100 – 100th Birthday Edition

Editorial

Welcome to the hundredth edition of the SOF magazine, whose name for the last five and a half years has been Sofia. In order to celebrate this milestone, we have a full-colour, four-page, centrefold spread of all 100 covers, so that readers can look back over its development. Our archivist Ronald Pearse has kindly supplied me with the magazines missing from my collection, so that I could scan them all for this display.

For this centenary edition, two founder members of SOF, David Paterson and Stephen Mitchell, have written special articles, reminiscing and looking forward. David, who runs the Oxford SOF group, which is very active in that university city, has A Vision to Offer and Stephen, Rural Dean of Mildenhall, Suffolk, who chaired the Network for many years, looks back on the magazine’s beginnings using the technology of the period: In the Beginning was the Amstrad PCW. In Sofia: the Pursuit I have written about editing the magazine.

Stephen has also reviewed Don Cupitt’s ‘final’ (hmm!) book The Fountain, which is dedicated ‘To the members of the Sea of Faith with my gratitude’. Don Cupitt, of course, has been a major influence on SOF, and the Network is named after his 1984 BBC TV programme Sea of Faith. The two core images in The Fountain are the fountain itself and the sun (water and fire), both pouring out. Don Cupitt has certainly followed his own advice and poured himself out with great generosity, publishing many books and in other ways. Thinking about these images, I remembered that they were both used of Christ.

In the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus offers ‘living water’ which is ‘a spring of water welling up to eternal life’. And in the Advent liturgy he is ‘Sun of Justice’, invoked at the solstice to ‘Come and give light to those sitting in darkness and the shadow of death’.

Although I have sometimes strongly disagreed with Don, like so many others I have been inspired by his writing, especially about the death of God and, more recently, the point of God. To express my gratitude, although I think editors should use the utmost restraint in publishing their own poems, for this centenary issue of Sofia I’ve taken the liberty of dedicating a little poem to Don, which I hope he will like.

In the matter of editorial restraint, poet Anne Ashworth was exemplary when she edited Universalist. I have had many very positive comments about her Spiritual Journal, extracts from which have been appearing in Sofia.

Unfortunately there is no space for the next extract in this centenary edition, but there will be more to come next time.

At the recent well-attended London SOF Conference, Kenan Malik gave a talk on God, Science and the Quest for Moral Certainty. We publish two extracts from it, in which he reflects on the strange similarity between relying on God or Science for moral certainty. The whole talk will be published on SOF website.

On page 6 we have an announcement once again of this year’s annual SOF Conference, Brain, Belief and Behaviour. Full details and an application form are also on the website www.sofn.org.uk.

There is a strong line-up of speakers and the event is set to be challenging and enjoyable. Do come if you can.

Whether or not you can get to the Conference, I hope you will raise a glass to Sofia’s hundredth birthday edition and wish her many happy returns.

I wanted two particular images for the front and back covers. I have a small, unsophisticated camera and am certainly no expert but decided to revisit two London churches with unusual twentieth-century artwork behind the altar. In Notre Dame de France, the round French Church near Leicester Square which also has a Cocteau mural, I snapped the tapestry of Wisdom playing, looking rather like Snow White. And in St Botolph’s without Aldgate, which stands just where the East End meets the City of London, there is a modern batik of the Tree of Life with a transformed golden city in the background, which could be London. As in Blake’s visionary poem: ‘There Jerusalem’s pillars stood’ – on Earth.

Perhaps because it was near Pentecost, there was a dove suspended on a wire over the altar. There was no way I could keep this dove out of the picture and I baulked at photoshopping out the Holy Ghost. As we used to sing:

You can’t kill the Spirit She’s like a mountain, old and strong.

She goes on and on and on... 100th Birthday Edition editorial The world has changed a lot since 1987. That was the year when some Anglican clergy in the Leicester Diocese had been meeting together to share their dissatisfaction about the Church. Many Christian clergy – priests, vicars, ministers – though they had learned about the new light thrown on text, doctrine and ritual by modern scholarship, were failing to pass this on to their congregations. Church authorities were still trying to prop up ideas of faith which were no longer viable. Bishops who knew better wouldn’t challenge their clergy, vicars were afraid of their bishops and reluctant to shake the faith of the laity, and sceptical people in the congregations didn’t dare tell the clergy about their doubts, and many either conformed to or left a Church still deep in denial and collusion.

I had joined this little radical group. Unlike the others I hadn’t ever been an Evangelical in any conventional sense, having already rejected the concept of God’s existence before I applied for ordination. My motive – half-formed, but deeply felt – was to give my life to the service of truth, justice and compassion. ‘God’ was just a word you could use to encapsulate these ideals.

Listen to one another’s insights, value them, challenge them...

But for some the idea that God was a creation of the human imagination was like a bereavement. We took on the task of providing a route from beliefs which were no longer tenable to something which could really be believed in the light of modern thought (later this was to be termed A Reasonable Faith).

Loughborough University were to hold their annual Summer Conference, so we decided to run a workshop at it.

Honest to God had long since made waves, and now Don Cupitt had published Taking Leave of God and done the TV series The Sea of Faith. Two of our group held livings in the gift of Emmanuel College Cambridge, so knew Don as the Warden. We shared our ideas with him, and he gave us the mailing list of those who had responded to the TV series. It was long, and we soon had too many people wanting to come to our little workshop, so instead it became a conference in its own right. It was very successful, so we did it again the next year. We did not see ourselves as starting a movement, or forming a society or an organisation, but aimed simply to link together people with similar concerns and needs. We called what was emerging a Network, free to develop in its own way, with ourselves and a few others as a Steering Committee to hold it together.

The original purpose of the Network was, then, to reassure people in the Christian Churches that they need not be afraid of their doubts, but should value them. The context was a world in which Christendom was losing its credibility and its influence. To find God we must ‘take leave of God’; religion is a human creation, and it is entirely our responsibility. There is no god ‘out there’, nothing supernatural. It is all contained in human experience and expressed in human language.

Much has changed since then. Christianity – contrary to widespread predictions for over a century – didn’t die. It lost its power over British society, perhaps, but in the world as a whole the religions have moved centre-stage. Don was right as he explored the Christian tradition in the light of modern Western philosophy, but there were other things going on. And the form of religion which has become more powerful is fundamentalism. This has been particularly so in two economically and culturally important communities – Christianity in the United States and Islam in the oil-rich nations of the Middle East – but it can be seen in Judaism and Hinduism as well. When threatened, the instinct is to barricade yourself in and fight tooth-and–nail. Religion is a source of power.

Rival truth-claims by religions have always been a seed of conflict, and now they have become a major danger.

In this changing world, the Sea of Faith Network – in my opinion – failed to move with the times. It is true that support for radical thinkers within the Churches remains necessary. That’s a battle that will not go away. But the world as a whole has much bigger problems to face. Religion as a force for good – a source of insight and compassion, a prophetic critique of power struggles and greed, a vehicle of respect, co-operation and peace-making – has been lost in truth-claims, dogmas and pontificating about ethics. Most of what flourishes is bad religion. Does the Network have a vision of good religion to offer?