Harvey Cox
Based on Wikipedia: Harvey Cox
The Man Who Declared God Moved to the City
In 1965, a thirty-four-year-old theologian published a book that sold over a million copies. That fact alone should stop you. Theology books do not sell a million copies. They gather dust in seminary libraries. They get assigned to reluctant graduate students. They do not become cultural phenomena.
But Harvey Cox's "The Secular City" did exactly that.
The book's central argument was almost scandalously simple: God is not hiding in churches waiting for you to visit. God is out there in the secular world—in the office buildings, the political movements, the urban chaos of modern life. The church, Cox insisted, should stop trying to preserve itself as an institution and start celebrating the new ways religious impulse was finding expression in the world around it.
This was 1965. The civil rights movement was reshaping America. The counterculture was brewing. Vatican Two had just concluded, shaking Roman Catholicism to its foundations. And here was this young Harvard professor telling Christians that their job was not to resist the modern world but to join God's "permanent revolution in history."
Some people found this thrilling. Others found it terrifying.
Small Town Boy, Big Ideas
Harvey Gallagher Cox Junior was born in 1929 in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, a small town about thirty miles northwest of Philadelphia. He grew up in nearby Malvern, the kind of place where churches anchored community life and everyone knew which family sat in which pew.
After high school, Cox did something unexpected for a future theology professor: he joined the United States Merchant Marine. There is something fitting about this. The Merchant Marine takes you to foreign ports, exposes you to different cultures, shows you that the world is vastly larger and stranger than your hometown suggested. For a young man who would later write about religious pluralism and global Christianity, it was perhaps the perfect preparation.
When he returned to civilian life, Cox pursued the traditional academic path with unusual intensity. He earned his bachelor's degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951, then a Bachelor of Divinity from Yale Divinity School in 1955. He was ordained as an American Baptist minister in 1957—the same year he married his first wife, Nancy Neiburger. Finally, in 1963, he completed his doctorate in the history and philosophy of religion at Harvard.
By that point, Cox had already begun teaching at Andover Newton Theological School in Massachusetts. But Harvard came calling in 1965, the same year "The Secular City" made him famous. By 1969, he was a full professor. Colleagues would later describe him as "the single most heeded professor in religion at Harvard."
What "The Secular City" Actually Argued
The book's original title was supposed to be "God and the Secular City," and Cox has said he still thinks that title would have been more accurate. The change matters because it shifts the emphasis. "The Secular City" sounds like a book about urbanization and modernity. "God and the Secular City" makes clear this is still fundamentally about theology—about where and how the divine manifests in human experience.
Cox's argument challenged an assumption so deep that most Christians did not even know they held it: the idea that sacred and secular are separate realms. Under this conventional view, God lives in the sacred realm—in churches, in prayer, in religious ritual. The secular realm—work, politics, city life—is neutral territory at best, hostile territory at worst.
Cox flipped this completely. God, he argued, is just as present in the secular as in the religious realms of life. The church is not primarily an institution to be maintained. It is a people of faith and action. And those people should be "in the forefront of change in society."
You can see why this resonated in 1965. If you were a young Christian who felt called to march for civil rights, Cox was telling you that this was not a distraction from your faith but an expression of it. If you were troubled by the institutional church's reluctance to engage with social change, Cox was validating your frustration.
But you can also see why church leaders found Cox threatening. Phrases like "intrinsic conservatism prevents the denominational churches from leaving their palaces behind" are not diplomatic. Cox was essentially accusing the institutional church of failing its mission by clinging to respectability when God was calling for revolution.
The Second Book Crisis
After "The Secular City" made him internationally famous at thirty-four, Cox faced a problem familiar to authors who achieve early success: what do you do for an encore?
He worried he had "peaked" too soon. He called what followed his "second book crisis."
The solution turned out to be completely different from his first book. If "The Secular City" was Apollonian—rational, analytical, focused on social structures—then "The Feast of Fools" in 1969 was Dionysian. It celebrated festivity, fantasy, play. Cox argued that there was "an unnecessary gap in today's world between the world changers and the life-celebrators." Why not be both?
