Abstract
Harvey Cox is an original religious thinker who prefigured and pioneered much of the basis for contemporary thinking about secularism in the United States. This chapter presents Cox’s ideas and introduces key works for further study.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1991); and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015).
- 2.
Nietzsche , of course, recognized as much, in his claim that the event of God’s death, although a present reality, remains “far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension eve for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived yet.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random, 1974), 279.
- 3.
I suggest that such romanticism continues to remain a temptation for certain strands of contemporary theology, especially those affiliated, in one way or another, with postliberalism and radical orthodoxy. The work of John Milbank is representative; he writes in Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990): “Once, there was no ‘secular.’ And the secular was not latent, waiting to fill more space with the steam of the ‘purely human,’ when the pressure of the sacred was relaxed. Instead, there was the single community of Christendom, with its dual aspects of sacerdotium and regnum” (9).
- 4.
Behind Cox’s discussion, here, is Martin Buber’s classic distinction between “I-Thou” relationships and “I-It” relationships (I and Thou, trans. R. Smith [New York: Scribner’s, 1958]). Cox argues that Buber’s distinction is too dichotomous and thus should be supplemented with “I-You” relationships, which “include all those public relationships we so enjoy in the city but which we do not allow to develop into private ones” (SC 49).
- 5.
Saying that Cox’s theology is “contextual,” I mean that all theology is contextual, whether acknowledged or not. Cox is, in this sense, well aware of his own positionality, despite the universalism of his rhetoric at times.
- 6.
In addition to the following example, Cox discusses sex and the university.
- 7.
See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2001).
- 8.
This is similar to Philip Goodchild’s claim in Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002): “The meaning of the murder of God, that is, the emergence of a secular worldview with a corresponding affirmation of atheism, is that God is no longer required to play a foundational role in organizing humanity’s activity in relation to reality. The murder of God therefore reflects a shift in pieties. God has stopped paying us our ordered existence; or rather, there is another god who pays us, who responds more immediately, directly, and tangibly to our prayers: Mammon” (27).
- 9.
To refer to “prosperity” may call to mind the “prosperity gospel,” but Cox separates his position from the latter. He explains: “Our prosperity, if we have it, carries with it the obligation of generosity to those who do not have it. On this point the much maligned ‘prosperity gospel’ has it right. It just goes astray… when it suggests that those who enjoy prosperity do so because of their surfeit of piety, and those who do not prosper are being punished for their deficiency of spiritual zeal” (Cox 2016, p. 70).
- 10.
Douglas E. Oakman discusses such stipulations in Jesus, Debt, and the Lord’s Prayer (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).
- 11.
For a fuller discussion of the role that wealth played in the debates between Augustine and Pelagius, see Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 83–114.
- 12.
Augustine is, of course, not the only one who advanced such a view of wealth. See, for instance, Clement of Alexandria’s famous “Who is the Rich Man that Shall be Saved?” (online, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0207.htm).
- 13.
Smith, quoted in Cox (2016), 175.
- 14.
Hence Walter Benjamin’s claim in “Capitalism as Religion” that under capitalism there “are no ‘weekdays.’ There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us” (Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, eds. M. Bullock and M. Jennings [Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996], 289).
Works Cited
Cox, Harvey. 1965. The Secular City. New York: Macmillan.
———. 1969. Feast of Fools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1984. Religion in the Secular City. New York: Simon & Shuster.
———. 2016. The Market as God. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Phelps, H. (2018). Harvey Cox. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_8
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