Parish Work, Life and Thought
“An Age of the Spirit”: Review of The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox (HarperCollins, 2009)
Harvey Cox is a pre-eminent American theologian, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School where the focus of his teaching and research has been on developments in world Christianity, especially liberation theology and the emerging Christianity in the Global South. He is best known for his book The Secular City : Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965) which sold over a million copies. In that book Cox argued that God was just as present in a secular society as in the church. Cox took to task the older mainline Protestant denominations for their conservatism and their reluctance to move with the times. His other titles include The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (1969); Fire from Heaven: The Fire of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Re-Shaping of Religion in the 21st Century (1994) and When Jesus came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (2004).
The Future of Faith was published to coincide with Cox’s retirement in October 2009 from Harvard University where he has taught since 1965.
In this book, which is in the form of an extended essay, Cox draws attention to the similarities between the 21st century and the 1st century of the Common Era. Today, as in the 1st century Christians find themselves a minority living in societies that are multicultural and pluralistic. He notes that there are historians who are now studying the dynamics of the young churches in the Global South in order to better understand how the early churches developed and operated in the New Testament. He remarks on the important role of women in the early church and how again today women have a voice and a say in the decision making of the Church. He refers to the lay associations in the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, specifically to the grass-roots Community of Sant' Egidio that started in Rome and now has a membership of 50,000 worldwide:
During the first three centuries, the Age of Faith, Christians constituted a minority among worshipers of Isis and Osiris, Mithra adepts, and those who venerated the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheons and participated in the cult of the divine emperor. Today, both in the world at large and in the places where they are spreading fastest, Christians are once again minorities and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. In those early centuries, as today, there was no central hierarchy, no commonly accepted creed, and no standard ritual practice. In those first centuries Christianity was not yet “Western”; today it is no longer Western. Christians then were united by their celebration of Jesus as Lord, by the exchange of visitors, gifts, and letters, and by a vibrant confidence in a shared Spirit. They were known as “the people of the Way.” Although trends toward centralization and standardization were already visible, it was Constantine’s political deployment of Christianity as an imperial ideology that sanctified those developments. (author’s italics)
Cox cites the hundreds of congregations, representing a vast range of practices and doctrines, that are united by their faith in Jesus and sharing in the Spirit, with various types of social outreach In the Roman Catholic Church there are bishops in Africa and priests in Latin America who are taking the initiative.
Cox distinguishes carefully between faith and belief. He defines faith as trust in God whereas belief refers to belief systems, creeds, dogmas, and doctrines, requiring cognitive assent. He contends that reducing faith to belief has had a deleterious effect on the Church, especially after the Council of Trent in the 16th century which defined Catholic doctrine definitively and systematized it:
The rise of natural science initiated the final step in the decline of a Christianity that was a collation of ostensible propositions about the world that one was supposed to accept on the basis of a religious authority. Science gradually evolved a method of testing factual assertions and by so doing discredited one pseudo-factual religious claim after another. The trial of Galileo by the Inquisition marked the turning point. He had insisted that earth moves around the sun, not vice versa, and claimed that what he actually saw through a telescope had to take precedence over what both the ecclesial and the contemporary scientific authorities taught about the motion of the heavenly bodies. He was forced to recant, but walked away murmuring that the earth still moves.
Cox notes that Pope John Paul II honoured Galileo and rightly so because Galileo rendered Christianity a valuable service: he forced the Church to abandon its claims to privileged knowledge of the physical world, ”thus helping Christianity to regain its original impetus as a movement of faith.”
Cox sees no inherent conflict between religion and science since they occupy very different domains, what Stephen Jay Gould designated as two non-overlapping “magisteria.” Science’s domain is empirical description of the natural world; religion is concerned with meaning and values. The problem today is that biblical literalists treat Genesis as if it were a geological or zoological textbook:
Biblical literalists, who totally misunderstand the poetry of the book of Genesis, try to reduce it to a treatise in geology and zoology. Their mirror image is found among the atheists and agnostics who mount spurious pseudoscientific arguments to demonstrate that the universe has no meaning or that God does not exist. Both parties are fundamentalists of a sort, deficient in their capacity for metaphor, analogy, and the place of symbol and myth in human life.
The “New Atheists” take the literalists at face value and then proceed to challenge them on the basis of empirical evidence. Cox emphasizes the danger of “the literalization of the symbolic”: “The ill-advised transmuting of symbols into a curious kind of ‘facts’ has created an immense obstacle to faith for many thoughtful people.”