The book began as the William Belden Noble Lecture at Harvard in 1968, but Cox being Cox, he did not just stand at a podium and read. The presentation included music, dance, film, and balloons. This was entirely in character. Cox was known to play tenor saxophone in a jazz ensemble called The Embraceables. He understood that ideas could be embodied, not just articulated.
"The Feast of Fools" remains Cox's personal favorite among his books. When people ask him at parties which of his works they should read, this is the one he recommends.
The Charge of Faddishness
Throughout his career, critics accused Cox of being "faddish"—of chasing whatever topic happened to be hot at the moment. First the secular city, then festivity, then Eastern religions, then liberation theology, then Pentecostalism. To unsympathetic observers, it looked like intellectual channel-surfing.
Cox pushed back against this characterization. He saw himself as a "church theologian," influenced by the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth. His job, as he understood it, was to help the church confront the world as it actually exists. If the world keeps changing—if new movements emerge, if new questions become urgent—then of course a church theologian's focus will shift too.
There is something to be said for both views. Cox did have a remarkable ability to identify emerging religious trends before they became obvious to everyone else. His 1995 book "Fire From Heaven" recognized Pentecostalism as a major force reshaping global Christianity at a time when many mainline Protestants still dismissed it as emotional excess. Today, Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing form of Christianity worldwide, with hundreds of millions of adherents.
But this responsiveness to the moment also meant Cox's work could feel provisional. He himself admitted that his 1973 book "The Seduction of the Spirit" had "the best first chapter of anything I have ever written"—a memoir of his boyhood in Malvern, his baptism, the churches he grew up in—but that it went "downhill" from there.
Liberation Theology and the Turn to Latin America
One of Cox's most consequential intellectual commitments was to liberation theology. This movement, which emerged primarily in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, interpreted Christian faith through the lens of the poor and oppressed. Its adherents spoke of Jesus as "the Liberator" and argued that God shows a "preferential option for the poor."
Liberation theology was controversial from the start. Critics, including many Vatican officials, worried that it mixed Christianity with Marxism. Supporters argued that the Gospels themselves show Jesus consistently siding with the poor, the outcast, the marginalized.
Cox became the first to introduce liberation theology at Harvard Divinity School, drawing on firsthand experience from a training center in Venezuela. He was not content to study the movement from a comfortable academic distance. He wanted to see how it worked on the ground, among the people whose lives it addressed.
This commitment led him into direct conflict with church authorities. In 1988, Cox published "The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: The Vatican and the Future of World Christianity." Boff was a Brazilian Franciscan priest and liberation theologian whom the Vatican had ordered to stop speaking publicly. Cox's book was a defense of Boff and an argument that silencing such voices was not just wrong but dangerous for the church's future.
Turning East
In 1977, Cox published "Turning East," a book about his experience teaching at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Naropa was—and remains—a Buddhist-inspired university founded by the Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. It was an unusual place for a Baptist minister and Harvard theologian to find himself.
But Cox was not trying to become a Buddhist. He was trying to understand why so many Americans were looking to Asian religions for spiritual nourishment that their own traditions apparently failed to provide. The book's subtitle made his purpose clear: "Why Americans Look to the Orient for Spirituality—And What That Search Can Mean to the West."
This was characteristic of Cox's approach to religious diversity. He did not advocate for some generic spirituality that dissolved all differences between traditions. In his 1988 book "Many Mansions: A Christian's Encounter with Other Faiths," he argued that interfaith dialogue works best when each participant speaks from their own distinctive identity. A Christian engaging with Buddhism should remain firmly Christian. A Buddhist engaging with Christianity should remain firmly Buddhist. The conversation is richer for it.
An Interfaith Marriage
Cox's first marriage ended in divorce. In 1987, at age fifty-eight, he married Nina Tumarkin, a professor of Russian history at Wellesley College and a devout Jew. The marriage was not just personally significant but intellectually generative.
