by Harvey Cox
The Future of Faith
Harvey Cox
Dedication
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY GRANDCHILDREN:
Maximilian Davis Marshall
b. December 8, 1993
Sara Cox Kelemen
b. January 21, 1994
Josephine Maria Marshall
b. June 23, 1996
Lucille Boushall Kelemen
b. December 2, 1997
Miles Bennett Marshall
b. July 9, 1999
Logan Cazier Cox
b. October 6, 2002
Ethan Cutler Cox
b. September 11, 2004
Miranda Jasmine Cox
b. May 11, 2007
THEY EMBODY MY FAITH IN THE FUTURE
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1 An Age of the Spirit: The Sacred in the Secular?
Chapter 2 Einstein’s Snuffed-Out Candles: Awe, Wonder, and Faith
Chapter 3 Ships Already Launched: The Voyage from Mystery to Faith
Chapter 4 The Road Runner and the Gospel of Thomas: What Happens When It Wasn’t Really That Way?
Chapter 5 The People of the Way: The Devolution from Faith to Belief
Chapter 6 “The Bishop Is Your High Priest and Mighty King”: The Rise of the Clerical Caste
Chapter 7 Constantine’s Last Supper: The Invention of Heresy
Chapter 8 No Lunch with the Prefect: How to Fix the Papacy
Chapter 9 Living in Haunted Houses: Beyond the Interfaith Dialogue
Chapter 10 Get Them into the Lifeboat: The Pathos of Fundamentalism
Chapter 11 Meet Rocky, Maggie, and Barry: Which Bible Do the Bible Believers Believe?
Chapter 12 Sant’Egidio and St. Praxedis: Where the Past Meets the Future
Chapter 13 Blood on the Altar of Divine Providence: Liberation Theology and the Rebirth of Faith
Chapter 14 The Last Vomit of Satan and the Persistent List Makers: Pentecostals and the Age of the Spirit
Chapter 15 The Future of Faith
Back Ad: How to Read the Bible
Acknowledgments
Notes
For Further Reading
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
An Age of the Spirit
The Sacred in the Secular?
What does the future hold for religion, and for Christianity in particular? At the beginning of the new millennium three qualities mark the world’s spiritual profile, all tracing trajectories that will reach into the coming decades. The first is the unanticipated resurgence of religion in both public and private life around the globe. The second is that fundamentalism, the bane of the twentieth century, is dying. But the third and most important, though often unnoticed, is a profound change in the elemental nature of religiousness.
The resurgence of religion was not foreseen. On the contrary, not many decades ago thoughtful writers were confidently predicting its imminent demise. Science, literacy, and more education would soon dispel the miasma of superstition and obscurantism. Religion would either disappear completely or survive in family rituals, quaint folk festivals, and exotic references in literature, art, and music. Religion, we were assured, would certainly never again sway politics or shape culture. But the soothsayers were wrong. Instead of disappearing, religion—for good or ill—is now exhibiting new vitality all around the world and making its weight widely felt in the corridors of power.
Many observers mistakenly confuse this resurgence of religion with “fundamentalism,” but the two are not the same. Fundamentalism is dying. Arguments still rage about whether the Christian Right in America is fatally divided or sullenly quiescent. Debates boil about whether the dwindling support for radical movements in Islam is temporary or permanent. But as the twenty-first century unfolds, the larger picture is clear. Fundamentalisms, with their insistence on obligatory belief systems, their nostalgia for a mythical uncorrupted past, their claims to an exclusive grasp on truth, and—sometimes—their propensity for violence, are turning out to be rearguard attempts to stem a more sweeping tidal change.
However, the third quality, the equally unforeseen mutation in the nature of religiousness, is the most important in the long run. Not only has religion reemerged as an influential dimension of twenty-first-century life; what it means to be “religious” is shifting significantly from what it meant as little as a half century ago. Since religions interact with each other in a global culture, this tremor is shaking virtually all of them, but it is especially evident in Christianity, which in the past fifty years has entered into its most momentous transformation since its transition in the fourth century CE from what had begun as a tiny Jewish sect into the religious ideology of the Roman Empire.
Scholars of religion refer to the current metamorphosis in religiousness with phrases like the “move to horizontal transcendence” or the “turn to the immanent.” But it would be more accurate to think of it as the rediscovery of the sacred in the immanent, the spiritual within the secular. More people seem to recognize that it is our everyday world, not some other one, that, in the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “is charged with the grandeur of God.” The advance of science has increased the sense of awe we feel at the immense scale of the universe or the complexity of the human eye. People turn to religion more for support in their efforts to live in this world and make it better, and less to prepare for the next. The pragmatic and experiential elements of faith as a way of life are displacing the previous emphasis on institutions and beliefs.1
It is true that for many people “faith” and “belief” are just two words for the same thing. But they are not the same, and in order to grasp the magnitude of the religious upheaval now under way, it is important to clarify the difference. Faith is about deep-seated confidence. In everyday speech we usually apply it to people we trust or the values we treasure. It is what theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965) called “ultimate concern,” a matter of what the Hebrews spoke of as the “heart.”
