Life in a Defatalized World

"We shall have to stop talking about 'God' for a while," says Baptist Harvey Cox, an ordained Protestant minister and an assistant professor at Andover Newton Theological School. One of the nation's most radical and respected young Christian thinkers, Cox, 35, tries to go well beyond existentialism and Bultmann-like "demythologizing" in order to program theology for what he believes is a new era in man's history: the age of urban secularization.

"Technopolis," as Cox calls this phenomenon in The Secular City (Macmillan; $1.45), supersedes not only early tribal society but also the town culture that has shaped the Western world since the time of the Greek polls (city) and has left man such varied gifts as "printing and books, rational theology, the scientific revolution, investment capitalism and bureaucracy." The emerging era of the supercity, Cox argues, grows out of town culture, but is qualitatively different; it is characterized by automation and mass communication, superhighway mobility, and the anonymity demanded by high-rise living. The style of life in the secular city is both pragmatic and profane. For practical-minded technopolitan man, "life is a set of problems, not an unfathomable mystery." He is too engrossed in grappling with the realities of this life to have much concern with those of the next.

Between Milking Hours? Cox believes that man in the secular city is equally indifferent to religion, in which gods or God are seen as controlling the destiny of the world, and to metaphysics, which philosophically defines the Creator as some kind of First Cause or Prime Mover. In other words, the world has been "defatalized," and has become the task and responsibility of man alone. Instead of deploring this trend, the church should welcome and assist it by supporting rapid social change. This will mean, Cox warns, a restructuring of its essential tasks: kerygma (proclaiming God's message), diakonia (service) and koinonia (creating a community). In technopolis, the message of the church is to proclaim those secular events and movements "where God's reconciliation is break ing in." Service means to "identify" with this reconciling action.

The church, Cox argues, must become "God's avantgarde" in the same radical way that Jesus related to the Judaism of his time. This will not be easy, partly because the churches tend to look toward the past rather than the future. "Their organization (residential parishes) is based on the sociological patterns of 1885 (before automobiles, commuter trains and industrial parks). Their Sunday-at-11 cultus is timed to fall between the two milking hours in the agricultural society. Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back. The first Christian church was one that looked forward in strained and eager anticipation to the end days and the coming again of the Lord. The church of today looks back to the Pilgrim Fathers or to the founding of the First Church of Cedar Elms."

This-Worldly God. The secular city demands not only a renewed message from the church but a renewed lan guage. Technopolis, Cox argues, sees no meaning in religious terminology derived from tribal society--God as Father, for example--or even in the metaphysical discourse of town culture that defined God as Supreme Being. Its proper language is, in the broadest sense of the word, politics. Thus, says Cox, if the church is to preach God to the emerging secular city, it must find a secular, pragmatic way of proclaiming him in mis-worldly terms. This will not be easily or quickly discovered, since the secular city is still a developing reality, and its language and concepts far from established. For that reason, Cox suggests that the church may have to declare a moratorium on talk about "God" until there comes a better way of expressing the real meaning of this now all-but-incomprehensible word.

But the church should not despair at the prospect of having to find new ways of speaking about God, Cox says. After all, God revealed himself to Israel at different times under different names--as El Shaddai (the Almighty) to Abraham, and as Yahweh to Moses. "Rather than clinging stubbornly to antiquated appellations or anxiously synthesizing new ones," says Cox, "we must simply take up the work of liberating the captives, confident that we will be granted a new name by events of the future."

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