Abstract
We turn to the thought of Harvey Cox for the light it sheds on the Secular City. His work is vast and there are many vantage points to gain an entry into his thoughts. In this chapter, we engage with him via the pentecostal portal. The discussion starts with his book Fire from Heaven and burrows deep into this thought. This engagement with Cox is important for four reasons.1 First, his thought has for 50 years been grappling with what kind of religiosity informs or will inform ethical responses to social problems in the Secular City.
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Notes
Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 81–83.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 182.
Here I am using Arnold Toynbee’s metaphorical language. See Harvey Cox, Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 191–92, 196, 267.
See Amos Yong, Discerning the Spirit(s): A Pentecostal-Charismatic Contribution to Christian Theology of Religions (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 18–20.
Here I am making an allusion to Hegel who criticized the materialists of his day for reducing the concept of spirit to a bone, to only what goes on in the bony skull, a dead object. He summed up their conception of the spirit with this statement: “The spirit is a bone.” Hegel’s insight is also that there is a spirit insofar as there is a material base, some nonspiritual portion of the human being. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), para. 336–40. Thus, I am also drawing attention to Cox’s reductionist conception of the spirit (an unprocessed psyche) along similar lines of thought.
See also Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2008), xvi–xvii, 26–27.
Cox, Secular City, 101. For a discussion of temporal gaps in shaping ethics, see Nimi Wariboko, Ethics and Time (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010).
“I am not one of those who believes … that a single world civilization will inevitably result, sooner or later, in a single world religion.” Harvey Cox, “Afterward and Forward,” in Religion in a Secular City: Essays in Honor of Harvey Cox, ed. Arvind Sharma (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity International, 2001), xxiii.
Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 2–3; italics in the original.
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005), 244,
quoted in Mark Lewis Taylor, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), 127.
Amos N. Wilder, “Art and Theological Meaning,” in The New Orpheus: Essays toward a Christian Poetic, ed. N. A. Scott (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), 407, quoted in Cox, Secular City, 228.
“We have proceeded toward a time of no religion at all … How do we speak of God without religion … How do we speak in a secular fashion of God?” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prisoner for God (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 123, quoted in Cox, Secular City, 211.
Taylor, Theological and the Political, xii. This is not the time and place to critically engage Taylor on his distinction between theology and “the theological.” His concept of the theological refers in one crucial sense to the kind of discourse that facilitates and is in service of creating sociopolitical structures that create, sustain, and promote human flourishing. And its basic orientation is anti-instutionalism and resistance to transcendence. In very broad terms, Taylor and Cox follow an anti-institutional approach to theology and even the presence of God, which leaves out the Church seen—as theologians like William Cavanaugh have done—as the political structure designed to create, sustain, and promote human flourishing. See William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
For a discussion of spirituality and faith in Pentecostalism, see Wolfgang Vondey, Beyond Pentecostalism: The Crisis of Global Christianity and the Renewal of the Theological Agenda (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).
Donald Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
This point has been argued by James K. A. Smith and Amos Yong in various places. See Amos Yong, “Radical, Reformed, and Pentecostal: Rethinking the Intersection of Post/Modernity and the Religions in Conversation with James K. A. Smith,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 15, no. 2 (2007): 233–50;
J. Smith, “The Spirit, Religions, and the World as Sacrament: A Response to Amos Yong’s Pneumatological Assist,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 15, no. 2 (2007): 251–61.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973), 66–68, 224–25.
Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 54.
Anne Norton, “Pentecost: Democratic Sovereignty in Carl Schmitt,” Constellations 18, no. 3 (2011): 397.
For a detailed explanation of the immanent nature of the common good, see Nimi Wariboko, Methods of Ethical Analysis: Between Theology, History, and Literature (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 143–51.
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Wariboko, N. (2014). Fire From Heaven. In: The Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion. CHARIS: Christianity and Renewal—Interdisciplinary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463197_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463197_5
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