An apologia for my thinking (part 2) by Don Cupitt The second part of a paper that was presented in advance of the Multi-Faith Centre conference that was held at Derby: | 1th May 2002.
So much for the way my philosophy was developing during the Eighties. In theology, I was in 1980 still close to the existentialist theologians — people like Bultmann and Tillich. For these thinkers, each Christian doctrine was to be understood in terms of the attitude to life that it prescribed.
Thus to believe in God as our Creator was to understand that you should treat your own existence as a pure and gracious gift, and to believe in God's Providence was to believe that if we stick to our faith, we will in the end come through. When I live a risen life, Christ is risen - in me; and when Christ's teaching rules my life, he is ascended - in me.
So I didn't actually change the doctrines very much at all. I just translated them into rules of life, as Wittgenstein had said one should do.
By the end of the Eighties, however, as I moved into all-out postmodernism, I was claiming the latitude to borrow religious symbols and themes and to reinterpret them in whatever way seemed to be necessary. The notion of an endless flux of conflicting interpretations after all applies as much to the Bible and the Christian tradition as to anything else, and I was feeling the need to take advantage of it, so that I could drastically reinterpret tradition. It was beginning to be clear that Christianity as we have received it is collapsing very rapidly, and we are moving into a revolutionary situation.
After 1991, then, I gave up officiating in church - though to this day I remain a communicant - and I began to talk about Post-Christianity, or alternatively ‘Kingdom theology’. The main idea is that we now need to move beyond the ecclesiastical version of Christianity that we have known hitherto.
Church-Christianity has a strong authority-structure. It is disciplinary, based on faith in supernatural doctrine, and very strongly oriented towards either life after death, or the Second Coming of Christ. In all these respects, it is now historically obsolete — the main reason being that since the death of communism and of the belief in progress, we have quickly lost all remaining forms of the idea that it is worth putting up with hard times now for the sake of a much better and greater world that is yet to come. Instead, we need what I call 'solar ethics', or kingdom religion. It is a way of committing oneself completely and unreservedly to life, through which we can find ‘eternal’ happiness (a happiness that never fails us, however bad things get to be) in the present moment. We can't trust doctrine and we can't trust promises about the future: religion must deliver now.
This last stage in my thinking was first sketched in 1994/5, and has been further elaborated in a flurry of books since 1996. There have been three or four new themes. In After God (1996) I sketched a philosophy of our religious history that aimed to show how in traditional society religious ideas functioned to stabilize the whole 'Symbolic Order’; that is, the whole world of language. A society oriented towards change, like ours, will not need the older kind of religion any more. In Mysticism after Modernity I argued that mysticism should be seen, not as a special way of knowing, but simply as an embryonic form of radical theology. It was a kind of writing that was already trying to resolve the traditional ecclesiastical theology down into 'solar' or ‘kingdom’ religion.
In particular, church religion sets up and insists on maintaining an unbridgeable gulf between Holy God and the sinful human being. The church's realistic view of God keeps believers in a state of permanent religious alienation and subjection, in order to terrify them into obedience and conformity. The mystical writer tries to deconstruct the gulf between God and the individual human being in order to overcome theological realism, unite the believer with God, and produce an effect of supreme happiness and liberation. It is of course because non-realist religion is such a wonderful release from realist religion that the church fears it, and has so often persecuted the mystics. For the church has always been a disciplinary organization that aims, not to fuse the divine and the human together, but to keep them apart for the sake of social control.
A third theme of recent years has been ontology, the theory of the nature of Being, or existence. In two books about 'Being’ I followed Heidegger in trying to overcome the traditional contrast between Eternal Being and temporal Becoming, saying that there is only temporal Be-ing. Be-ing is a continuous and gentle but very dense outpouring of pure contingency; a sort of white noise, which language differentiates and forms into the world of our experience. In my symbolism Be-ing is female, like 'the womb of time’. The fourth of these new themes arrived in the three little ‘Everyday Speech’ books of 1999 /2000, in which I tried to show that ordinary language is already 'the best radical theologian’. Study of the new idioms that have become established in the common language during the past half-century or so shows the remarkable extent to which ordinary people have already demythologized God down into the contingent flux of life. The new Kingdom form of religion is already taking shape. The reason why So] 55 September 2002 church Christianity is nowadays in such rapid decline is therefore not that it is being replaced by no religion, but that it is today being elbowed aside by its own fulfilment!
It is to be noted that in the new globalized and communicative world, change is brought about not by the labours of individual geniuses, but by a shift in the general consensus of which we become aware only in retrospect.
These recent ideas converge to show how it is that religion today is fast becoming more democratic, more identified with the way ordinary people experience their life, and more ready to accept and embrace everything's transience.
Belief in life after death is dying out. Religion is becoming less and less a matter of seeking an anchorage in a point somewhere outside life, and more and more a matter of simply saying Yes to life. In a final little trilogy I have tried to present my conclusions as Philosophy’s Own Religion (2000), as a project for Reforming Christianity (2001), and as a synthesis of Eastern and Western thought in Emptiness and Brightness (2002). From now on I imagine that there will be some tidying-up operations, but the main thrust has been taken about as far as my abilities can take it.
And that is that. I am still sometimes asked to write an autobiography, but my writings have been my autobiography, in the sense that through them I have slowly worked my way towards a personal religious outlook and philosophy of life with which I can feel content. It has often been very hard going, but I am not complaining about anything. In my view, not only should one say Yes to life, but one should also in the end be able to say Amen to one's own life. That I hope I can do; and I shall be even more pleased if my own testimony proves to be of use to some other people.
Copies are available of the July edition of the magazine in which the first part of this paper appeared.