Talk given to the 2024 SOF Conference by Anthony Freeman.
Inevitably this will be a personal account, if only because (apart from Don himself) I had my life changed more dramatically than anyone else as a result of the Sea of Faith. Put briefly, I lost my income, my home, my career, and the standing in society that still attaches to a parish priest in the Church of England. What I did not lose was my Christian faith: it was transformed, but in a way that has been entirely positive.
I shall first paint a picture of the theological landscape in the 1970s and ’80s, and then describe the significance of Don’s contribution in that context.
Christian Believing
We start in 1976, when the Church of England’s Doctrine Commission published a report on The Nature of Christian Faith and its Expression in Holy Scripture and Creeds. The Commission had been expected to give a summary of the Christian Doctrine held in the Church of England, and to show how this conformed to the God-given teaching already set out in the Bible and the Creeds. What it did instead, was to insist that ‘the first and fundamental loyalty of the Christian conscience … must be to the truth’. And that furthermore, this loyalty to the truth demands a genuinely open quest, a ‘voyage of discovery’ on which the final destination cannot be known in advance.
By taking this approach to Christian doctrine, the Commission acknowledged that it was putting itself at odds with ‘the overwhelming majority of Christians’, for whom the Bible and Creeds already contain the only correct answers to questions ‘about God and the universe and the relation between them’.
Nonetheless, the Commission took the view that for many Christians (including some of themselves), faith was no longer something fixed, that could be written down in scripture or in creed, or in a doctrine report, but an ongoing process, engaged in both by individuals and the church as a whole. They signalled this by giving their report the dynamic title Christian Believing, rather than the more static ‘Christian Doctrine’.
I can remember my pleasure that the Church of England was at last accepting officially the approach to Christian believing to which I myself had become accustomed. Not that it was altogether a surprise, because the chairman of the Commission was professor Maurice Wiles, whose two books, The Making of Christian Doctrine and The Remaking of Christian Doctrine, had largely guided my own understanding of the matter.
However, there were two problems. First – perhaps predictably – the report was thrown out by General Synod. They were not ready to accept that neither the Bible nor the Creeds could be treated as sources of absolute universal truth revealed by God.
The second problem was – for me – far more significant, and would lead me eventually to Don Cupitt and The Sea of Faith. This problem was, that having clearly set out the case against treating ‘the Faith’ as a set of divinely revealed propositions about God and creation, the 1976 Doctrine Report did nothing to address the religious consequences of such a position.
Weakness of Liberal Theology
There is a persistent underlying weakness of liberal-modernist theology, shown up by the Report: it cannot avoid looking wishy-washy and vague, and ultimately incapable of sustaining the religious practice it is meant to underpin. This is because it still maintains a theory of a supernatural world, with a Creator, a Saviour, etc., whose intentions and acts influence our lives, but at the same time admits that in practice no particular historical event can be proved to be an act of God. The same contradiction applies to the Bible (I quote the Report):
‘To speak of the Bible as the “Word of God”, or the “Word of God in the words of men”, is just as much a judgment of faith as to speak of some historical event as an “act of God”. It is not a proposition that can be proved.’
I can see how these must be judgments of faith. My difficulty is, having ruled out identifiable divine intervention or revelation, what basis does a liberal Christian have for making any such judgment of faith? And once the judgment is made, once we have made the leap of faith, what difference does it make?
To take an example, St John assures us that, although no one has ever seen God, we know what he like because the only Son has made him known. But what good is that to me? Even if I accept (as a judgment of faith) that Jesus is the Son of God who has made God known, I have never met Jesus face to face. My only access to Jesus is through the New Testament, and the critical study of the gospels – which lies at the heart of liberal theology – has shown that there is no single clear picture of the historical Jesus. At best, we have a confusing and often conflicting collage of snapshots, and these may well tell us more about the evangelists than about him.
My act of faith in Jesus as the Son of God has brought me no closer to a description of the unseen God, because I have no secure information about the Jesus I have never seen either.
