Word: coxing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first effect of God's presence should be joy. Augustan said that Christians are Easter men and their song should be Alleluia-a cry of joy, ecstasy and euphoria which implicates and explicates its root ( El ), the name of God. Cox looks at the churches and sees little enough of joy. The Good News is bad news, especially for the poor. The Church is in many instances a non-prophet organization living on the prestige of dead saints. It is more a case of the "bland leading the bland...
...COX LEVELS criticism with fairness, bestows kudos with justice. He criticizes the radical theologians after first paying them a deserved tribute. They rightly saw the need to get on with a new synthesis, God needed new symbols. The old ones were good in their day, but they are encumbrances in ours. But the radicals are so oriented toward the present that they tend to lose the forward thrust of Christianity. Cox rightly sees the Church as metahistorical. Any symbol system which tunes in to one period exclusively becomes trapped in its own symbols-leaving God as the Edsel...
...chapter on solutions to the problems of the theologian (chapter 9 entitled, "A Theology of Juxtaposition") Cox endeavors to pull a thesis out of this pastiche. He calls his methodology "juxtaposing." By this he means to make theology three-dimensional. Existentialism and the Death of God phase are too now- centered. He proposes that we juxtapose past solutions and future possibilities next to our present situation. This element of futurity gives man the thrust forward toward the Christ of the possibles. He is the One who comes in Glory as well as being...
...Cox calls this the element of discontinuity. We must crack open the old forms and push on toward the future. Christ is both immanent and futuristic; here and to come. Any over-balancing ends in existentialist entrapment. If the old God symbols are dead, so is Sartre with his existentialist "angst." The "nowism" of existcutialism and death-of-godism trapped man in himself. There is no way out. Man was trapped building a world which wasn't going anywhere and hadn't been anywhere...
This absurdity served its cathartic purpose, but Cox sees that it is time to put the therapy to bed. Man just isn't made to face ultimate absurdity-paradox, yes. Absurdity? Not as a steady dict anyway. The Holy is meta-historical. Existentialism, for all its benefits, has no time for dreams, no visionary capacity, and therefore no stomach for celebration...