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Legendary Harvard religion scholar Harvey Cox offers up a new interpretation of the history and future of religion. Cox identifies three fundamental shifts over the last 2,000 years of church history: The Age of Faith was when the early church was more concerned with following Jesus′ teachings than enforcing what to believe about Jesus. The Age of Belief marks a significant shift-between the fourth and twentieth centuries-when the church focused on orthodoxy and… More >>
Tags: Faith · Future5 Comments
In First Corinthians 1:18-20 (The Living Bible), Paul writes to the Corinthian church,”I know very well how foolish it sounds to those who are lost, when they hear that Jesus died to save them. But we who are saved recognize this message as the very power of God. For God says, ‘I will destroy all human plans of salvation no matter how wise they may seem to be, and ignore the best ideas of men, even the most brilliant of them.’ So what about these wise men, these scholars, these brilliant debaters of this world’s great affairs? God has made them all look foolish, and shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense.”
Paul addresses the likes of Harvey Cox in these verses. Cox on page 148 of his book “The Future of Faith” states that the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith are arbitrary and even peculiar. The doctrines of divine inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus on the cross for the sins of the world, His bodily resurrection from the dead, and His imminent 2nd coming in glory are summarily dismissed as too conservative and inflexible. This Divinity emeritus at Harvard, once a school devoted to preparing pastors and missionaries to go into the world to spread the Gospel to every living creature, has exposed in a few brief paragraphs who he really is-a heretic and apostate of the first order.
John in his 1st epistle 2:19 writes, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us; but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.” (KJV) Cox’s background is very similar to Bart Erhman another writer critical of Christian orthodoxy. They both were once well-versed in fundamental, evangelical dogma, but upon entrance into liberal institutions and coming under the influence of heretical teachings, they decided to make their life’s work compromising Scripture and in turn persuading young minds through their teaching and writing to seek a more enlightened path, adopting other religious viewpoints and propagating the social gospel.
Cox, along with Erhman, Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Sagan and others are all bent on promulgating the same message: The Bible is not the final authority on faith and living and Jesus Christ is not who He says that He is – the Son of the Living God and the two are one. I write this review as one who wishes to earnestly warn unsuspecting readers of the dangers embodied in this deceitful and patently fallacious work.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book started well but seems to lose focus as it progresses. Also, it seems to me that the basic premise that somehow faith and beliefs or doctrines are somehow mutually exclusive is flawed. The author also should have provided more footnotes. The book provides an interesting thesis and one worth exploring. However Dr. Cox’s analysis is sorely lacking. Very disappointing book from such a scholarly source.
Rating: 3 / 5
Harvey Cox’ book is a page turner! It is destined to rival Augustine’s Confessions as classic religious autobiography. In this readable account, Harvey Cox speaks vulnerably about the beginnings of his faith as a fundamentalist Baptist with a complete description of his baptism by immersion. He repeatedly speaks openly about his liberation from belief to a person of faith. “The Spirit cannot be restricted by doctrinal or ecclesial boundaries.” He talks of his liberation from fundamentalism as a university student at Penn where during a religious retreat in southern New Jersey he discovered his belief in liberal mainline Protestant theology disagreed with the bibliolatry of more fundamentalist-evangelical students aligned with the Inter-Varisty Christian Fellowship student movement. Dr. Cox’ often nostalgic personal spiritual catharsis continues by speaking of his freedom from belief to become a person of faith. Possibly many, with him, can relate to the bane of creedal formulations of historic Christianity, from which one may find freedom. I was especially struck with his account of his liberation from Gnosticism where through the use of neo-Platonic dualism he continually pitted faith against belief, as if the two were mutually exclusive. Clearly, his personal spirituality counters the both-and resolution of un-necessarily rivaling motifs. Can a person of belief simul be a person of faith? According to this autobiography, apparently not. I wondered often out loud about the church leaders who took 500 years to write the poetry of the Nicene Creed or the Apostle’s Creed and how the earliest Christians might have learned “to read symbolic language symbolically” while reciting the Creed in Mass or later in other liturgical Christian forms of worship. As I continued to read this book, I was challenged by Cox’ ongoing war with fundamentalism, as if this were any different from his own “fundamentalistic” critique of historic Christianity which might be stated in the following Five Fundamentals. 1. There is no such thing as Early Christianity.
2. All Christian Creeds are flawed. 3. Belief and Faith are mutually exclusive 4. Anything Western about Christian Faith is in error. 5. Ecclesiology should be banned from Christian theology. I was furthered enamored by Dr. Cox’ diatribe and spiritual concern with literalism, as I read his own book written by him using words, all of which I took literally, without a “tone-deafness to literalism.” Cox’ autobiography informs the reader of his inter-faith conversations with world religious leaders. I was saddened that the Pope failed to offer him lunch. I was surprised that fundamentalist pastor Rick Warren even made it into his autobiography, but then, Warren’s quote “deeds, not creeds” supported his thesis. Possibly the new word Harvey Cox coins—-”hascent, on page 77″ is the symbolism which most appropriately assesses this book. I failed to locate this descriptor in any dictionary he identifies with the “first two and a half centuries of the Christian movement”–you see, I was reading his book literally. I took great interest in Cox’ appraisal of base communities as the answer to all that’s wrong with the organized church; but then, where are the base communities today while all those Pentecostal churches from the West abound and flourish, as he states? I was intrigued that whenbase communities did exist, they were not spoiled by the fundamentalism of a “Jesus as personal savior whose mission was to rescue them from a sinful world…”
In sum, Harvey’s intellectually-challenged and poorly-researched book is more the author’s nostalgic spiritual journey than it is a scholarly history of Christianity. It is, however, prophetic; for it forecasts the conclusion to historic Christian faith. If this book represents academic research [one footnote for every 3 pages], Christian faith may have no future in America, or anywhere, even in the global South. An author with integrity would have marketed it as his own personal spiritual journey. This book is an insult and an affront to any thinking theologian who still cares about scholarship and who calls herself Christian.
Rating: 1 / 5
I have always wondered what the dialogue would sound like if the religious right (fundamentalists) took the time to study the history and origin of their beliefs. This is a great book and offers sanity and REALITY to the Christian faith. (Quite a refreshing change from the tired, mythological beliefs that define the fundamental Christian religion.) The Future of Faith is an excellent read on many levels. It is well written, interesting and not a boring theological thesis.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’m really enjoying this book. Cox is an engaging writer, very accessible yet thought-provoking. Lots of interesting ideas to talk about!
Rating: 5 / 5