The Future of Faith by Harvey CoxThis is an excellent and tremendously important book for every Christian wanting to understand the global and sweeping changes that are happening across the globe with religion. You - like me - may not agree with everything, but it is helpful to see the movement of religion today, in light of it's history. Harvey Cox, Professor of Divinity at Harvard, shows how Christianity, which began as a movement of the Spirit, soon clotted into a catalog of beliefs administered by a clerical class. Then he shows how Christianity is re-capturing its roots from the first three centuries as it makes a clear distinction between faith and beliefs, that is, a distinction between a way of life following Jesus in the Spirit, and a list of right beliefs about Jesus to which we intellectual assent. Faith that looks for places where the kingdom Jesus described appears and works with whomever is there being led by the Spirit, and beliefs which strives to define the limits and is suffocated by creeds, hierarchies, and the disastrous merger of the church with the empire. Faith, rather than beliefs, is once again becoming Christianity's defining quality, and this is actually reclaiming what faith meant during its earliest years.
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