Contents
Articles
- Religion Still Matters, Don Cupitt
- An Ethic for the 21st Century, Daphne Hampson
- Can't we be more Evangelical?, Anne Padley
- Calling our Bluff on Non-Realism, Wendy Funnell
- Why so Conservative?, Thomas Altizer
- In the Footsteps of the Buddha and the Mahatma...and the Christ...and the Om..., Kenneth Wilson
Reviews
- Christians Awake!, David Boulton
Regulars and Occasionals
Editorial
Postscripts by Seafarer EDITORIAL Sea of Faith The quarterly magazine of the Sea of Faith Network Hobsons Farm, Dent, Cumbria LA10 5RF Editor: David Boulton Leicester Squared was the worst of conferences. I heard both views expressed as | left Leicester after our tenth annual get-together. It was certainly the oddest of conferences. Who but the Sea of Faith Network would devote the whole of the principal day to three presentations all radically critical of core aspects of the Network’s distinctive stance?
Arthur Miller politely declined to engage with “religious faith as a human creation” — and indeed with religious faith understood in any other way. Thomas Altizer offered an impressive impersonation of the prophet Amos, but his message of “Apocalypse Now” was delivered with all the charm of a medieval matron flinging open the window and emptying an over-laden piss-pot on our heads. Altizer the wunappetiser...
Daphne Hampson told us how deeply dangerous is our notion that religion and the transcendent truth and beauty some call God is wholly human, cultural and language-borne: and we gave her the longest round of applause we have given any of our speakers since Bishop Jack Spong told us that while he was happy to mythologise the bible and the life of Jesus he was sticking with a real God.
The result of this triple-assault was nevertheless hugely invigorating. All three speakers challenged us in ways which demand responses if we are to grow up as a Network.
I: was the best of conferences. It “Can the Sea of Faith Network dream the new dreams and inspire the new visions, constructing alternatives to fundamentalism, nihilism and the dumbing-down of human life?” Arthur Miller took us through the controversies among scientists and philosophers of science between the realists, who see science as the pursuit of objective truth, and the “idealists” or anti-realists for whom the truths of science are simply analagous to the imaginative truths of the arts. The anti-realist view of physics, he told us, has been abandoned by virtually all practising physicists. What does this mean, then, for those who have followed Wittgenstein, Derrida and Cupitt into a whole-hog non-realism which embraces science, psychology, history, language, the arts, philosophy, theology, the lot? Professor Miller said that wasn’t his field: he “didn’t talk God-language”.
But it is our field, and the explorations we claim to be engaged in have to face the question: can you be a realist in science (or politics, or mathematics) and a non-realist in religion? Of course not, says Cupitt and half the SoF Network. Of course you can, says Miller and the other half. Discuss.
Tom Altizer’s challenge is less theoretical, more practical. Following Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God”, and drawing on “the atheist visionary Blake’s” inspired understanding of the unity of heaven and hell, light and dark, God and humanity, Altizer tells us that we have hardly begun to understand the demands made upon us by the new situation we have created for ourselves by pushing the all-powerful king of kings, Blake’s satanic God, off his throne.
We have put down the almighty from his seat, but have failed to transfer his sovereignty to ourselves. Altizer’s is a lonely, angry voice in the radical antinomian tradition of the seventeenth-century Ranters and Muggletonians, revived in twentieth-century protest politics, anarchism and _ post-modernism. I’m sure he thinks we in Sea of Faith are too nice, too cosy, too complacent, too damned liberal. He certainly thinks we are a conservative lot (see page 22). We have nothing to say to the hungry, the wretched and the damned — which is why we too are damned. We think we have pulled down the walls of old Jerusalem, but we are too absorbed in our own “spirituality”, in discovering and fulfilling our selves, to commit to the building of a New Jerusalem, the “new Heaven and a new Earth” of, yes, the Apocalypse. Again, discuss. ‘Dream’ photo: W. Eugene Smith Daphne Hampson issued more than one challenge. She shares SoF’s radical rejection of traditional Christian-ity but remains a defiant theological realist, worshipping a reality which she believes transcends human knowledge and experience, and which she is happy to continue to call God. She is a non-Christian realist where many in SoF are Christian (or post-Christian) non-realists. But her quarrel with non-realism is not only that it is, in her view, philosophically flawed (she quotes Derrida against Cupitt) but that it isn’t radical enough. Non-realists, she says, are happy to take on board the Christian myth as myth, and the symbolism of the creeds as symbolism, but they don’t seem to ask themselves whether these are good or bad myths, useful or profoundly dangerous symbols.
