Frank Walker Don Cupitt's book The Sea of Faith, first published in 1984 to accompany his BBC TV series, has been reissued in a revised edition by SCM Press (£12.50). Cupitt's new book, After All (extracts from which were first published in this magazine last October under the title After the Church) was published last month, also by SCM Press (£9.95).
Some years ago I took part in a demo outside the Cambridge Guildhall. It was not long after the Vatican had made the grave pronouncement that Fr Hans Kung could no longer be considered an official Roman Catholic theologian. In protest, two thousand students of Tubingen University had marched in torchlight procession to support their professor. In the end, all that happened was that Fr Kung exchanged a chair in the Catholic Faculty of Theology for a chair in some secular university department. Martyrdom in modern Europe can be a very civilized affair. As far as professors of theology are concerned, it may even give them a financial leg-up.
At the demo I happened to be standing next to the dean of a college and we got into conversation. I reminded him of the curious case of Fr Kung and how remote this German enthusiasm seemed from England and Cambridge. I wondered what would happen if the Archbishop of Canterbury declared that Fr Don Cupitt, for example, could no longer be considered an official Anglican theologian. I couldn't imagine ten students going in procession. How dull we were compared with Tubingen's effervescence.
Not at all, replied the dean. He could easily imagine far more than two thousand Cambridge students lighting torches, as long as at the end of their procession they could set fire to Don Cupitt.
Why should this fertile post-theological and post-philosophical writer, this constant media presence (who yet remains, as we all know, the most friendly and unpompous of men), arouse such fear and loathing?
Perhaps his two latest books will reveal an answer, but first we might ponder an adaptation of Tom Lehrer's celebrated quotation from Nicholai Ivanovich Lobachevski: "In one word, I tell you the secret of success in theology: obfuscate!" Mr Cupitt resolutely refuses to obfuscate. Indeed, in After All he says "I'm still chasing my insane fifteen-year ambition - to write the first not-untruthful Western religious book". (This is a less hubristic claim than it seems. All he means is that he is not seeking to manipulate the reader in the service of spiritual power, which is what Westerners have always assumed a "religious" book must do).
Mr Cupitt is hated because he says clearly and openly what other divines hint at obscurely. He compounds the offence by doing it on television. The BBC series The Sea of Faith was surely the most interesting presentation of religious and intellectual history ever shown. Here at last a liberal and radical outlook found exciting expression. It even sparked off a tiny but significant radical group, the Sea of Faith Network - an extraordinary achievement.
Don Cupitt has called into question accepted religious platitudes. He refuses the traditional consolations. In particular he would banish the view that religion is about some other world than this. Plato, he thinks, has bewitched the Western world with his false and alluring ideas of a perfect higher world beyond this unsatisfactory and unreal world. Christians took over this philosophy and began to think of God as some objective being in a higher heavenly realm. This outlook, which he calls "theological realism", Cupitt believes is false. It devalues this world and it offers false consolation. We must not expect some heavenly object in some mysterious other world to come and put everything right for us. The cosmological and consolatory sides of religion must be dropped.
Many find this frightening and, as always, the popular reaction is to shoot the messenger who brings bad news. His words sound unbearably confusing: isn't he turning the world upside down? "Non-Realism"? Surely the looniest slogan ever invented by a brilliantly clever man? In ordinary language it suggests fantasy or an unwillingness to face up to the real world. "Anti-realism" sounds even more dottily defiant, as though you are out to attack the real world and refuse to put up with things as they are (though this may begin to hint at something insanely heroic).
Insiders know that such terms are simply technical philosophical jargon. "Non-realism" is opposed to the view that might be called "thingification", that something is valuable only if there corresponds to it some object. Cupitt the "nonrealist" tells us that we need not imagine God as some "objective" reality outside the universe. Why not imagine God as the highest possible ideal that human beings can think of, the sum of all our values? Then God becomes the spiritual requirement, the inner demand that we fashion our lives in accordance with this highest ideal - which is a human creation, admittedly, but how could it be otherwise? 'Why can't he be dishonest, as an honest cleric should?' People are also wary of Mr Cupitt because he is prepared to admit that he has changed his mind. Such honesty is a disturbingly rare virtue in theological writers. Normally, as he admits, people "expect religious writing to be an attempt at deception - as is indicated by their indignant reaction to the rare phenomenon of an honest bishop. 'It is utterly dishonest of him to be so honest', they complain. 'Why can't he be dishonest, as an honest bishop should?'" Mr Cupitt has not disguised his frequent changes of mind. The biggest change, no doubt, is that he was once a "realist" and now he is not. Once he endorsed the popular veneration of hierarchy; now he does not. Once he spoke of "the Transcendent"; today he makes do with the here and now. Once he believed it was the task of religion to deliver us from imprisonment by nature; now he is content to describe himself as a thorough-going naturalist. Doubtless he is, as we all are, a mass of contradictions. He is honest in admitting this: "When in the mid-eighties I was asked to attempt a spiritual autobiography, I could find no moral standpoint around which I could unify my life. I have changed too much and - mercifully - have forgotten too much. I'm lost in the flux, a string of selves. There's my-life-in-the-living here and now, but there is no my-Life in the sense of a coherent whole taking shape." Don Cupitt has now revised The Sea of Faith which he first wrote as a companion to his celebrated TV series. He has removed all references to the series, and also (to my regret) all the illustrations. He has adopted the gender-inclusive style of his later work. It is now part of his project of "non-realist" books, and we can see how it contains the germs of much of his later writings. In my view it is one of the most accessible and exciting of his books, and I am delighted to see it made available in this new form.
