Responses to Dr. Harvey Cox’s 2010 Lectures
(Thanks to Mike Maholchic for the following lecture summaries.)
Update: the Massachusetts Bible Society has posted videos of the 2010 Beck Lectures with Harvey Cox.
October 18, 2010
Jesus in Jerusalem: The Gospels and the New Research
A group of spiritually inclined Milton residents from East Congregational Church traveled to First Parish Church in Weston, MA on Monday, October 18 to hear Dr. Harvey Cox, the renowned Harvard Divinity School Professor, deliver the third in a series of five lectures sponsored by the Massachusetts Bible Society titled “Coming to Grips with the Bible”.
Rather than being obsolete or irrelevant, the Bible is a part of our cultural DNA. In an earlier lecture Dr. Cox told from personal experience how the story of the Exodus reverberated in the minds of those who decided it was time to end racial segregation in the South. There is no most compelling figure in the Bible for Christians than Jesus Christ. In this lecture Cox focused on two particular individuals, who sought to answer the question “Who was Jesus?” and “What did his life mean?”
For centuries we could only know Jesus through four canonical Gospels, which got in the Bible as “the result of a political process”. Now we have other views of Jesus. Since the 19th century a trove of other ancient Gospels have been discovered, showing great diversity in the early church. The Gospel of Thomas is possibly older than the Gospel of John. The Gospel of Mary Magdelene portrays a female church leader. Jesus inspires people from outside Europe and North America. Recently a group of scholars, the Jesus Seminar, has met to decide which of the deeds and sayings of Jesus in the Bible are historically likely. In Cox’ view the Jesus seminar, while having done some good scholarship, has suffered from a lack of consensus and “didn’t get to the point”.
The point, in Cox’ view, is personal – to find, as it says in the Gospel of Luke - the kingdom of heaven amongst us. He offers two extraordinary individuals from recent history as examples.
Albert Schweitzer was a scholar writing a book which tried to answer these questions using historical-critical methods. He came to see how empty that exercise was, and hearing of the desperate medical needs of Africans, quit his job as pastor and professor at the age of 38 to enter medical school and become a doctor. He left his comfortable life in Europe behind, and started a hospital in Lambaréné, West Africa.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer shocked his aristocratic German family by becoming a Lutheran pastor. When Hitler came to power he went on the radio to deliver an anti-Nazi message – and was cut off before he could finish. He escaped Germany but felt compelled to return to resist Nazism, ultimately, after much soul-searching (he was a pacifist) choosing to take part in a doomed plot to assassinate Hitler. He was imprisoned for 18 months and then executed. His “Letters from Prison”, smuggled out by a sympathetic guard, influenced Cox more deeply than any other theological writing. The letters are not downbeat – they celebrate the joy of being alive from the perspective of those who suffer.
Few of us can drop everything to enter medical school and start a clinic in remotest Africa. Few of us can have the opportunity to assassinate one of the most evil leaders in history. But all of us eventually will suffer, as Albert Schweitzer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Jesus did. In our suffering we might ask, “God, take this cup away from me”. If like them we can say, “but not what I want but what you want”, secure in knowing we have done our best to love God with all our heart and our neighbor as ourselves, we will find satisfaction in a life well lived - a kingdom of heaven - within us and amongst us.
September 20, 2010
This is the age when the atheistic “Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse” - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens - receive unprecedented media attention. The highest grossing documentary at the movies was Bill Maher’s anti-religious ”Religulous.”
On Monday, September 20th seven members of East Congregational Church, UCC went on the first of three Theological Field Trips this fall to hear the renowned theologian Harvey Cox. Dr. Cox, the author of The Secular City and most recently The Future of Faith answered the charge that the Bible is obsolete, dangerous, and ridiculous.
In one of a series of five original lectures sponsored by the Massachusetts Bible Society, Dr. Cox, at a gathering of about two hundred people at Andover-Newton Theological School in Newton, said “our identity is formed by our parents, whose identity was formed by theirs” on through a chain of history which includes the Bible stories in the book of Exodus. The ancient story of liberation is passed on in Christian Sunday schools and to Jewish children on Passover evening when they ask, “why is this night different from any other night?”