Belief, on the other hand, is more like opinion. We often use the term in everyday speech to express a degree of uncertainty. “I don’t really know about that,” we say, “but I believe it may be so.” Beliefs can be held lightly or with emotional intensity, but they are more propositional than existential. We can believe something to be true without it making much difference to us, but we place our faith only in something that is vital for the way we live. Of course people sometimes confuse faith with beliefs, but it will be hard to comprehend the tectonic shift in Christianity today unless we understand the distinction between the two.
The Spanish writer Miguel Unamuno (1864–1936) dramatizes the radical dissimilarity of faith and belief in his short story “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr,” in which a young man returns from the city to his native village in Spain because his mother is dying. In the presence of the local priest she clutches his hand and asks him to pray for her. The son does not answer, but as they leave the room, he tells the priest that, much as he would like to, he cannot pray for his mother because he does not believe in God. “That’s nonsense,” the priest replies. “You don’t have to believe in God to pray.”
The priest in Unamuno’s story recognized the distinction between faith and belief. He knew that prayer, like faith, is more primordial than belief. He might have engaged the son who wanted to pray but did not believe in God in a theological squabble. He could have hauled out the frayed old “proofs” for the existence of God, whereupon the young man might have quoted the equally jaded arguments against the proofs. Both probably knew that such arguments go nowhere. The French writer Simone Weil (1909–43) also knew
. In her Notebooks, she once scribbled a gnomic sentence: “If we love God, even though we think he doesn’t exist, he will make his existence manifest.” Weil’s words sound paradoxical, but in the course of her short and painful life—she died at thirty-four—she learned that love and faith are both more primal than beliefs.2
Debates about the existence of God or the gods were raging in Plato’s time, twenty-five hundred years ago. Remarkably, they still rage on today, as a recent spate of books rehearsing the routine arguments for and against the existence of God demonstrates. By their nature these quarrels are about beliefs and can never be finally settled. But faith, which is more closely related to awe, love, and wonder, arose long before Plato, among our most primitive Homo sapiens forebears. Plato engaged in disputes about beliefs, not about faith.
Creeds are clusters of beliefs. But the history of Christianity is not a history of creeds. It is the story of a people of faith who sometimes cobbled together creeds out of beliefs. It is also the history of equally faithful people who questioned, altered, and discarded those same creeds. As with church buildings, from clapboard chapels to Gothic cathedrals, creeds are symbols by which Christians have at times sought to represent their faith. But both the doctrinal canons and the architectural constructions are means to an end. Making either the defining element warps the underlying reality of faith.
The nearly two thousand years of Christian history can be divided into three uneven periods. The first might be called the “Age of Faith.” It began with Jesus and his immediate disciples when a buoyant faith propelled the movement he initiated. During this first period of both explosive growth and brutal persecution, their sharing in the living Spirit of Christ united Christians with each other, and “faith” meant hope and assurance in the dawning of a new era of freedom, healing, and compassion that Jesus had demonstrated. To be a Christian meant to live in his Spirit, embrace his hope, and to follow him in the work that he had begun.
The second period in Christian history can be called the “Age of Belief.” Its seeds appeared within a few short decades of the birth of Christianity when church leaders began formulating orientation programs for new recruits who had not known Jesus or his disciples personally. Emphasis on belief began to grow when these primitive instruction kits thickened into catechisms, replacing faith in Jesus with tenets about him. Thus, even during that early Age of Faith the tension between faith and belief was already foreshadowed.
Then, during the closing years of the third century, something more ominous occurred. An elite class—soon to become a clerical caste—began to take shape, and ecclesial specialists distilled the various teaching manuals into lists of beliefs. Still, however, these varied widely from place to place, and as the fourth century began there was still no single creed. The scattered congregations were united by a common Spirit. A wide range of different theologies thrived. The turning point came when Emperor Constantine the Great (d. 387 CE) made his adroit decision to commandeer Christianity to bolster his ambitions for the empire. He decreed that the formerly outlawed new religion of the Galilean should now be legal, but he continued to reverence the sun god Helios alongside Jesus.
Constantine also imposed a muscular leadership over the churches, appointing and dismissing bishops, paying salaries, funding buildings, and distributing largesse. He and not the pope was the real head of the church. Whatever his motives, Constantine’s policies and those of his successors, especially Emperor Theodosius (347–95 CE), crowned Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The emperors undoubtedly hoped this strategy would shore up their crumbling dominion, from which the old gods seemed to have fled. The tactic, however, did not save the empire from collapse. But for Christianity it proved to be a disaster: its enthronement actually degraded it. From an energetic movement of faith it coagulated into a phalanx of required beliefs, thereby laying the foundation for every succeeding Christian fundamentalism for centuries to come.
