Religion: Change of Mind & Heart

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Still another criticism of the theology of violence comes from, of all people, Dr. Harvey Cox of the Harvard Divinity School. The very model of the committed cleric, Cox was co-chairman of the Detroit conference on Church and Society. In his bestselling The Secular City, he stressed the need for a relevant Christianity, and for an avant-garde church that would be "a sign of the emergent city of man." Now Cox feels that the churches are beginning to overstress involvement at the expense of inner religious experience. "Once you transform everything into a mission for social action and lose the intrinsic joy of the spirit of worship, you are in danger of losing both," he says. "You don't really worship and you don't really serve."

Last week Cox delivered the first comprehensive statement of his new perspective in a three-part lecture series at Harvard on "The Secular Search for Religious Experience." In his first two talks, he dwelled on what he called the root problem of contemporary religion—the "immolation of history," or the tendency of modern man to rebel against his past. The rejection of history, Cox argued, not only throws out the good of tradition with the bad, but "can result in a corrosive contempt for the present." In his third lecture, entitled "Christ the Harlequin"—appropriately accompanied by psychedelic strobe lighting and calliope music—Cox suggested that the church can help bridge the credibility gap between past and present by reviving the "joy, festivity and holy mirth" in religion.

Without Humor. As Cox sees it, mirth and festivity involve a certain juxtaposing of past with present, which has the effect of affirming experience. "When one approaches religious faith with a kind of playfulness," he says, "one can't become as anguished and inwardly torn up about belief and nonbelief as has been popular in recent theological literature. For both the Christian spirit and the comic sensibility nothing in life should be taken too seriously. The world is important but not ultimately so." One reason witty Cox is critical of a Christian atheist like Thomas Altizer is that "there is not a humorous line in his books." Adds Cox: "The recent focus of theology has been on doubt, unbelief, or on the church's mission to the world. All this is very important, but what has been missing is the joy of serving."

By developing a "theology of celebration," based on joy, hope and even fantasy, Cox concludes, "we can celebrate the past, delight in the present, and gladly anticipate the future without sacrificing one to the other. Christ has come to previous generations of men in various guises, as teacher, judge, healer. Now, in a new or really an old but recaptured guise, Christ has begun to make an unexpected entrance onto the stage of modern secular life. Enter Christ the harlequin: the symbol of festivity and fantasy in an age which has almost lost both."