A Harvey Cox Reader ed. by Robert Ellsberg (review)

Reverend Dr. Cox has led an amazing life by any of the measures that mean the most to him. To read The Harvey Cox Reader is to travel through key terrains of post-war American theology, sociology, and politics that Cox has inhabited.

In this collection of largely occasional essays, Harvey Cox speaks in a conversational tone conditioned by curiosity in and warmth for the Christian tradition. “I love to preach and do so whenever I am invited, often in my own Baptist congregation here in Cambridge,” he says in the book’s introduction (xvii), perfectly preparing us for a companionable, distinctively American Christian guide through the signs of the late-modern times.

The Reader opens with our author’s religious and intellectual autobiography. From his 1973 essay on the power of formation in a town “amply blessed with churches . . . More churches than filling stations, more churches than saloons, more churches than restaurants” (4), the collection proceeds roughly chronologically.

Cox went on to war-crushed East Berlin, serving as a young American Baptist minister. There he connected strongly with his lifelong theological and political hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Ministering on both sides of the wall, Cox sought to awaken Bonhoeffer’s vision for a “religionless Christianity.”

Cox’s breakthrough book The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965) properly fills a significant portion of this collection, given its still-astonishing scope of readers. Cox became an almost overnight giant, shaping America’s thinking about religion and modernity. Written when he was just 35 years old, The Secular City is Cox’s explication of the power of Christianity to shape even ostensibly post-religious culture. He also proffers theological charges for how distinctively modern Christians might live out God’s commands for work in the world. Rowan Williams hailed this a “groundbreaking work,” among the “undoubted classics of the great upheaval in religious thinking that took place in the sixties.”

Yet reviewing the other essays that comprise the The Harvey Cox Reader, the singularity of Cox as a man of a passing historical epoch stands out more particularly than the acumen of any particular piece of writing. As a world-renouned Christian thinker, Cox became both theologically and politically aligned and personally friendly with other great progressive Christian leaders and thinkers. He lived in Peru with Gustavo Gutiérrez and walked for civil rights with Martin Luther King in the 1963 March on Washington.

As his academic career matured, Cox became intrigued by religious epiphenomena in their variety. In “Turning East” (on America Muslims, Zen Buddhists, and Sikhs) and “Fire from Heaven” (on American Pentecostalists), Cox walks his readers into religious worlds that are new to him. He is eager to share the beauty and possibilities that he discovers.

Cox speaks from his open, confident, joyful alignment with the progressive strains of American Protestant Christianity. This “continued to constitute what theologians call the ‘master narrative’ that gives my life coherence,” he says. “They have stayed with me not just as ideas and values but as a cluster of deep and ineradicable affective traces: feelings of joy, terror, awe, history, and well-being” (242). Today, one senses the rarity of freedom from second-order estrangment, particularly among scholars of religion. Even the essays such as “The Future of our Faith,” and “Why I Am Still a Christian” that close the Reader have a conspicuously twenty-first century flavor.

While Cox’s tone is always inviting, the reader cannot forget that she travels under the auspices of a man enthusiastically ordained and sustained by his religious community and professionally accustomed to Harvard students writing down his words. This is not a shortcoming of The Harvey Cox Reader so much as a reality of the authorial voice. At times, Cox reaches for more credit than his readers may want to grant him. For instance, when quoting from The Secular City, he states in retrospect that “in this paragraph I was actually proposing a new agenda for the next stage of theology, one...