The Coming of the Cosmic Christ:

...This is not so different from the Augustinian Fall/Redemption thinking that Fox seems to dislike so much (and terribly misunderstands...

...Accordingly, "meditation" is largely identified with clay work, painting, massage, and ritual...

...We can always dispute particulars, but Fox has a real sensitivity to matter, sexuality, play, and the arts as a "craft" of the "folk" rather than the elite...

...Fox writes beautifully about reverence and praise, but primarily these are tendered toward the Creator's effects, and in them, the Creator...

...Is that all God's belly is...

...I tend to agree with McColman's critique...

...William M. Thompson Here is a passionate invitation to reverse the matricidal wounding of the earth through revitalizing our reverence for the cosmos and (re)learning the great skills necessary for a harmonious existence...

...If so, then we're not much different from all those other beans...

...As Fox blurs the "God beyond revelation" and the "God of revelation," so we come upon a blurring of the Logos in se and the Logos imaged in the cosmos...

...Settling for the cosmic glue description runs the danger of deriving the Logos' worth from its contribution to us...

...Significantly, this kind of idolatry is missing from Fox's list of matricidal "sins...

...The "Cosmic Christ" is "The Oil" of the universe, overcoming the friction of ecological matricide through harmonizing the mystical, the scientific, and the artistic...

...The reader must decide whether defining mysticism as "primarily...our entering the fullness of the mystery of our existence, the gift and blessing of creation itself will really do...

...Finally, I think, it is that reality of nonmanipulability which guarantees a true future and harmony for us all...

...Consequently, we live in God's belly, which is the whole earth...

...It is the book's shortest section, which may be wise since too much apocalypticism can cripple rather than energize...

...But I doubt whether this can be done effectively by a kind of quick return to prepersonalistic modes of thinking (archaic or other-which isn't to say that we cannot learn much from these...

...Not enough of this nonmanipulable (by us) Logos shines through in Fox...

...Yes, God is our Creator and our "womb...

...Despite its transitional nature, Part IPs treatment of mysticism makes it the key to the book...

...Humans are different and special because, while they eat the first three types of beans, "God eats human beings...

...Understanding the inner trinitarian Logos as the "cosmic glue" is not adequate theologically...

...Part I describes the earth's "matricide...

...Derived from the Greek christos, the "anointed," the term can refer to oil, the element which keeps machines running smoothly...

...The notion of adoration (reserved for God alone) is basically absent in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ...

...He calls for a balance between the historical and the cosmic, mind and heart, individual and cosmos, but wants to concentrate on the latter elements of these pairs...

...But the Logos is a nonmanipulable and transcendent "More," and insofar as that is so, we Christians believe that the radically unique and unsurpassable (because finally nonmanipulable) can happen and has happened-which is what we point to in Jesus...

...Fox's emphasis here is decidedly on the mystical component...

...Fox tends excessively to accent the "God who reveals" at the expense of the "God who is more than revelation...

...What is required, thinks Fox, is a viable cosmology (creation-centered spirituality), integrating science, mysticism, and art...

...And since it is the mystic whose body is most massaged by that oil, Fox concentrates his efforts here...

...Using a favored image (one likely to hurt as much as help), Fox writes that the "mystic" swims in "wet love...

...Meister Eckhart, the mystic Fox loves so much, was pointing to this in his distinction between the "Godhead" ("the womb beyond our womb") and "God" ("our womb").od" ("our womb...

...But readers need to be persuaded of the earth's predicament, and to do this requires that Fox give a greater sampling of the range of opinions than is present here...

...He believes a "Cosmic Christ Mysticism" is the key to a viable cosmology for the world today and he explores in particular the "harmonizing" nature of the term "Christ...

...I agree with Fox on this, and that in this respect all of us are "Logos-bearers...

...Fox's view of the Logos as our common glue makes possible a "deep ecumenism...

...We struggle through to a thematization of our deepdown, more basic goodness, which leads us to believe that "originally" we were created simply good...

...I found particularly stimulating his treatment of the largely forgotten cosmological motifs in the Gospels, his analysis of the Song of Songs, and his retrieving of the "child-motif in theology...

...Fox believes that theologians and others have been too influenced by the Enlightenment's rationalism, as illustrated by the tomes devoted to searching for the historical Jesus, ignoring the Cosmic Christ as well as the mystical traditions that tend to be the carriers of that Cosmic Christ tradition...

...His understanding of "science" remains terribly vague: Newtonianism is said to foster mechanistic fragmentation...

...Without explanatory comment, Fox approvingly cites a letter from a five-year-old describing the difference between the "four kinds of beans-green beans, pork and beans, jelly beans, and human beings...

...In light of his other writings, it is more than interesting that this "cosmologie foxique" begins with matricide, rather than with his theme of "original blessing...

...Here I would strongly recommend Walter Kasper's writings on the notion of the "personal" (in the Trinity especially) as signifying nonmanipula-tion...

...Carl McColman has noted this emphasis in his review in The St...

...Luke's Journal of Theology, where he speaks of Fox blurring the distinction between the Creator and the Creator's effects, which may be the most dangerous of idolatries...

...Yet it guarantees this in a nonutopian manner, leaving open precisely how this created cosmos will share in that eternal future, all the while fostering a genuine respect for this universe...

...I think McColman means that there's a way of using God-language which blinds us to our own, more hidden idolatry...

...There are some finely written passages in the later sections of the book (Parts III to V...

...I find in the mystics he loves to cite a far greater awareness of this "nonmanipulable More...

...Einstein's sense of "mystery" attracts Fox...

...Again, the afterlife-the more than this worldness of it all-seems missing (the tradition's "cosmos" is larger here than Fox's...

...Fox seems to admit here that in our experience we begin with a "mixed bag" of good and evil (intuiting the superiority of the former...

...But for the great Christian tradition, God is even more than our Creator and our womb...

...Granted, Fox is trying to correct what he views as the excessive individualism and anticosmological bias of the recent West...