1. Sea of Faith
Last week I went to the Sea of Faith conference. This week I read God of Reality (edited by Colin Crowder, 1966), a series of essays on Christian non-realism. I first encountered Don Cupitt as my Director of Studies in Cambridge (1967-9) and he preached at Gillian’s and my wedding (a mystical sermon!). I returned to him in 1985 for a term’s sabbatical, and recently chaired a lecture he gave in Newcastle University (1997). I have as church warden, John Pearson, treasurer of the Sea of Faith Network, and a thoughtful contributor to the life of the church. It was high time to go and taste.
I find Don Cupitt one of the most profound and provocative theologians writing today, although the competition is not what it was, as there seems to be retreat in the air – retreat into evangelical dogma, liberal dogma and even merely traditional dogma.
Theology at the end of over a century of ferment seems battered and bruised and looking for a rest. And ‘yet there are 7000 in Israel who have not bowed the knee’, and who are seeking and demanding inside and beyond the church that we use our finest and highest endeavours to encounter the things of God. The Sea of Faith is one (and a major) focus of this endeavour. So I went as an individual observer, and this essay is the first fruits of my involvement and observation.
2. The Sea of Faith Conference
Sea of Faith says it is a network. It is supposedly free of dogma, although it has its own foundation documents, and especially the belief in ‘religion as a human creation’, and to a lesser degree ‘God as non-real’. Most members would assent to these, but more as a position that they are willing to argue than as a fundament.
Sociologically, the conference members exhibited quite a lot of the behaviour of a sect. SOF has its fundamentalists, its heretics (especially, and affectionately, Bishop Jack Spong, the propounder of ‘sliverism’, the belief that there is still a sliver of reality about God), its power struggles (e.g. a fascinating coded argument about editorship of the magazine – vital position in an organisation committed to the importance of language).
Don Cupitt himself is not a leader in the way of cults. He is always moving on (which annoys his opponents no end!). And at times one feels that SOF members are trying to create an idealised Cupitt to be their leader, guru and founding father; all of which sits uneasily with the real Don. He is not a proselytiser and nor is he a controversialist, despite the controversy he has stirred up in his journeyings and writings.
On many lips of committed members at the conference is the question ‘where is SOF going?’ And they want to go somewhere – to become a movement, which in some respects it already is. Some of them see it as ‘the true church of the future’ – the belief of every new sect or cult. Others see it as having a mission to liberate the masses of ordinary Christians, who ‘really believe as they do’, from the tyranny of realist priests and bishops. As a ‘new church’, it has its first martyrs in Anthony Freeman, with a mythology (a martyrology) surrounding his dismissal by a prince bishop who stands for the repressive spirit of organised religion.
As a sect, SOF runs true to type in as far as it spends a lot of time defining itself by means of caricature of its opponents, real and imagined. Don Cupitt is also guilty of this; allowing his trenchant pen, and mastery as a wordsmith, to paint pictures of church present and religion past that are often partial and even distorted. Neither church nor Christianity have ever been other than a coalition of a great variety of believers, faith positions, and every dogma has had its doubters and opponents. So, in fairness, does the Sea of Faith itself – more than most! Many in the Sea of Faith do not fit the sociology of cult or sect as described above, and they are fascinating people. It is with them especially that the ferment of ideas continues and, indeed, has its flow and pattern: but whether they know it or not (many do) they are a marginalised element, among them, I suspect one Don Cupitt.
3. Getting the Metaphors Right
Another insight of the Sea of Faith is the need for a radical break with the past, but (like Daphne Hampson in the best and most robust attack in God and Reality) I am not sure they are breaking in the right area. Daphne Hampson, from a feminist critique of the church and its history, looks for a radical break with Christianity itself, as being hopelessly compromised by patriarchy and male chauvinism. I think that much of what she says is true, but that again she fails to recognise the variety that has been the hallmark of Christianity, producing another caricature.
The Christian faith, being a human creation, has an infinite capacity to reinvent itself and indeed has done so in the past. New visions arise, are decried by the orthodox, but gradually become orthodoxy, only to perish in turn, as the time comes and goes. At any one time the church contains people who are loyal to old orthodoxies, very old orthodoxies, the old new one and a whole load of heresies (I take a heresy to be a good idea held too single-mindedly). Sadly, the preferred behaviour is for the holders of all these positions to spend their time caricaturing each other and then slagging off the caricatures, while complaining bitterly that they are themselves misunderstood.
I think that the radical break with the past that is now needed is in the realm of metaphor and description. I have never liked the Creed, not so much because of its content, but because of its nature – a statement devised to divide Christians according to what they can and cannot affirm. It is for me a symbol (an ancient word for ‘creed’) of the unpleasant behaviour outlined in the last paragraph. I would like to see creedal definitions of this sort go altogether.
We need to look urgently at the doctrine of the Trinity, not so much its content, more its form. The actual heart of the Trinity I find supremely important, namely that God is herself community and interconnected. This is a vital idea that we mustn’t lose. But it is high time that the Father/Son fit is consigned to where it belongs, the now-past age of patriarchal understandings. It is a human creation; a male creation; and in part due to the historical fact of Jesus’s maleness. We need new metaphors here – and I do not mean just new words, but some new ways of describing the interrelationship of God as we encounter her. (I use the pronoun ‘her’ both as a necessary corrective and also slightly tongue-in-cheek).
We need to look urgently at liturgies. Like others, I already use inclusive language when I celebrate, but that does little to alter the liturgy that still feels patriarchal, that links us too closely to the model of the Byzantine court. The way we do things needs to change. It can so often be that we worship God’s power from a position of weakness; that we are clients, children, dependants in the monarch’s court. The last supper was not like that.
Simple things like putting the altar (altar? table?) in the middle, not seating people in a hierarchy and excluding some (e.g. children) from the ‘mystery’ too deep for them, could move us quickly to rediscovering and re-writing the Communion that again is all about interconnectedness. Look at the word itself!
We need to look urgently at our ministry. We need new metaphors for the range of ways the people of God are called to serve the world and love each other. Bishops are often humble men devoted to service, but they don’t look like it in the hierarchy of the church. Whatever we say about the new laity, the metaphors we use put clergy in a privileged position. They are servants of their ‘flock’ – what a metaphor! And don’t blame Jesus if we have taken his vibrant shifting parables and discourses and reapplied them in a different context. His way of presiding included the foot-washing. Again new words won’t do; we need new images, new metaphors for our interconnectedness.
We need to look urgently at our prayers. In common with other faiths, we have a long and lively mystical tradition, taught only occasionally and to a few as an extra. Too often we teach about prayer in terms of dependency, petition, propitiation of an angry monarch. We need new metaphors for this most vital of human modes of being; metaphors that recognise how rich and varied we are in relationships and how infinite the ways of encountering God.
Conclusion: There isn’t one. Just thoughts provoked and distilled by the challenge of the Sea of Faith. For that I am deeply grateful. And the Sea of Faith will understand when I say that I am grateful both to them and God.
Kit Widdows was Master of the Church of St Thomas the Martyr in Newcastle upon Tyne. He joined SOF Network and became Vice Chair of its Board of Trustees. He died in 2007. These extracts from his 1998 Notebook were transcribed by David Lambourn.