[Oe List ...] 3/09/2023, Progressing Spirit: Rev.Dr. Matthew Fox: M. D. Chenu’s Very Progressive Christianity; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Mar 9 05:45:57 PST 2023
M. D. 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!important;padding-bottom:9px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv5189815492 .yiv5189815492mcnTextContent, #yiv5189815492 .yiv5189815492mcnBoxedTextContentColumn{padding-right:18px !important;padding-left:18px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv5189815492 .yiv5189815492mcnImageCardLeftImageContent, #yiv5189815492 .yiv5189815492mcnImageCardRightImageContent{padding-right:18px !important;padding-bottom:0 !important;padding-left:18px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv5189815492 .yiv5189815492mcpreview-image-uploader{display:none !important;width:100% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv5189815492 h1{font-size:22px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv5189815492 h2{font-size:20px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv5189815492 h3{font-size:18px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen 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screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv5189815492 #yiv5189815492templateBody .yiv5189815492mcnTextContent, #yiv5189815492 #yiv5189815492templateBody .yiv5189815492mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv5189815492 #yiv5189815492templateFooter .yiv5189815492mcnTextContent, #yiv5189815492 #yiv5189815492templateFooter .yiv5189815492mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} By Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
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M. D. Chenu’s Very Progressive Christianity
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| Essay by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
March 9, 2023Some wonderful news and a wonderful book appeared in my life recently that has everything to do with a “Progressive Christianity.” The news is this: The German Dominicans have opened a “Chenu Institute” in Berlin and have published a book called A Coming of God into Time and History: The Theological Project of M-D Chenu OP.I welcome both events with open arms. Why so? Renowned historian Etienne Gilson stated that "there is only one Fr. Chenu each century."[1] Pere Chenu was a French Dominican who was my mentor at my studies at the Institut catholique in Paris. He named the creation spirituality tradition and the Fall/Redemption tradition for me when I was in class with him in the Spring of ’68. A year that saw the deaths of MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy and Thomas Merton (who had recommended I study at the Catho and admired Pere Chenu very much). In 1968 students were protesting in Paris, Berkeley, California, Madison, Wisconsin, Tubingen, Germany and many other places. (One result of the student protests in Tubingen was the “conversion” of theologian Josef Ratzinger from being a contributor to progressive theology at Vatican II to being an arch conservative. When students invaded a faculty meeting at Tubingen he left the room and came back a totally changed man.)[2]As it turned out, my semester with Pere Chenu was his last semester of teaching. I still have my notes that I took in his class which was a course on the Spirituality of the 12th Century, a century that he, historian that he was, called “the one Renaissance that worked in the West” because it was bottom-up—freed serfs, the young and women led--and not a top-down renaissance like that of the 16th century.Why is a Chenu Institute and a new book about him such good news for progressive Christians today? Because he was a progressive and courageous theologian throughout his life and was unafraid to break the glass in so many areas of culture and religion including theological education. As regent of studies at the Dominican House of Studies, he reinvented theological education and wrote about it in a short book on Le Saulchoir. In 1942 the Vatican put his book on the Index of Forbidden Books. Why? For daring to redesign theological and seminary education--a task, I might add, that was my preoccupation for 45 years of a redesigned education to teach spirituality to lay and religious alike, beginning with ICCS (the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality) at Mundelein College in Chicago for 7 years; then 12 years at Holy Names College in Oakland, California. During ten of those years Cardinal Ratzinger sought to shut us down and when he finally succeeded, I started up the University of Creation Spirituality with its Doctor of Ministry program to bring work and spirituality together as I laid out in my book, The Reinvention of Work. Chenu wrote two books on work, Spirituality of Work (1941) and Toward a Theology of Work (1955).In one of my visits with him years after I graduated, I told him of my books on Hildegard of Bingen and he told me that he taught courses on Hildegard as well as Mechtild of Magdeburg back in the 1930’s —and with a woman scholar, Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache (who also wrote on Meister Eckhart). In short, he was a feminist in the 1930’s. Chenu found himself in hot water for supporting the worker priest movement in France through his writings. In addition, he marched in protests in the streets on behalf of workers and unions (which in France after the war were quite Marxist at times), and attended union meetings giving feedback when asked about debating views being expressed. For this ministry, he was forbidden to write and was exiled from Paris for 8 years, right