Michael Morton reviews Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings (Modern Spiritual Masters) by Francis McDonagh (ed.) Orbis Books (New York 2009). 189 pages. £10.99. ISBN: 978-1-5705-823-2. reviews So, Don has come back to Jesus! More than 30 years after his first stab at the subject in a 1977 BBC book called Who was Jesus?, he’s back for another crack at decoding the sage of Nazareth. And this is vintage Cupitt. His aim, he tells us, is ‘to right an historic wrong’. The earliest followers of Jesus made him into a cosmic personification of what they dimly remembered and largely invented of his teachings, embedding it all in ‘almost entirely fictional biographies’. We can’t be sure of anything the New Testament tells us about the life and actions of Jesus. From the miraculous birth stories to the passion narratives, it was all made up by those who found Jesus easier to sell as a holy spirit, than a wholly human teacher. But now that Jesus as a god is ‘all washed up’, it’s time to rescue him from the Church, which turned a subversive prophet into ‘the insipid Christ of popular faith’.
Fortunately, Cupitt argues, if we can know virtually nothing of Jesus’ life, we can make a reasonable stab at recovering his core teachings. Here he relies on the work of the Jesus Seminar scholars. Indeed, I suspect this little book is Cupitt’s acknowledgment of the debt he owes the Seminar and its parent body, the Californianbased Westar Institute, which elected him a Fellow and arranged for publication of his books in the USA when the SCM Press in Britain (temporarily) dropped him.
Jesus and Philosophy is dedicated to Westar’s founder, Bob Funk, and Cupitt’s Jesus bears more than a passing resemblance to Funk’s.
Cupitt uses my summary of the Jesus Seminar’s work (in Who on Earth was Jesus?) to separate out a scholarly consensus on the authentic teachings of the historical Jesus from the theological mystifications of the four spin-doctors who wrote the canonical gospels.
What emerges is ‘a notably secular teacher who does not appeal to religious law’, and whose ‘kingdom’ teachings offer ‘a secular hope, the age-old dream of a good society here on this Earth’. Above all, says Cupitt, Jesus’ authentic teaching was strongly antinomian – that is, against obedience to law, rules, and religious ordinances. ‘Here we glimpse Jesus’ radical humanism, his understanding that morality itself only becomes really moral when human beings have fully appropriated it to themselves. No god can possibly tell me what morality is. Only my own heart can do that.’ (The old evangelical idea that we are saved when we take Jesus into our heart takes on a new meaning!).
Cupitt draws out ‘the philosophical implications of Jesus’ commanding ethical vision’. Jesus is not a rationalist and realist, who wants us to regard existing reality as fixed and rational, and to stay within its bounds. He wants us to step outside existing reality and choose a new world. He called this new world ‘the kingdom of heaven’, a glimpsed alternative to our default reality, what I have called an enabling dream: that is, a vision that propels us into action, spurred on by the realisation that only we can make it happen (which is why I obstinately refer to it as the republic of heaven). In my own books The Trouble with God and Who on Earth was Jesus? I place Jesus in the utopian tradition. Cupitt goes further: ‘The long-lived, slow-acting, indelible Dream... we owe most of all [my italics] to Jesus of Nazareth.’ In his final chapter, Cupitt concedes that the Dream ‘seems to be impossible’. If we all sell up everything we have, who would there be to sell to? We cannot all live like holy vagabonds. So the Dream will always be just that: a dream. But ‘the compromise might be justifiable, so long as the Dream is not idle, but influential and productive’. So long, I would say, as it remains an enabling dream, subversively gnawing away at the foundations of received wisdom, received morality, and received notions of social and economic order. As Cupitt concludes, ‘If the Dream is sufficiently vivid and attractive, it will shape our values and the orientation of our lives, so that in the very long term it will tend to become self-fulfilling.’ Of course, Cupitt lays himself wide open to the familiar charge that he, like everyone else who looks for the real Jesus, comes up with a reflection of himself: Jesus as proto-Cupitian philosopher of religion, antinomian nihilist, moral relativist, and so on. The charge wouldn’t worry him. I imagine he would respond that every concept of Jesus is necessarily a reconstruction, and that a relevant living Jesus is of more use to us than a dead historical one. But Cupitt’s Jesus is both historical and relevant. He was ‘the most important pioneer in antiquity of a kind of radical humanism in ethics that is still up to date and challenges us even today’.
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Review of Jesus and Philosophy by Don Cupitt (SCM Press, London 2009). Pbk. 110 pages. £16.99. ISBN 978-0-334-044338-6.