Harvey Cox Quotes

#1. The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.

Harvey Cox

#2. Not to decide is to decide.

Harvey Cox

#3. Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back.

Harvey Cox

#4. The dominant ethos of the twenty-first century consists of an intermingling of the sacred and the secular.

Harvey Cox

#5. Students, like most of us, want answers, even to intractable mysteries. It is hard for anyone to come to terms with the raw truth that sometimes there just are none.

Harvey Cox

#6. Somewhere deep down we know that in the final analysis, we do decide things and that even our decisions to let someone else decide are really our decisions, however pusillanimous.

Harvey Cox

#7. I am dead against trying to keep religious conservatives out of the political debate. The tactic of exclusion is self-defeating.

Harvey Cox

#8. God laughs, it seems, because God knows how it all turns out in the end.

Harvey Cox

#9. A myth is essentially true because it is a symbol, and a symbol is something that points beyond itself to a truth that might be difficult or impossible to express in ordinary language.

Harvey Cox

#10. All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.

Harvey Cox

#11. The comic, more than the tragic, because it ignites hope, leads to more, not less, participation in the struggle for a just world.

Harvey Cox

#12. Rick Warren, the influential evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, says that what the church needs now is a "second Reformation," one based on "deeds, not creeds."2

Harvey Cox

#13. What we are seeking so frantically elsewhere may turn out to be the horse we have been riding all along.

Harvey Cox

#14. It is always the task of the intellectual to "think otherwise." This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.

Harvey Cox

#15. Man must now assume the responsibility for his world. He can no longer shove it off on religious power.

Harvey Cox

#16. Scholars of religion refer to the current metamorphosis in religiousness with phrases like the "move to horizontal transcendence" or the "turn to the immanent." But it would be more accurate to think of it as the rediscovery of the sacred in the immanent, the spiritual within the secular.

Harvey Cox

#17. Instead of a 'Western Christianity,' we now witness a post-Christian West (in Europe) and a post-Western Christianity (in the global South). America is somewhere in between.

Harvey Cox

#18. The difference between a "problem" and a "mystery" is that we may be able to "solve" a problem, but a mystery is something we have to live with.

Harvey Cox

#19. Secular Humanism is opposed to other religions; it actively rejects, excludes, and attempts to eliminate traditional theism from meaningful participation in the American culture.

Harvey Cox

#20. There has never been a better raconteur than Jesus of Nazareth.

Harvey Cox

#21. Secularism is not only indifferent to alternative religious systems, but as a religious ideology it is opposed to any other religious systems. It is therefore a closed system.

Harvey Cox

#22. Your reach should always exceed your grasp.

Harvey Cox

#23. There is scarcely one figure in the entire Hebrew scripture we would want our children to emulate.

Harvey Cox

#24. The real ecumenical crisis today is not between Catholics and Protestants but between traditional and experimental forms of church life.

Harvey Cox

#25. Let us not project our own spiritual limitations onto the modern world, for it is not the world which prevents us from being religious. The kind of world we live in shapes the manner and mode of our religiousness

Harvey Cox

#26. The political is replacing the metaphysical as the characteristic mode of grasping reality.

Harvey Cox

#27. If freedom once required a secular critique of religion, it can also require a religious critique of the secular.

Harvey Cox

#28. From the beginning, the Bible says, God has shared his power and tried to enlist us in continuing his creation and in caring for it. Instead, we have messed it up badly more often than we have gotten it right.

Harvey Cox

#29. Once written, a classic text is like a bird released from its cage. It develops a life of its own. Its "meaning" is not locked in.

Harvey Cox