Harvey Cox has a gift for spotting religious trends. While this gift isn’t infallible (as any reader of Secular City recognizes), his engaging writing style makes even his misses interesting! It remains to be seen whether the trends spotted in this decade-old book will continue.

In The Future of Faith, Cox draws a distinction between faith and belief:

Faith is about deep-seated confidence. In everyday speech we usually apply it to people we trust or the values we treasure. … Belief, on the other hand, is more like opinion. We often use the term in everyday speech to express a degree of uncertainty. (3)

(It should be noted that Cox is not using these terms in their biblical sense since both English words refer to one Greek word, but rather as convenient ways to describe the spirit of the age.)

Cox divides Christian history into three periods:

1. The Age of Faith. This period describes the time of Jesus and disciples. Explosive growth and brutal persecution marked this age. “To be a Christian meant to live in his Spirit, embrace his hope, and to follow him in the work that he had begun” (5).
2. The Age of Belief. This period began a few short decades after the death of Jesus when belief in the form of creeds and catechisms replaced the vibrant faith of the first era. This period was solidified during the Constantinian era and continued on through the Enlightenment and the modernist secularization which reached its pinnacle in the twentieth century.
3. The Age of the Spirit. In this age, the Spirit breaks through the belief-ism of past centuries. People now identify as spiritual-but-not-religious.

In short, faith=good; belief=repressive.

I understand that Cox has created a popular work and not a rigorous historical assessment. Still, frustrations abound. I’ll point out some examples. Cox describes First Clement as obsessed with the struggle for ecclesiastical authority, in contrast to the early Christian ideal of a fellowship of equals. While the argument for the authority of the bishop is vivid in First Clement, it was there for the sake of Pauline-style unity. Furthermore, Cox’s “fellowship of equals” (91) is a modern democratic dream—not a first century reality. From the very beginning, the church had structure and leadership. Other anachronisms abound, such as Cox’s lamentation about how Irenaeus was “less the democrat” than Ignatius (93).

Even points I where I agreed with Cox left me unsatisfied. For example, Cox lampoons the absurdity of fundamentalist-style biblicism. Great—but what now? I was discouraged to see that Cox provided no hermeneutically sound alternative. All he did was suggest that people should avoid fundamentalistic interpretations by using their imagination and treating the Bible as literature. That’s a good start, but it doesn’t go far enough.

While Cox’s main thesis is interesting, it is far too broad a generalization. He oversimplifies and carefully selects (and interprets) historical data to support his thesis. In the end, his thesis is so broad, it will be hard to tell whether or not his predictions prove true.

Cox, Harvey. The Future of Faith. HarperCollins, 2009.