The dedication is appropriate. At the very first Sea of Faith conference in 1988, the question delegates were left asking was: ‘Can we create a new religious story?’ As Denis Nineham had said in his lecture, ‘If a new radical theology is to be communicable and become the focus of a community it needs a new religious story which isn’t biblically based.’ Here, now, over twenty years and thirty books later is a new religious story, a secular theology. But don’t expect a self-congratulatory read. This book is a challenge to the Sea of Faith.
At the end of that first conference, many of us thought we could easily write a new religious story. It was simply a matter of stripping out the supernaturalism and doing a bit of demythologising. It was only the religious story that needed rewriting. The story of everything else was fine. I remember devising a workshop with Clive Richards for the second Sea of Faith conference. We asked delegates to tell us how they felt about certain words – resurrection, spirit, life, salvation and so on. They told us what they thought by putting these words into a smiley face column or under the skull and crossbones. All we had to do was tell the story in smiley face words.
Had we thought about it, this couldn’t possibly do.
The religious story was a story of everything from beginning to end, from creation to death and everything else in between. As Mark C.Taylor says in Erring, ‘God, self, history and book are bound in an intricate relationship in which each one mirrors the other. No single concept can be challenged without altering the others.’ Our task is nothing less than making ‘a new beginning, “all over again”, as Cupitt challenges us at the end of the book.
So this is a book about everything. It’s about our world and ourselves. It’s about how to live and how to die. And it’s the drawing together of the threads of a forty year quest. ‘Some of my most recent books . . . have been casting about, looking for the best way to frame a final statement. Here it is then – though no doubt I shall soon start to feel very dissatisfied with it.’ The central, unifying symbol which brings these themes together is the fountain. The fountain symbolises all our experience of life. As Cupitt sums up the argument later in the book, ‘In our time the development of thought and of our new technologies has surrounded us with images of everything as pouring out into expression and passing away – broadcast, scattered, disseminated.
We have looked at examples: the silent outpouring of all be-ing, our Big Bang cosmology, the energetic perpetual striving and self-renewal of all life, the human self as intensely and continuously expressive and communicative, and the good life as an ‘outgoing’ life of emotional expression, the life of love. We have used the Fountain as a traditional unifying and reconciling symbol: it is restful, life-giving, and a blissful object of contemplation.’ And it’s in that contemplative frame of mind that we are also challenged to read this book. We can sit down and read this book from beginning to end in an hour or two. Or we can read each chapter and ask ourselves: Have I learnt to love life fearlessly? Have I got myself together and found ways of avoiding the splitting of the self between reason and emotions, sense and spirit, justice and love, short-term and longterm, duty and inclination?
There is work to be done. Take one paragraph at random. ‘We cannot even conceive personal life except as temporal, and if I reflect I find that all the beauties I love most are transient, and that it is precisely for their transience that I love them. I cannot coherently wish them to be anything but transient and the same goes for myself.’ We’re not asked to agree or disagree but to reflect, examine and challenge ourselves. I sometimes wish Don would add reflective pauses in the text, but then why should he do what I must do for myself? Of course, Sea of Faith is but one of those transient loves. Whether it proves beautiful and life-giving will depend upon its members’ willingness to rise to the challenge of becoming generous and fearless. I just wish I could get the third stanza of the hymn Jesu, Lover of my Soul out of my brain!
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The publishers SCM are offering Sofia readers a discount on this title of 20% off the received retail price (i.e. £14.99, Sofia Reader Offer £11.99).