Calling

Courtney Cowart

Director of Congregational Learning

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August 13, 2010

Harbingers of the Age of the Spirit

Reflecting on The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox

“Where do you find yourself is this story?” is a frequent question posed to twenty-first century Christians grappling with sacred texts in mid-week and Sunday morning Bible studies across denominations.  Less frequent are church study groups that ask the same question of a contemporary text like Harvey Cox’s The Future of Faith, a provocative depiction of what Christianity could be becoming right now.   

As I read Cox’s latest book I found myself persuaded that indeed Christianity could be making, as Cox proposes, “its most momentous transformation since its transition in the fourth century CE” from “a tiny Jewish sect into the religious ideology of the Roman Empire” (p.2).  The most convincing part of Cox’s thesis is his two-part case that at a pivotal point in the fourth century a different development of Christianity was possible. As Cox describes it, at this hinge in religious history Christianity was re-paradigmed by the Roman Empire. What was originally an explicitly anti-imperialist movement to establish “the Kingdom of God on earth” was hijacked and a religion which had blossomed into thousands of expressions of living the example of Jesus, and was thus far comfortable with theological variety, spiritual fellowship, distributed leadership, and acting to establish in this world the era of God’s shalom, deteriorated into a tool of the empire, imposing an inflexible, creedal orthodoxy enforced by an apostolic hierarchy to achieve a bland disengaged passive social conformity inconsistent with the example of Jesus and earlier followers of “The Way.”

According to Cox we now stand at a crossroads where we have a second chance to choose praxis more aligned with the original patterns, purposes, and understandings of the earliest phase of Christianity, The Age of Faith, or allow Christianity to be hijacked again by the contemporary counterparts of the Roman imperialists.  Consciously or unconsciously, a new set of choices about how Christianity is practiced is being made with significant implications for the future (p.57).  

As Cox has contended consistently throughout his career as a religious scholar, beginning with his blockbuster best-seller, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965), there will always be hotspots of religiosity, but these vanish over time only to re-emerge “transfigured, in another pattern,” to quote, as Cox does, T.S. Eliot.  Cox names one pattern in which a transfigured Christianity shows signs of re-emerging now, “The Age of the Spirit.” Inviting us to appreciate the momentous hopefulness of this form of Christianity, and gently coaxing us to eschew much of our middle history in favor of participating in the emergence of a different future, Cox leads readers on a worthwhile journey of interpretation and discernment.  

The extent to which Cox is able to convey to a popular audience the responsibility and capability of Christians to shape the future of faith and to inspire us to see that this future still matters is one of the successes of the book. Helpfully Cox also guides us to see some specific choices a significant number of Christians worldwide are making, and how different these are from choices made by dominant figures of the Christian past.  Repeatedly the book begs the question of its readers, “Where do you stand? What kind of future is your practice of Christianity an indicator of?” I suspect many readers will find themselves, like me, to be some hybrid of the three ages of belief Cox describes – a harbinger of the coming age in some respects and still embodying many of the inherited and possibly dying attitudes, behaviors and loyalties of the previous “Age of Belief” in others.

Which is why I am issuing an invitation, a call if you like, for congregations to read this book and ask as practicing twenty-first-century Christians, do we recognize ourselves in the new Christianity Cox painstakingly describes?  Do we see ourselves as “harbingers of the Age of the Spirit?” And do we see imaginative partners along with ourselves?  If the answer is yes, what are the implications of this for our choices as the next generation of Christian leaders right now?