Is the Network sidelining its church members and going overboard on humanism? JIM DAVIES thinks so, and asks Are we still a fortunately the tolerance | required of others within our broad church seems to be less in evidence than once it was. I have some sympathy with those like Mike Jenkins who have lost patience with the traditional churches and seek to make a new start regardless of the dangers and difficulties involved - as his cogently argued article in the Winter 1997 issue sets out. But in making his point did this really require an all-out attack on Stephen Mitchell’s Agenda for Faith?
Are we really saying that all of our culture and language can be simply made again at the drop of a hat? Mike said, “the church is a human creation (remember!). It is what we are because we are it: there is nothing else”. Is this so? Surely there is need for a little caution here? While Karl Marx cannot be quoted as an authority nowadays, he surely wasr’t wrong on every issue; for instance Marx and Engels’ (1868) Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” That might give us pause for thought.
It is not possible to simply make all things new as if the past never happened. Are all of us who decide to fight on in the traditional churches really just “the dead”, fools who must circle the world in order to get back to our neighbour next door? Possibly so, it may be that we are just too dim to realise it, I suppose. If this is the case, please could we ask for a little patience for the slowlearners in the class?
Clearly Mike is entitled to his honestly expressed views but I have noted a “How can we square our acceptance of the postmodernism/ post-structuralism of Cupitt...with a happy acceptance of humanism?” less than subtle change in the recent wording of the inside front cover of our quarterly magazine which appears on the surface, despite disclaimers, to be a semi-official, anonymous statement on what the Network actually is. This I think is less than fair. Whereas once those of us attending a “Church-members-in-SoF” gathering could happily echo David Boulton’s tolerant statement in his A Reasonable Faith:
Introducing the Sea of Faith Network, and as recently as the Winter 1997 issue, the wording of “the contingent of committed members of local churches:
C of E, RC, Quaker, Unitarian and the Mainstream non-conformist denominations” as acceptable and unproblematic, in the latest Spring issue we get the jibe, “For those in the Network — and there are some! — who belong to a church, or synagogue, or other religious institution, God is not dead”. For the rest of the membership he plainly is, as the rest of the introduction makes clear, and this obviously sets church members apart from the humanists and others in SoF membership.
I would like to correct this blanket statement. For me at least, God is dead.
There was a great deal of acrimony, misunderstanding and abuse directed at Tom Altizer during and after last years conference, Anne Padley as | recall being the only person to publicly voice support: “In a splendidly passionate piece of non-realist Bible-chumping, he gave an account of what at least one road Church? aspect of the Christian myth meant to him. Here at last was an actual taste, a flavour of non-realist religion...more like chilli pepper than anything, but I was extremely grateful for it”, As Mark C. Taylor noted in his book Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion, Karl Barth’s neo-orthodoxy governed theological discourse from 1918 to the 1960s. The orthodoxy in question was Protestant or, more precisely, Calvinist.
It was challenged by the second leading twentieth-century theological option, the so-called “death-of-God” theology. “The most important of the radical death-of-God theologians”, writes Taylor, “is Thomas J.J. Altizer. The 1966 publication of his Gospel of Christian Atheism unleashed a debate that still rages in theological circles. In subsequent articles and books, Altizer continues to develop and refine the position he initially advanced in the mid-sixties...his theological vision represents a reworking of Hegel’s most basic insights...a radical immanence in which every vestige of transcendence disappears...When fully comprehended, the incarnation does not merely involve a single historical figure but is an all-encompassing kenotic process through which the infinite empties itself into the finite. From Hegel’s and Altizer’s dialectical perspective, the descent of the infinite into the finite is at the same time the elevation of the finite to the infinite. Though the death of God initially seems to be the disappearance of the center and ground of value, which inevitably leads to nihilism...within Altizer’s economy of salvation, the death of God redeems appearances, and appearances are redemptive. In terms that mix the insights of Hegel and Nietzsche, Altizer proclaims the good 39> news of his ‘gay wisdom”. —* a Personally, I do not buy all of this, but I am sympathetic to the approach and frankly I don’t see it as being divorced from the ideas of Lloyd Geering and Cupitt which I thought most of us in SoF happily accepted. In fact I would argue that Cupitt’s theology builds on Altizer’s.
As for the strong current in favour of humanism which seems to be running in the SoF, I am not entirely happy to go along with this as I would have thought that the anti-humanism of post-modernist thinkers of the stature of Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan and Althusser with their decentring of the human subject, deconstruction of the unified, transcendental self, etc., central as they see these to be to humanism, might have made more impact on us given our supposedly postmodern outlook. Still I leave others to stir this anti-Cartesian pot!
I would simply like to ask how we can square our acceptance of the postmodernism/ post-structuralism of Cupitt and the supposedly general allegiance of SoF to postmodernism with a happy acceptance of humanism and an almost universal repudiation of Altizer?
In February about 50 people attended the annual gathering of “Churchmembers-in-SoF”. This was apparently about double the number who attended the previous year. This may of course signal another exodus from the churches as Mike Jenkins would possibly argue, or it may indicate a realisation that we can work towards something new within the churches.
Clearly many were concerned about the possibility of some initiative being taken within the churches. There were a large number of suggestions as to what, might be included in a letter to the press. Personally I don’t think “Church-members-in-SoF” should be side-lined as yet. After all, SoF started out from the churches. Remember Radicals and the Future of the Church?
Remember Cupitt?
Jim Davies is a retired librarian living in Wakefield and a member of Yorkshire SoF group. We comment on some of his points in Postscripts on page 23.