A review of Turns of Phrase on Amazon by Ian Stubbs.
Ian is Priest-in-Charge of All Saints, Glossop, and is a longstanding member of Sea of Faith.
Don Cupitt is the Hadron Collider of religious thinking. His mind is like a theological, high energy particle accelerator bringing ideas from a range of disciplines into creative attraction and collision, re-writing theology and advancing our understanding of the possibilities of being religious in post-modernity. This book could be seen as a notebook of his experiments in what he terms head-on theology.
Cupitt is the only theologian, certainly in Britain, to take post-modern culture seriously enough to develop theology from within. The book title is significant because his key starting point is language, that we construe our world, give it meaning, in language and in the continuous turning of conversation. He uses the poetic metaphor of the fountain to express this experience of language constantly bubbling up in our consciousness and into life-giving expression. Cupitt argues that we have no access to `raw' data outside of language. Facts are already interpretations and are always open to re-interpretation. Not just in the visual arts but in the sciences and in life generally, we make and re-make the picture. There is no outside meaning; life is what we make of it. There is no absolute fixed Truth, our values are constantly being renegotiated and truth is the current consensus. Truth is now fallible but is not solipsistic or relativistic. It is not doing things `my way' as some critics have tried to argue. Rather, truth has become democratised, Cupitt observes, as hypotheses are put forward and critically tested. Truth is no longer absolute or revealed but continuously renegotiated like art or literary criticism. In my view this helps us to see, for example, why public theology wedded to theism is a non-starter. It either speaks in secular terms and has nothing really distinctive to offer or appeals to revealed truth and puts itself out of the debate. When people want to look for meaningful accounts of what it means to be alive in the 21st century they don't tend to look to the Church.
The understanding, that we shape our world and give life meaning in language, leads to the notion that all our ideas, outlooks, values including our religious ideas are products of history. We can now write the history of God and what is now important is not that people believe in God, but what they mean by God. In the last few hundred years all areas of life can be understood without reference to an eternal and transcendent source of truth and power. It is this experience which has been known as the death of God. The old theistic language, argues Cupitt, no longer has meaning nor does any real work. It is defended only by reactionaries who wish to impose traditional values and hang on to authority, especially over women. More liberal Christians will refer to concepts like a Christian vision for society, meaning perhaps a more generous society. So God, says Cupitt, can still have meaning but in the sense of that to which we aspire, a guiding spiritual idea, a pearl of great price. in his recent thinking Cupitt, as he describes, has tended to take his leave of this idea and simply to equate God with Life. He observes this is what is happening more generally in ordinary language, in the number of `Life' idioms now commonplace, for example, `life is what you make of it', or `she loved life'. The result of this change for Cupitt is to encourage us all to embrace the `whole of life', to say yes to the whole package. I think his most moving and poetic expression of this is `going solar'; burning ourselves out like the sun, living without resentment, losing ourselves in reckless living and loving.
Cupitt traces the death of God not only in science and philosophy but also in his reading of the Bible from Genesis to Pentecost as a gradual handing over of the world by God to humanity and of God's progressive dispersal. After centuries of ideological capture by ecclesiastical theology the Kingdom of God announced by Jesus is at last being realised within postmodernity where life, including that of the cosmos, is constantly pouring out and passing away. As Cupitt puts it, with powerful resonances of Jesus, all life is dying, including the life of God. In Jesus `the immortal dies' as Charles Wesley expressed it in his hymn. It is only now in postmodernity, when ecclesiastical theology of the Kingdom postponed has died, that we are able to fully grasp the significance of this. The Kingdom of God, or Republic or Realm, is here and within us. What Jesus was passionate about is now possible; God is fully dispersed into people and we are able to fully appropriate Jesus' concerns with the space between people, how they let go of themselves, live generously and without jealousy, rivalry and hostility; even how they may love their enemies. Jesus invites us to die daily and to embrace death as part of life.
Anyone who takes funerals will be aware that ideas about what happens after death have been changing. Funerals now are typically a celebration of the life of the person. There is an increasing acceptance that death is final, that we really are returning to stardust and that maybe we will live on for a time in the lives of those we leave behind. I was surprised, as a parish priest, at the number of people who commented favourably on Steve Jobs' Buddhist-like observation that, "Death is very likely to be the single best invention of life because death is life's change agent". Polls suggest that about half of the UK population believe that this life is all we have and agree with Cupitt and John Lennon that there is, `Above us Only Sky'. The Church's funeral rites are out of kilter with this view. I would like to argue, following Cupitt, that there is space within Christianity for those with such a view. Orthodox Christianity has always been circumspect about the afterlife and it is difficult to sort out what has been merely been taken over from Greek philosophy. Some will want to go on believing in some sort of afterlife, but can there not be a place for followers of the Way of Jesus who do not? For those who believe that this life is all we have and don't look for an eternal reward? What an opportunity for the Church of England's Liturgical Commission to produce a new funeral rite!
