A Particular Form Of Panentheism

by Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer

Father Mitch Pacwa is a world renowned lecturer, author, and spiritual director. He is the spiritual director for televised Holy Land pilgrimages. He is also the host of shows on Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), a Global Catholic Network, available in over 150 million television households in more than 140 countries and territories. Pacwa is the author of an article entitled "Catholicism for the New Age: Matthew Fox and Creation-Centered Spirituality."

Matthew Fox (b. 1940) is an internationally acclaimed spiritual theologian, Episcopal priest, and activist.

A section of the article reads:

Neo-Platonism (a mystical philosophy which combined ideas from Plato with Oriental, Jewish, and Christian beliefs) of the Middle Ages, especially as represented by John Erigena, Nicholas of Cusa, and Meister Eckhart. Because Fox does not like Platonism, he dubs these Neo-Platonists “creation-centered theologians.”

[The Divine Universe] All three philosophers came under church scrutiny and condemnation because their explicit claims of panentheism (which is bad enough, since it holds that the creation is inherently divine masked an implicit pantheism). Fox has the same problem. His quotation of Nicholas of Cusa sounds like pantheism, though he calls it panentheism:

"The absolute, Divine Mind, is all that is in everything that is.... Divinity is the enfolding and unfolding of everything that is. Divinity is in all things in such a way that all things are in divinity...."

[We Are The Divine Universe] "We are, as it were, a human deity. Humans are also the universe, but not absolutely since we are human. Humanity is therefore a microcosm, or in truth, a human universe. Thus humanity itself encloses both God and the universe in its human power."

Fox frequently quotes his version of Meister Eckhart: "The seed of God is in us.... Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree, a hazel seed into a hazel tree, the seed of God into God. I discover that God and I are one. There I am what I was, and I grow neither smaller nor bigger, for there I am an immovable cause that moves all things."

These and similar passages throughout Fox’s books manifest an understanding of Christ and divinity rooted in Fox’s translations and imagination rather than Scripture or church teaching. ... Fox wants people to “birth” their own “ I am,” which is the experience of the divine “I am.” The reason for our existence, Fox tells us, is to “birth the Cosmic Christ in our being and doing.” Fox believes that everyone can and should give birth to the Cosmic Christ, which he believes will awaken the maternal within us.

My comment:

Rev. Fox's Cosmic Christ is the Spirit of God immanent in the Cosmos. It is the Spirit of the Universe, and It manifests as the material and psychic Divine Universe. To become One with the Divine Universe is to become One with the personal God. This "personal God" is the Cosmic Christ. This becoming "One with God" is "the final recognition of the All in All, the unity of the Self with the Cosmos - the cognition of the DIVINITY OF THE SELF!" The Spirit's impersonal transcendence beyond the Cosmos is essentially irrelevant. This is Fox's panentheistic Creation-Centered spiritual philosophy.