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For more than four decades, Harvey Cox has been one of America's most influential and provocative theologians. In his new book, "The Future of Faith," Cox argues that Christianity is moving from an "Age of Belief" dominated by creeds and church hierarchies to an "Age of Spirit," in which spirituality is replacing formal religion. Cox, who is retiring from Harvard, spoke about issues such as the nature of faith.
Q: What's the difference between faith and belief?
I think of belief as having to do with subordination to ideas or doctrines, a kind of mental assent. Whereas faith is far more deeply rooted in life orientation. It comes from the Latin word "fides," which means "loyal to." I think the confusion of faith as loyalty or adherence to ideas or propositions is a mistake.
Q: Why do you think Christianity is moving toward an "age of the spirit"?
A lot of the book grows out of my years of careful observation of religious groups and movements around the world. I couldn't help but notice that more and more people think Christianity is about the way one lives one's life. Doctrinal questions are just as not as important.
Q: But don't lots of denominations still recite creeds and consider them foundational?
Yes, but who in the denomination emphasizes doctrine? Even in churches that have formal creeds and recite them, people sit rather lightly on these creedal affirmations and think of them more as poetry or a symbolic statements rather than a catalogue of doctrinal compositions.
Q: Don't some scholars say that religious movements with "high walls," or that require a lot from believers, actually are growing quite fast?
I know that argument, and for me it's not persuasive for this reason: look at the charismatic Pentecostal movement. What in the world is growing faster than that? In Africa, in Latin America, in China - those movements are indigenous, non-creedal and non-hierarchical.
The distinction is not between groups with high walls or explicit rules. It has to do with a yearning people have for a taste of the sacred. I think about the students here and what brings them into religious expression. It's meditative practice, or prayer groups, or religiously motivated social action. It's experiential and existential. People are growing suspicious of taking something on someone else's authority, and I think that's healthy.
Q: Your epigraph is a T.S. Eliot poem that says history can be either liberating or imprisoning. How can early Christian history be liberating?
The phenomenal discoveries in the last few decades of all these hidden documents and scrolls show that the first 300 years of Christianity were enormously more diverse than we had been given to believe. There was no central creed; it was all centered on following Jesus. It wasn't until Constantine in the fourth century, who decided he needed ideology to sew together a fragmenting empire, that a whole new thinking was created about what made a Christian, with an emphasis on belief instead of experience.
