And, of course, there’s Don Cupitt’s new magnum opus, After God: The Future of Religion, out next month (April) from Weidenfeld and Nicholson in the UK and Basic Books in the USA. It is being translated into five languages. We plan to give it some space (but only in English) in our next issue! ‘Famous Five’ bat for Non-realists God and Reality: Essays on Christian Non-realism Edited by Colin Crowder, Foreword by Rowan Williams Mowbray, 1997, 178 pages, £14.99 THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS WAS PUBLISHED IN November 1996, despite the 1997 date inside, about six months later than originally expected. Its editor is Lecturer in Theology at the university of Durham. He locates its conception at the Sea of Faith conference in Leicester in 1994 and says that later that year Judith Longman, then of Cassell, and he agreed that there was “need of a new kind of book on the non-realist debate, which would emphasize the internal diversity of Christian non-realism itself and of the critical response it has generated over the last few years”.
The resultant book has twelve contributors. Five (they bat first) are described by the publishers as leading non-realist writers (but see below). The other seven are categorized as some of the most influential critics of their work. All twelve explore non-realism from a variety of perspectives and the publishers see the book as an introduction to the contemporary ‘debate and a contribution to its future development as a constructive theological dialogue.
The five are Don Cupitt, Anthony Freeman, David Hart, Stephen Mitchell and Graham Shaw.
The seven may not all be so familiar to this magazine’s readers and so I give a little more information about them: Jeff Astley (Director of the North of England Institute for Christian Education), Daphne Hampson (Senior Lecturer in Divinity at the University of St Andrews), Fergus Kerr OP (Honorary Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh), George Pattison (Dean of Chapel at King’s College, Cambridge and editor of Modern Believing), Peter Selby (Professional Fellow in Applied Christian Theology at the University of Durham and honorary assistant bishop in the dioceses of Durham and Newcastle), Denys Turner (Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham) and Graham Ward (Dean of Peterhouse, Cambridge).
In a foreword, the Bishop of Monmouth writes that the central question is not, “Does God exist?” but “How does God exist?”. I look forward to detailed reviews and from them to the constructive dialogue that is so badly needed within the churches and elsewhere.
Meanwhile I content myself with an appreciation of the editor’s introduction. He seems to me to have done his homework on the Sea of Faith Network well. In particular, he writes (page 3), “I ought to stress, however, that many members of the Sea of Faith Network, and even some of the writers named above [‘the five’], are reluctant to be described as ‘non-realists’.