David Hart reports on the Day Conference at The Multi-Faith Centre at Derby University, 'The Theology of Don Cupitt' A sort of live 'Festschrift' was held for Don, in his presence, on Saturday 11th June, with the intention of making some sort of assessment of his contribution to the history of religious thought in the twentieth century.
About 150 people attended, both fans and critics, and the tenor of the debate was even, with a good smattering of humour to help us negotiate some of the jagged edges!
Frank Walker opened the conference with a lively presentation that viewed Don as it may be seen by the ordinary person, recognising how Don has called ordinary people to question obsolete assumption.
Sof 54 July 2002 22 D r a f t O n l y Karen Armstrong gave a glowing tribute, revealing that she had arrived at a non-realist position by a completely different route from Don's ('from the Koran, the great Rabbis of the Talmud, Maimonides, Ibn al-Arabi , Mullah Sadra, Mir Dimad, the Kabbalists and the Sufis... [and] the whole Greek Orthodox Christian tradition, especially Denis the Areopagite'). But she very much appreciated his philosophic underpinning of that type of position.
Brian Hebblethwaite described poignantly his debts as a close friend of Don's, but then urged us to consider he was 'wrong, wrong, wrong' and almost as deluded as Nietzsche had been in the previous century.
Daphne Hampson took the position of agreeing with Don that patriarchal Christianity based on the Incarnation was no longer an appropriate myth for our society, and she valued Doris attention to the subordination of women that the Christian myth legitimised, but she still wished to keep a concept of a transcendent deity, using the romantic terminology first explored by Schleiermacher.
Dan Cohn-Sherbok suggested to Don if he had been a Jew he would not have been marginalised by his non-realist perspective, since there are established US synagogues that hold to atheist and agnostic views of God, including Mordecai Kaplan (Reconstructionist Judaism) and Sherwin Wine (Humanist Judaism).
After lunch we held a series of seminars on different aspects of Don's thought, from psychoanalysis to social implications. Then Don faced his challengers in a panelled question time that explored his contribution and the position he might hold in the theological world a century from now.
Feedback from the conference was very positive, and we are hoping to publish the papers shortly: look out for further details later this year!