up to 1962, the year of the opening of Vatican II.His work with the worker priests, an act of listening to real people discussing their real issues and decision-making, became it seems to me an integral part of the methodology of liberation theology and base communities. He always insisted that laity should have prominence in the church.He used to say: “I never did theology from an armchair.” (Or from an ivory tower of comfortable academia.)On receiving one of my books he would write me back a short note, “we are brothers in communion of thought.” He gave me permission to translate and combine two articles of his that I still refer to these days (and to add a few teachings from Rabbi Heschel) on the very important topic of non-dualism that was so central to him and his mentor, Thomas Aquinas. Called “Body and Body Politic in the Creation Spirituality of Thomas Aquinas,” it was published in my book, Western Spirituality: Historical Roots Ecumenical Routes. There he demonstrates how Aquinas took on neo-platonic and Augustinian dualism that put the seat of the virtues in the mind. He showed how Aquinas broke ranks with them in a big way by placing the seat of virtues in our passions. Aquinas calls the union of matter and spirit, passions and virtues, a communio mirabilis, a “wonderful communion.”Chenu was invited as a “peritus” or theological guide not by a European bishop but by the bishop of Madagascar, a “third-world” bishop of Africa therefore. His influence was felt strongly at the Council and in documents he authored including Gaudium et Spes. One of his favorite terms, “to read the signs of the times,” made its way into several major documents at the Council. Among other things, he worked closely behind the scenes with Eastern orthodox bishops and theologians, thus engaging in deep ecumenism. His ecumenism extended back to 1938 when he urged his students to meet scholars of Islamic mysticism in Paris and helped found an Institute in Cairo for Christian-Muslim dialog. Zen artist Frederick Frank, who traveled to the Council uninvited (there were no artists invited to Vatican II), told me that of all the hundreds of participants, “Chenu had the most interesting visage” and he eagerly sketched him. Chenu insisted on the marriage of spirituality and the arts—it comes through powerfully in his iconic book, Nature, Man and Society in the 12th Century. In class he brought in large picture books of the Cathedrals of the Middle Ages and taught from them, saying that “you cannot understand the theology of the Middle Ages without studying the great art--architecture, sculpture, windows of the time.” The last time I visited him, he was 91 years old and going blind, and he put his arm around me, wagged his finger and said, “Never forget. The greatest tragedy in theology of the last 300 years has been the divorce of the theologian from the poet, the musician, the painter, the potter, the dancer, and the film maker.” No doubt this has something to do with my insistence on using art as meditation as integral to educating for spirituality.A brief note on the fine book, A Coming of God into Time and History. The first essay is written by Ulrich Engel, one of the Dominicans overseeing the Chenu Institute. It is called “The Question of Modernity in Catholic Theology, the dispute over ‘Nouvelle Theologie’ as the Context of M-D Chenu’s book Une Ecole de theologie: Le Saulchoir (1937). It begins this way. “The term ‘nouvelle theologie’ (New Theology) is a battle term. At least that was the case for a large part of the twentieth century, more exactly the periods between the middle of the 1930s and the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965)." Chenu and others opposed the “strict division between faith and the world” and tried to “build a bridge between the two.”[3] You can see the roots of the “Church in the Modern world” document of Vatican II right here. A second article, written by Sister Janette Gray, RSM of Australia, demonstrates how Chenu’s insistence on historicity overthrew what he called “baroque scholasticism” and “seminary Thomism.” (He had a colorful way with words--which did not always endear him to anal-retentive academic types.) She cites Chenu, “this scholasticism tended to define intelligibility in a strictly rational way.... Logical formalism has triumphed at the cost of curiosity.” He showed how profoundly “modern scholasticism” deviated from Thomas’s pre-modern spirit and theology, endorsing the epigram, “no theology without new birth.”[4] Chenu, being critical of the hyper rationalism of the modern era, anticipated a post-modern consciousness imbued with pre-modern awareness.A third excellent article, by Thomas O’Meara, an American Dominican, reflects on Chenu’s favorite topics: “History, Culture and Revelation.” He cites Chenu again addressing creativity while taking on contemporary academia: “Cultural dimensions in the course of history go beyond academic teaching. They emerge in new images and lead the religious dimension to find new mental categories and vocabularies.” Invoking Albert the Great, Aquinas’s mentor, Chenu writes that “science was far from complete: new sciences are awaiting discovery. Theology appears as a historical dimension for the life of the church at the same time as the life of the church enters into the breadth of theology.” Says O’Meara, “Chenu was both historian and theologian. ‘History in theology lies at the inner reality of theology itself.’” In O’Meara’s words, “Creation becomes history.”