Perhaps the answer is to bypass the Bible and go direct to the detailed description of God contained in the Creeds. But this will not do either, because liberal theology quite rightly applies the same critical approach to the Creeds as it does to scripture. The Doctrine Commission Report is remarkably frank in this regard. Having acknowledged the difficulties facing those who hammered out the Creeds in the first place, in their ‘attempt to express the inexpressible’, the Report then goes on:
‘… we can form some idea of what the creeds intended to affirm when, for example, they asserted the humanity and divinity of Jesus; and we cannot escape the obligation to decide whether we can repeat that assertion in their own language; or whether, while continuing to share their intention, we must express it in different terms; or whether again we have to conclude that what the creeds intended to say is no longer meaningful or in fact not true.’
You can see why General Synod did not like this. But I quote it here simply to underline my point about the weakness of liberal theology. To maintain a theory of a supernatural God, while admitting that our official description of God could be wrong, or at best meaningless, is a very peculiar and weak position.
I hope I have said enough to show why, by the early eighties, the liberal theology of my student days had ceased to be an adequate foundation for my preaching and teaching ministry. This is the point at which Don Cupitt came to my rescue.
Enter Don Cupitt
You must by now be able to picture me, frustrated by my liberal-modernist teachers like Maurice Wiles, who took away my confidence in the Bible and Creeds as reliable windows on to God, but still said I must – by a judgment of faith – accept that he existed. John Macquarrie, another Oxford professor, had gone so far as to write that it is probably more accurate to say that God does not exist than that he does, but he then went off to quote Psalm 94, to the effect that God might still have his beady eye on us, so best say he exists anyway.
And then comes Don Cupitt, this saviour from Cambridge, saying, ‘But, Anthony, you don’t have to say that God exists. In fact, from a religious point of view, you ought not to speak of God’s existence at all.’ The effect was like St Paul, telling his fellow-Jewish Christians, that they no longer needed to struggle to keep the whole Law of Moses. In fact, as Christians, they should not follow the Law at all. I felt free of a great burden.
But if Don was right, why was everyone else still clinging to the language of existence in relation to God? The unwitting villain, it seems, was Plato. He had lived 400 years before Christ; but seven centuries later, at the time Christian doctrine was being formalised, the Graeco-Roman intellectual world was gripped by a revival of Plato’s philosophy, Neo-Platonism. Plato had taught that our earthly physical world was but a pale reflection of the real but unseen world, the world of what he called ‘forms’. Thus every dog that we have ever seen is a more-or-less imperfect version of the archetypal heavenly form of Dog – capital D. And what was true of physical objects was equally true of abstract words like truth, beauty and justice. These words, according to Plato, must also designate forms, real beings existing in a timeless, heavenly world above.
This is what Don calls philosophical realism. But as he explains in The Sea of Faith, that is no longer how we understand such things. I quote:
‘We now see that values like this do not have to be independently and objectively existent beings in order to be able to claim our allegiance. [e.g.] We can … recognize that duty calls … without supposing that duty … is a real being.’
This what Don calls philosophical non-realism. And – crucially – it applies to religious words just as much as to ethical or aesthetic terms. Thus, Don goes on to write:
‘As with values, so with God, because God’s status in the language is very close to that of values. God simply is the ideal unity of all value, its claim upon us, and its creative power. … Just as you should not think of justice and truth as independent beings, so you should not think of God as an objectively existing super-person. That is a mythological and confusing way of thinking.’
The key sentence in this quotation is, God’s status in the language is very close to that of values. Don’s revolution is to say that we should not ask what certain words refer to in some outside world, but rather we should focus on the meaning we give to words and ideas. We should study how we use them, and the role they actually play in our lives. And this is especially the case with religious words and ideas.
And so he continues: ‘The … idea of God is imperative, not indicative. To speak of God is to speak about the moral and spiritual goals we ought to be aiming at, and about what we ought to become. The meaning of “God” is religious, not metaphysical … The true God is not God as a picturesque supernatural fact, but God as our religious ideal.’
Of course, this change of approach raises all sorts of questions that I don’t have time to deal with here, but which I discuss in simple terms in my book God in Us. My aim today has been to give a sense of the freedom that non-realism gave to me.