For her, the myths of the virgin birth and God’s assumption of manhood, and the symbolism which pictures God as Father, Lord, King, are bad myths and bad symbolism in that they validate, and were deliberately created to validate, the dominance of men over women. The SoF priest who justifies his recitation of the creeds, formularies and liturgies of the church on the basis that he means what he says symbolically rather than literally is simply perpetuating this monstrous injustice. Now that we really do have to discuss! fter all that, our speaker the Aves morning, Don Cupitt, might have been tempted to throw away his prepared script and respond to the challenges of our guest-critics. But no. Instead, he chose to issue a ringing challenge of his own. The “instrumental rationality’ and modern technologies which helped bury the supernaturalism and superstition of old-time religion are now producing so dehumanized a culture that we face a nihilistic nightmare. Nightmares are best dispelled by visions, and “we need new visions of the good life and of the good society, because so many of the old ones are out of date and so many of the new ones are banal”.
Can the Sea of Faith Network dream the new dreams and inspire the new visions? Well, don’t let’s get above ourselves... But we can play a modest part in the subversion of the old Jerusalem by the new. We can join with others, now with fellowhumanists, now with religious radicals, with poets and playwrights and film-makers and other inspired subversives, to construct alternatives to fundamentalism, nihilism and the dumbing-down of human life.
Cupitt thinks they must be religious alternatives — or, at least, that the search for alternatives is itself religious. We can argue about that.
But that’s what the Network has to do, and it is going to need all the allies it can get if it is to make any impact in turning the world upside down « WANTED!
The Editor Sea of Faith Hobsons Farm Dent Cumbria LAIO 5RF POSTBAG Survey I would like to hear from readers who were unable to attend conference and receive my questionnaire. I am studying SoF as part of my degree, exploring the visions which members have for the future of the Network and ways in which it can grow.
I wonder how many feel isolated, as I do in Scarborough, and welcome suggestions. I hope to establish how many members seek change within the Church, compared to those who want the Network to evolve along separate lines. Many members have already indicated that they would like to try separate Sea of Faith services (I prefer to use the word “gatherings”), seeing such developments as celebrations of our common commitment to exploration, and our bond of fellowship. Any suggestions?
I also wonder how many members have felt held back from deep commitment because of conflicting views of their partners and a sense of duty to children.
I promise confidentiality, and results will be made available at a later date.
— Pam Mason, Scarborough
Pam Mason 7 West End View, Cayton, Scarborough, N. Yorks YO11 3SP When size matters I have a problem reading small print and the Spring 1997 issue caused great difficulties as the print was small throughout. I was very pleased therefore to see that the print size in most of the Summer 1997 issue is larger.
Please will you try in future to keep to this larger type, even if this means limiting the number of articles.
Many thanks for all your hard work and lively contributions.
— Josephine Howarth, Harrogate
Josephine Howarth Flat 2, 75 St Winifred’s Ave West, Harrogate HG2 BLS Quaker Humanism I have just finished reading The Faith of a Quaker Humanist as reviewed by Don Cupitt (Summer 1997). For over 30 years I have been struggling with the problem of detaching the ideas and experiences covered by the term “spitituality” from God-centred religion.
This pamphlet does this, and more, exquisitely — so well that it will get attacked by the hardliners in both the Humanists and the Quakers.
I remember twenty years ago I had been asked to address, as a Humanist, a group composed of those seeking a new outlook for what could be called “religious ecology”. I described to them that in 1955 Margaret Knight had made a short broadcast on the subject of her new book Morals Without Religion. She put the point that it was possible to consider morals and religion as separate concepts because there were two different words.