In 2002, Cox published "Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year." The book offered exactly what its subtitle promised: a Christian's perspective on the major Jewish holidays, written by someone who experienced them as a husband and family member rather than as an outside observer.
This is harder than it sounds. Interfaith families must constantly navigate questions that single-faith families can take for granted. Which holidays do you celebrate? How do you explain your traditions to children? What does it mean to maintain your own identity while fully honoring your partner's? Cox's book addressed these questions not abstractly but through lived experience.
The Three Ages of Christianity
When Cox retired from Harvard in 2009, he published "The Future of Faith," a book that attempted to make sense of Christianity's entire two-thousand-year history. His framework divided that history into three ages.
The first three centuries, Cox argued, constituted the Age of Faith. During this period, Christians focused on following Jesus's teachings. Doctrine was fluid. What mattered was how you lived, not what propositions you affirmed.
Then came the Age of Belief, which lasted roughly from the fourth century until the twentieth. During this period, church leaders consolidated power by defining correct doctrine and stamping out alternatives. The Nicene Creed, the great ecumenical councils, the heresy trials, the Inquisition—all of these belonged to the Age of Belief. What mattered was not just following Jesus but believing the right things about him.
Cox argued that the last fifty years had inaugurated a third era: the Age of the Spirit. In this new phase, Christians were increasingly ignoring doctrinal requirements and embracing spirituality. They were finding common ground with other religions. The institutional church's grip was loosening.
Whether you find this framework convincing depends partly on your own religious commitments. To traditional Christians, the Age of Belief was not a corruption but a necessary clarification of what Christianity meant. To progressive Christians, Cox's three ages validate their sense that something important is changing.
The Market as God
In his mid-eighties, Cox turned his theological attention to an unexpected subject: the free market.
His 2016 book "The Market as God" argued that market capitalism functions as a religion. It has its own creation myths (the invisible hand). Its own temples (banks, stock exchanges). Its own priesthood (economists). Its own concept of omniscience (the market "knows" the true value of everything). Its own promise of salvation (prosperity through growth).
This was not a simple critique. Cox was not just saying capitalism is bad. He was making the more subtle point that we have sacralized economic activity in ways we do not recognize. When politicians speak of "market forces" as if they were natural laws rather than human constructions, when economists claim privileged access to truth, when growth becomes an unquestioned good—these are religious moves, whatever secular vocabulary they employ.
Final Questions
At ninety-three, Cox published "A New Heaven" in 2022. The book grappled with questions that become increasingly urgent as one ages: What happens when we die? What should we hope for? What can we know about the afterlife, if anything?
Cox approached these questions through personal stories and cross-cultural comparison. Rather than defending any single doctrine, he explored how different cultures and religions have understood death. For a man who spent his career arguing that God is present in the secular world, it was perhaps fitting that his late work turned to what might lie beyond that world entirely.
The Vibe Coder Theologian
Looking back at Cox's career, what stands out is his willingness to engage with whatever was actually happening in religious life, rather than with what theologians thought should be happening.
When the sixties demanded social engagement, he wrote about the secular city. When the counterculture emphasized festivity and play, he wrote about feasting and fools. When Americans turned to Eastern religions, he explored that turn. When Pentecostalism exploded globally, he paid attention before most academic theologians did. When his marriage brought him into intimate contact with Judaism, he wrote about that too.
Critics called this faddish. But there is another way to see it: as intellectual honesty about where the religious action actually was. Cox did not wait for phenomena to become respectable before engaging with them. He went where the energy was.
He remains, as of this writing, alive at ninety-five, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts—just miles from Harvard Divinity School, where he spent forty-four years as perhaps the most influential figure on the faculty. His four children carry forward whatever questions about faith, family, and the sacred he planted in them. His books continue to circulate.
And the questions he asked—about where God is present, about how faith should engage with the modern world, about what Christianity is becoming—remain as urgent as they were in 1965, when a young theologian shocked the religious world by declaring that God had moved to the city.