Cox is highly critical of fundamentalism, whether religious or secular. His strictures extend beyond atheistic fundamentalism to militant secularism (chapter 10). However, he especially censures “Bible-believing” Christians, stressing the need to reclaim the Bible from the literalists who have effectively replaced faith with the Bible. He challenges them by asking what do we mean by “the Bible”:
Since what we mean by “the Bible” has been changing from century to century, with various books being included and excluded depending on the theological climate, it would be useful for ”Bible-believing” Christians to engage in an imaginary experiment., What if they were Bible believing Christians in the second century CE? At that time the only Bible Christians had was the Old Testament. The New Testament had not yet been completed. What if they lived at a time when books like First Clement and the Apocalypse of Peter were still being read in many congregations along with the various letters of Paul? Many Christians at that time wanted to include them in the New Testament, but eventually they were not. What if our Bible believers lived in the fifteenth century when the “apocryphal” books that Protestants excluded a few decades later were still considered Holy Scripture and still read in the churches (as they are in Catholic churches today)? The idea that “the Bible” has always been the same book year in and year out and you either believed it or you did not may be comforting, but it has no basis in reality.
Then, there is the vexed question of which translation do “Bible-believing” Christians believe in, the NRSV vs. AV?
Cox maintains that Christianity started out as a movement, "the Way," and that it needs to go back to being a movement. This is what is happening in the Global South where sixty per cent of the world’s Christians now live. Cox is an advocate of liberation theology which he contends is “the most innovative and influential theological movement of the twentieth century, and also probably the most widely misunderstood.”
Cox recounts his discussions with the Peruvian priest, Father Gustavo Gutiérrez,O.P., often called “the father of liberation theology” whose seminal work, Theology of Liberation (1973) was the virtual manifesto for the movement. He recounts the “conversion” of the martyred Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, the champion of liberation theology.
The “ecclesial base communities,” orcomunidades eclesiales de base, as they are called in Spanish, originated in the 1960s to complement regular worship in the parishes in the cities. Later they spread to remoter areas where they were lay-led because of the lack of priests in the countryside. While Liberation theology began in the slums of Latin America, it is by no means confined to South America; it has spread throughout the global South. Cox even envisages the possibility that it may eventually fuse with progressive Pentecostalism:
Liberation theology is more than just a regionally specific “Latin American theology” or a passing fad. It embodies a momentous leap out of the many centuries in which Christianity was defined as a system of beliefs imposed by a hierarchy. It symbolizes the resurrection of faith-as-trust and represents the retrieval of the core of the gospel message as it was understood and lived in the earliest centuries of Christianity. It is an unmistakable sign of the coming of an Age of the Spirit.
The fact that Christianity became an institution, with a hierarchy and ecclesiastical bureaucracy with a formulated belief-system was its undoing as a movement. The centralization of authority in Rome and Constantinople, along with the unholy alliance between church and state seriously compromised Christianity. This gave rise to what Cox calls “the clerical caste.” “Christianity was defined as a system of beliefs imposed by a hierarchy.” It is Cox’s contention that this era is now ending and that a new age of the Spirit is upon us:
Christianity understood as a system of beliefs guarded and transmitted through a privileged religious institution by a clerical class is dying. Instead, today Christianity as a way of life shared in a vast variety of ways by a diverse global network of fellowships is arising. The initial fruits of this resurrection are already obvious. In those countries where the clerical leadership clings to the older model, the churches are empty. Any visitor to Europe can witness these vacant pews at first hand. But in those areas of the world where creeds and hierarchies have been set aside to make way for the Spirit, like the stone rolled away from Christ’s grave in the Easter story, one senses life and energy.
The paradigm Cox adopts here is that of the twelfth-century biblical exegete, theologian and mystic Joachim of Fiore (Joachim of Flora). Joachim divided history into three ages: the Age of the Father, corresponding to the Old Testament; the Age of the Son, corresponding to the period between the coming of Christ and the impending Age of the Holy Spirit; the Age of the Holy Spirit, which he predicted on the basis of certain texts in the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse) would begin in 1260. Joachim thought that in the Third Age ecclesiastical organization would no longer be necessary because people would live in direct contact with God. For Cox this is what is happening now when a newly empowered laity, led by the Spirit, is transforming Christianity.
Cox, clearly influenced by Joachim, divides Christian history into three periods: the Age of Faith, the Age of Belief, and the Age of the Spirit.
The Age of Faith refers to the first three centuries when Christians were more concerned to follow the teachings of Jesus than to speculate about the nature of his being;
The Age of Belief comprises the period between the fourth century when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great and the twentieth century when the Constantinian era finally ended;
The Age of the Spirit began in the 1960s when people started to abandon organized religion for other forms of spirituality.
Admittedly this schematization is somewhat artificial and arbitrary; it is also simplistic. Cox might just as easily have selected other fault lines in Church history: the rift between the Church and the Synagogue in the 1st century; the Great Schism of 1054; the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century or the Enlightenment in the 18th century.
Cox is highly critical of the accepted version of church history still taught in many seminaries and schools where the post-Constantinian understanding of ecclesiastical history is considered normative and read back into the earlier period. This version fails to recognize the diversity within early Christianity and to accept the results of recent research into early Christianity.
