harvey cox: from the secular city to the age of faith

Harvey Cox's latest book is in part an autobiographical account of Cox's own journey of faith seen in an historical context as a product of the movement of his faith development. In large part it is a continuation of his previous work that looked at the place of the church within an evolving secular society. What he sees now in The Future of Faith is a Christianity that has indeed evolved from it's pre-modern state into something that can be said to be quite wholly modern.

The church is, and is becoming a self-critical entity that has understood the folly of it's essential doctrines to become something more organically in tune with the world and the movement of the Spirit of God rather than the strictures of human social and religious structures. It is a return to something more ancient, but is its own instance of the nascent and pre-pubescent stages of the followers of Christ before it was something normative, authoritative, and establishmentarian. What I want to touch on here is his previous work to put The Future of Faith in a better context that runs seamlessly with his previous work.

In The Secular City looks at secularization with a profound sense of optimism as an opportunity to reconstruct the place and purpose of the church in a secular and urban society. He does not bemoan the accommodation of churches to the technical, scientific, and planned urban environments of modernization. Cox rests quite comfortably in the notion that, “Secularization simply bypasses and undercuts religion and goes on to other things. It has relativized religious world views and thus rendered them innocuous. Religion has been privatized. It has been accepted as the peculiar prerogative and point of view of a particular person or group…Secularization rolls on, and if we are to understand and communicate with our present age we must learn to love it in its unremitting secularity” (Cox, 1966, p. 2-3).

Rather than decry the force of secularization, he consents to it as something inevitable or at least irreversible and seeks to glean from it those qualities which are helpful to religion rather than those which are harmful to it. It is “the liberation of man from his religious and metaphysical tutelage” (p. 15) and is thus, clearly echoing Weber a way to focus on the human condition and to unify truth “by bringing it to bear on specific human problems. The truth is unified pragmatically” (p. 57-58). Finally, more than this view looking at the secularization thesis as something to change, Cox makes his resignation quite clear throughout the book, especially with regard to the emergence of the secular university. “(T)he current cleavage between (university and church) is wider and more impassable than ever, precisely because we now stand at the end of the epoch of the church’s dominance in Western culture” (Cox, 1966, p. 192, emphasis added).

From this stage of secularization theory, we can discern several common threads. 1) In the continued and progressive legitimation of scientific rationality, religion will move to the periphery of society and see its relevant functions continue to decline. 2) Secularization is a stable, progressive, and evenly distributed process that is both predictable and irreversible since modernization is itself irreversible. 3) The church must adapt to these processes or it will effectually resign any social legitimation and social capital that it currently has. 4) Religious practice no longer has a public or objective quality to it and has been removed to a private and subjective phenomenon that serves different purposes for different persons and social groups.

The primary thesis for Cox is that Christianity began as a faith-oriented and rather pragmatic way of life that was not encumbered by sectarianism yet and was rooted in following Jesus who was something of an insurgent figure in the Jewish and Roman systems of belief and politics. Primarily through the creation of an establishment through Constantine, the Church of Christ entered into a stage where the normative political establishment of the day fused with the Lordship of Christ where people now represented that Lordship rather than co-followers of one Way. This has continued up until the modern age where these establishment systems of belief and politics have been challenged. The American and French Revolutions certainly were fused with revolts against established religion as two pivotal Western examples. The former was a rebellion rooted in the freedom of conscience to believe while the latter was a liberty from established beliefs that were set in a fusion between the Papacy and political Absolutism. What Cox saw in 1965 is something that he in large part now sees coming to fruition. As the establishment of Christian Protestantism continues to dissolve, a more organic kind of faith is rising in its place.

To that we will turn next in order to see how this book resolves some of the issues regarding secularization that Cox along with others observed in the 1960's through the 1990's. Perhaps secularization is freedom from the establishment to a faith more organically rooted in a different set of assumptions only now coming to fruition since the American Revolution.

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