The lasting human needs that give rise to what we details, including a large selfaddressed envelope to:
Helen and Peter Fisher, | pow call religious beliefs |} 17 Vincent Road, will remain, but there’sno [| Sheffield S7 1BQ reason to suppose that religions themselves will.” a Visit the Andrew Brown, = > “The Independent” SoF Website www.sofn.org.uk REVIEWS: BOOKS Don Cupitt sometimes takes us all down a blind alley, writes LESLIE GRIFFITHS in this critical review of his latest book, The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech (SCM) £8.95 Cupitt: serious thinker or practical joker? that the word “life” is where the action is these days. This is the word that now carries much of the baggage previously borne by the word “God”. Our intrepid author seems to have kept a notebook in his top pocket whose jottings have provided the raw material for this latest work. Over the last thirty or forty years, so his argument runs, the word life has acquired a new and different set of dynamics which dictionaries have yet to catch up with. He’s noted phrases and themes from sources as varied as a Christian Aid poster, Damien Hirst and a roadside shrine. More than once he presents long lists of the ill-considered trifles he’s snapped up and they do indeed make fascinating reading.
Life is what biologists study, what actuaries calculate, what biography is about, what literature (and particularly the novel) seeks to capture. Over the last 150 years, alongside the secularization of religion and the unabated erosion of traditional religious belief, we’ve seen another equally persistent trend, namely the sacralization of life. Or at least, we should have seen it since it’s been there right under our noses. This process has seen “frustrated religious feeling... displaced into ‘life’ - this life.” The life Cupitt is interested to discuss and to illustrate is all about the here and now.
Not for him notions of life understood as a preparation for some future existence beyond the grave. It’s one-day-at-a-time stuff, to be grabbed, enjoyed, made the most of; it’s life understood performatively.
A glance at the book’s index shows that the author’s apparently free-roaming ideas are well and truly anchored in writers and thinkers he’s been parading before us for a long time now. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Husserl, Wittgenstein and Darwin are in full view, accompanied by DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and (a pet hate of mine) FR Leavis. So the apparent newness of the material gathered in his notebook is soon tied back firmly to the thinking of Cupitt’s familiar old mentors. Tout ca change...
I've always felt that Cupitt’s muchvaunted concept of non-realism was defined in contradistinction to a notional “realism” that’s more of a man of straw set up for the purpose of demolition than a S™ inner voice has told Don Cupitt responsible intellectual idea put forward as part of the search for a contemporary apologetic. New Testament Scholar Tom Wright has worked hard and diligently to establish what he calls “critical realism” as a central feature of his methodology. Hans Kung, in his magisterial Does God Exist?, explores modern unbelief and puts forward a carefully argued basis from which a contemporary theology might be developed. His whole argument turns on ’ “Today we have to ask why it is that the values ‘taught by RELIGION, which seem sensible in themselves, have got such a bad press?
Undoubtedly it is Partly because RELIGION is often put forward as a series of chants and rituals rather than asa sane, practical and, dare } I say it, necessary guide _ to responsible living.” - Indarjit Singh, editor “Sikh Messenger” his well-known phrase “trust in uncertain reality”. The ready recognition on the part of these and other modern voices that reality/realism must be approached carefully and (of course) critically seems much nearer the kind of discussion we need at this time. Cupitt’s out-of-hand dismissal is far too naive for me.
For all that, he writes so engagingly well. One example will serve the point.
He describes modern angst. “It is hard to see”, he writes, “how someone caught up in it can escape, except by faith that somehow, somewhere, someone or something has got that huge swarm of finite possibilities under firm control. Any doctrine that tells us that the future course of events is predetermined is a huge relief, whether it be astrology, or mechanistic determinism, or orthodox predestinarian theism. If I can be assured that there is but one scenario for the future, then I can study it and adapt myself to it. I know where I am. I can act, I can start living.” But even the brilliance of this description yields a conclusion that steamrollers any further (or more nuanced) discussion. “Faith”, Cupitt concludes, “writes off this world and this life and instead lives on the basis of dogmatic promises and a foretaste or foreshadowing of a Real life that is yet to come.” This is such a wild generalization as to deserve to be called irresponsible.
But then Cupitt confesses his own naughtiness just a page later: “I like being infuriatingly heretical,” he states. So there, it was all a joke and he’s caught me out for the humourless creature I am. Perhaps I ought to treat him as practical joker rather than serious thinker.
A friend of the author suggested to him that “Life-talk can be as naive, superstitious and self-serving as can God-talk”. That same friend asked whether Cupitt was going to produce any “criteria for evaluating all the new(ish) life-talk”. After reading this book, I’m certain that he hasn’t.
When I was at Cambridge in the 1960s I got caught up in the swirl of ideas then current: Wittgenstein, Sartre, Soundings, Harvey Cox, Paul van Buren and the most dogmatic phase of the historical critical study of the Bible. I had previously read English literature and struggled with the Bloomsbury set, Scrutiny and Lawrence. I can see how Cupitt got from there to where he is today. But I was rescued from the blind alley down which he’s disappeared. I went from Cambridge to Haiti where I spent the next ten years. I encountered Liberation Theology at work.
The non-European cultural mold of black people challenged my Western ideas.
All my ministry since has been in multicultural contexts. I've never sensed in any of Cupitt’s writing any awareness of voices from these backgrounds. I’ve often wondered how many members of the Sea of Faith movement are black. It needs lots of them. And I certainly wonder how many black people would even care to get to page two of this book. And that too is the strongest comment I could make on its thinking and its premises.
Leslie Griffiths is Minister at Wesley’s Chapel, London, and a former President of the Methodist Conference. “Rugged” by Kitty North, oil on canvas, 1998 SoF Publications A REASONABLE FAITH Introducing the Sea of Faith Network cay David Boulton jet “Vin! J 0952393018. Price £2.00 kK Soateanact Sy Ee membership enquirers. i” of «| An accessible introduction to the ideas and activities of Sea of Faith, a non- | denominational, inter-faith network which explores and promotes religious faith as human creation.
Review of The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech by Don Cupitt (SCM, £8.95).