Word & World 8/1 (1988)
Copyright © 1988 by Word & World, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN. All rights reserved.
page 42
The Matthew Fox Phenomenon JANE E. STROHL Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota One Friday last winter I confided guiltily to a colleague that I had nothing either academic or ecclesiastical on my calendar for the weekend. While my students toiled in the library stacks and the rest of the faculty prepared to publish, I was going to a yoga workshop. My friend responded that he was making the first of several scheduled cross-country skiing trips. He commended the pursuit of such activities, which he described as “sheerly doxological” and which, he assured me, require no apology. The “sheerly doxological” is one keynote of Matthew Fox’s paean to a renewed and reformed Christian spirituality. There is no doubt that he has struck a responsive chord in the hearts of many spiritual seekers, both within and without the institutional church. A recent issue of the Yoga Journal featured an interview with Fox and carried the headline “Original Blessing: Matthew Fox Takes on the Vatican.” The very title reveals the ambiguous feelings harbored by many people toward the Christianity that formed them and the extraordinary role Fox is able to assume in their struggle to make their peace with their spiritual origins. In an introduction to the above-mentioned interview, the editor writes: Many of us, in the last decade or two, have explored Eastern paths. We have practiced Hatha Yoga and Vipassana meditation, studied Taoist healing, puzzled over Zen koans, and consulted the I Ching. Nevertheless, a full 50 percent of our readers still consider themselves Christians. The tradition in which we have been raised, it seems, continues to exert a powerful hold on us! How rewarding, then, when we find that our own tradition continues to renew itself, through the work and experiences of certain key individuals, individuals who look beyond the external trappings to the essence of the tradition—individuals like Matthew Fox....Fox, a Dominican priest, is proud to count himself among a long line of Dominican renegades, including St. Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart. Taking the Catholic mainstream to task for its emphasis on sin, redemption, asceticism, and guilt, he has rediscovered an alternative within Catholicism itself—what he calls “creation-centered spirituality.”1 1
Stephan Bodian, “Editorial: Creation Spirituality,” Yoga Journal 71 (November/December 1986) 4. page 43
Matthew Fox offers himself naturally as the champion of the dispossessed, those who feel themselves alienated by ecclesiastical teaching and practice which they experience as oppressive. He does not speak as a disgruntled former churchman but as a critic from within. Fox