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TIIE
I N SECULARIZATION AND THEOLOGICAL

S h L u

E C U L A R CITY
URBANIZATIOK PERSPECTIVE

by Harvey Cox

T H E M A C M I L L A N C O M P A N Y , N E W YORK

Tlle author wishes to thank the editors of TIze Commonweal and of Christiantty and C r i s i s for permission to use material already published in those magazines, and to the Association Press for permission to use material that first appeared in their series of pamphlets Revolzltiorz and liesponse.

Copyright 0 Harvey Cox 1965. All rights reserved. No part of this book nlay be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. First Printing. The hlacnlillan Company, New Yolk. Collier-Macmillan Canada Ltd., Toronto, Ontario. Library of Congress catalog card number: 6516713. Printed in the Unlted States of America. Nintlr Printing lOGG

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Epoch of the Secular City

The Biblical Sources of Secularization


Secularization us. Secularism Dimensions of Secukrization
CREATION AS THE DISEHCHANTMENT OF NATCTRE
THE EXODUS AS THE DESACRALUATION OF POLITICS

THE SINAI COVENANT AS THE DECONSECRATION


OF VALUES

The Shape of the Secular City


Anonymity
THE hL4.N A T THE GIANT SWITCHBOARD ANONYMITY A S DELIVERANCE FROM THE L A W

Mobility
THE M A N IN THE CLOVERLEAF YAHWEH AND THE BAALUvI.

3 The Style of the Secular City John F. Kennedy and Pragmatimn


Albert Camzcs and Profanity Tillich, Barth, and the Secular Style

4 The Secular City in Cross-Cultural Perspective New Delhi and India Rome and Western Europe Prague and Eastern Europe Boston and the United States

Contents

5 Toward a Theology of Social Change The Kingdom of God and the Secular C i t y Anatomy of a Revolutionary Theology
6 The Church as God's Avant-garde
The Church's Kerygmutic Function: Broadcasting the Seizure of Power The Church's Diakonic Function: Healing the Urban Fractures The Church's Koimmiac Function: Making Visible the City of Man

7 The Church as Cultural Exorcist

8 Work and Play in the Secular City


The Separation of Places of Work and Residence The Bureaucratic Organization of Work The Emancipation o f Work from Religion

g Sex and Secularization


The Residue of Tribalism Remnants o f Town Virtues
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The Church and the Secular University

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To Speak in a Secular Fashion of God Speaking of God as a Sociological Problem Speaking of God as a Political Issue Speaking of God as a Theological Question Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

The Epoch of the Secular City

THE RISE of urban civilization and the collapse of traditional religion are the two main hallmarks of our era and are closely related movements. Urbanization constitutes a massive change in the way men live together, and became possible in its contemporary form only with the scientific and technological advances which sprang from the wreckage of religious worldviews. Secularization, an equally epochal movement, marks a change in the way men grasp and understand their life together, and it occurred only when the cosmopolitan confrontations of city living exposed the relativity of the myths and traditions men once thought were unquestionable. The ways men live their common life affects mightily the ways they understand the meaning of that life, and vice versa. Villages and cities are laid out to reflect the pattern of the heavenly city, the abode of the gods. But once laid out, the pattern of the polis influences the way in which succeeding generations experience life and visualize the gods. Societies and the symbols by which those societies live influence each other. In our day the secular metropolis stands as both the pattern of our life together and the symbol of our view of the world. If the Greeks perceived the cosmos as an immensely expanded polis, and medieval man saw it as the feudal manor enlarged to infinity, we experience the universe as the city of man. It is a field of human exploration and endeavor from which the gods have fled. The world has become man's task and man's responsibility. Contemporary man has become the cosmopolitan. The world has become his city and his city has reached out to include the world. The name for the process by which this has come about is seculurization. What is secularization? The Dutch theologian C . A. van
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Introduction

