I just received for review The Future of Faith by Harvard’s professor of divinity emeritus, Harvey Cox. I’m going to go ahead and say it’s a must read for anyone interested in a faithfully critical look at the construction of doctrines within Christian history, as well as the different sects that emerged with those doctrines. Brilliant research, accessible readability, Cox’s personal history with varying traditions, and allegories of discussions with everyone from Jerry Falwell to the Pope Benedict make this an incredibly inclusive and in-depth look at the history of the Church.
Cox’s central thesis is that the church is edging into a “Age of the Spirit,” as he puts it, a move beyond the “Age of Belief” that dominated the church from the 4th century at Nicaea until the mid 20th century. This age of Spirit will see the multifaceted and never consistent belief structure of the pre-Constantinian church, a less emphasis on lists of beliefs as requirement for inclusion, and higher emphasis on praxis. The age of beliefs killed the spirit, and with it we learned to kill each other for the purpose of consistency under the name of piety. The Catholics coined the elegant Latin killjoy, Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, to mean there was no salvation outside the (Catholic) Church. As of late, American Fundamentalism has sought to do the same with sets of beliefs chosen in response to the religious debates of the 1920’s. As Cox sees it, we are moving beyond this. While it will never disappear, Fundamentalism is on the decline, and the shift resulting from globalization requires a new emphasis on, not just inter-faith dialogue, but intrafaith faith dialogue as well with the margins resisting change of any kind from a firmly 19th/20th century faith.
In his chapter entitled “The Road Runner and the Gospel of Thomas,” Cox points to salient histories that just ain’t so. Like the coyote running of a cliff while chasing the roadrunner while continuing to suspend in air, our pervasive myths of history support us well- at least until we learn that we have no historical ground beneath this. For Catholics, this may come in the form of scholarship highlighting the lack of veracity in claims of Apostolic Succession. In a system where claim to power comes from being heir to Peter, one needs to continue to believe in a myth that things simply were this way from the beginning. Protestants do this same thing, believing 1) that there was a set of original beliefs based purely on the Bible (even though the Bible would not be constructed until the late 4th century) and 2) they, or their church, conforms to this list of proper orthodox beliefs. In fact, these two beliefs are always illusory. These misunderstandings stem from, Cox argues, a myth of orthodoxy. Scholarship is simply pummeling these myths. As Cox puts it, research shows “scattered throughout the Roman Empire from Antioch to Gaul, there was no standardized theology, no single pattern of governance, no uniform liturgy, and no commonly accepted scripture… Some, especially around Jerusalem, emphasized the historical Jesus; others, the universal Christ; and still others, a mystical inner Christ.”
With the advent of Emperor Constantine pushing for a uniform Christianity to stabilize the fledgling Roman Empire, power was handed to certain clergymen who were by no means disinterested or objective observers. When time came to settle on holy books, beliefs, or authority structures, preferences were read back into the texts and histories selected, which created a myth of orthodoxy. It’s much the same as the way we remember what we want to remember in order to justify ourselves in a fight, or how we chose to ignore unsettling factoids about past men we want to venerate. A movement that had begun with a messiah, crucified because of the political danger he posed, now hopped into bed with “the Man.” Ever since, Christians have felt entitled to political nobility, seeking to create laws that either benefit them or enforce their ideals. The irony of the first ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325 A.D. being called by a pagan emperor and deciding that, yes, Jesus and God must be one in the same, is an irony lost on most Christians today. Yes, we believe this about Jesus being co-eternal with the Father, but would we believe this if not for a group of power-hungry bishops being lobbied for this position by a sun-worshipping emperor, all while surrounding the council of bishops stood soldiers with swords drawn awaiting for their consent to a particular belief? It’s really quite impossible to tell.
Cox argues that 3 developments have undermined the myth of orthodoxy:
1) The 1940’s finding of the ancient texts hidden and preserved in caves provided us with gospels and biblical texts unseen for the better part of two millennia. Though most likely written under a pseudonym (likely as several books of the New Testament were), the Gospel of Thomas and others presented us with texts every bit as old as several of the Canonical Gospels. We saw in these ancient manuscripts such evidence that the early Christian community already varied far and wide in belief and practice. This combined with finding older texts of books we include in the Bible already, texts with sometimes differed very significantly with our versions today (much as your average apologist insists the opposite), shook of the educated world from the myth of a perfectly preserved Biblical text, dictated word-for-word from God, from whence our current beliefs come from.
2) Until very recently, historians and New Testament scholars did not talk. One held the realm of scholarship, the other the realm of religion. After all, Cox comments, NT scholars were supposed to work with inerrant texts, while historians new, with evidence in hand, that this was not the case. Historians new as well, to the chagrin of Catholic scholars, that apostolic authority was a contrived myth, and nor were early Christian theologians neutral or critical as historians. But when historians and Biblical scholars hop into bed, a love child of a more educated and informed faith emerges, although this education has been slow to disseminate to the masses. Even pastors, who become very well aware of the problems with Biblical texts in seminaries, rarely pass on this information to their congregations.
3) The third development is a “people’s history” of Christianity. Sans Gutenberg’s cheap publishing, today’s blogs, or even literacy, most of our pictures of early Christianity come from far less than 1%- the most political and the most educated. Like today’s heady theologians, such men do good work, but do not represent the common people’s Christianity. Recent work has rediscovered this, painting a broader picture of the amorphous early Church, and further killing the myth of one orthodoxy.
At last, Cox slides in the problem of reading the Gospel through our culture. As a culture that emphasizes separation of church and state, or coming from a stream of theology that emphasizes “getting saved,” it is all to easy to miss the earthy message of Christ, and the political reasons he was killed for. We miss the anti-empire rhetoric of Jesus, John’s Revelation, and the early church. We miss that early Christians were persecuted not for telling people they were going to hell if they didn’t believe in Jesus, but because they refused to pledge allegiance to Rome, because they (in a rare example of early unanimity) refused to participate in politics or the military, because they refused to look like patriots. In a cultural theology that encourages all these things, it’s really quite easy to miss messages.
More on Cox’s work to come… conversations with the Pope, pagans writing our Creeds, the rise of American 20th century Fundamentalism, and the future of faith.
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