The ancient corporate merger triggered a titanic makeover. The empire became “Christian,” and Christianity became imperial. Thousands of people scurried to join a church they had previously despised, but now bore the emperor’s seal of approval. Bishops assumed quasi-imperial powers and began living like imperial elites. During the ensuing “Constantinian era,” Christianity, at least in its official version, froze into a system of mandatory precepts that were codified into creeds and strictly monitored by a powerful hierarchy and imperial decrees. Heresy became treason, and treason became heresy.
The year 385 CE marked a particularly grim turning point. A synod of bishops condemned a man named Priscillian of Avila for heresy, and by order of the emperor Maximus he and six of his followers were beheaded in Treves. Christian fundamentalism had claimed its first victim. Today Priscillian’s alleged theological errors hardly seem to warrant the death penalty. He urged his followers to avoid meat and wine, advocated the careful study of scripture, and allowed for what we would now recognize as “charismatic” praise. He believed that various writings that had been excluded from the biblical canon, although not “inspired,” could nevertheless serve as useful guides to life. Still, Priscillian holds an important distinction. He was the first Christian to be executed by his fellow Christians for his religious views. But he was by no means the last. One historian estimates that in the two and a half centuries after Constantine, Christian imperial authorities put twenty-five thousand to death for their lack of creedal correctness.
The Constantinian era had begun in earnest. It was the epoch in which imperial Christianity came to dominate the cultural and political domains of Europe, and it endured throughout the medieval centuries, a time of both bane and blessing. It gave birth to both Chartres Cathedral and the Spanish Inquisition, both St. Francis of Assisi and Torquemada, both Dante’s Divine Comedy and Boniface VIII’s papal bull Unam Sanctam, which asserted the pope’s authority over the temporal as well as the spiritual realm. Neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation did much to alter the underlying foundations of the Age of Belief, and the European expansion around the planet extended its sway over palm and pine. This middle era, the Age of Belief, was the one that prompted writer and historian Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) to coin the phrase, “The faith is Europe, and Europe is the faith.”
The Age of Belief lasted roughly fifteen hundred years, ebbing in fits and starts with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the secularization of Europe, and the anticolonial upheavals of the twentieth century. It was already comatose when the European Union chiseled the epitaph on its tombstone in 2005 by declining to mention the word “Christian” in its constitution.
Still, to think of this long middle era as nothing but a dark age is misleading. As we have seen, throughout those fifteen centuries Christian movements and personalities continued to live by faith and according to the Spirit. The vast majority of people were illiterate and, even if they heard the priests intoning creeds in the churches, did not understand the Latin. Confidence in Christ was their primary orientation, and hope for his Kingdom their motivating drive. Most people accepted the official belief codes of the church, albeit without much thought. Many simply ignored them while they thrived on the pageantry, the festivals, and the stories of the saints. Lollards, Hussites, and later thinkers like Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and many others explicitly rejected some of the church’s dogmas. The medieval period, after all, was rife with what the officials called heresy and schism. The Age of Belief was also, for significant numbers of people, a spiritually vital “age of faith” as well.
Now we stand on the threshold of a new chapter in the Christian story. Despite dire forecasts of its decline, Christianity is growing faster than it ever has before, but mainly outside the West and in movements that accent spiritual experience, discipleship, and hope; pay scant attention to creeds; and flourish without hierarchies. We are now witnessing the beginning of a “post-Constantinian era.” Christians on five continents are shaking off the residues of the sec
ond phase (the Age of Belief) and negotiating a bumpy transition into a fresh era for which a name has not yet been coined.
I would like to suggest we call it the “Age of the Spirit.” The term is not without its problems. It was first coined in the thirteenth century when a Calabrian monk and mystic named Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1132–1202) began propounding an inventive doctrine of the Trinity. He taught that history, having passed through the ages of the Father (the Old Testament) and the Son (the Church), was about to enter an Age of the Spirit. In this new dispensation, Joachim declared, people would live in direct contact with God, so there would be little need for religious hierarchies. Universal love would reign, and infidels would unite with Christians.
Joachim died a pious Catholic, but some of his followers pressed his arguments farther, declaring that the new age had already dawned and there was no further need for priests or sacraments. They also contended that this would be the last age and that the world would soon end. They even began setting dates. But the hierarchy did not look with favor on the prospect of a church without hierarchies. And the world continued to exist. Finally, some sixty years after Joachim’s death, the church under Pope Alexander IV pronounced his ideas heretical.
Joachim of Fiore, and especially his followers, obviously got carried away, and scheduling the end of the world is always a risky proposition. Nonetheless, his idea of an Age of the Spirit, or something like it, has always fascinated people. There is an irrepressible visionary or utopian streak in almost everyone. In any case, I hope the new stage of Christianity we now seem to be entering is not the final one (there may be many, many more), but I still prefer to think of it as an “Age of the Spirit” for a number of reasons.