Peursen says it is the deliverance of man "first from religious and then from metaphysical control over his reason and his language."l It is the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed world-views, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols. It represents what another observer has called the "defatalization of history," the discovery by man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that he can no longer blame fortune or the furies for what he does with it. Secdarization is man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time (saeculum = "this present age"). It is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1944 called "man's coming of age."2 To some, Bonhoeffer's words still sound shocking, but they really should not. He was merely venturing a tardy theological interpretation of what had already been noticed by poets and novelists, sociologists and philosophers for decades. The era of the secular city is not one of anticlericalism or feverish antireligious fanaticism. The anti-Christian zealot is something of an anachronism today, a fact which explains why Bertrand Russell's books often seem quaint rather than daring and wlly the antireligious propaganda of the Communists sometimes appears intent on c k s p e h g belief in a "God out there" who has long - since been laid to rest, The forces of secularization have no serious interest in persecuting religion. Secularization simply bypasses and undercuts religion and goes on to other things. It has relativized religious world-views and thus rendered them innocuous. Religion has been privatized. It has been accepted as the peculiar prerogative and point of view of a particular person or group. Secularization has accomplished what 6re and chain could not: It has convinced the believer that he could be wrong, and persuaded the devotee that there are more irnportant things than dying for the faith. The gods of traditional religions live on as private fetishes or the patrons of congenial groups, but they play no role whatever in the public life of the secular metropolis. Of course there are events and movements which momentarily raise questions about whether secularization has really

Introduction 3 succeeded in unseating the gods of traditional religion. The self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, the rise of fanatic sects such as Soka Gakkai in Japan, the appearance of the Black ;\fuslims in America, even the new vigor of Roman Catholicism-all seem to suggest that the published obituaries of religion have been premature. But a more careful look will re\-eal that these phenomena cannot be understood apart from certain swift-flowing secular currents in the modem world. These currents either express themselves in quasi-religious form or else elicit adjusments iii religious systems which alter them so radically that they pose no real threat to the secularization process. Thus the revival of ancient Oriental religions gives voice to the nationalistic political aspirations of peoples who preserve antiquated symbols but use them for utterly novel purposes. Pluralism and tolerance are the children of secularization. They represent a society's unwillingness to enforce any particular world-view on its citizens. Movements within the Roman Catholic Church culminating in the Second Vatican Council indicate its growing readiness to be open to truth from all sides. Pluralism is breaking out where once a closed system stood. The age of the secular city, the epoch whose ethos is quickly spreading into every corner of the globe, is an age of "no religion at all." It no longer looks to religious rules and rituals for its morality or its meanings. For some religion pro\-ides a hobby, for others a mark of national or ethnic identification, for still others an esthetic delight. For fewer and fewer does it provide an inclusive and commanding system of personal and cosmic values and explanations. True, there are some people who claim that our modem age has its secular religions, its political saints, and its profane temples. They are right in a manner of speaking; but to call, for example, nazism or communism "religions" is to obscure a very significant difference between them and traditional religions. It also obscures the fact that nazism was a throwback to a lost tribalism and that every day communism becomes more "secularized" and hence less and less a "relirrion." The effort to force secular and political movements of our time to be "religious" so that we can feel justified in clinging
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Introduction to our religion is, in the end, a losing battle. Secularization rolls on, and if we are to understand and communicate with our present age we must learn to love it in its unremitting secularity. We must learn, as Bonhoeffer said, to speak of God in a secular fashion and find a nonreligious interpretation of biblical concepts. It will do no good to cling to our religious and metaphysical versions of Christianity in the hope that one day religion or metaphysics will once again be back. They are disappearing forever and that means we can now let go and immerse ourselves in the new world of the secular city. The first step in such an immersion is learning something about its peculiar characteristics. But before we do we must ask more precisely about the other key tenn we have used in describing the ethos of our time, urbanization. If secularization designates the content of man's coming of age, urbanization describes the context in which it is occurring. It is the "shape" of the new society which supports its peculiar cultural style. In trying to define the teim urbanization, l~owever,we are confronted with the fact that social scientists themselves are not entirely agreed about what it means. It is clear, however, that urbanization is not just a quantitative term. It does not refer to population size or density, to geographic extent or to a particular form of government. Admittedly some of the character of modem urban life would not be possible without giant populations concentrated on enormous contiguous land masses. But urbanization is not s o m e h n g that refers only to the city. As Vidich and Bensman have shown in Small Town in Mass Society,3 high mobility, economic concentration, and mass communications have drawn even rural villages into the web of urbanization. Urbanization means a structure of common life in which diversity and the disintegration of tradition are paramount. It means a type of impersonality in which functional relationships multiply. It means that a degree of tolerance and anonymity replace traditional moral sanctions and long-term acquaintanceships. The urban center is the place of human control, of rational planning, of bureaucratic organizationand the urban center is not just in Washington, London, New York, and Peking. It is everywhere. The technological me-

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