PART 10:
Sea of Faith The extent of Don Cupitt’s influence on contemporary theology is probably best attested to by the emergence of the Sea of Faith, an organisation that was born out of a response to his acclaimed television series and book of the same name, and which is dedicated to ‘exploring and promoting religious faith as a human creation’. Associated with this movement are a number of writers who have contributed to the idea of God as a metaphoric or poetic expression. As might be expected, perhaps, the range of expression is not confined to theological narrative, but extends into poetry, fiction and historical investigation. :
Within the realm of theological discourse, perhaps the — most famous Sea of Faith writer is Anthony Freeman, an Anglican priest who was dismissed from his post by the Bishop of Chichester for publishing God In Us: A Case for Christian Humanism (1993). In his book Freeman begins by developing a three-fold categorisation of Christianity. The first category, conservative, is described in terms of a religious group that endeavours to protect its faith by ‘ringfencing’ it off from the modern world and ascribes meaning through its own self-imposed unchanging character. This, for Freeman, is self-defeating. Religion under this regime is not only demonstrably unable to respond to the modern world from which it is set apart, but it is also made available only to those in the ‘club’.
The second category, the liberal tradition, is viewed as an attempt to engage with the modern world by allowing science and other secular disciplines to explain ‘how things are’ and requiring theology to explain ‘why things are’. This, for Freeman, is also unsatisfactory as he sees embedded in the method the essential contradiction of constantly recognising the potential, through prayer, for a supernatural God to interfere in the natural order. This interference, Freeman contends, is recognised by succeeding generations as less and less demonstrable, or even less and less likely: ..you can square the idea of a creator God with the well-regulated world of science, but how can you make sense of prayers in which you ask that same God to intervene and do things now? It can’t be done, so your prayers increasingly take the form ‘Lord, help us to do things.’ The third category is radical. Here, in the camp where Freeman claims to sit, theology is seen to be pushing beyond the historically conditioned supernatural literalism of an objective deity and on towards the idea that God is created out of human experience. For Freeman, the concept of the A Brief History of Radical Theology Old Testament God has to be replaced by a metaphor. ‘Only when I had accepted that “I do not believe in God” (my old God) was I free to discover how with integrity I could still say “I believe in God” (understood in a new way).’ The new way is the re-interpretation of the word God, an interpretation that localises it within individual human experience. As he states, ‘Instead of referring it (God) to a supernatural being, I shall apply it to the sum of all my values and ideals in life’.
Stephen Mitchell, another non-realist writer, challenges Freeman’s idea of God as a metaphor for individual human value. Like Freeman, Mitchell expresses the idea of God as a metaphor, yet he develops a more socially inclusive ideal that understands God in terms of a reality within a believing community. Whilst subscribing to the non-realist one world (this world) ontology of Freeman and Cupitt, Mitchell seeks a definition of non-realist Christianity that engages more fully with the concept of community. Rejecting Freeman’s definition of God as the personification of personal ideals as anti-religious, he observes ‘If he [Freeman] was now free to find joy in the natural world and in human life, why did he not simply abandon religion altogether? How was religious practice a help in finding such joy?’ Mitchell develops the idea of personality being ‘scattered’ throughout individual experience and being referenced only through, or by, the subjective discourse in which it is engaged. Just as Mitchell sees himself not as an objective being, but rather as someone who is found in relationship with friends, family, community, congregation etc, so is God similarly understood, not as an objective being but as that experienced in relationship: ..when I talk about myself I don’t find it helpful to say that I discover myself by peeling away the layers in search of a hidden soul, the real me. Rather I become myself by embracing the roles and communities in which I live and work. I find it more helpful to see myself as scattered throughout my relationships and activities with other people.
Freeman and Mitchell can, perhaps, be seen as representing opposite ends of a spectrum of non-realism.
Freeman, essentially post-modern in outlook, defines God in terms of his own individual experience. Mitchell, however, sof 65 May 2004 seems to cling more to the vestige of democratic theological socialism; he cannot define God other than in terms of community, of others and of the meaning of relationship.
David Hart is another non-realist theologian whose first book Faith in Doubt (1993) rejected the traditional concept of an objective deity, exploring instead the ideas that language about God is actually language about self and worship and really reflects the human desire for community. Hart contends that this has come about simply because of a breakdown in the concept of language meaningfully relating to a transcendental object. For Hart there are no primary and secondary categories of existence and there is no experience prior to language because, conversely, it is language that makes experience of God possible. The signifier, that symbol which once related to the signified transcendent God, must now be re-interpreted and understood in other ways.
Hart's theology is particularly interesting, because what seems for many to be a radical fracturing of tradition is reevaluated by him to be more a simple evolutionary step in human religious thinking than a break with the past. It is not the end of the road, but more simply ‘the point we have now reached on our pilgrimage’, a point where doubt, historically denigrated as the un-virtuous, dark side of the coin of faith, must now be approbated and accepted as a valid and vital theological expression. The death of God does not signal the death of theology, but rather, the potential for movement away from a fixed and immutable liturgical vision towards a more creative expression of human experience.
Hart’s subsequent work has largely dealt with the issues of inter-faith dialogue and multi-culturalism in which his commitment to the Derby Multi-Faith Centre and his nonrealist theology have combined to produce an energetic discussion of the wider aspects of religious, rather than just Christian, thought. In One Faith, for example, Hart examines possible non-realist interpretations in other world religions, seeing such insight as an opportunity for a meaningful communion between those who see that ‘by creating God in our own human image; and in worshipping his divine attributes we have in reality always extolled the sublimity of those attributes within our own humanity.’ Hart’s interest in creativity is similarly reflected in the range of literary forms developed by the Sea of Faith. David Boulton, for example, has explored the history of nonconformism, itself a significant constituent of the Sea of Faith, through books on historical, radical Quakerism, the religious revolutionary, Gerrard Winstanley, and his acclaimed The Trouble With God (2002). Within the poetic genre Dinah Livingstone and the late Pamela Donohue, among others, have incorporated and developed non-realist perspectives into their respective bodies of work that, whilst satisfying the intellectual demands of the individual existential enquiry into the human _ condition, circumnavigate philosophical narrative to speak directly, heart to heart. Non-realist poets, like non-realist theologians and historians, direct attention to the encounter between reader and text, human being and the world and the creative power of language. The result is an apotheosis of the recursive and relational word that creates reality out of everyday experience and finds deity in encounter. As Shirley Murray asks in How Shall We Find You?, How shall we love You if not as human, loving us wholly, fleshed in our frame, known in our hunger known in our meeting spirit to Spirit, naming our name.
The Sea of Faith, largely because of its focus on networking rather than producing and adhering to doctrine, has been a broad church constituted by those whose primary philosophical interests focus upon the subjectivity of deity, the nature of language and the inherent value and dignity of life. It exists in the forefront of the creative attempt to let go of the God of Abraham as he disappears over the horizon of human credibility and, in his place, it endeavours to refashion a religious humanism that speaks to, of and for the post-modern pilgrim.
Trevor Greenfield is an Associate Lecturer in Religious Studies, The Open University, with research interests in Radical Theology.