The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox

Author:Harvey Cox [Cox, Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Faith, Pneumatology, General, Religion, Christianity, Christian Theology, History
ISBN: 9780061755538
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-10-04T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Living in Haunted Houses

Beyond the Interfaith Dialogue

One rainy winter day when I was a boy of eight or nine and feeling unusually restless, I decided to rummage through the attic. There, tucked behind some dusty suitcases and chipped blue French provincial bedroom furniture, I uncovered a stack of old encyclopedias. I thumbed through them distractedly until suddenly coming upon a foldout map, “The Religions of the World.” I stared at it with mounting curiosity. It was color-coded. It showed “Hinduism” in red occupying the Indian subcontinent. “Buddhism,” appropriately orange, was spread across Southeast Asia from Thailand and Cambodia up to Japan. Since the map was an artifact from before the Maoist revolution, China was designated “Confucianist” and tinted in light gray. What the editors called “Mohammedanism” constituted a long yellow splash across North Africa, through the Middle East, and into Indonesia. Christianity sprawled comfortably across both Americas and Europe. I was amazed. In our small town we had Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, and Catholics. But, I wondered, who were all these other people, and what were their religions like? I date my lifelong interest in theology and comparative religion to that drizzly afternoon.

The multihued map, however, is now totally outdated. Today all these religions are everywhere. Just as Christians are rediscovering their genuine origins, they also find themselves bumper to bumper with other traditions in areas where Christianity is a small minority. The other religions are here, not just there. All are now crammed into a shrinking world as well. Immigration patterns have transported large Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim populations to Europe and America. Pagodas and mosques nestle among churches and synagogues. Adherents of the different world religions can no longer avoid each other, so understanding each other is no longer merely an option, but a necessity. The sobering truth, however, is that proximity has not always bred respect. In many places it has spawned suspicion and contempt, and just as religion has become more rather than less of a force in our time, the relationships among the different traditions have reached a new moment of crisis.

As human beings we live in both nature and history. We fuse two modes of existence. We all inhabit bodies, but we clothe them with everything from loincloths to Prada. We all speak, but in hundreds of different languages from Bengali to Serbo-Croatian. Likewise, we are all “faith-ing” animals. We cannot live without some degree of confidence in whatever lends coherence and purpose to our lives. It can be good luck, our ancestors, our money, brains, or contacts. It can even be a confidence that none of the above can be trusted, and it can change from year to year or from one hour to the next. Still, it has to be something. We are all “faith-ers,” but we direct our faithing toward a myriad of different entities.

The religious and cultural patterns we live in shape our languages and our thought forms in ways that are almost impossible to escape. Jews and Christians

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