I pointed out to my audience that we only had the one word “spirituality” to describe what amounted to religious spirituality and the agnostic version.
There is a lot of bitter argument in the Humanist movement about this concept. Some totally insist that it can have no place in our vocabulary as it refers only to religious beliefs.
It would be good to have a booklet on the history of the word, like Nicolas Walter’s on the word “humanism”.
Meanwhile, The Faith of a Quaker Humanist is a wonderful booklet!
— Margaret Chisman, Tring
Margaret Chisman Near Station, Tring, Herts HP23 5QX Finale Just a short note to congratulate Anthea Boulton on the splendid finale to the Conference. Excellent music, speakers and choir-master! But most of all, top marks for the programme as a whole, which is by far the most difficult thing to arrange. It was a very moving experience.
— Beryl de Wit, Warwick
Beryl de Wit 19 Archery Fields, Bridge End, Warwick CU34 6PQ St Tony I know that Seafarer provides a lighter touch at the end of a serious publication but can he be discouraged from the emotional political stuff? His widening grin should wait until we reach the Promised Land. If we want political comment in a lighter vein, there is always Matthew Parris in The Times — one who has been through the political mill and who now comments from the sidelines.
I think it better for Sea of Faith to stay up on Parnassus.
— W.J. Milne, Brackenfield, Derby
W.J. Milne Woodbine, Brackenfield, Derby DE55 6AR [See ‘Still Grinning’ in Postbag, pg. 27] Backing Swampy I hope that Keith Bamford will give further thought to his views as expressed in your last issue [June 1997] in the first of his three comments. Road protesters like Swampy and Animal and Denise cause trouble for some; but time and money are well spent when more slovenly minds are caused to pay attention to wasteful uses of land and permanent destruction of that land’s natural resources.
True, nobody likes “once attractive towns being gridlocked for a couple of hours at evening rush hour” but there is no guarantee that more and better roads will permanently improve town traffic congestion. Better by far to live and work locally and where journeys are necessary to use transport which is economical with the countryside as well as with the towns.
Roads protesters, at the eleventh hour, contribute to the country by activating conscience and consciousness, at great effort and often danger to themselves. The important job which these young people have set themselves is to show us that the transport/land use problem is too complex to be solved by building by-passes.
— Eileen Cameron, Edinburgh
Eileen Cameron 48 Barnton Park Avenue, Edinburgh EH4 6HE Any Answers?
— William Spray, Marlborough
Is it perhaps time that the Sea of Faith not only lapped, sometimes a bit smugly, round matters of individual belief but was roused to engage, as effectively from its premisses as does (say) Peter Selby from his Grace and Mortgage (Darton Longman Todd £10.95), with ; POSTBAG challenges as real and desperate as world poverty and debt? That might be an endeavour as revealing to Sea of Faith members themselves as to those of us who are still on the shore, trying to make out whether the Sea carries fierce waves of positive commitment and action as well as gentle bubbles of intellectual clarification. If it does, why and in what form? If not, why not?
William Spray Manton Down Lane, Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 1RP Unfair This letter is an expression of my acclaim for the article by Lorna Marsden, “The Sea of Doubt” [Spring 1997]. I feel that the criticism directed towards her [Postbag, Summer 1997] was unfounded and completely unjustified.
Erwin Schrodinger, an eminent physicist, introduced his famous cat paradox into the quantum debate, thus taking the uncertainty principle out of its atomic domain and into a macroscopic situation.
The God of love can quite easily be transformed into the God of physics.
But we must be careful and not let science blind us, by letting it be likened to a deity. For it is easy to fall into the trap of bowing down to the graven images of physics and be led to preclude other uncertainties as we continue to explore a meaning for it all. Did we invent mathematics, or was it waiting in the wings to be discovered? A bit like God, I suppose.
— Robert Wales, Holyhead
Thank you for editing and publishing an excellent and most interesting magazine complete with its agreements, contradictions and uncertainties.
— Kate Cousins, Clacton-on-Sea