[5] Surely this perspective smacks of Chenu’s often repeated call to “read the signs of the times” that made its way into the consciousness and documents of Vatican II.There is great depth and riches in this book on Chenu. The final chapter is a wondrous surprise—an article by Chenu himself written in 1939, called “Catholic Action and the Mystical Body” which demonstrates his early commitment to values of both Liberation Theology and Creation Spirituality today. Indeed, Gustavo Guttieriez calls liberation theology “a daughter of Chenu.”[6] I call Chenu the father (or grandfather?) of creation spirituality.I rejoice that Chenu’s spirit and story, courage and curiosity, prophetic spirit and critic of modern consciousness, is being remembered at this critical time in human and planetary and religious/spiritual history. As he said to us in class in 1968 as Paris was literally shut down and all schools except ours were closed, “we have been studying history. Here is your chance to make it. Go out and join the revolution. Don’t come to school next week; come back in two weeks and tell me what you have contributed.” He was 76 at the time. And the youngest person I have ever known.~ 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. 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; A Spirituality Named Compassion; Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started DailyMeditationswithMatthewFox.org[1] Hilary D Regan, ed., A Coming of God into Time and History: The Theological Project of M-D Chenu OP (Brompton, SA, Australia : ATF Press, 2021), p. 14, note 37.[2] See Matthew Fox, The Pope’s War: How Ratzinger’s Crusade Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved (New York: Sterling Ethos, 2011).[3] Hilary D Regan, A Coming of God into Time and History, p. 3.[4] Ibid. pp. 23f., 25, 48.[5] Ibid., pp. 71f.[6] Gustavo Gutierrez, “Liberation theology—a daughter of Chenu,” 2004, Copyright by Institut M.-Dominique Chenu Berlin, www.institut-chenu.eu. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By AlbertJesus never tried to teach us a theology. If it was important, wouldn’t he have at least mentioned his theology? When he interacted with people, he loved and accepted them for who they were. He didn’t try to change them and he didn’t try to change the world, except maybe one person at a time. He taught them to have faith and do the right thing. Why do Christian churches, ministers, missionaries, etc. feel the need to force their theology on us? Jesus would not be doing this. In my opinion, no theology is entirely correct, even my own.
A: By Dr. Carl Krieg
Dear Albert,Fifty years ago I wrote a book entitled What to Believe?? The Questions of Christian Faith, published by Fortress Press and currently available from ProgressiveChristianity.org. In that book I asked fifteen different theological questions, summarized answers that have been given throughout the history of Christian thinking, criticized those answers, and concluded by offering some thoughts of my own. Well, not quite concluded, because now, fifty years later, I have tried to reflect about how my thinking has changed. These reflections are serialized, also in progressivechristianity.org. All of this is to underscore your last comment, that “no theology is entirely correct, not even my [your] own.” Our perceptions are culture-bound and short-sighted, in many ways products of our time. But we can change, hopefully, and grow, perhaps evermore approaching that which is true.There is a difference between thinking theologically and pronouncing dogma. Much to our dismay, there are many churches and clergy who prefer the latter, especially those who proclaim that they alone have the truth, that in order to be “saved” [whatever that might mean], you have to believe that Jesus died for your sins and that the Bible is inerrant. On the other hand, we all do need to think about life and God and about the meaning for which we search, but in that process we certainly must not impose our beliefs on others. If each of us could admit the shortcomings in our perception, the world would be more peaceful and just. Jesus did not have a set of beliefs that he wanted to transmit to others, but he did have an awakened attitude that he tried to teach, challenging people to “have faith and do the right thing”, as you succinctly put it. Love God and love your neighbor. As an illustration of loving confrontation, we read that a teacher of the law came to Jesus and asked “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus responded, “There was a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among thieves…and a Samaritan came by…” Jesus did challenge those who were blind to the essence of their humanity, as with this teacher of the law. The challenge was love in action. Part of that awakened attitude was a vision for a different world. The society into which Jesus was born and in which he walked, was a society founded upon oppression of the poor. The rich and powerful ruled without mercy, and Jesus really did challenge that system, not least by gathering a family of friends, a group of about 25 disciples who cared for one another and shared their goods. This vision of a new way to live directly challenged the status quo established and enforced by the rich and powerful, so they had him murdered. If we gather these thoughts together, the sum and substance is that it is integral to our humanity to creatively think theologically without slipping into dogmatism. Beginning with the basic premise, taught by Jesus and others, that love is the way, we need to challenge ourselves and others to continually work toward that higher awareness. Should we succumb to the temptation to impose our belief on others rather than helping them to grow in their own understanding of life and love, then we have ourselves become blind to the truth, and our pronouncements are null and void. ~ 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 Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith, The Void and the Vision and The New Matrix: How the World We Live In Impacts Our Thinking About Self and God. 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
