Contents
Editorial
- The Future of God and Organised Religion
Articles
- Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith Archive, Elaine Graham
- The Future of God and Organised Religion 1, John Pearson
- The Future of God and Organised Religion 2, Paul Vittle
- The Future of God and Organised Religion 3, Iain Robertson
- Solarity: The Story So Far, Dave Francis and Denise Cush
Poetry
- Jacko Calls, Dan Kennedy
- Curious Necessary Space, Kathleen McPhilemy
- Always Language is where the People are, Kathleen McPhilemy
Reviews
- Stephen Mitchell reviews And Did those Feet: The Story and Character of the English Church AD 200–2020 by Patrick Whitworth
- Edward Nickell reviews New Horizons: The Celebration of Oneness based on the Eucharist by Jon Robinson
- Dominic Kirkham reviews Conquistadores: A New History by Fernando Cervantes
- Kathleen McPhilemy reviews The Voyage of St Brendan by A.B. Jackson
Regulars and Occasionals
- Revisiting: Dominic Kirkham revisits The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy
- Letters to the Editor
- As I Please: John Pearson goes on a Dales Walk, John Pearson
Editorial: The Future of God and Organised Religion
Unfortunately, as the pandemic is not yet over, the SOF Annual Conference had to be on Zoom this year. However, it was well attended. The various talks provoked interest and lively discussions. A main theme of the Conference was ‘The Future of God and Organised Religion.’ This issue of Sofia contains texts of most of the talks, with some having been held over until December for reasons of space.
The first talk was a report by Elaine Graham on her research (together with Graeme Smith) on the work of Don Cupitt. She says: ‘We think that Cupitt’s work has been neglected, especially within academic circles, but that his ideas continue to be supremely relevant today.’ She will also be researching into his role in the foundation of the SOF Network: ‘In many respects, they are intertwined, or at least run in parallel. But there are also significant ways in which each trajectory takes separate directions as time goes on.’ We don’t all always agree with Don!
Dave Francis and Denise Cush, both specialists in religious education, reported on their Solarity project: ‘The Story So Far’. They say: ‘It was clear to us that the SOF Network had something of importance to say’ to the younger generation. They have already produced a website with 82 sessions of ‘learning resources that could be accessed by young people themselves, or by leaders of [extra-curricular] clubs or groups interested in exploring some of the deeper questions of life’. Now, with a team of collaborators, they are working on an actual curriculum for ‘Religion and Worldviews’. SOF members have contributed generously to fund this latest Solarity development.
With different views and perspectives, three speakers – John Pearson, Paul Vittle and Iain Robertson – gave short talks on ‘The Future of God and Organised Religion’. After hearing all three, we were asked to discuss them in ‘breakout rooms’. Everyone had plenty to say in the one I was assigned to.
The three speakers, and probably most of the participants in the discussion, were from a Christian background. The key issue was if religion is a human creation, how much of it to keep. (Of course, that applies to all religions but perhaps first and foremost it is the task of members of a tradition to explore their own.) Should we just keep the ethics and ditch the rest? Or can we also keep the stories and poems, the theology and liturgy? And if so how? Is theology a sister art to poetry? Perhaps, for example, the theology of incarnation and trinity are ‘poetic tales’ with a lot to say to us.
We are embodied mortal creatures and our timespan is linear, a lifetime from birth to death. Our timespan is also cyclical, day and night and a year of four seasons. The traditional Christian liturgy has ceremonies for important stages in life, and goes through the hours of the day and round the seasons of the year. In midwinter it goes down into the dark and then celebrates a new birth. In spring it celebrates life bursting forth again, resurrection. And humanity itself has a history of people living in the past. The liturgy recalls some of them on their feast days.
The gospel stories and the ensuing liturgy and theology have accumulated a mass of glorious words and music, poetry and song, as well as visual art. Do we have to ditch all that when we realise the divine is not supernatural and it is all a human creation? It’s a product of the human poetic genius, the human creator spirit. Isn’t that marvellous?
But how do we keep it? Seeing an altarpiece in an art gallery or hearing a Mass in a concert hall is not the same as the way they act in a church. Founders and early members of the SOF Network hoped that the churches would ‘buy non-realism’. But mostly that did not happen and many churches have retreated into a fundamentalist literalism. Edward Nickell gives an example of how he copes in his review on page 24.
Isn’t the task of SOF both to be honest and say plainly that religion is a human creation, but also to sift and find ways to keep this precious common treasury, so that it can enrich communities and individuals? Then it will ‘flash upon the inward eye (and ear), which is the bliss of solitude’ and provide insights that ‘pass into the fabric of the mind’. That adds to an abundant life, as well as the ethical inspiration provided by the poetic visions of a reign of kindness on Earth, humanity as one body all sharing the same bread, and the beautiful city where every tear is wiped away.
