Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Lessons for Transforming Evil in Soul and Society

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh, by Matthew Fox, is a big, exuberant, difficult book. It's a new theology that re-evaluates fundamental Christian methods of perceiving spirit and flesh by denying any hard and fast distinction between the two. Even more radically, Fox denies that goodness and sinfulness can be cleanly distinguished. Following to its logical conclusion Thomas Aquinas's belief that sin is misdirected love, Fox describes parallels between the Seven Deadly Sins of Christianity and the seven chakras of Eastern traditions--how, for example, even the ugliest expressions of lust are, at their root, corrupt expressions of a God-given desire for union with another. In this regard, Fox quotes the German mystic Meister Eckhart: "Everything praises God. Darkness, privations, defects, and evil praise God and bless God." Sins of the Spirit is so complex and ambitious that its structure and language often become knotty and abstruse; however, Fox always returns to his central goal, "to ground our sense of sinfulness--and of awe--in the body." For this reason, Sins of the Spirit is a landmark of popular contemporary writing about Christian theology. It points the way to a time when we might learn to live out our confession that God's incarnation is the reason for our faith. --Michael Joseph Gross