What shape will the Christian faith take in the 21st century? In the midst of fast-paced global changes and in the face of an apparent resurgence of fundamentalism, can Christianity survive as a living and vital faith? With his typical brilliance and lively insight, Cox explores these and other questions in a dazzling blend of memoir, church history and theological commentary. He divides Christian history into three periods: the Age of Faith, during the first Christian centuries, when the earliest followers of Jesus lived in his Spirit, embraced his hope and followed him in the work he had begun; the Age of Belief, from the Council of Nicaea to the late 20th century, during which the church replaced faith in Jesus with dogma about him; and the Age of the Spirit, in which we're now living, in which Christians are rediscovering the awe and wonder of faith in the tremendous mystery of God. According to Cox, the return to the Spirit that so enlivened the Age of Faith is now enlivening a global Christianity, through movements like Pentecostalism and liberation theology, yearning for the dawning of God's reign of shalom. Cox remains our most thoughtful commentator on the religious scene, and his spirited portrait of our religious landscape challenges us to think in new ways about faith.

The future of faith, Cox argues, is spiritual rather than credal or dogmatic, egalitarian and hands-on rather than mediated by a hierarchical clergy. Christianity, in particular, has arrived at an age of the spirit, in which the term spiritual is increasingly preferred to religious, the vast numbers of conversions worldwide are made outside church establishments, and Christ-like behavior is considered more meaningful than doctrinal precision, Mother Teresa is more admirable than the pope. Apprehension of the divine arrives for more people through experiences of wonder and awe and the appreciation of mystery, not out of study, reasoning, and formal professions of belief. In the center of this lucid and congenial book, Cox retraces organizational Christianity from the earliest communities of Christians through the long career of the church within Roman imperial and later political systems to the structural devolution of the church since the Reformation. He is not alone, but he is most cogent, in thinking that the content of Christian faith is becoming more like that of the early church, rooted in personal and communal behavior, and its expression more syncretistic and secular than ever before. A book full of good news.—Ray Olson

Q: Let me begin by inviting you to sum up, if you would, the central idea of The Future of Faith.

A: Let’s say it’s a tripartite thesis in this book. One is that the resurgence of religion around the world and the various religious traditions, which is unexpected, global—there were people who were predicting the marginalization and even disappearance of religion in my early years as a teacher. That disappearance, marginalization, didn’t happen, and in various religious traditions, almost all of them, there’s been a resurgence for complicated reasons. I do not think that is a mere transient phenomenon. I think it’s a basic change in the nature of our civilization, that it will continue, and so, therefore, programs like this one probably have a future. You deal with religion and ethics. The second part of the thesis, however, is that fundamentalisms, I use the word in the plural, which have often been associated with this resurgence of religion, at least in the popular mind, are on the decline. I do not think that they’re going to last out much longer. It’s a recent phenomenon, began in the early 20th century and has appeared in various different religious traditions, always as a kind of a reaction against something that’s going on in that tradition. ... (Read the full interview)