Review: [Untitled]

Reviewed Work(s):
Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology by Harvey Cox
Carroll J. Bourg

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 24, No. 2. (Jun., 1985), pp. 222-223.

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222 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION
BOOK REVIEWS
Edited by ROBERT WUTHNOW
RELIGION IN THE SECULAR CITY: TOWARD A
POSTMODERN THEOLOGY. By Harvey Cox. New
York: Simon and Schuster. 1984. 304 pp. $16.95 hard-
back. $7.95 paper.
Harvey Cox is a good observer of the contem-
porary religious scene. He is quick to recognize new
movements and to identify new energies in older
movements, and he does not delay in going directly to
the places where the activities are taking place. His
observations are sometimes like eyewitness news.
In the current volume, Cox continues to report his
observations in addressing the theme of religion in the
secular city, just twenty years after the publication of
his popular The Secular City. In the earlier book.
religion appeared to be in need of new form and expres-
sion because of the demands in the secular city itself,
and because of a newly recognized biblical mandate to
become engaged in the city's reconstruction. In the
1984 book, Cox targets modern religion but now to
mark its dissolution and to identify the ingredients for
the construction of its replacement in a postmodern
theology.
Cox's thesis stems from the question: where will
the resources for a postmodem theology come from?
He answers: not from the center (that is, from the still
dominant, modern religion) but from the bottom and
the edges (21). The resources will come from those
religions that until now have been excluded from the
chance of formulating the contemporary religious
vision. Before the resources will be used, the current
religious center "will have to be dismantled."
Modem religion was born as the world became
segmented. Religion soon became one among many
private worlds, assigned, as it were, to the tasks of in-
terior life alone, with neither mandate nor privilege to
be engaged in the worlds of science, politics, and
technology (200). Cox traces four crucial historical
moments in the responses to the bourgeois revolution
and to modernity (163-165).At first there was total op-
position, followed by some support from the Protes-
tant, especially Calvinist, wing. Later, some Christians
supported the ancien regime, others the modern world.
Finally, Cox notes, a fateful alliance occurred in which
theology made "the problem of skepticism its main
challenge," and thus the dominant classes became its
"conversation partner." Other persons were pushed to
the periphery; concerns not held by the dominant
classes were ignored.
The modern world in Cox's analysis has five pillars
(183): sovereign national states: science-based
technology as the dominant source of life's images:
bureaucratic rationalism in organizing and administer-
ing: the quest for profit maximizing; the secularization
and trivialization of religion. All these pillars received
theological support and justification. Modern religion
was a partner in the experiment of modernity.
The dismantling of modem r e b o n ' s carefully con-
structed edifice is taking place, according to Cox's
thesis, from two major sources, ones in fact not usually
thought to be participants in a common project. He
argues that "the rudiments of a postmodern theology
will emerge from Christian subcultures that have been
in touch with the dominant liberal theological consen-
sus of the modern world but have not been absorbed
by it. The American fundamentalist movement
qualifies as such a subculture" (50). And further, that
"oddly, redneck religion is closer to some of the outer
edges of new age religious and scientific thought than
most modern theology" (55).
The other major source for the dismantling of
modern religion is found in the many base com-
munities, principally in Latin America, but also in
other countries of the world. These biblically based
Christian communities sometimes engage in explicit
tasks of "liberation theology" and sometimes they are
constructing communities of meaning through careful
reflection on the bible in their daily lives. Together with
redneck religion, however, the base communities are
perceived to be undermining the foundations of modern
religion and theology. The "alien" religious orienta-
tions from the edges and the bottom of society threaten
the hegemonic status of modern religion.
The second, major part of the book identifies the
ingredients of a postmodern religion. Here Cox expects
little lasting contribution from the fundamentalists
and redneck religion. While Cox is less clear, and I
think, less persuasive in this section, he argues that
fundamentalism accepted uncritically the capitalist
component in the modern world and thus became ill-
equipped to provide an adequate critique of modernity.
While a partner with liberation theology in dismantling
modern religion, fundamentalism is poorly prepared to
contribute significantly to the construction of the post-
modern theology.
The elements in the postmodern religion or
theology are sketched by Cox in reflection on observa-
tions he has made. They include: a focus on the body
and on the importance of the resurrection; emphasis
on the particular, that is, more precisely the local com-
munity in constructing the new religion; attention to
the phenomenon of global religious pluralism both as
BOOK REVIEWS
