The Evangelical Universalist Forum

95 Theses (Matthew Fox)

have read about half, and agreed so far…interesting stuff. quite alot of inclusive spirituality, which i think is good.

matthewfox.org/about-matthew-fox/a-new-reformation/95-theses/

94 is a bit odd…but if you really think about them, despite the language and wording, most are fairly orthodox points, taken to their logical conclusions.

Good stuff James. Just read through these and found myself nodding along to most of them. A veritable smorgasbord of spiritual aphorisms!

I was struck in particular by 83 and 84:

  1. The Dark Night of the Soul descends on us all and the proper response is not addiction such as shopping, alcohol, drugs, TV, sex or religion but rather to be with the darkness and learn from it.

  2. The Dark Night of the Soul is a learning place of great depth. Stillness is required.

Many of us - me included - often find the Dark Night of the Soul a source of doubt and fear, and hence try to escape from it. Maybe Fox is right. Maybe we need to embrace it, as Fox says, and view it as another positive tool in God’s armory?

Cheers

Johnny

Johnny - I’m already missing the cuddly piture of you for some reason :laughing:

James and Johnny -

I used to be a huge fan of Mathew Fox and saw him speak twice when he was in his heydya in the 1990’s and creating quite a stir in the UK. I even worte a letter to Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) when Matthew was under investigation when still a member of the Dominican Order.

I still admire Matthew Fox - but hope to have a nuanced discussion about him over a pint with you boys someday (I now have some reservations about the spin in his teaching). But yes - his creation centred spirituality does honour a space for ‘dark nights’ - and I think this is important.

Blessings

Dick

yes, it’d be interesting to chat, Dick.
i liked this bit of writing (well almost all of it), but i could detect some oddities in the chosen language, though that might be the shreds of evangelicalism i still haven’t rid myself of. most of even the “odd” ones made sense if i thought about them.
i’ve not read/heard anything else from him to my memory so really unsure about anything else he might be teaching.
but these are some good points. i agree that engaging with the dark night of the soul can be ultimately and ironically illuminating. it might be some small comfort for anyone who suffers through them.

‘Original blessing’ is his big title - and I loved the book as a welcome correction to the life despising elements in Christian tradition. Fox’s big grouch is the Fall Redemption tradition in Christianity –which overlaps in a big way with Etc but they are not quite the same thing – and he’s advocating the Creation Centred tradition rather than the universalist one (again there’s substantial overlap but…) If you do a search on Matthew Fox here I’m sure I’ve done a couple of posts about him - one in which I mention my misgivings about him and another in which I tell of how he was slanderously/wrongly portrayed by fundamentalists as some sort of Satanist in the 1990s. Oh and I have an essay by a member of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion who seeks to reconcile the best insights of Matthew Fox with the best insights of Girard (normally they are seen as rather incompatible - but it’s a good essay)