Today I begin a series of posts looking at Harvey Cox's new book The Future of Faith. We'll see how long it goes - at least a couple of weeks. Cox is the Hollis Professor of Divinity emeritus at Harvard and is best known for his 1965 book The Secular City. I first became familiar with Cox and his work through his book When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today, a very thoughtful and thought provoking book. The new book explores the trends that Cox sees in the history of the church and his thoughts on the future of faith, including Christian faith.
In the first chapter of his book Cox describes a history of the church divided into three ages, the age of faith, the age of belief, and the age of the spirit (we will look at these in greater detail below). He then talks about his personal faith journey from a rather fundamentalist Baptist to the current day. He talks about his experiences at Penn as an undergraduate where his belief - but not his faith - was shaken. To understand this statement it is important to understand what Cox means by faith as he now uses the term.
As Cox describes it faith is the experience of the divine - not a set of theories about the divine, and Christianity is best understood as a way of life, not as a creed or set of proper beliefs. He notes that the confusion began to clear in his mind when an acquaintance described himself as "a practicing Christian, but not always a believing one"; when a bishop of the Catholic church welcomed an audience saying "The line between belief and unbelief ... runs through the middle of each one of us, including myself, a bishop of the church"; and as he pondered the doubts experienced by Mother Teresa. (p. 16-17)
Does Cox's idea that faith is experience and way of life hit a resonance? Is it possible to be a practicing Christian, but not always a believing one?
Now a little more detail. In his book Cox divides church history into the following three eras:
The Age of Faith - comprising the first three centuries. In this age Cox suggests that the church was more concerned with following Jesus than with enforcing what to believe about Jesus. This is a summary that strikes me as rather broad brush as I do think that there was also concern about what to believe.
The Age of Belief - the next 1500 or more years of the church. A time when power and creed and hierarchy became the rule. Faith about Jesus becomes more important than faith in Jesus. Cox notes:
The year 385 CE marked a particularly grim turning point. A synod of bishops condemned a man named Priscillan of Avila, and by the order of the emperor Maximus he and six of his followers were beheaded in Treves.... He was the first Christian to be executed by fellow Christians for his religious views. (6-7)
The church, in a fashion, moved from persecuted to persecutor. But Cox doesn't do full justice to the history. This isn't an abrupt change, and it is a change that began while the church was persecuted. With the power of state it became possible. It would also be a mistake to think that the church was united in favor of the execution - it was not, although Cox fails to mention this in his summary. (See Priscillian on wikipedia - if someone has a better link - let me know)
The Age the Spirit - A trend where Christians now are defining faith by action rather than creed, where spirituality is more important than dogma. What is spirituality as Cox uses the term?
It reflects a widespread discontent with the preshrinking of religion, Christianity in particular, into a package of theological propositions by religious corporations that box and distribute such packages. (13)
...it represents an attempt to voice awe and wonder before the intricacy of nature that many feel is essential to human life without stuffing them into ready-to-wear ecclesiastical patterns. (13-14)
...it recognizes the increasingly porous boundaries between different traditions and, like the early Christian movement, it looks more to the future than to the past. (14)
A change is underway and the church will never be the same. Cox sees this as the next big change in Christianity, an irreversible and unavoidable process ... the age of the Spirit, the decline of hierarchy, the distancing from creedal belief, the importance of practice, the significance of faith as a way of life.
I must admit I find Cox's summary a little too much of a broad brush. While the trends ring true it seems to me that there is a thread in the faith throughout the centuries that is true to following Christ as a way of life and founded in central beliefs about Christ. The essence of the creeds did not spring from thin air in the third century, nor did the practice of faith disappear for 15 centuries.
What do you think? Does this outline of church history make sense? Could we be entering an age of faith - but not belief, an age of the spirit?
If you wish to contact me, you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net
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dopderbeck (#19) wrote: >>>I tend to think where one falls on the pole between scholastic and mystic has more to do with individual temperament than with any period in history.
Good point. In addition to what is core vs peripheral or essential vs accidental or what is normative for all, we do want to recognize that some differences are due to temperament differences, choices in spirituality, differences in charisms and so on that are unique to individuals.
On another front -
It is also worthwhile asking whether entire demographics are yielding to temptations that any of us can fall into as individuals re: various over- and under-emphases as rationalism, pietism, quietism, encratism, clericalism, institutionalism, dogmatism, ritualism, legalism and so on. To the extent orthopraxy is authenticating orthodoxy, we can ask (as does Don Gelpi) whether we have successfully institutionalized Lonergan's conversions: intellectual, affective, moral, social and religious. We can ask with Thomas Merton whether we have been more so socializing people or authentically transforming them. We can ask what special revelation brings to the table that humankind does not already have available via general revelation and focus, then, less on morality, for example, and more on our core competency: growth in intimacy with God, thus awakening to our solidarity with one another and the cosmos.