fact and as project to be acted on in the postmodern
situation; the crucial contribution of popular piety.
sometimes called folk piety or the people's religion (and
the task of articulating it without glib reductions to
received notions); and the vital emergence of celebra-
tion, even instances of pilgrimage, as the source and
expression of new religious energies. Cox has witness-
ed these elements in a wide range of religious contexts.
He intuits their difference from the modern religious
constructions and he expects them to be important in
postmostern religion.
The book is puzzling in ways I have not satisfac.
torily figured out. On theone hand, I find his observa.
tions clear and convincing because he is a good
observer. On the other hand, I do not find connections
among the components; I fail to find coherence.
At first, I thought the subtitle should read
Postmodern Religion rather than Theology, because he
is reporting religious events he has witnessed and
sometimes participated in. Then, it seemed that he is
doing theology in a new way, one that neither requires
nor produces coherent theological systems. He is in the
realm of story with close attention to lived experience
and to the groping for meaning in everyday life. His
theology, then, is empirically based and thus a
challenge to other theologians to be open to such an
empirically-based religious theology. But it is also a
challenge to social scientists to be more empirical in
studies of religion, that is, to go where religion is
happening, to observe closely the dynamics of religion
as it activates and energizes the lives of people,
especially of those in modest circumstances.
Postmodern theology, then, must leave the podium
and go to the villages, that is, to the centers where the
people from the bottom and on the edges of society
gather together. Among them, language is concrete,
it is the realm of story. Implications are more im-
mediate: they are social, political, domestic, human,
religious, all at the same time. Human stmggle and sur-
vival among them are generating religious behavior
and theology, too. Yet we have been trained to do
theology differently, and for different audiences. Thus
our docta ignorantia. Cox invites his colleagues to in-
quire into religion through an empirically oriented
attention to what is happening among peoples at the
periphery of society.
While Cox admires the constructions of modern
theology, he expects them to be supplanted. He
believes that liberation theology and the base com-
munities are "here to say. They are the germ cells of
the next era of our culture, Toynbee's internal
minority, bearing our common future" (267).Based on
that conviction, Cox urges attention to the elements
of a postmodern theology they are now identifying. Yet
these too, he concludes, must incorporate the modern
liberal legacy, because "no one can move beyond the
secular city who has not first passed through it" (268).
These concluding assertions introduce an even
broader agenda which the current, slender volume can-
not address. I t is surely not clear at the moment that
223
the liberal legacy will indeed be incorporated at all.
CARROLL J. BOURG
Fish University
Nashville, Tennessee
INDIVIDUALISM AND SOCIAL ETHICS: AN
EVANGELICAL SYNCRETISM. By Dennis P.
Hollinger. Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
1983. $12.50 paper.
Professor Hollinger's book is a critique of the social
ethics of conservative evangelical Christians, whom he
distinguishes from their fundamentalist next of kin on
the right and "new breed evangelicals" on the left. At
the same time, it is quite self-consciously a manifesto
endorsing the social ethics of the latter, with whom the
author earnestly identifies. The author admits his criti-
que of the conservative evangelical tradition contains
no new themes but represents, rather, a systematic
treatment of what others have considered its
individualistic bias. For this reason the limitations of
his account and the blind spots of his particular van-
tage point are more widely shared and, hence, of more
general interest.
The empirical core of this study is an examination
of writings published in Christianity Today, which the
author, along with others, sees as representative of the
mainstream of evangelical thought. He argues that,
although evangelicals have, on occasion, addressed
issues of "social" as opposed to merely "personal"
morality (that is, drinking, swearing, movie-going),
their diagnoses and solutions remain hopelessly stuck
in the "miry clay of American individualism" inherited
from their fundamentalist forebearers. They see in-
dividual sin at the root of social problems like "war,"
"racism" and "poverty" - which they address largely
in response to the challenge of "social gospel"
theologians - and individual conversion as the means
for remedying them. They are committed to laissez
faire capitalism, skeptical of organized labor, and op-
posed to the welfare state and communism. Embrac-
ing such a worldview presuming, in Hollinger's view.
the atomistic individual, evangelicals failed to develop
a "full-fledged social ethic" (p. 93),but only a "personal
ethic in social clothing" (p. 106).
There is little novel or surprising in this account.
Its plausibility derives from its very familiarity. But
there are considerations which threaten to disturb its
reassuring surface. While such critics have often
asserted that conservative evangelicals' reoccupation
with issues of "personal" morality would increasingly