Christian story that it is the primary way that Jesus is described in most Christian liturgies. Other forms of the word “savior” are the words “redeemer” and “rescuer.” We Christians even name some of our churches “The Church of the Redeemer.” We speak of redemption in Christ Jesus. This word means to restore full value to that which has been compromised, to make whole that which was broken. One redeems one’s valuables from a pawn shop by paying a premium.“Rescuer” is the word that lies behind many Protestant hymns like “Throw out the lifeline,” “Love lifted me” (when I was sinking deep in sin) and a variety of others. We are told in thousands of ways that Jesus’ act of saving us had to do with his death and with the shedding of his blood on the cross. The images are somewhat gory as we sing words such as “Washed in the blood,” “Saved by the blood” and “There’s a fountain filled with blood,” all of which imply that we are “dirty,” that we are sinful and that the blood of Jesus is endowed with cleansing power. For many people there is no other way to understand either Jesus or the Cross. It might, therefore, surprise us to know that Paul, the earliest writer of material that came to be included in the New Testament, never used the word “savior” to describe Jesus. Paul wrote between 51 and 64 C.E. If Paul is representative of the thinking about Jesus in those years before any gospel was written, we get the hint that to think of Jesus primarily as “savior” was not present among the followers of Jesus in the early years of Christian history.Neither Mark, who wrote the first gospel in the early years of the 8th decade, nor Matthew, who wrote the second gospel in the middle years of the 9th decade used the title “savior” for Jesus. So, we can surmise, that “savior” was still not the title of choice for Jesus when the 9th decade of Christian history arrived. The word “savior” makes its first appearance in Christian writing in the Gospel of Luke, a work written in the late 9th to early 10th decade of Christian history, somewhere between the years 88-93. Luke uses the word “savior” twice. The first time is in the song sung by Mary called “The Magnificat.” There she says “My spirit rejoices in God my savior.” Note that the first biblical use of the word “savior” is not a reference to Jesus, but to God! The second Lucan use of the word “savior” does apply to Jesus and is found in the song of the angel in Luke’s version of the birth of Jesus: “for to you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). The only other use of the word “savior” as a name for Jesus in the gospels comes in John’s story about the Samaritan woman by the well who, after her conversation with Jesus, returned to her village and announced that “This is the savior of the world” (John 4:42).Both of these gospel uses of the word “savior” could better be translated “messiah,” for they are references to the messianic function of bringing about the “Kingdom of God” on earth in which the Jewish people would be rescued from such perils of history as slavery, defeat, exile and oppression. In the Hebrew Scriptures to ask God to save meant to save the Jewish people from the clutches of an enemy, a natural disaster or a personal tragedy. It was never a reference to being saved from one’s sinfulness or one’s fall from an original perfection.It is not until one gets to the Pastoral Epistles (I & II Timothy and Titus) and the General Epistles (I & II Peter, I, II & III John and Jude), all of which are dated from about 90 to about 135 C.E., that the word “savior” comes to be applied regularly to Jesus. These are the biblical data that cause me to question just how this title “savior” comes to be the one by which Jesus is primarily known today. It clearly was not the original way the disciples thought about him.To see human life as distorted, fallen and in need of a “savior” is an idea that does not get attached to Jesus until the 4th century and was, I submit, the contribution of a man named Augustine, who was the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, and whose writings shaped Christian thinking for about a thousand years. It is his view of the origins of human life and the birth of sin that still infect the Christian message in 2012.Augustine collapsed the two competing creation stories in the book of Genesis into a single narrative to form the background for telling the Christ story. From the first story (Gen. 1:1-2:3) he got his sense of the original perfection of the world and all that is within it. That story says that God created the world in six days and when God had finished, God looked out on all that God had made and pronounced it not only good, but complete. Human life, this story says, shared in this perfection for in the “image of God,” the man and the woman were fashioned. From the second creation story (Gen. 2:4 -3: 24) Augustine got his understanding of human rebellion, disobedience and the fall into sinfulness. Eve, tempted by the serpent, ate the “forbidden fruit” then fed it to Adam and “their eyes were opened.” God’s creation was ruined by this act of disobedience. Their sinfulness resulted, according to this primitive story, in the banishment of the original human family from God’s presence in the Garden of Eden. It caused human distress from the woman’s pain in childbirth to the man’s need to gain his daily bread from the soil of the earth. The ultimate punishment for this act of disobedience was death. The fact that everyone died meant two things to Augustine. First, it meant that everyone shared in the fall and, second, that sin was universal and original. It could not be escaped. It was part of the “being” of human life into which we were born. We needed to be saved from it, redeemed from it, rescued from it. That was the human condition. In order to free the world from its sinfulness the “savior” had to be external to the world, which of course meant that the savior had to be sent from the God who lived above the sky. In time, it became clear that the savior had to be, in some special sense, of the very nature of God.That became Augustine’s frame of reference and into that frame, he told the story of Jesus. Messiah no longer meant the one who would usher in the Kingdom of God on earth but the one who would save human life from the fall and from the power of original sin.That is thus the context in which the Jesus story has traditionally been told and it is obviously dependent on that understanding of human life’s origins. You and I, however, live in a post-Darwinian world in which this story is nonsensical. There was no original perfection from which one could fall; there was rather the emergence of life out of an evolutionary process in which survival became the driving principle and the highest value. Our ancient forebears interpreted this basic survival drive, present in all living things but self-conscious in human life, to be a manifestation of a self-centeredness that resulted from the fall, thus viewing self-centeredness moralistically when they should have viewed it biologically. Our survival-driven self-centeredness is, however, not sinful, it is in the DNA of life itself.Being saved, therefore, does not mean that someone has to pay the price of our evil in order to satisfy the judging God and to restore human life to a status it has never before possessed. It cannot mean that “Jesus died for my sins.” It cannot mean that baptism is the liturgical act to wash away the stain of the fall. It cannot mean that the Eucharist is the liturgical reenactment of the divine rescue operation accomplished on the cross. When one pulls out this central plank of the Christian story, then the whole superstructure of doctrine, dogma, creeds and liturgy collapses. That is when we know that we must “think different” and “accept uncertainty.” The future of our Christian Church depends on our doing just that. So we will continue to develop these new themes as this series continues.~ John Shelby Spong |
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