He provides a brilliant intellectual history of the modern world: Galileo, Pascal, Darwin, Freud, Jung, Strauss, Schweitzer, Kant, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. It all points to an uncomfortable conclusion. Kant showed that all our knowledge is inescapably human knowledge and cannot be anything more. Nietzsche went further with his doctrine of nihilism: the universe is without any objective meaning or purpose. Humans are in a terrifying and tragic situation: we ourselves must be the meaning-givers and creators of value. Scientific theories, too, it must be understood, are entirely human constructions and can claim no objective validity. So, not content with being the highly productive Barbara Cartland of contemporary theology, Mr Cupitt also strives to be its Samuel Beckett. Such tragic defiance has a romantic appeal. If the bleakest pictures of human life and the universe are true, can we still be religious? Yes, says Mr Cupitt, but we must practise the spiritual life for its own sake, not for any reward.
Whether this is bad news or good news, it is certainly not the story we are used to. Official Christian mythology is very comforting and reassuring. The story says that we human beings have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. There is no health in us. We need not despair though because a supernatural being has intervened in the past and will intervene again to put things right. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. This myth harmonises very well with the basic hidden myth of modern Western society. Our secular myth underlies thousands of stories and films and goes like this: a community feels troubled, threatened, utterly miserable, and no-one inside it can help save it. At last, though, it is rescued by some wonderful outsider who comes in and puts it right.
Mr Cupitt proposes a different myth. There isn't anybody outside who is going to put everything right: there isn't any outside anyway. So we must put things right ourselves, or as right as they ever can be. As Anne Cavidge's visionary Christ, in Iris Murdoch's Nuns and Soldiers, tells her: "The work is yours". Such a story will never be popular. Those who tell it will be abominated.
This is a humanist myth that seems to contradict the other 'Our post-theological Dracula has lost none of his bite. And once bitten, you're never the same again' two myths - though perhaps it can include them just as larger Russian dolls include smaller. Can you commend the humanist myth and still use the official Christian language? This will certainly involve you in ambivalence and conflict, which may be all to the good, as on Mr Cupitt's view these are necessary and creative experiences.
After All was written within six months of a life-threatening illness and a traumatic operation on the brain. Happily, it shows no diminution in intellectual power, but fizzes with wit, ideas and provocation. It is an essay in what he calls "post-philosophy". Metaphysics in the old sense of some grand final account of everything seems impossible. We are always stuck inside our own merely human point of view, our own language, and our own small stretch of historical time. Nevertheless Mr Cupitt is proposing to reinvent metaphysics in the cautious sense of sketching a view of the world and the human condition that a reasonable person might currently hold: "what it is not to be a nut today". This might take the form of "a network of unifying metaphors".
There is only one tangled and dense flow of events, he says. But it is always overlaid and formed by language. Concept, he claims, precedes percept. Everything slips away, but life has the trick of converting its own passing away into a continuous joyous renewal of itself. It is like a fountain. It is like the sun: "The process by which it lives and the process by which it dies are one and the same".
The good news is that we are no longer servants below stairs in Kafka's castle, waiting for orders from some mysterious Upstairs. "It is time to decide that there is nothing wrong with the senses, the body, this world, time and this life, and there is nothing wrong with the standards and values that we ourselves have developed. It is time to give up the old sense of exile... We want a quite new kind of Kingdom-religion, grown-up, open-air and free-moving. It is time to leave the world of 'service'". We can now have religion without alienation, a religion of world and life affirmation.
At first sight I thought that Mr Cupitt was caught in a contradiction, or at least a paradox. He stresses that consciousness, language, culture, life, depend on ambivalence and conflicting forces. In that case, alienation would seem to be so built-in as to be ineradicable, and a religion without alienation would be impossible, or at least not worth having. But no, what he means by getting rid of alienation is simply that we should accept the need for ambivalence and conflict. In Christian terms, the time of the Church, always provisional and second-best, is coming to an end, for the Kingdom has come. "A modern person can in principle be more fully reconciled to the world, to life and to death, than the person of any previous period. That is fulfilment".
After All provokes a feast of disagreement. Does concept always precede and predetermine percept? What of those blind from birth whose sight was restored by an advance in medical techniques? They opened their eyes, they were dazzled, remaining speechless for days until at last they said "How beautiful!" Did concept come before percept here?
Whenever I open the morning paper or switch on the news I become dubious about grandiloquent phrases like "humanity has come of age" or "the Kingdom has come". I suspect them to be the optimistic babble of excessively literary persons. At the first SoF conference Mr Cupitt said we needed a great international society - the church - pledged to defend different values from those of the State, the market or the mob. I cannot agree that this insight is now outmoded.
I am encouraged, though, by his new conclusion to The Sea of Faith: "the historic task of religion, of embodying our values, witnessing to them, conserving them, setting them forth in symbols and securing their realization in human life, remains unchanged".
Emmanuel College once treated us to a sombre piece of modern music, Joseph Horowitz's Horrortorio. In the middle of this extravaganza pitch blackness suddenly fell. The chorus faltered. A mysterious figure entered. As the lights winked on again, we beheld a tall inkily-cloaked figure, his craggy face powdered a preternatural and sinister white. The Dean! Savagely he swept up the aisle, menacing both left and right amidst screams of delighted horror. As he bounded upon the platform, orchestral players dropped their instruments; the chorus shrank back in terror. Abruptly, Dracula, the cause of this delicious consternation, disappeared.
Our post-theological Dracula is no longer Dean, but his bite has lost none of its power. Whatever you make of him, once bitten, you're never the same again. Long live our post-Dean, and may he bite again another day.
Frank Walker is minister of the Cambridge and Bury St Edmunds Unitarian churches, a former teacher and writer of children's novels.