Part VI Matthew: The Genealogy (1:1-17)
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
November 7, 2013“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham” — that is how the gospel of Matthew begins. The word “genealogy” means “origins,” beginnings. It could thus also be translated the book of the “genesis” of Jesus, the messiah. For “genesis” is what is being described in this opening chapter and Christ is simply the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “machiach,” which means messiah. If the words “genesis” and “messiah” were both used in an English rendition of this text, it would become very obvious that Matthew was a Jew writing to a Jewish audience about the Jewish Jesus to make the claim that he was the expected Jewish messiah. I suspect that all of these things were obvious both in Matthew’s mind and in the minds of the Jewish audience for whom he wrote. Matthew, we will discover later, will divide his teaching of Jesus into five major blocks, just like the Torah was divided into five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. So it should not be surprising that Matthew opens his gospel with his account of Jesus’ “genesis.” Today we will circle back to the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel to examine his view of the “genesis” of Jesus.Matthew’s genealogical narrative begins with Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation. Jesus is to be heir to and the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham. In this “genesis,” Matthew will also touch a second major moment in Jewish history. This was their memory of the days of Jewish glory, the golden age of Jewish history, which they had identified with King David. Among his many accomplishments David had begun the plans for the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. His son Solomon had brought this Temple to completion. As the years rolled by King David, despite many character weaknesses, still had his reputation filled with the mythological content of heroes. Ultimately all Jewish dreams of the coming messiah included in them the re-establishment of the royal house of David as the mark of the arrival of the Kingdom of God. Matthew touched all of these bases in his “genesis” of Jesus. He was the son of Abraham, the son of David and the messiah for whom the people yearned.The third experience in Jewish history to which this “genesis” would allude was the most painful moment these people ever endured. They called it “The Babylonian Exile.” It came about after the defeat of the Jews at the hands of the Babylonian army that happened first in 596 BCE and then once again a decade later in 586 BCE, when an ill-conceived rebellion broke out in Jerusalem. To pacify the land, the Babylonians moved significant numbers of the Jewish population to the land of Babylon, where they became an underclass of cheap labor. That kind of exile normally ended in the loss of national identity as intermarriage occurred and the people forgot their own biological roots and places of origin. That had been the fate of the Northern Kingdom of Israel when they were defeated by and exiled into the land of the Assyrians in the 8th century BCE. Today, we call them “The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.”Matthew, however, was well aware that the defeated Jewish people survived this crisis of the exile. They did it with Herculean efforts to keep themselves apart from the people of Babylonia. They accomplished this by emphasizing those things that made them separate and different. The Jews of the Exile observed the Sabbath by refusing to work on the seventh day of every week; they adopted Kosher dietary laws that prevented them from eating with and thus from fraternizing with non-Jews, and they placed the sign of their Judaism, circumcision, on the bodies of every Jewish male. Those intense efforts at separation paid off and in time these exiles were able to return to their homeland as a cohesive people. This was the time when they began to dream of the one who would someday come to restore the power and the fortunes of the Jewish people. These were the notes that Matthew struck in his genealogy. He wanted his readers to know that Jesus was the son of Abraham, the son of David and the expected messiah. Despite the boring nature of these opening verses this “genesis” was terribly important in developing the purpose of Matthew’s work.Everyone, including Matthew and his original readers, knew that this genealogy was not literally accurate. It was filled with stylized numbers. All of the great moments of Jewish history were divided, said Matthew, by fourteen generations. From Abraham to David was fourteen generations, from David to the Exile was fourteen generations and from the Exile to the birth of Jesus was fourteen generations. What was that about? Since seven was the holy, perfect and lucky number, the generational dividers were double sevens or fourteen in number. It was an interesting, but historically impossible claim to make. The years between Abraham and David were about 900, the years between David and the Exile about 400 and the years between the Exile and Jesus were about 600. If a generation was 20 years, which would be the average measure in a world where the life expectancy