Cox remarks how the notion of heresy gradually developed and how the heresy of one age sometimes became the orthodoxy of another age. Cox contrasts Francis of Assisi and Peter Waldo (Valdes), two twelfth-century laymen who sought to embody the message of Jesus. St. Francis sought papal approval and was eventually ordained as a deacon. His followers became the Order of Friars Minor; Peter Waldo dispensed with papal permission and his followers, the Waldensians, were condemned as heretics:
My own favorite example of a “heretical” group that survived centuries of excommunication, persecution, and exile to become a small but significant part of the Christian family is the Waldensians. First organized by Peter Waldo as the “Poor Men of Lyon” around 1176, they emphasized living with simplicity. Waldo himself, a rich merchant, gave all his money away and suggested that the church could more credibly preach the message of Jesus if it did the same. The Waldensians taught that the Bible should be the sole authority and therefore eventually questioned the authority of the papacy and rejected the idea of purgatory and the practice of granting indulgences. Like the Franciscans, who came to birth at about the same time, the Waldensians, although they were laypeople (as St. Francis was), preached in the streets and the markets. But unlike the Franciscans they allowed women to preach and did not try to seek approval from the pope. The papacy responded by branding them heretics and directing the Dominicans to use the Inquisition to root them out. But the repression did not succeed. The Waldensians fled to remote mountain regions in Italy and France until the late nineteenth century when religious toleration finally arrived in Italy.
Cox makes good use of historical research and brings together the discoveries of archaeology and the results of textual analysis. To illustrate the prominence of women in the church prior to the year 1000, he describes the ninth century mosaic in the Church of St. Praxedis in Rome that represents a certain Theodora with the word episcopa (“bishop”) written above her head. Theodora is presented together with Mary of Nazareth, St. Prudentia, and St. Praxedis, prominent women belonging to the 1st and 2nd centuries. There is controversy over what episcopa meant in the time of Theodora; her exact role cannot now be determined. Still Cox wonders how the mosaic ever survived. Someone has attempted to remove the “a” in Theodora’s name, probably for the same reason that a scribe altered Junia to Junias in Romans 16:6. The presumption was that Theodora must have been a male to hold a position of authority in the church.
The second example Cox gives is of the group of female figures in the fresco Fractio panis in the Catacombs of Priscilla on the Via Salaria. Is this the Eucharist or an agape? Cox admits that because the fresco lacks any accompanying text it is not possible to give a definitive answer. However, the distinction between Eucharist and agape may be specious here.
The book contains several delightful vignettes of John XXIII, Paul VI and Benedict XVI. Cox was staying in Rome in the summer of 1996 when John Paul II invited a group of Waldensians to meet him in St. Peter’s Basilica. Cox describes the scene:
When we arrived, to our astonishment the Vatican staff gathered our small group not in some little reception room as we had expected, but around the high altar in St. Peter’s itself. There we stood for a few minutes, some of us gazing up at the biblical text emblazoned around the inside of the dome: “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will establish my church.” After a few minutes the Successor of Peter entered in glistening white papal regalia, walked slowly to the altar, and then told us, in deeply sincere tones, that it was now time to leave our differences behind and search out what we all have in common. He then strolled around and shook hands with everyone, blessed the entire delegation, and left. I am sure this was the first time any pope had ever received and blessed a group of Waldensians. It had taken eight hundred years.
Cox’s account of his own meeting with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the doctrine of the Faith (formerly, the Holy Office of the Inquisition) was less favorable but it did provide insight into the personality of the man who would later become Pope Benedict XVI: “As Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger is arguably one of the best-trained theologians ever to occupy the throne of St. Peter. He has not been as severe as some feared he might be. But I still wonder how good a listener he is.”
Overall The Future of Faith presents a very hopeful message. Cox, like the German theologian Hans Küng, has somehow managed to hold onto his youthful idealism: he is still confident that the world can be radically transformed. He is at times prophetic, at other times visionary. His conclusion is certainly upbeat:
The wind of the Spirit is blowing. One indication is the upheaval that is shaking and renewing Christianity. Faith, rather than beliefs, is once again becoming its defining quality, and this reclaims what faith meant during its earliest years. I have described how that primal impetus was nearly suffocated by creeds, hierarchies, and the disastrous merger of the church with the empire. But I have also highlighted how a new global Christianity, enlivened by a multiplicity of cultures and yearning for the realization of God’s reign of shalom, is finding its soul again. All the signs suggest we are poised to enter a new Age of the Spirit and that the future will be a future of faith. (author’s italics)
The text contains a number of errors: Ebionites instead of Ebionates (page 108), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (page 11) appears as Pierre Teilhard des Chardin (page 193), McGill University is spelled Magill University (page 225). On page 81 Kyrios is translated as “anointed one” instead of “Lord.” There is one truly egregious error: on pages 110-111 Cox states: “During the reign of Charlemagne, the Western church arbitrarily inserted a short phrase, called the filioque (“and the Son”) into the Apostles' Creed.” In fact, this interpolation was made to the Nicene Creed (not the Apostles’ Creed) at the Third Council of Toledo (589). This error also appears in the index under the entry “creeds: filioque and the Apostles’ Creed,” page 238.
I recommend The Future of Faith, along with Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (pbk. 2007) and The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (pbk 2008)
© 2009 William Converse
