Thank you for detailed reply. I see that Cox was mostly talking about liberal Protestant movements in the global south. I find it pitiful that sometimes these movements remain the only Christianity people know. I know a person from the South-Eastern Asia, and she was sure that Christianity was necessarily associated with uncontrollable ecstatic crying in the “church”. She didn’t like it (actually, she was afraid of it) until she moved to Italy, to discover that there is other Christianity. What’s troubling me more in such “Age of Spirit” movements, is that they expand their operation worldwide, even where traditional faith exists, and use their financial advantage to expand. Ultimately, they bring segmentation of the faith, and it is not a good thing.

What about me, I don’t have much trust for the creedless faith. It lacks protection against transformations. Well, it’s like a dynamically typed language, you can never be sure what happens next. But I feel liberal in the Chesterton’s sense, with much trust to tradition: “It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history”.

There is a reason why they call it be a ‘disciple’. It’s a disciplining of the mind, body, and spirit. Takes work and dedication.

A ‘religion’ tends more to be a human construct.. most ‘religion’ tends to be pretty worthless and can actually be quite misleading. Fundamentalism usually is about dogma and human rules and such.. and is usually something that you should ignore.

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As far as the Bible goes… I figure a person can take it a hell of a lot more literally then most christians beleive they can… I don’t see any sort of incompatibility with science or anything else.

In fact if your a christian your beleif shoudl dictate that science is freaking terrific. It’s a glimpse into the workings of the hand of God in this universe and can be a serious aid in the understanding and quality of the relationship between you and God.

The thing is that you have to read it yourself and gain your own personal understanding and DO NOT believe what other people tell you is in in there.

For example… Adam and Eve did NOT eat a Apple. The book of Genesis does NOT say that Adam and Eve were the first humans that ever existed. Hell; Even taking a completely literal reading of the book would make zero sense if you tried to inject those two ‘facts’ into a reading of it.

You will never find any of that anywere in the Bible. Yet these two ‘facts’ are so ingrained into popular culture that I expect that most self-described serious theologians would have no idea what I am talking about.

There is misconceptions like that all over the place and it stems from a lack of understanding and study of what the Bible is, what the purpose of it is, and what it is trying to tell you.

Even really basic probing questions about the Bible most Christians would be at a loss to answer.

A example I see all the time is stuff like this:

Student/Doubter (healthy state of mind, btw) asks: ‘The old testiment has all sorts of requirements for sacrificing animals and ‘thou shalt not suffer’ various types of people and so on and so forth… why do Christians not practice that to this day if the Bible is the core of your religion?”

A typical answer I may see is something like: ‘Oh those are just stories, don’t take them literally. They are ment to be lessons and good stories to help you be a better person’. A more accurate answer would be: ‘Jesus died for our sins on the cross. The blood sacrifice of the human embodiment of God on earth is all we ever need for the atonement of our sins. In fact, carrying out sacrifices like described in the old testiment would be blasphemous since it would be effectively saying that Jesus is not good enough for our sins. Remember that when you ask for forgiveness that Jesus made the sacrifice for us and our salvation.”

Something like that. It’s all about a personal relationship between the individual and God. Everybody is given their own way, their own path, and their own unique understanding. However the Bible, being the letter of god to us, is intended to be a guide through this reality, through this universe.

it’s up to us individually to figure this out.

I think you’re just describing how religion seems to work over here (N. Europe). We rarely have any big debates over evolution, over geological time, or the existence of a global flooding event – Christians and non-christians alike seem to accept the scientific beliefs, without having it interfere with their faith. I think this is a logical conclusion of scientific discoveries disproving belief after belief about the physical world rooted in the bible or related dogma.

I’ve occasionally tried to challenge people’s beliefs – but in general, they don’t seem to have them. I.e. they will have no clear opinion on whether there actually was a global flood, whether God literally appeared as a column of smoke, or what part of our cognitive self actually goes to heaven, and when. Most people tend to only have some vague and rather non-biblical notion of going to heaven when we die, and generally don’t seem to think a lot about these issues. Which to me is strange, since by faith this is substantially more important than anything else.

-ketil (via planet Haskell :-)

Cox sees the apex of the Age of Belief happening in the late 1800s, and declining somewhat more rapidly since the 1950s.

Cox highlights the quite rapid growth of Christianity in the “global South” as part of the turning point. He points out that Christianity is growing there, while it is contracting elsewhere; also that where it grows, it tends to be following the “Age of the Spirit” model. He writes: “Instead of a ‘Western Christianity,’ we now witness a post-Christian West (in Europe) and a post-Western Christianity (in the global South). America is somewhere in between.”

He sees elements of this change in many (though perhaps not all) branches of Christianity, from Catholicism to various Protestant denominations, and he also sees the growth of non-hierarchical churches as a part of the change.

Cox tackles the Paul issue directly, writing: “It is important to remember that the first three decades of Christian history were no Garden of Eden. As the New Testament itself makes painfully clear, early Christianity was in no sense free of internal conflict. The letters of Paul to the congregations in Corinth and Galatia bristle with stern advice about coping with their arguments. Still, one congregation rarely intervened in what was going on in another. At first most of them simply accepted the diversity. But as my previous chapters have shown, eventually some parties within the nascent movement strove to impose their way of doing things on the others. One such faction, with a hefty assist from the Roman emperors, ultimately won this battle. Then, by purging its rivals, branding them as heretics, burning their books, banishing their leaders, and rewriting the history, the winners assumed the title of ‘catholic,’ or ‘official,’ Christianity.”

The bishop he quoted was Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini in a 1995 talk in Milan.

@Sergey – Yes, Paul did work against schism often and firmly. The Hong Kong example cited sounds rather like a “different sides of the same mountain” or “blind men describing an elephant” analogy, which do not fit well with Jesus’ statement that “no-one can come to the father except through me”.

That makes me wonder, without knowing anything about Cox, how liberal/evangelical he might be

If you were an inhabitant of that time, and the archivalists came to you with the problem “We need to determine whether this “Jurassic Park” book was intended by its authors as a work of fiction or a factual description of events”, what method of determining the intent of the authors would you advise?

Thank you for review. It seems like the book is worth reading. I don’t think I will have time to read it in forseeable future, so thanks for writing this review down.

I liked that distinction between faith and belief. The thing about “The time is ripe to retrieve the term “Way” for Christianity” gains my sympathy too. Now there are some questions:

* What makes Cox think that the new period is dawning? Why since the 20th century? What did change? To tell the truth it remained pretty unclear what distinguishes this period from the previous one (distinction between pre- and post- Constantine is evident, it’s a distinction between an underground and a publicly accepted movements). Does he think this is global or is it specific only to some branches of Christianity?

* “There never was a single ‘early Christianity’, there were many”, but wasn’t Saint Paul criticizing Corinthians for splits and divisions between them? So even if there were splits, Saint Paul viewed it as a problem. But isn’t Cox proposing something like “many branches of Christianity are equally true”, “diversity is OK” (I have such an impression from the review, unfortunately)

* What’s the name of the bishop that Cox is citing?