was 30-40 years, the separation between Abraham and David would be closer to 45 generations; between David and the Exile, 20 generations, and between the Exile and Jesus, 30 generations. In the line that connected David to the Exile, Matthew claimed to be following the kings of the Southern Kingdom, but he still left out some kings that were actually named in the biblical story in order to produce his rounded symmetry. Matthew surely knew this. The audience for which he wrote would also have known this, for they were both conversant with the Jewish Scriptures and with Jewish history. Thus it would not have occurred to them to think that this genealogy or “genesis” of Jesus was to be treated literally. That would be the later contribution of the Gentiles who became almost exclusively dominant in the Christian church by 150 CE. Lacking the Jewish knowledge and background to read or to understand these basically Jewish gospels, they assumed that they were reading literal history. I repeat a general theme of this entire series. Biblical fundamentalism was born in Gentile ignorance. It is a “Gentile Heresy!”One other detail in this “genesis” must have leapt out at the original Jewish reader. Four women are named in the genealogy of Jesus, all of whom have their stories told in the Bible itself. To include women in a genealogical line of ancestors, whether historical or mythological, was quite rare because in the ancient world, the role of women in reproduction was simply not understood. Western science did not definitively establish the existence of an egg cell in the female until the early years of the 18th century. People thought of reproduction after the analogy of a farmer planting his seed into the womb of Mother Earth. The role of Mother Earth was to nurture the man’s seed to maturity, not to contribute genetically to that seed. Women were thus thought of as the incubators of life, which was a product only of the male. So, in the ancient world, women did not make it into genealogical lines because they were not thought of as primary contributors. Yet, in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, four women are included. They are Tamar, whose story is recorded in Genesis 38; Rahab whose story is recorded in the 2nd and 6th chapters of the book of Joshua; Ruth whose story is recorded in the book that bears her name and especially in chapter three, and the wife of Uriah, who is unnamed in the genealogy, but since her story is told in II Samuel 11, we know that her name is Bathsheba.What are these women doing in the genealogy? What do they contribute to Matthew’s story? What was his purpose in including them? Why did he name these four and not others? Major female figures in the Old Testament like Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel, for example, are not included. These questions simply were not asked before the dawn of critical, biblical scholarship, and since these women were hidden in a genealogy, which is so boring that most people skipped over them anyway, their presence was barely noticed until relatively recently. What can we say about them in this introductory study of Matthew? Our answer involves at least three things.First, each of these women was a foreigner, a Gentile, not a Jew. Matthew will open his gospel with a story of Gentiles in the form of the Wise Men coming to pay homage to the infant Christ Child at the moment of his birth. When he reaches his climax in the final chapter, Matthew will have the risen Christ send his disciples “into all the world,” beyond the boundaries of the Jews “to make disciples of all nations.” So breaking down the barriers that divide Jews from Gentiles is a very important theme of this gospel. It is, therefore, not surprising that in the line that produced Jesus four foreign women find a place in Matthew’s genealogy. Tamar was a Canaanite woman, Rahab a citizen of Jericho, Ruth a Moabite and since Uriah was a Hittite, we must assume that his wife was also. Bathsheba’s name literally meant “daughter (bath) of Sheba” and the Queen of Sheba in the biblical story was certainly a foreigner when she came to visit King Solomon. So the first interpretive clue to the inclusion of these women in the genealogy is that none of them was Jewish, all of them were foreigners, “unclean” foreigners.There was one other surprising clue that comes only when these women’s stories are read in the Bible. All of them were, by the standards of that day, sexually-compromised women. One was guilty of incest, one was a prostitute, one was a seductress and the last was an adulterer. We will turn to their stories next week. Until then ask yourself why Matthew would introduce four sexually-tainted women into the genealogy of Jesus in the verses that form the preamble to his story of Jesus’ miraculous birth? Then recall that the Virgin Birth makes its first appearance in the Christian tradition as the immediate follow on to Matthew’s startling genealogy! It is at the very least a strange way to introduce the Messiah.Once the literal prison in which we have confined the Bible has been shattered then, far from being destroyed as traditional Christians seem to fear, our faith is rather opened to new meanings. These columns leading up to Easter are designed to introduce my readers to the kind of biblical debates that are commonplace in the world of academia but which institutional Christian spokespersons are loathe to discuss publicly. This week I examine one more detail in the passion story that we have mistakenly literalized, the unit of time that we call “three days.”~ John Shelby Spong |
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