First of all let me say that I love the title 'The Sea of Faith'. But for me it is an image informed not by Matthew Arnold so much as by a British World War One poet named G.A. Studdart-Kennedy, who likened God to the sea beneath the sun: it always changes yet never changes, says Studdart-Kennedy, and I have a sense that that is what the God we talk about — or try not to talk about! — is all about. It's an ever-changing never-changing concept that sort of haunts us.
Secondly, it’s always a pleasure to be with Don Cupitt. I love to watch his mind work. I’ve watched him sometimes when he could not even speak, because he could not articulate the place where his mind had already raced on to be. I really would like to have the church that I represent appreciate and value Don Cupitt’s work and his probing. I worry about a church that is afraid of new truth.
I met a theologian once who said, ‘Any God who can be killed ought to be killed. You do the world a service if you kill a mortal deity.” I think we ought to free the theologians of the church to probe any frontier, to walk on any path and to make their thoughts available to the life of the church for us to do with whatever it is that we can. I think Don Cupitt ought to be valued and honoured as one of the great servants of the church in this generation — and that is true whether anybody agrees with everything he’s ever said or not. If Don is like me, he doesn’t agree with everything he’s ever said on more than one occasion!
I wish that I were Don Cupitt’s bishop, for if I were I would support his work, I would protect him from the abuse of this institution and I would free him to roam wherever he decided to roam, so that he would make his gifts available to this institution. It would be an honour to list Don Cupitt among the priests of the diocese of Newark — and if things ever get too tough, Don... [warm laughter and applause].
The next thing I would say is that I go to a lot of conferences and I am certainly honest to say that this is different from any conference that I have ever attended . . . in that usually my role as a conference leader is to break open concepts, traditions, stereotypes and idols that have been created by the institution, so that somehow we can move people beyond these stereotypes and idols into new territory and new issues and new consciousness. But here I found that the concepts, the traditions, the stereotypes and the idols have been shattered already, and the issue is what can be said in the face of this, what meaning found, what issues can be expanded? This conference has given me a new vision of what the church might become.
I see the church dying today, as so many of you do, because I see it assuming that it is the place where religious answers can be found — and those answers are thinner and thinner and thinner. But I yearn for there to be a church that is a fellowship of human beings, which is primarily a place where religious questions might be raised in openness and honesty, without anyone saying, ‘But the bible says . . .” or ‘But the church teaches .. .” I saw a poster on a church wall one day that has always intrigued me. It said, ‘Why is it that the churches that claim to have all the answers don’t allow any questions?’ You ought to think about that.
A couple of other observations. An American playwright once said, ‘God is dead and modern folk gather nightly at the divine grave to weep.’ My sense is that a good deal of that weeping has been present here. You would not call it weeping, but it is found — it seems to me — in a reluctance to give up God but not a great reluctance to give up God-talk. There is even a bit of hostility I might try to identify, that seems to surround some comments when God has been referred to as if the person speaking still found great meaning in that word or that concept.
Even to suggest that that person is hanging on to ‘only a sliver’ is a bit pejorative. A sliver of God means that your point of view has almost prevailed but there’s this single little hook that has caught one or two people who are not brave enough, strong enough or free enough of their paternal needs or parental needs to take that final step into the glorious promised land of non-realism. May I suggest you might look at that language and check the pejorative quality that is in it. Perhaps there’s another way of looking at that. Perhaps it’s not a sliver at all. Perhaps what has happened is that through the years we’ve been able to break open the symbols and remove the barnacles and perhaps we’ve gotten down to what is an essence that has been hidden from us for years, not a sliver but an essence in its pristine beauty that we might look at in a different way.
I would like to suggest that sometimes we ought to look at the history of ideas in this world and recognise that some movements that had great promise tured out not to produce great results. The communist dream of a generation or so ago — their assumption that history was on the side of their convictions and that all that they needed was the passage of time that would bring victory to their point of view — was articulated quite well. Mr Kruschev said, ‘We will bury you.” He was not right.
Communism has vanished as from the face of the earth, at least the kind of military communism which was the bedrock of foreign policy in your country and mine since the end of World War II. I would question any commitment to the inevitability of any process of any human idea moving in a particular direction at a particular rate with a particular destination that we think we see clearly.
It just might be that the word ‘God’ needs to be unpacked and scraped and transformed and redefined, but that the word God still participates in reality. So much of the God that I have heard rejected here I have also long ago rejected. I’m not interested in a supernatural God, I’m not interested in an invasive God, a God who rules the world on a basis of rewards and punishments, a God who undergirds and authenticates oppressive measures, be they political or theological. I think I can reject that God as quickly as anyone else can, but I’m not certain that when I reject that concept of God I’m also rejecting God. I would like to reject all imperialistic words, all concepts that are part of a tradition that has oppressed human beings, but God for me is still real. God for me still is a symbolic word with all of its human limitations, but it refers to something that makes all the difference in the world to me.
As a bishop and as a member of institutional religion — not always certain how long I’ll be a member, not because of my votes but because of the votes of others who are not at all sure that I still represent Christianity as they understand it — but in my pilgrimage I am always planning to give a vote to my ancestors and to their faith journey. I also want to keep an ear tuned to the past. We know very much more conceptually today than did our ancestors in the faith, but I’m not sure that we’re much more perceptive. So I will continue to assume that there is a substance and a truth behind the symbolic words that I use to explore that realm, the realm I call spirit, or the transcendent, or the divine, and I will continue to use words like God and Christ and sin and grace and atonement and salvation and Holy Spirit. And I will continue to work within my institution to open that institution as widely as I can, so that people might find it a companion on their journey and to enable all folks to walk beyond the idolatry of the literalised symbols of our religious past.
I may never break out of that sufficiently to identify myself fully with the Sea of Faith, as much as I appreciate what you do and as much as I appreciate who you are. You have a vocation and I honour it. Please recognise that so do I. I have a very different vocation as a Christian and as a bishop. On the other hand, if the Sea of Faith finally turns out not to be the wave of the future, if it sinks into oblivion beyond the sunset because it had no unifying principle that would endure, I would like to suggest that if that day comes I hope that I will be around in a life-raft and I hope that somehow Ill be representing an institution that because of the work you’ve done has scraped itself much cleaner than its ever been before, and it’s there ready to offer a divine invitation and a welcome, to walk into the fullness of life, to bring your doubts, your ~ questions, your fears and your affirmations, and somehow to engage in dialogue with others who are in that pilgrimage.
SoF Magazine No. 23, October 1995 I think that there are people in the world today who want to look again at the symbols that once held life together, symbols that had been made little and idolatrous and had become destructive. And when symbols reach that point many people feel that they are no longer life symbols but have become death symbols, and so they have to be discarded. But there is another possibility and that is they can be broken. And when they are broken perhaps we can see the original essence of what the truth was that they pointed to in the first place, and begin to recover those.
Perhaps, now, those symbols have been broken open — and if they have this organisation has been instrumental in forcing us to look anew at some of those symbols. In any event, that will be my hope.
I would like to be your companion along the way. I would like to be in dialogue with you. But I would like to walk with you as one who is walking to the beat of a different drummer but one that can at least have your respect and one that will be using the path that I am walking to bring about many of the goals of a renewed humanity that I see as a part of this organisation’s work and effectiveness. We have loved being here and we thank you for the privilege.