I lost my theological innocence in 1984, with the Sea of Faith. Apparently religion wasn’t the sole preserve of the weird – and from then on I bought everything Don produced. It sits proudly displayed (and substantially unread) on my bookshelves. The problem is that he expects too much of us – or at least, of me. I remember him saying (with genuine incredulity) during the plenary at the first SOF conference, that apparently there were still people in the churches who had yet to come to terms with Derrida. A ripple went round the hall, as those involved in churches reflected on the gulf between the congregations they knew, and the world where Don spent his time.
And that gulf is still there, in the assumptions he makes. All this heart-warmingly inclusive ‘we’ business – when maybe it’s just him (plus a few of us trailing breathlessly behind). When he talks of ‘the postmodern condition that is now everyone’s everyday normality’ – who’s he kidding? Or when he says that ‘old-style ‘belief in God’ is at long last in final collapse’, he’s obviously not speaking for the church congregations I know. Or again, when he says that ‘we know that there is not literally any God, nor life after death, nor supernatural order’, who’s he speaking for? Not the people who pay my stipend, nor the frighteningly clever Rowan Williams – and maybe not that many religious radicals either, at least in terms of his degree of certainty. Aren’t things just a bit less clear-cut than that? Isn’t there some wriggle room? Doesn’t our postmodern world allow (even encourage?) some shades of epistemological grey?
He can’t leave us in peace – because the essence of his position is that there is no position – but simply an unending conversation.
And as long as there’s breath in him, he’ll keep exploring and dismantling and re-creating and teasing and prodding and cajoling, never escaping the shackles of language, and (therefore?) never reaching a conclusion. The sheer quantity of his work is an expression of the openness and inconclusivity of it all – and a reproach to most of us, with our yearning to escape the full implications of postmodernism, by pitching our tent just somewhere.
There’s an austere purity about Theology’s Strange Return, which demands more than most of us can give. ‘We have all read our Nietzsche and we all know the score’. Have we? Do we? Who says? What’s the evidence? So many assumptions, Don – and so far removed from the world that I live in. I wish I’d read my Nietzsche in the sense you mean – volume after volume, in the original German. I’m not up there with you – and I don’t know anyone who is.
So who is this book for? A few dissident academics? Thoughtful inhabitants of pews?
Clergy who aren’t entirely brain dead? Members of the Church Alumni Association? SOF anoraks?
Will it convert anyone? Or is it of interest only to those who are already part of the club? As has been the case for thirty years, Don finds himself almost entirely unsupported by both academic and clerical colleagues – and that’s a lonely place to be. His life’s work has been to try and reposition Christianity so that its message stands some slight chance of speaking to our secular age.
The problem is that substantial parts of our age are in fact not at all secular, and have adopted literalist religion as if the Enlightenment had never happened. It’s enough to make anyone with a brain despair – and Cupitt comes close to it. But the book ends on a positive note, focusing on the consolations that religion can, even now, bring to our lives, if we’re prepared to put in the hard work needed to reinterpret/reinvent ideas and doctrines that have found earlier gainful employment in very different circumstances.
Most people won’t, of course. They will continue uncritically dismissing religion as ludicrous; or uncritically accepting it as revealed truth. There are few with whom this book will resonate – but those few are in for another rare (and rarefied) treat. Thank you Don for this book.
And thank you even more for making the world of religion a possibility for people like me.
Tony Windross is the Vicar of Hythe, Kent, and a former SOF trustee.
Tony Windross reviews Theology's Strange Return by Don Cupitt SCM Press (London 2010). Pbk. 133 pages. £16.99.