[5] After a stint in the US Merchant Marine, Cox attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in history.

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.

[citation needed] Cox developed the thesis that the church is primarily a people of faith and action, rather than an institution.

"[7] 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.

"[11] In 1973, Cox wrote The Seduction of the Spirit,[12] which he said "has the best first chapter of anything I have ever written (about my boyhood in Malvern, Pennsylvania, the churches there and my baptism)," but he added it went "downhill" from there.

[13] In Turning East (1977), Cox describes his teaching at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where his mind and soul were challenged by the Buddhist "dharma", and he enjoyed doing research in Asian religious movements.

[19] An outgrowth of Cox's second marriage to Nina Tumarkin, a devout Jew and a professor of Russian history at Wellesley College,[citation needed] was his book Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year (2002), which is a look at the Jewish year through its major holidays, as seen by him an outsider who is an equally devout Christian.

Then came the Age of Belief, in which church leaders increasingly took control and set acceptable limits on doctrine and orthodoxy.

The last 50 years, Cox contends, welcome in the Age of the Spirit, in which Christians have begun to ignore dogma and embrace spirituality, while finding common threads with other religions.