Harvey Cox > Quotes

“Not to decide is to decide.”
― Harvey Cox

“Not To Decide Is To Decide”
― Harvey Cox

“A myth is essentially true because it is a symbol, and a symbol is something that points beyond itself to a truth that might be difficult or impossible to express in ordinary language.”
― Harvey Cox, How to Read the Bible

“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.”
― Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith

“Let us not project our own spiritual limitations onto the modern world, for it is not the world which prevents us from being religious. The kind of world we live in shapes the manner and mode of our religiousness”
― Harvey Cox, Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology

“The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.”
― Harvey Cox, Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology

“The dominant ethos of the twenty-first century consists of an intermingling of the sacred and the secular.”
― Harvey Cox, How to Read the Bible

“Rick Warren, the influential evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, says that what the church needs now is a “second Reformation,” one based on “deeds, not creeds.”2”
― Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith

“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.”
― Harvey Cox, Harvey Cox Reader

“Not to decide is a decision.”
― Harvey Cox

“From the beginning, the Bible says, God has shared his power and tried to enlist us in continuing his creation and in caring for it. Instead, we have messed it up badly more often than we have gotten it right.”
― Harvey Cox, How to Read the Bible

“There is scarcely one figure in the entire Hebrew scripture we would want our children to emulate.”
― Harvey Cox, How to Read the Bible

“Students, like most of us, want answers, even to intractable mysteries. It is hard for anyone to come to terms with the raw truth that sometimes there just are none.”
― Harvey Cox

“We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1–35) has returned in … the idolatry of money.… In this system … whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market.”
― Harvey Cox, The Market as God

“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.”
― Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith

“The contest between the fundamentalist and the experientialist impulses has barely begun. The question of which one will eventually supersede the spent and weary forces of scientific modernity and conventional religion as the principal source of coherence and value in tomorrow's world is still undecided. The stakes are very high, and the battle is raging on several fronts at once….”
― Harvey Cox, Harvey Cox Reader

“Once written, a classic text is like a bird released from its cage. It develops a life of its own. Its "meaning" is not locked in.”
― Harvey Cox

“the people who are attracted to pentecostalism around the world, although many critics dismiss them as an anachronism, are actually more of an avant-garde. They are the very people who are already bearing the brunt of the same numbing social dislocation and cultural upheaval that is in store for us all.”
― Harvey Cox, Harvey Cox Reader

“As The Preacher in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes puts it: All words wear themselves out;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear with hearing. Confronted with this verbal paralysis, what can people do? They sing, they rhapsodize, they invent metaphors; they soar into canticles and doxologies. But ultimately, words fail them and they lapse into silence. Or they speak in tongues.”
― Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven: The Rise Of Pentecostal Spirituality And The Reshaping Of Religion In The 21st Century

“The difference between a "problem" and a "mystery" is that we may be able to "solve" a problem, but a mystery is something we have to live with.”
― Harvey Cox, How to Read the Bible

“If freedom once required a secular critique of religion, it can also require a religious critique of the secular.”
― Harvey Cox