Harvey Cox

Harvey Gallagher Cox, Jr. (born May 19, 1929 in Malvern, Pennsylvania) is an American theologian who served as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, until his retirement in October 2009. Cox's research and teaching focus on theological developments in world Christianity, including liberation theology and the role of Christianity in Latin America.

After a stint in the U.S. Merchant Marine, Cox attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1951 with a B.A. degree with honors in history. He went on to earn a B.D. degree from the Yale Divinity School in 1955, and a Ph.D. degree in the history and philosophy of religion from Harvard University in 1963.

Cox was ordained as an American Baptist minister in 1957, and started teaching as an assistant professor at the Andover Newton Theological School in Massachusetts. He then began teaching at the Harvard Divinity School in 1965 and in 1969 became a full professor. He was to become "the single most heeded professor in religion at Harvard." (George Hunston Williams, Divinings: Religion At Harvard, Vol. 2, 2014, p. 521.)

Cox became widely known with the publication of The Secular City in 1965. It became immensely popular and influential for a book on theology, selling over one million copies. Cox developed the thesis that the church is primarily a people of faith and action, rather than an institution. He argued that "God is just as present in the secular as the religious realms of life". Thus, the original title was God and the Secular City, which "he still believes...would have more accurately described the book's theme." (Ibid.,Williams, 594) Far from being a protective religious community, the church should be in the forefront of change in society, celebrating the new ways religiosity is finding expression in the world. Phrases such as "intrinsic conservatism prevents the denominational churches from leaving their palaces behind and stepping into God's permanent revolution in history" (p. 206) were viewed as threatening to the status quo by some, or seen as an embrace of the social revolution of the 1960s. Cox revisited his topic in Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Post-Modern Theology in 1984. In 1990, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Secular City was published.

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