Religion and Social Justice editorial The Idea of God as our Maker Two extracts from Don Cupitt’s new book Theology’s Strange Return brilliantly describe how it was our idea of God that made us humans what we are, beings capable of science and ethics. 1.
In the earliest times the world appeared as a theatre in which extremely violent non-rational forces contended ceaselessly with each other. But as religious thought developed, those mythic forces gradually became mythic beings, then powers, and then true spirits distinct from, and with knowledge of and power over, the sites with which they were associated. The spirits became gods and in due course they became an organised, sovereign body controlled by an ancient sky-father, who himself then gradually developed towards being the One Nature-transcending God of monotheism, and when full monotheism is reached, all Nature is seen as being subject to a single regime of law. Now, understand that in this whole story we humans were certainly not merely indulging in a compensatory fantasy. No: we were gradually and in theological form developing the all-important idea that there could be, and even that there already was, a unified, law-governed, intelligible and even controllable cosmic order out there; and correspondingly that there could be an autonomous, mobile, self-possessed, rationally unified kind of self that stands back a little from Nature, knows all that is happening, and can guide and control events in order to secure the fulfilment of its purposes. If God can be such a self, perhaps by getting closer to him we can get to be like that, too... [The earliest humans] had some social institutions and skills. But they hardly had any unified, rational reflective selfhood of their own, and they could not make any progress until they had developed more organised, unified, law-abiding conceptions of the world, society and the self. They were too hardpressed to be able to do any of these things directly: they had to do them ‘heterologously’, through religion.
It was religious thought that first drafted and then slowly clarified our ideas about the world, about law, about reason and about active selfhood. Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.
And so it happened. Over some thousands of years God created us in his own image, as the idea of God gradually called into being the modern human self. 2.
As all this happens, the emergent One God hauls us humans along with himself, so that we can still be lesser counterparts of himself. Like him we can learn to project out an orderly, intelligible world around ourselves, like God we can plan and implement a great moral purpose. The idea that when we build our natural philosophy we learn ‘to think God’s thoughts after him’, profoundly influenced the rise of early modern physics in the seventeenth-century West between Galileo and Newton, so close to each other are the ideas of God and the self. Our science actually arose in the Cartesian belief that we can know the world as God knows it. The same principle holds in the ethical realm: we first imagined God as covenanting himself to his creation, pledging himself to uphold its order, and then as covenanting himself ethically to his chosen people; and only then did we become capable of developing and theorising all the human ethical ideas of vowing, contracting, promising, undertaking, covenanting and pledging. Indeed, God demands of us mimesis, reciprocity, copying of his ethical nature. He had himself become ethical, and now he taught us ethics.
So it goes on: modern secular people, laying down the law, building their worlds, doing their science and technology, and also signing their contracts and making promises, are still recognisably the children of the God in whom their ancestors believed. So God returns indirectly and reminds us of himself even within a culture that has been secular-humanist since the rise of the modern novel two centuries ago. We still have the old God’s thumbprints all over us. Long, long ago, through the slow evolution of ancient theology, we made spirits, and finally God, in the image of what we obscurely knew we wanted to become; and it worked, as God then remade us in his own image, and gave us something of his old worldmastery. Now, long afterwards, after the Death of God, we ourselves are God’s legacy, his testament.
Extract 1 is from pages 31-3 and extract 2 from pages 90-91 of Theology’s Strange Return. Don Cupitt discussed this idea briefly in the closing panel of the SOF Annual Conference in Leicester. His latest book, A Great New Story, retells Christianity’s classic salvation-narrative along similar lines. It is to appear in December from the Polebridge Press of Salem, OR.
Extract 1 is from pages 31-3 and extract 2 from pages 90-91 of Theology's Strange Return. Don Cupitt discussed this idea briefly in the closing panel of the SOF Annual Conference in Leicester. His latest book, A Great New Story, retells Christianity's classic salvation-narrative along similar lines. It is to appear in December from the Polebridge Press of Salem, OR.