Hugh Dawes reviews Creative Faith: Religion as a Way of Worldmaking by Don Cupitt. Polebridge Press (Salem, OR, 2015). Pbk. 146 pages. £12.82.
Creative Faith is Don Cupitt’s fiftieth book. By any criteria that is an amazing achieving — and for any theologian other than Cupitt would surely be an occasion for special celebration. But I rather doubt if that aspect to it would matter a great deal to Don. And sadly, other theologians may not be queueing up wanting to heap laurels upon him. Restless by nature and not given to self-congratulation, he has grown accustomed to living on the margins of Western theological discourse.
But both the book’s title, and perhaps still more its subtitle — Religion as a Way of Worldmaking — suggest that this is meant to be seen as a rather different book from many of his others in the last few years. And for all that he is a philosopher and dedicated to that, Creative Faith is not intended, if I have read it correctly, as in any straightforward sense a work of philosophy. For all the overlap with what has gone before, and there is quite a bit of that, it is a fresh Cupitt — voyaging with fresh companions — whom we encounter here.
The first of these is Nelson Mandela. Cupitt writes of Mandela being, at the time of his death in 2013 at the age of 95, ‘perhaps the most highly and widely esteemed person on Earth.’ Cupitt as philosopher plainly expected the world’s press — who flocked with the world’s leaders to Mandela’s funeral — would have wanted to investigate precisely what it was about the man that made him in Hegel’s term ‘world historical’, and to discover more about where his ideas were actually from. But things didn’t happen that way. For what made Mandela remarkable was his simple commitment to live out the maxim ‘love your enemy’.
What Cupitt calls liberal humanitarianism was in Mandela’s eyes the Christian story, its myth, with its continuing challenging narrative as a chosen practical way of life; not to be discounted or dismissed as nothing more than the submission to arbitrary obedience. Cupitt writes movingly in this context of the rapture to be encountered in art; Manet, Monet, van Gogh, are amongst those who are named, but also the later Bridget Riley — new to me but quite stunning. Any religious aspect in this may well be implicit rather than explicit, but many will find themselves responding to it in ways that generate wonder and reverence. Indeed Cupitt now adds that he rates music more highly even than art, since music is truly pure feeling.
Cupitt’s second new travelling companion — more worrying possibly for those who have journeyed with him over a number of years — turns out to be Pope Francis. Like so many other people Cupitt has been quite bowled over by the figure of this human Pope. That which it was impossible to imagine happening actually happened. Francis stepped down from the armoured popemobile his two predecessors rode in and walked freely among the crowds. He quit the large and sumptuous papal apartments in the Vatican, preferring the simple St Martha’s Guest House. Driving his own battered car, which he used when a cardinal in Argentina, he assumed the role of an ‘ordinary’ Pope.
Valuing the ordinary is a central theme to this book. 20th century papal language eschewed the ordinary. But Francis considers truth, Cupitt observes, as ‘a relationship’. Not handed down on tablets of stone, but ‘given to us always and only as a way of life.’ My personal fantasy is of what fun it would be if the two of them could meet. They are of a similar age (Francis just slightly younger than Don) and both of them people in a hurry, aware that life is short. Oh, to be a fly on the wall!
Though no philosopher, I have greatly enjoyed this book. Its clarity and straightforwardness make it genuinely ‘a good read’. This reviewer’s only quarrel is with Cupitt’s exaltation of non-realism as being the one genuinely altruistic religious understanding. Cupitt scorns what he labels ‘Church Christianity’. Maybe he has been away from church a little too long. Free, generous loving and living for others is what happens quietly and without fuss in churches of all types all over Britain. He should perhaps take another look.
Hugh Dawes is a retired Anglican priest, somewhat bemused to be living now in Haslemere. He was chair for some years of PCN (Progressive Christianity Network) Britain and until recently edited its newsletter, Progressive Voices.