EDITORIAL Sea of Faith The quarterly magazine of the Sea of Faith Network Hobsons Farm, Dent, Cumbria LA10 5RF Editor: David Boulton New Labour, New Britain, New Church Don Cupitt wrote the following article for the Guardian, December 6th 1997, and we reprint it here as a “guest editorial” with permission. He argues for an extension of the Blair project to include nothing less than “a fully modernised Christianity” which, he suggests, might resemble “left Quakerism” with freer experimental use of myths, rituals and symbolism. Such a modernisation would destroy orthodoxy, liberate the religious imagination, and identify the sacred with the common world of everyday life. he government, we learned * [escent has no plans to dises- tablish the Church, but it is interested in seeing the Church modernise itself — even, if necessary, giving it a little help to do so.
In the same week we hear that the Human Rights Bill — the vehicle to put the European Convention into English law — might be used against the Church of England.
From this, one learns something about our Church’s true priorities and its deepest fears. It longs to remain part of the Establishment, and it longs to retain the freedom to go on falling well short of the secular standards in its respect for human rights. For a Church that thinks like this, modernisation must mean Birtist reform: closer supervision of people’s performance in the lower ranks, and an even greater concentration of power in the hands of the bishops. As indeed has been the pattern throughout the 20th century: bishops diocesan, suffragan, assistant, and “flying” have multiplied exceedingly, while the number of priests has halved and the number of lay people in the congregations has divided by four or so.
In order to stem the haemorrhaging of the best lay people and priests, the Church must restore its own, intellectual self-respect. It is not an accident that in English literature and drama, for more than a century, the clergyman has been stereotyped as a silly ass. One does indeed feel acutely embarrassed and ashamed to be stuck with a medieval world-view in an increasingly technological culture.
Why has it become obligatory for Christians to be silly? Where in the Bible does it say “Thou shalt be 400 years out of date”? I blame the Victorians for turning the Church into a medieval theme-park. Their legacy has been a history of ever-worsening Disneyfication and decline. How do we escape? The answer is that we have to overcome the old distinction between the heavenly supernatural world above and the earthly world below. We must give up all belief in supernatural beings and powers. God, the heavenly world, divine Grace and eternal life have all got to be brought down to earth and dispersed through this world and this life. We see now that our language builds only one world, this world, our only home. The religious realm is this world and all Sea of Faith Winter (December) 1997 No. 31 New Labour, New Britain, New Church Editorial by Don Cupitt 3 Making those Waves of Positive Action A plea for radical simplicity by John West 5 Book Briefs Reviews and recommendations 6 A Future in Innocence?
Cupitt’s After God reviewed by Alison Webster 7 All Worked Out Stephen Mitchell’s Agenda for Faith critiqued by Mike Jenkins 9 The ‘H’ Word The history of ‘humanism’ by David Boulton II It’s Time to Reclaim our Symbols A heartfelt address given by Jude Bullock 4 Omen, Showman The Harold Bloom experience by Aileen La Tourette 17 The Bitch is Back!
Myths, ancient and modern by Lawrence Coupe 19 Postbag You're Telling Us! 21 Postscripts by Seafarer 23 the cheques have got to be cashable here and now, by anyone.
Intellectually, a fully-modernised Christianity will resemble Quakerism.
But it may well retain the common meal, and make freer experimental use of myths, rituals and symbolism.
And you will not be required to hold any untrue beliefs.
A version of this left Quakerism, as taught by the Hegelian Quaker philosopher John Macmurray, was an important influence on Tony Blair, we are told. Macmurray was a non-realist about God, who demythologised God down into the field of human relationships. He was a significant influence, both upon John Robinson’s radical theology in the 1960s and even upon “If [modernism] leaves us with any saints at all, it will leave us with that thin line of eccentric visionaries, from Blake and Palmer to D.H.
Lawrence and Stanley Spencer, who remain the only really interesting religious figures this country has pro- duced since the Reformation.” mine in the 1980s. It is odd that he is now so little read, for it could just be that when Downing Street talks about modernising the Church, it is talking about rather more than the Church is bargaining for.
Macmurray’s Quaker style of theology rejects the vision of the universe “Christ in the Wilderness IV: Consider the lilies...”, Stanley Spencer, 1939 as a cosmic absolute monarchy. God is democratised, dispersed into people. It also does without any hierarchy of spiritual power and authority in the religious society. Instead it seeks to be radically democratic, both in world-view and in social life. It fits our present needs so well that one wonders why something like it has not prevailed.
The answer — and the reason why the efforts of Christian revisionists have so far invariably failed — is that our whole culture has been dominated since late antiquity by a juridical conception of religious truth. Truth is what those in power have declared “orthodox”, truth is what they command you to believe, truth is tradition, truth is conformity, truth is what you are supposed to think.
In our culture, you are supposed either to accept or to doubt established religious doctrine. A proposal to revise established doctrine because it is out of date sounds to people like a proposal to legalise crime, and new religious thought always tends to attract exactly the same mixture of bewilderment and outrage as modern art. A person whose misfortune it is to be religiously inventive is liable to find himself spending his entire life in the dock.
Modernisation, if we ever achieve it, will end all that. It will destroy “orthodoxy”. It will liberate the religious authority. It will liberate the religious imagination, and it will identify the sacred world of religion with the common world of everyday life. If it leaves us with any saints at all, it will leave us with that thin line of eccentric visionaries, from Blake and Palmer to D.H. Lawrence and Stanley Spencer, who remain the only really interesting religious figures this country has produced since the Reformation. Could the Government’s remarks be the start of something?
Don Cupitt is an Anglican priest and a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. his most recent books are “After God” and “Mysticism and Modernity”.
Reprinted, with permission, from an article by Don Cupitt first published in the Guardian, 6 December 1997; presented here as a guest editorial.