Don Cupitt introduces his own summary of some of his recent thinking: "I'm often asked to give a public lecture to a non-specialist audience outlining my current ideas. For such occasions I usually write a combined handout and summary. The audience can see from it just where we are in the argument at any moment; I'm kept on the rails, while having a little freedom to improvise. It all works quite well. Here is a recent handout, as used March 1990 at Birmingham University. People ridicule these handouts for presenting in all-neat-and-tidied form an argument to the effect that you can't have it all cut-and-dried."
Cupitt's anti-system, neatly systematized.
All right, all right, I know.
BEYOND NIHILISM
1. Until quite recently the West took for granted platonism in philosophy (at least up to Kant ...) and supernaturalism in theology (up to A. Schweitzer).
PLATONISM, the belief in 'absolutes', i.e. objective principles, out there in a noumenal world to guide our thought and conduct. A bit of our minds is outside language, history and cultural change. It contacts an eternal order. There is a real scheme of things out there: hence the unity of Truth and the unity of Virtue. A pre-established harmony between the mind and the world: 'Realism'.
SUPERNATURALISM, a colourful, personalizing version of platonism. Notice: strong emphasis on founding and final Truth, and the habit of jumping to a higher order to seek explanations and guidance. 2. The story of the general secularization of culture since the Renaissance is familiar. It involves, among other things: a) A changeover from a sacred, hierarchized to a one-level, naturalistic view of the world, b) and therefore a preference for immanent, naturalistic explanations; c) the detection in the course of events of mathematical regularities rather than moral purposiveness; and d) a return of value into this world, this life, the body, the passions, human agency.
SOME AREAS:
SCIENCE (e.g. Astronomy, Medicine, Agriculture, Meteorology) HISTORY (including Church history) PSYCHOLOGY (including religious psychology) LANGUAGE (meaning as differential and changing) COMPARATIVE RELIGION (religion as cultural) 1980s 3. ANTI-FOUNDATIONALISM. Human knowledge systems, moralities etc are so varied, so tied into evolving forms of life, that it no longer makes sense to try to give them objectivity by grounding them in an eternal order. Hence the END OF PLATONISM: 'ANTI-REALISM'. Among the casualties: the fact-interpretation distinction, pure data, fixed meanings, objective truth, any linguistic 'harmony' between the mind, or language, and the world, absolute beginnings, a last end. i.e. we lose so much that some speak of NIHILISM, some of POST-MODERNISM.
Our standards, our language, our values become fluid and unsupported. 4. POSTMODERNISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE a) ACCEPTING CONTINGENCY. We just find ourselves in an historical process, a life, that has no outside. We are immersed in a culture and programmed with a language, values etc that just are what they are. They can't be justified; rather, they have to be accepted, and used b) INTERPRETATION. Everyone is an interpretative artist, in the sense that we are given a vocabulary, a score, a script - and must make it our own, do our own thing with it. If there are no antecedently-fixed absolute meanings, we must imagine and make meanings. c) MAKING TRUTH. Instead of seeing life as receiving of, and living by, a fixed framework of objective Truth, we see the task as a continual new making-of-truth. So life's like an art-project, our fiction. d) MAKING GOOD. Similarly in ethics, there's always an inherited valuation-of-life, built into our vocabulary and practices. Our task is to develop it, criticise it, update it, and to make new values. As we do.
Thus a postmodern philosophy of life is non-metaphysical. It emphasizes groundlessness, tradition, language, interpretation and art. 5. POSTMODERN RELIGION a) FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE CULT MENTALITY? Historic Christianity was platonic and supernaturalist. To survive, it becomes more fideistic and authoritarian. A closed mind, a fixed circle of ideas, strong group pressure on the individual ... and TU QUOQUE arguments about 'presuppositions' to the effect that 'we are no more irrational than everyone else.' b) ACTIVE NON-REALISM. Alternatively, a fully critical view of religion might see it as a productive, creative activity by which we continually reinterpret our own tradition, altering it as history prompts. A religious belief-system is a set of life-guiding symbols and a programme of world-criticism and world-transformation, which is itself continually under review. (A radicalized version of Catholic Modernism).
And haven't we in a sense always known that religion is human and historically-evolving? Christianity in particular is always passing into humanism, secularizing itself, losing itself and thereby renewing itself. 6. NON-REALISM AND THE BIBLE Notice a) Counter-factual elements in Jewish faith, and b) in PAUL and JOHN, the injunction to live as if it were all true already ('realized eschatology'), so that it functions as a life-guiding programme, rather than as a lot of supernatural hypotheses. Language about resurrection, eternal life etc is to be cashed in the here and now.