BOOK REVIEW: Matthew Fox: Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.

Among Influential/thoughtful Living White North American Male Writers, Matthew Fox has to be in the top ten (with Wendell Berry, John Updike, M.Scott Peck, Richard Rohr, Robert Bly, the humorist Garrison Keillor (?) – who else?).

If you haven’t been living on another planet, you’ll know that Matthew Fox has been one of our century’s burrs in the Vatican’s saddle – with others like Boff, Schillebeeckz, Hans Kung. After a protracted struggle with the Vatican thought-police and his own order, the Dominicans, in January 1994 he became an Episcopal priest.

What is Ratzinger (and his German mafia, as Fox describes them) supposed to do with someone who tries to overturn the main thrust of post-Augustinian Western theology? In a sentence, Fox believes that the Fall-Redemption view of God’s primary relationship with God’s human creatures is deeply flawed. Humans are primarily loved creatures, made in God’s image. Augustine – and from him the whole Western church, Catholic and Protestant – got it wrong.

Fox’s heroes are Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, John of the Cross, Tolstoy, Bede Griffiths, Otto Rank, Gutierrez. And, above all: Rabbi Abraham Heschel (Fox’s first choice of an author if he were limited to one on a desert island: what’s yours?).

Matthew Fox, I believe, is on to something. His best-known work, Original Blessing, is a classic, and ought to be on the compulsory reading list for every would-be pastor. Now you don’t have to follow Fox all the way down his postmodernist path: I confess to being a bit too conservative for his Mother-Earthishness, for example. Nor do you have to rave, as he does, about planetary masses. And you probably won’t feel as strongly as he does about homophobia and paganophobia…

Institutionalism is inimical to a genuine spirituality. The prophets know this, and Matthew Fox, I believe, is a prophet, larger than either the Vatican Catholic or Protestant systems. He had to learn, painfully, that the real issue the Vatican had with him was about power, not theology – ‘The very act of silencing theologians instead of engaging them in dialogue is a sign of institutional violence’ (p.174). As all prophets are anticlericalist, Fox says he has always had a relationship to his priestliness that was nonpossessive and playful. (He wrestled deeply with the option of laicization as he was leaving the Roman Catholic fold).

Fox has a brilliant critique of both Catholicism and Protestantism. The Catholics’ ‘shadow side’ includes clericalism, ‘closing churches without asking why no one wants to come to mass’, ‘papalmania and the cult of personality’, ‘ignorance of its own mystical-prophetic tradition’ etc. (p.234). He has 13 problems with Protestantism, including its ‘boring worship, based as it is on words, words, and more words’ and a seminary system that ‘owes more to Descartes and Kant than to Jesus and our tradition of mystics/prophets’ (p.256). Fox quotes with approval a letter from Bishop John Spong: ‘Our task as Christian people is not to protect the institution we represent. It is to seek the truth of God.’ And he took comfort from Dom Bede Griffiths’ comment, ‘Don’t worry about the Vatican. It will all come tumbling down overnight someday, just like the Berlin Wall’ (p. 214).

An important question about any theological system is ‘What kind of person does it produce?’ Fundamentalisms, for example, are generally joyless. (Fox asks ‘Did Augustine ever dance once he became a Christian?’). What kind of person espouses a theology of joy and mysticism? A few years ago I interviewed Matthew Fox for Australian TV, and found him to be as gracious, charismatic, erudite and charming as he writes. And several women at his conference asked, wistfully, ‘Why does God call such a beautiful man to be celibate?’

Some interesting questions/quotes:

• Why are all the best movie directors Catholic? (p.148)


• Our denominational differences ‘are no more than “the narcissism of minor differences”, to use Freud’s phrase’ (p.247)


• Jung commented that ‘the churches are emptying because the symbols no longer touch people and because the church has lost touch with its symbols’ (p.182)


• ‘The greatest tragedy in theology in the last three hundred years has been the separation of the theologian from the poet, the dancer, the painter, the dramatist, the potter, the filmmaker’ (Pere M.D.Chenu, matthew Fox’s mentor) (p.63)


• ‘Animals have a sense of their own worth and dignity – a pride at their own unique existence that subtly suggests that no one ever preached to them about original sin’ (p.110)


• ‘Santayana proposed that if European philosophers had lived among the mountains of the American west, all of Western philosophy would have been different from the tradition handed down since Socrates’ (p.135)


• ‘St Augustine was right-wing in his politics – in struggling with the Donatists in North Africa, Augustine gave orders that have poured from the mouth of every dictator since then: “Coerce them to come in”‘ (p.147)


• ‘Religion has always suffered from the tendency to become an end in itself, to seclude the holy, to become parochial, self-indulgent, self-seeking; as if the task were not to ennoble human nature but to enhance the power and beauty of its institutions or to enlarge the body of doctrines’ (Rabbi Heschel, p. 244)


• ‘Western culture has been running for two centuries on Rene Descartes’s egoistic and heady statement: “I think, therefore I am.” More recently, American consumer culture has altered this philosophy in its own unique way to: “I buy, therefore I am”… As I participated in the Planetary Mass I sensed that a new philosophical era was opening up. Its shibboleth would be: “We celebrate, therefore we are.” And of course it is founded on a deeper truth: “We are, therefore we celebrate!”‘ (p.262).

Rowland Croucher