Stephen Mitchell reviews The Last Testament by Don Cupitt. SCM Press, London 2012. Pbk. 146 pages. £17.99.
Forget you've heard of Don Cupitt. Pretend you don't know who he is and have never heard him speak. You haven't heard the rumours that this is his last book. (And I have it on good authority that there are ideas for another four or five books!) These are the last days, the only days and any sort of intense personalism is out of place:
The number of people keen to read Ray Monk's large biography of Wittgenstein is far greater than the number who can be persuaded to peruse the first 50 or 60 pages of the great man's Philosophical Investigations (1953).
The Last Testament is remarkable for its audacity. Like Jesus who is said to have rolled up the scroll of Isaiah, given it back to the attendant and said to those gathered in the synagogue: 'Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing', this book announces that a change of dispensation is occurring. 'The old promise seems now to be our fact.'
The congregation were furious with Jesus and attempted to throw him off a cliff. The writer of The Last Testament expects no such reception for his announcement. This is something everyone already knows. He is only the presenter of this simple truth. Indeed he formally disclaims any personal copyright in the text. (The publishers seem not to have noticed!):
These little essays are not scriptures, nor are they to be regarded as an individual's art product. They are meant to be the merest platitudes, and interesting chiefly for the way they show that nobody before now has ever really attempted to describe a religion that is simply true, with no mystique of the Catholic type that is designed to bamboozle the punters.
Those who have tried to talk about religion in such a straightforwardly truthful way will know just how very, very difficult it is to accomplish. There is as much to learn from these essays as from the elegant simplicity of Philosophical Investigations.
Wittily, the book is in two parts: The Gospel and The Epistles. The nine Gospel essays form an excellent introduction to the sort of religion that will reconcile us 'to life's transience, a way of persuading human beings to get on with each other better, and a way of seeing this world as a satisfactory theatre for effective moral action.' The Epistles are public lectures, position statements written for audiences during the past decade. They are occasional and personal, which is why they are compared with the canonical Epistles.
The text constantly catches and amuses us with its questions and wide-ranging illustrations and yet there is something utterly unnerving about it. How is it to catch on? Who will hear the message? Who will open the book of life and read even 50 or 60 pages? It is argued that Jesus was an early teacher of this immediate and markedly humanitarian religion of the heart but the writer sees little hope of today's churches responding to the call of the original Jesus. So what hope outside the institutions of religion? Could there be a rediscovery of the message within popular culture? Has there already been a rediscovery of something close to a gospel of the final times? Or is it simply the case that truth is mighty enough to survive?
But doesn't truth have to prevail through somebody, within someone's life, within your life and my life? It has to be the truth about our world, about your world, about my world. There has to be an executor of the will. There has to be a probate proceeding to test the validity of the testament. Someone has to stand against the forces of scientism, personalism and compulsory untruth. And yet again, the text exposes my John-the-Baptist-like fears of being of a former time. For those who live as the sun does, haven't a care, they are simply pouring themselves out and giving life to all.
Stephen Mitchell is Vicar of All Saints Church, Gazeley (Suffolk) and Rural Dean of the Mildenhall Deanery. His book God in the Bath was published by O Books (Winchester) in 2006.