Dinah Livingstone
Letters to the Editor
A Note from Don Cupitt
May I again use your Letters page to report to the membership? I’m cheerful and fairly clear-headed, but homebound and very slow-moving and dim-sighted. Fortunately my wife remains very much fitter and more active. She can still drive us out for a meal with friends.
I have caused some people to be disconcerted by saying in my last blog that I was unsure what my whole oeuvre has been about. In fact, I deliberately left the issue open to permit various interpretations in the future. But briefly, I was a would-be reformer. Western Christianity as we have inherited it has been wrapped around platonic philosophy and the authority of Rome and its Bishop. The sixteenth-century Reformation left Christian doctrine largely untouched, though it was and is an intellectual mess. I sought to discard all that, and instead wrap the best bits of the old faith around a one-world, naturalistic philosophy of Life, a kingdom-theology and solar ethics.
That’s it, very briefly,
Don Cupitt, Cambridge
On Sofia 139 and 140
Most unusually, my copy of Sofia 139 got ‘buried’ amongst other publications (‘to be returned to shortly’) after only a cursory glance when it arrived. Unfortunately it stayed ‘buried’ for longer than it should until ‘Christian Atheism’ came up in a Zoom conversation with 3 SOF friends. John Pearson’s article was mentioned – and I realised that I hadn’t gone back to it as intended.
Thank you so much for that article, which I have since read and re-read. I seem to be in a very similar position with regard to my relationship with church, and have tried on numerous occasions to justify satisfactorily my position (not only to other people, but also to myself!). John’s article sums it up beautifully for me. I have lots of books that cover, or at least include the topic – especially Canon Brian Mountford’s excellent Christian Atheist – Belonging without Believing – but your article is more valuable and helpful to someone like me who struggles to find the right words.
John’s ‘Talking Rubbish’ item is also very interesting and enlightening and will be shared with my friend and local Green Party activist (who sadly did not gain enough votes in our recent Council elections).
Janet Carpenter, Kirby Muxloe, Leics.
The most recent copy of Sofia arrived as we left home to go for breakfast at our usual coffee shop. It is our little Saturday morning treat and ritual. Before I went it was a great comfort to know that I had something to look forward to when I returned home. I always have books to read but it is interesting always to read the words of people that I have known over many years. In these strange times it is a great comfort that folk come to life through their words, ideas and observations.
When we returned home, somehow, this copy opened in reverse order and my eyes fell upon a photo of Guy Gibson, the wartime pilot and hero of the Dam Busters. It was a strange coincidence that at breakfast, a younger lady than myself had spoken of her great grandfather and told my husband and me that he had been part of that squadron, working on the planes as an engineer. I was absolutely thrilled to hear this personal story.
There is no way that I would want her to think of these brave young men as any other but heroes. She then went on to tell us that her other great grand-father had been in the merchant navy during the Second World War and his ship had been bombed but he had, thankfully, survived. Good for me in that here was one of his descendants able and willing to tell the story.
Those were difficult years and it surprises me not to hear that some of the heroes of the day were complex characters who, perhaps, were not always paragons of virtue. I applaud John P. for always speaking his truth; his article told us that some of our heroes were latterly found to be morally lacking.
I have held many a conversation with a policeman friend where we have agreed that there is that of the thief, liar and cheat in all of us. It only takes some particular circumstance or experience to change our behaviour. I must congratulate anyone who has managed to pass through the world as a sainted person. I could never claim to be in this category and would hope that this makes me a more understanding and compassionate though frail human being. Let him without sin cast the first stone seems not to have endured the passage of time or thought.
The phrase ‘presumed innocent until proven guilty’ was coined by the British barrister Sir William Garrow (1760–1840) during a 1791 trial at the Old Bailey. John was emphasising the cases of people who have been tried through the media long before they have reached any fair trial.
My thanks also to Andy Kemp for his interesting article about the origins of the Methodist movement which I enjoyed very much. A former SOF member and retired Methodist Minister often lamented in recent years that the lunatics had taken over the asylum. I have alerted him to Andy’s erudite article. It is sad that he no longer preaches if only to act as a counterbalance to the Evangelical trend.
Bobbie Stephens-Wright, Morpeth, Northumberland
On the SOF Conference, July 2021
My question in the Zoom chat box in the final session about John Pearson saying SOFN only has about another 10 years of life left in it was not taken up due to pressure of speakers queueing up. Could he perhaps write a short piece addressing and explaining this? Is this due to no younger people joining, or the decline of the churches themselves, or what? I asked Martin Spence and he did not agree, and did not think that SOF is absolutely dependant on the existence of the mainstream churches. As in the note I also put in the chat box, the Church of Scotland is faring badly, and even its own experts have analysed its recent course and extrapolated it out to a complete disappearance within a few decades. Church attendance is down in the UK across all categories, except of course those wild upbeat Evangelical establishments which offer the easy certainty that so many of us in SOF find so dismaying. A sketch of JP’s idea of the end of SOF might provoke some alternative visions.
I hope this can go somewhere.
The conference was great
Jerry Peyton, Edinburgh