Don Cupitt as the joker in the pack
MONICA FURLONG's new book C of E: The State It's In casts an affectionate but intensely critical eye on England's established church.
David Jenkins, former Bishop of Durham, will be reviewing it in our next issue. Here we extract a passage of particular interest to SOF readers:
Trick or treat? ...Another persona non grata for the church is Don Cupitt, clergyman, famously Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and, since his retirement, a Life Fellow of Emmanuel. In 1987 [Should be 1980 - Ed.] he wrote a book Taking Leave of God which was the beginning of a long sequence of books about the "non-realist God", the God who is structured from human imagination. In following on from a successful television series called Sea of Faith in the 1980s Cupitt helped to start a movement called The Sea of Faith, an organisation which holds conferences and publishes material discussing Cupitt's ideas and other ideas related to it. Quite a lot of clergy belong to it. One of them, Anthony Freeman, was sacked from his job in the Chichester diocese for refusing to defend traditional theology.
Since the mid 1980s Cupitt has produced a stream of slender books, sometimes more than one a year, in which he has talked about God, the churches, postmodernism, language, art and much else. He is quite simply the most interesting theologian around, not least because he tries to talk in everyday language and eschew the usual mandarin style which effectively excludes everyone not trained as a theologian. In spite of this he is not, in my view, particularly easy to read, but I value immensely his recognition that theology is of interest and importance outside its own charmed little circle. I am not saying that therefore I understand all that he says, only that I know he is trying to talk to me and others like me, not conducting a conversation from which I am carefully excluded. He is conducting a dialogue, not a monologue, with anyone interested enough to join in, and his side of the conversation is conducted not only with great knowledge in all sorts of fields of study, but with the most extraordinary passion, the sort that ordinary believers in God rarely show nowadays. Cupitt's non-belief feels more religious than most people's belief.
He is ready to use jokes, puns, even tricks, to make his readers think. In fact what has gradually emerged in his later writing is the image of "the Trickster". Many cultures, among them North American Indian, Inuit and Aboriginal Australian, regard the trickster as a sort of holy man. He is always going the opposite way from everyone else, not doing what is expected of him, making "mistakes", having accidents, yet getting something fundamental right. By inverting the normal pattern of things, in particular the gravity and heavy solemnity of "good people", he forces questions, doubts, crises, that might never occur to his community without his contribution. :
Almost alone among contemporary theologians Cupitt admits to religious experience - quite a lot of it. In his most recent book (at the time of writing - another will undoubtedly have appeared before this is published), he describes, under the title of "Bliss", a marvellous event which happened to him the previous year. He was sitting at his desk, writing a-book, and looking out at Cambridge's Parker's Piece "at moving clouds, kites, cars, groups of walkers and cyclists". Because of the writing he was doing he saw the scene as "Being" coming into existence in the human context - "the worlds of Being, of Meaning, and of human life". "These thoughts mounted. An all-round, unobstructed, clear understanding of things, which included me, seemed to dawn. There was an instant like the moment when a tightly coiled spring begins to release its energy, and then a violent explosion of pure happiness which passed so rapidly that I became conscious of it and identified it only as something that was already fast receding and becoming forgotten. I found myself snatching at it as it slipped away, melting through my fingers." Such moments of ecstasy or satori are rare in most people's lives, if they have them at all. Cupitt has "had such an experience, on average, every few years since early childhood". One such incursion of "the divine" came to him, in extreme pain, while watching sunlight through the window of a hospital ward.
What Cupitt does not do, as almost everyone else does, is to tie such experience immediately to "God".
Since Cupitt does not believe in anyone as static as the old objective God, when he speaks of "the divine" he forces us to stretch our minds to understand the incomprehensible (which is what primitive peoples value about the trickster), and we learn that he is speaking of something continually in flux, a flux of which we ourselves are a part. Like the feminists speaking of God in female terms (though they don't really believe he is a woman any more than he is a man), and thereby jolting Christian complacency, Cupitt speaks of "the divine" in terms of flux, the flux of Being, and moves us on, like a needle in the groove of an old-fashioned record, to listen to a new bit of tune. It is exciting, but disturbing, and many Christians don't like it much.
What I notice is that a number of other theologians, George Pattison and "radical orthodoxy" among them, seem to have been affected by Cupitt's work, if only, in some cases, because it makes them cross; they seem to be contradicting, or answering or working around his ideas. The trickster cannot be ignored. "Radical orthodoxy" does not, for example, "go with" the fragmentation of postmodernism with the ready cheerfulness that Cupitt does. (Like Ross Thompson's "map folk" they are all for going back.) I have a feeling that Cupitt has annoyed them so much that it has sharpened up their ideas a good deal...
Monica Furlong’s important book is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £18.99 Reviews in our July issue...
Extracted from Monica Furlong's C of E: The State It's In, published by Hodder & Stoughton at £18.99.