Dr. Cox, who ‘is horrified when he gets a parking ticket’, recalled his time in jail during the civil rights struggles in the 1960’s when a rousing chorus of Go Down, Moses broke out. He had a long friendship with Martin Luther King, Jr., whose moving words the night before he died he quoted:
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
Dr. Cox closed by saying that in coming to grips with the Bible, we are called to remember and deploy history, whether in the formerly segregated southern United States or at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and actively participate in the struggle for freedom inspired by the book of Exodus.
November 1, 2010
Rescuing Revelation from the Religious Right
Old South Church - 645 Boylston Street - Boston, MA 02116
The Massachusetts Bible Society sponsors annual lectures in the memory of former Boston University theology professor Harrell F. Beck. This year five different lectures were given by Dr. Harvey Cox, prolific author and former Hollis Professor of Theology at Harvard University, on “Coming to Grips with the Bible”. On November 1 a group from East Church attended the final lecture in the series on the final book of the Christian Bible – the Book of Revelation.
Dr. Cox began by asking, “How did this weird book get in the Bible?” Revelation was a late and controversial addition to the canon. The Eastern Orthodox Church to this day does not allow it to be read in services. Martin Luther didn’t think “the Holy Spirit produced it." Nevertheless, it is a very dramatic narrative, chock-full of fantastic imagery which survives in our everyday speech – ‘the four horsemen of the apocalypse’, ‘grapes of wrath’, ‘mark of the beast’, and the number ‘666’. Cox described the text as self-consciously archaic Greek, in a style is intended to invoke authority via tradition. To its original audience it would have sounded like the King James Bible sounds to us, with archaic words forcing us concentrate extra hard to catch the meaning, if we can.
Most scholars believe the Book of Revelation was written around 90 AD, as the cult of emperor worship was being revived by the Roman emperor Domitian. Christians at that time split into two groups – compromisers who would honor the emperor “with their fingers crossed behind their backs”, and hard-liners, who felt any reverence for the emperor was sacrilege. In its symbolism and imagery it comes down firmly on the side of the hard-liners, fundamentally attacking imperialism through its predictions of harsh consequences for those who collaborate with it.
Cox feels this scripture is misread both by those who interpret it symbolically and literalists. The former suffer from “imaginary oppression” – for example, middle class people who don’t want their taxes raised. More troubling, it inspires some literalists on the Religious Right to resist peace efforts in the Middle East out of a belief that God ordains a great final battle in “a little green valley in Israel” named Armageddon. Cox wishes he could “rescue Revelation from the Religious Right” but in the end confessed “I don’t know how”.
When viewed as an allegory, Revelation raises important issues for us to consider. Christians from time to time down through the ages have had to confront the issue of what loyalty they owe to their government while remaining faithful to the Gospel. Cox spent a year working in East Berlin in the 1950s, among Christians confronted by a hostile Nazi, and later Communist state. At that time they debated whether they should resist having their children take part in Jugendweihe, a secular rite of passage for teenagers intended to replace Confirmation. One of Cox’s most influential teachers, Paul Tillich, a German theologian forced into exile by the Nazis, taught there are “structures of evil” created by humankind that must be resisted.
‘Structures of evil’ of course are not was always represented by the larger political entity. One needs look no farther than some of Cox’s former enemies - the proponents of ‘state’s rights’ - who decried the ‘tyranny’ of the federal government as equal civil rights for African-Americans were imposed from above. There have been many cases of abuse by leaders of small fringe cults. Small is not always good.
What is good is the spirit of free inquiry leading to greater moral sensitivity, in both small communities and large. One of the benefits of attending these talks was the chance for us to think and talk about what we believe. We should aspire to that final vision of the Bible’s final book, that another world is possible, and God’s community is more powerful than any of the kingdoms of the earth.
