Stormy waters
We continue to make waves on our sea of faith. The October 1994 issue of Modern Believing, journal of the Modern Churchpeople’s Union and torchbearer for moderate liberalism in the C of E, was given over in its entirety to debate about us.
Has radicalism supplanted liberalism as ‘‘the avante-garde of religious progress’’, muses the editor, George Pattison, or are the liberals ‘‘a centre party standing between the intransigence of ecclesiastical conservatism... and the ‘loony left’ radicalism of SoF’’? Whatever your answer, he concludes, ‘‘SoF has... placed serious theological issues in the public arena in an almost unprecedented way, and... provided a rare focus and catalyst for the shaping of the contemporary debate about religion’’. The issues raised ‘‘can no longer be dismissed as the ravings of off-beat academics who’ve spent toc long locked up in their ivory towers. They are issues which the Church, and all who are concerned with the religious situation of our time, need to address.’’ This, from a writer not committed to SoF (so far as I am aware), contrasts oddly with a piece from SoFer David Hart entitled ‘‘On Not Quite Taking Leave of Don’’ in which Cupitt’s writings are criticised for ‘‘smacking of the rather natrow inhibited world of donnish Cambridge’’! But David can’t mean his caveat to be taken too seriously, or he wouldn’t have asked the Don he hasn’t quite taken leave of to write the preface to his latest book (see page 14).
Hopes dashed
Modern Believing has other meaty pieces: ‘‘Don Cupitt on Art’’ by Charles Pickstone, ‘‘Feminism and love of the ‘Unreal’ God’’, by Esther D Reed, a review by Jelt Astley of the reprinted Sea of Faith book, and a pychological study by David Major of ‘‘Autonomy and Religion’’, particularly in Cupitt’s work.
Finally, there’s Anthony Freeman on ‘‘Theology and the Church’’. He quotes the C of E’s Doctrine Commision report We Believe in God, 1987: ‘‘What theologians offer are much more like scientific ‘models’ than literal descriptions’’; and ‘‘all theological pictures, propositions and imaginings carry with them the possibility of being found to be defective or even wrong’’; and ‘‘we should learn to live with the approximate, incomplete and corrigible nature of our language, not as a defect, but as an asset’’. To which he comments: ‘‘How my heart soared when I read those words and thought that at last the Church of England was coming down off its dogmatic high horse! But I was too quick in my rejoicing...”
Free man and editor
Speaking of Anthony, readers will be pleased to know that he is neither kicking his heels nor wearing out his soles trudging around employment exchanges. He has been offered, and has taken, a part-time job editing the new Journal of Consciousness Studies, described as ‘‘a response to renewed interest in both academic and popular circles to questions like ‘How does your mind relate to your brain? Can you have conscious existence apart from your body? Does religious experience differ fundamentally from ordinary experience?’” Anthony is editing from his new home in Oxfordshire, but the Journal is obtainable from the publishers, Imprint Academic, PO Box 1, Thorverton, Exeter EXS SYX. UK subs are £15 for two issues. End of commercial.
Cautious welcome
The press release announcing Anthony’s appointment adds that ‘‘he has received messages of welcome from both the bishop and the parish priest’’. The Bishop of Oxford is, of course, none other than the author of a book, The Real God, rushed out to counter Anthony’s God in Us.
On the evening of November 30, welcomer and welcomed met in debate in Church House, Westminster, before a packed audience much swollen by the fact that General Synod was in progress, and what else is there for idle clerics to do on a winter’s night, after discussing church affairs all day, but to talk about God? Many were the books that were sold, and the publishers saw that it was good.
A small gaggle of SoFers managed to get in a few points from the floor. Since even the bishop disclaimed any intention of proving the ‘‘existence’’ of God, one questioner asked, wasn’t the real question whether the Church was ‘‘big enough, brave enough, humble enough, wise, enough, tolerant enough, to embrace different views on the meaning of ‘God’, or whether it was so narrow, so fearful, so blinkered, so arrogant as to insist that only the bishop’s view was tenable.’? What God would have thought of it all, she alone knows.
Cat chat
David Dulley’s essay on ‘*The Language of God as Love and not as Monster’’ elsewhere in this issue is untypical of much of his work in that it doesn’t take the form of a conversation with one of his cats, though it appears in his latest book, Still More Feline Conversation (available from 3 Elm Court, Cholmeley Park, Highgate, London N6 5EJ - suggest £2 contribution).
In this, the third of his cattalk books - the first, Conversations with Mona, was praised in the Guardian as ‘‘a subtle and amusing journey on the edges of faith’’ and ‘*your cheapest way into the God debate, and out of it’’ - David grumbles to cats Caroline and Sebastian about Aileen La Tourette’s description of his work in this magazine as ‘‘twee’’. ‘‘She’s right,’’ he concedes, ‘‘and she said nice things as well, but truth is bad for one’s vanity’’.
Tigress La Tourette - ‘‘she must be very elegant with a name like that’’ says Caroline - suggested David’s call for a radical redistribution of the world’s resources was ‘‘like being pro-apple-pie or pro-motherhood’’. ‘‘But it isn’t!’’, David tells his feline friends. ‘‘Redistribution is painful, and agreement on effective action difficult. But they’re essential to our survival; and smooth complacency is a more subtle threat than selfishness. That’s why I’m a democratic socialist, and why I write my little fables about cats, to encourage people like myself who have plenty of vague goodwill which we find it hard to translate into political or personal action. We resp nd sometimes to persuasion, but we run away | tigresses’’. ‘*Feeling better now?’’ asks Sebastian.
Calling Quaker theologians
My friend and Friend Rodney Hooper is preparing a paper for a forthcoming Quaker Theology Seminar and has asked me to ask SoF Friends for their help. If you have quotes, references or thoughts which may be helpful, or ideas you would like him to develop for you, drop him a line at 40 Henley Road, Norwich NR2 3NL, or phone him on Norwich 506151. But you’ll have to be quick. His paper must be in by the end of the month.
Off his head
Finally, a cautionary tale for errant clergy, nicked from the Guardian correspondent in Bangkok, Nicholas Cumming-Bruce (no, we haven’t got to the joke yet).
Thai Buddhist monk Sayan Duriyalak discovered his abbot making love to a nun - so he cut off the abbot’s head with a kitchen knife. ‘‘T want to uphold our moral and religious principles’’, a still-bloodied Sayan told police who arrested him, adding that he planned to display the severed head in a Bangkok park ‘‘as a warning to errant clergy everywhere”’.
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