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This-Worldly God. The secular city demands not only a renewed message from the church but a renewed lan guage. Technopolis, Cox argues, sees no meaning in religious terminology derived from tribal society—God as Father, for example—or even in the metaphysical discourse of town culture that defined God as Supreme Being. Its proper language is, in the broadest sense of the word, politics. Thus, says Cox, if the church is to preach God to the emerging secular city, it must find a secular, pragmatic way of proclaiming him in mis-worldly terms. This will not be easily or quickly discovered, since the secular city is still a developing reality, and its language and concepts far from established. For that reason, Cox suggests that the church may have to declare a moratorium on talk about "God" until there comes a better way of expressing the real meaning of this now all-but-incomprehensible word.
But the church should not despair at the prospect of having to find new ways of speaking about God, Cox says. After all, God revealed himself to Israel at different times under different names—as El Shaddai (the Almighty) to Abraham, and as Yahweh to Moses. "Rather than clinging stubbornly to antiquated appellations or anxiously synthesizing new ones," says Cox, "we must simply take up the work of liberating the captives, confident that we will be granted a new name by events of the future."