Naming the Unnameable by Dr. Matthew Fox | Homebound Publications

I got hold of this book because I often find Matthew Fox's writings intriguing and stimulating. I read them not expecting to agree with everything but because I think he points his finger on things that we need to pay attention to. The challenge for me is to work out, sometimes, why I'm not at ease with some of the things he says and to work out how to deal with the issue he raises in a way that I find consistent with my own starting points.

This book is no exception.

I love the project of thinking about our namings of God. Not least because I think it is something that the Lord's prayer implicitly calls us to do -'hallowing the name' implies identifying what kinds of ways we might find to attempt to name God. That point also brings us to the matter of the difficulties with the project of naming God anyway -which the start of the book helpfully outlines, so at that level it is a useful and brief primer in the spiritual help and danger of naming God, noting the limits of language and human imagination faced with an infinite and very different being.

This book has a similar effect on me. I want to affirm some things but one thing bugs me. What I find I can't quite embrace is where some of the namings seem to equate God to creation in some way. The first point I ran into this was in the naming of God as the "planetary mind field". I find this difficult because of my own work on corporisations (principalities, powers, angels, dominions etc): these I identify as emergent 'properties' ("entities" might be better) of human and other communities under certain conditions. What Fox seems to be naming, in this case, is actually potentially a corporisation. This is very much a being of creation. It may be a being which could be a residing place for God's nearer presence (much like an angel in the Hebrew scriptures) but it is not itself God.

I have similar issues with naming God as evolution and the mind of the universe. I sense that there is potential in this to honour the panentheistic intent and also the transcendent dimension, but that work seems not to have been done and leaves open the potential for evolution to be deified with the kind of difficulties CS Lewis dramatises in that conceptualisation in That Hideous Strength -where identifying evolution with deity ends up justifying eugenics. I think some kind of wrestling with issues of providence needs to be undertaken in this respect to give an account of immanence which doesn't drift into eugenics, in effect. While I agree that so much of evolution needs to be understood with a symbiotic and synergistic content, yet there are theodicy issues. This bit of the book tends to come over a bit too simplistic-'new-age' in feel.

It is one of the difficulties for me that I keep bumping into when I read Fox. I applaud the desire to honour and recognise the immanent God, I warm to a panentheistic perspective but I do wish that he could find a way to conceptualise these things that doesn't keep falling over into identifying God with created things. Or at least that's how it keeps coming over to me: panentheism tips over into pantheism which is a very different thing and has a set of problematics all of its own.

I hope this comes over as 'friendly' criticism. I really do warm to much of Fox's project, but I also quite understand why some people have a real problem with it, and because they don't 'get' the heart of the project, they bluster off at it. For the record I think Fox is right in affirming the joyous, loving, justice-making delight in creation and Spirit and the life-affirming fundamental stance which resonates with the best of the early Charismatic movement and of, for example, Hasidic Jewish spirituality. I think he is right in wanting to strengthen spirituality to support us in struggle against ecocidal trajectories, policies and lifestyles.

I was interested to note that Deepak Chopra is quoted several times, in a way that seems to take him as authoritative. I guess I'm not necessarily convinced of that. I think I'd have liked to have seen some of these namings argued rather than having Chopra and medieval Christians quoted as if beyond questioning. Don't get me wrong; I'm happy to learn from Aquinas, Eckhart and others and I will be happy to find that Deepak Chopra may have a way of saying something that is helpful and productive of insight -but I don't take their word for it; particularly when the conceptualising of the relationship between God and creation seems hazy and perhaps even unhelpfully blurred.

So I'd say that there were some bits of this that I found helpful and inspiringly put. There were other bits that didn't work so well and might even be cause for concern.


I should say, I got an e-copy of this book as part of a review package which asked that I read the book and post a review on my blog in exchange for a free copy. There is no obligation or pressure for me to publish a review which is anything other than my own response and evaluation.

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Naming the Unnameable by Dr. Matthew Fox | Homebound Publications