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Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People's Religion
Harvey Cox's two previous books, The Secular City and The Feast of Fools (both of them original, influential best sellers), have made him the best known and most iconoclastic writer on religion in America today.
Harvey Cox's new book is about the roots of religious feeling, about the need to find in the complex aspects of contemporary life—the new awakening of the encounter movement and the growing interest in Eastern mysticism—the sources of a new religion, with its own theology, its own morality, its own symbolism, which will be, in effect, a "people's religion."
Harvey Cox's new book is about the roots of religious feeling, about the need to find in the complex aspects of contemporary life—the new awakening of the encounter movement and the growing interest in Eastern mysticism—the sources of a new religion, with its own theology, its own morality, its own symbolism, which will be, in effect, a "people's religion."
- GenresReligion
352 pages, Paperback
First published September 10, 1973
2 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
About the author
Harvey Cox
53 books45 followersHarvey Gallagher Cox Jr., Ph.D. (History and Philosophy of Religion, Harvard University, 1963; B.D., Yale Divinity School, 1955) was Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he had been teaching since 1965, both at HDS and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, until his retirement in 2009.
An American Baptist minister, he was the Protestant chaplain at Temple University and the director of religious activities at Oberlin College; an ecumenical fraternal worker in Berlin; and a professor at Andover Newton Theological School. His research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. Among the issues he explores are: urbanization, theological developments in world Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, and current spiritual movements in the global setting. His most recent book is When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today. His Secular City, published in 1965, became an international bestseller with more than 1 million copies sold. It was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the twentieth century.
An American Baptist minister, he was the Protestant chaplain at Temple University and the director of religious activities at Oberlin College; an ecumenical fraternal worker in Berlin; and a professor at Andover Newton Theological School. His research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. Among the issues he explores are: urbanization, theological developments in world Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, and current spiritual movements in the global setting. His most recent book is When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today. His Secular City, published in 1965, became an international bestseller with more than 1 million copies sold. It was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the twentieth century.
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July 16, 2024
COX'S EARLY PROPOSALS FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF THEOLOGY
Harvey Cox (born 1929) is an ordained American Baptist minister who also taught theology at Harvard Divinity School.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1973 book, "I realize that one more book on what religion should do or be will not make a difference... It can only help if it becomes itself a part of the counterattack against the discrepant power of signals... It must itself be both a testimony and an endorsement of people's religion. So I will not register here the conventional apology for all the 'personal references' in the pages to follow. My telling my own story is in part at least what the whole book is about."
He suggests that any religion has three identifiable components: "First, it tells us WHERE we came from... and how we got that way... Second, religions hold up some IDEAL possibility for humankind... Third, a religion tells us HOW to get from our present fallen state... to what we can or ought to be..." (Pg. 14) Theology, then, is "a form of critical, informed and sympathetic response to 'religion' in the broadest sense." (Pg. 150)
He criticizes Jacques Ellul for saying that there is no continuity between the old terrestrial city and the New Jerusalem; "The fact is that in Christianity there is always continuity between the old Jerusalem and the new. Creation is NOT destroyed by grace; rather, it is transformed, deepened and purified." (Pg. 74)
He suggests that the basic metaphor for radical theology today "can no longer be DEATH, or God or anything else. It must be BIRTH... It includes in organic continuity with the past, but in birth something undeniably unique appears." (Pg. 174) He then suggests that the theology of the future "can most easily be understood as itself a form of play..." (Pg. 319) He concludes that "What we suffer from most is not a poverty of intellectual competence in theology but an erosion of experience and a failure of imagination." (Pg. 323)
This is one of Cox's livelier early books, and is still of interest to students of theology.
Harvey Cox (born 1929) is an ordained American Baptist minister who also taught theology at Harvard Divinity School.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1973 book, "I realize that one more book on what religion should do or be will not make a difference... It can only help if it becomes itself a part of the counterattack against the discrepant power of signals... It must itself be both a testimony and an endorsement of people's religion. So I will not register here the conventional apology for all the 'personal references' in the pages to follow. My telling my own story is in part at least what the whole book is about."
He suggests that any religion has three identifiable components: "First, it tells us WHERE we came from... and how we got that way... Second, religions hold up some IDEAL possibility for humankind... Third, a religion tells us HOW to get from our present fallen state... to what we can or ought to be..." (Pg. 14) Theology, then, is "a form of critical, informed and sympathetic response to 'religion' in the broadest sense." (Pg. 150)
He criticizes Jacques Ellul for saying that there is no continuity between the old terrestrial city and the New Jerusalem; "The fact is that in Christianity there is always continuity between the old Jerusalem and the new. Creation is NOT destroyed by grace; rather, it is transformed, deepened and purified." (Pg. 74)
He suggests that the basic metaphor for radical theology today "can no longer be DEATH, or God or anything else. It must be BIRTH... It includes in organic continuity with the past, but in birth something undeniably unique appears." (Pg. 174) He then suggests that the theology of the future "can most easily be understood as itself a form of play..." (Pg. 319) He concludes that "What we suffer from most is not a poverty of intellectual competence in theology but an erosion of experience and a failure of imagination." (Pg. 323)
This is one of Cox's livelier early books, and is still of interest to students of theology.
Displaying 1 of 1 review