RJS is teasing out the proper nuances. It's not Cox's conclusions as much as the questions they evoke which I find instructive. There are many great comments. I appreciate all of the contributors to this thread.
Lourens Grobbelaar: "All knowledge is at the end of the day some form of evaluated experience, or at least has its origins in evaluated experience."
D'accord!
The normative mediates between the descriptive and interpretive to effect the evaluative. (My succinct maxim based on a reading of Charles S. Peirce combined with Robert C. Neville.)
#23 was my post.
It seems to me that the labeling at this point in time probably isn't very useful. There has been too much broad brush painting of whole millenia, movements, etc going on over the last decades and many have learned to be very suspicious of these generalizations. Generalizations can be useful to a certain extent, but coming out of our era of scientific rationalism and materialism, there is a tendency to want to make generalizations into hard rules. And reality is, of course, that life and people are far too varied and exceptional to fit whole cloth into hard rules.
But I do think that there are interesting questions raised by material such as this. I think that the changes the author is observing are the struggle that many people face as we try to understand what our faith looks like once a scientific rationalist/materialist mindset is no longer tenable. For much of the 20th century, much of Christiandom was focused on creating scientific rationalist explanations for the faith which could go toe to toe with modern scientific and humanist views of the world. However, the presumption that being able to define everything down to the nth degree and that salvation could be found in proper belief didn't work back when the arguments were how many angels could fit on the head of a pin and inquisitions and don't work much better when the arguments are over creationism and immersion vs sprinkling. (There must be something about human nature which wants to eschew faith and mystery in favor of that which can be defined and enforced. Because we seem to keep trying it, just in different flavors as the times change.) At any rate, after a century or more of having faith presented to us as if it were meant to and could fend off competing modernist theories of the world, I think the argument has played itself out to the point that people are looking for a new way to move forward. (modernist giving way to post-modernist, anyone?) Of course, not having come this way before, no one really has a good road map and we find ourselves digging through old trunks to see if maybe great-great-great grandad left gems behind in the old trunk in the attic that we can use now. What seems clear to many of us is that we need a new relationship with belief than the one which we were brought up with. No longer should it be possible for someone to lose their entire relationship with God because of scientific discoveries about the origins of man. Yet we've also seen the mess that happens when there is nothing solid to hang onto and anything is negotiable.
At the end of the day, I think perhaps we need to embrace the idea that we are dependent on God to show the way forward. As messy and risky as it is, perhaps we need to accept that God does not need us to defend Him. That if we encourage people to develop their spiritual lives, this will empower their kingdom walks and provide as much protection as is reasonable for us to ask for against beliefs which really are damaging to the faith. Not that we never draw lines in the sand but just that we are much more considered and gentler about where and when we must do that. Not everything is a slippery slope. Perhaps the time has come to turn our focus to continually turning people to God, teaching believers how to pray, how to meditate on scriptures, how to co-operate with the work of God in our lives so that He is made more manifest in our lives. Let God protect Himself and His faith and trust that He is up to the task. Again, certainly the bible does talk of times when the borders need to be enforced, but perhaps we also need to be humble enough to admit that we've made a hash of that job and need to back off it when ever possible for the time being.
Going along with this, I think, needs to be the ability to let go of our very individualistic views of the faith. More often than not, God works through groups and over time to grow humanity. This story will not be resolved in our generation, and certainly not in our individual lives. We are not that important in the big scheme. And not all of this is going to be ours to solve. Which isn't to say that we ignore it, but just that we learn not to hold much more than God very tightly at all.
CamR #23 - Beliefs that matter? At the risk of over simplifying...
What Tertullian ca. 200 AD (within Cox's "Age of Faith" before his "Age of Belief" and arguably in an "Age of the Spirit") noted when he wrote "That this rule of faith has come down to us from the beginning of the gospel, even before any of the older heretics" (Against Praxeas)
Belief in the one God; belief in the Son, His Word - being both Man and God, the Son of Man and the Son of God, suffered, died, buried, risen, ascended, and coming again; belief in the Holy Spirit - the comforter and sanctifier of our faith.
I think that this is the foundation of our faith. The idea that beliefs didn't matter before Constantine simply doesn't hold - unless you accept that everything to the contrary was destroyed post Constantine. I just don't think that it is that simple.
But affirmation alone isn't belief - belief will impact life, all of life. Belief in Jesus also entails the desire to follow his teaching which is powerful stuff.
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