For Luther reason was the Devil's whore. For some Cupitt is the Devil (not his whore or merely his chaplain) and Cupitt wanted to call his book The Devil's Dictionary. Some may well think about his ideas and be afraid, very afraid. His publishers have given the book a more homely, commonplace title and Cupitt hopes it may be kept by the bedside and turned to when one turns in. His idea is that one thought may turn to another, until his way of thinking sinks in and the reader discovers and recognises a world already familiar.
Ian is Priest-in-Charge of All Saints, Glossop, and is a longstanding member of Sea of Faith.
Don Cupitt is the Hadron Collider of religious thinking. His mind is like a theological, high energy particle accelerator bringing ideas from a range of disciplines into creative attraction and collision, re-writing theology and advancing our understanding of the possibilities of being religious in post-modernity. This book could be seen as a notebook of his experiments in what he terms head-on theology.
Cupitt is the only theologian, certainly in Britain, to take post-modern culture seriously enough to develop theology from within. The book title is significant because his key starting point is language, that we construe our world, give it meaning, in language and in the continuous turning of conversation. He uses the poetic metaphor of the fountain to express this experience of language constantly bubbling up in our consciousness and into life-giving expression. Cupitt argues that we have no access to `raw' data outside of language. Facts are already interpretations and are always open to re-interpretation. Not just in the visual arts but in the sciences and in life generally, we make and re-make the picture. There is no outside meaning; life is what we make of it. There is no absolute fixed Truth, our values are constantly being renegotiated and truth is the current consensus. Truth is now fallible but is not solipsistic or relativistic. It is not doing things `my way' as some critics have tried to argue. Rather, truth has become democratised, Cupitt observes, as hypotheses are put forward and critically tested. Truth is no longer absolute or revealed but continuously renegotiated like art or literary criticism. In my view this helps us to see, for example, why public theology wedded to theism is a non-starter. It either speaks in secular terms and has nothing really distinctive to offer or appeals to revealed truth and puts itself out of the debate. When people want to look for meaningful accounts of what it means to be alive in the 21st century they don't tend to look to the Church.
The understanding, that we shape our world and give life meaning in language, leads to the notion that all our ideas, outlooks, values including our religious ideas are products of history. We can now write the history of God and what is now important is not that people believe in God, but what they mean by God. In the last few hundred years all areas of life can be understood without reference to an eternal and transcendent source of truth and power. It is this experience which has been known as the death of God. The old theistic language, argues Cupitt, no longer has meaning nor does any real work. It is defended only by reactionaries who wish to impose traditional values and hang on to authority, especially over women. More liberal Christians will refer to concepts like a Christian vision for society, meaning perhaps a more generous society. So God, says Cupitt, can still have meaning but in the sense of that to which we aspire, a guiding spiritual idea, a pearl of great price. in his recent thinking Cupitt, as he describes, has tended to take his leave of this idea and simply to equate God with Life. He observes this is what is happening more generally in ordinary language, in the number of `Life' idioms now commonplace, for example, `life is what you make of it', or `she loved life'. The result of this change for Cupitt is to encourage us all to embrace the `whole of life', to say yes to the whole package. I think his most moving and poetic expression of this is `going solar'; burning ourselves out like the sun, living without resentment, losing ourselves in reckless living and loving.
Cupitt traces the death of God not only in science and philosophy but also in his reading of the Bible from Genesis to Pentecost as a gradual handing over of the world by God to humanity and of God's progressive dispersal. After centuries of ideological capture by ecclesiastical theology the Kingdom of God announced by Jesus is at last being realised within postmodernity where life, including that of the cosmos, is constantly pouring out and passing away. As Cupitt puts it, with powerful resonances of Jesus, all life is dying, including the life of God. In Jesus `the immortal dies' as Charles Wesley expressed it in his hymn. It is only now in postmodernity, when ecclesiastical theology of the Kingdom postponed has died, that we are able to fully grasp the significance of this. The Kingdom of God, or Republic or Realm, is here and within us. What Jesus was passionate about is now possible; God is fully dispersed into people and we are able to fully appropriate Jesus' concerns with the space between people, how they let go of themselves, live generously and without jealousy, rivalry and hostility; even how they may love their enemies. Jesus invites us to die daily and to embrace death as part of life.
Anyone who takes funerals will be aware that ideas about what happens after death have been changing. Funerals now are typically a celebration of the life of the person. There is an increasing acceptance that death is final, that we really are returning to stardust and that maybe we will live on for a time in the lives of those we leave behind. I was surprised, as a parish priest, at the number of people who commented favourably on Steve Jobs' Buddhist-like observation that, "Death is very likely to be the single best invention of life because death is life's change agent". Polls suggest that about half of the UK population believe that this life is all we have and agree with Cupitt and John Lennon that there is, `Above us Only Sky'. The Church's funeral rites are out of kilter with this view. I would like to argue, following Cupitt, that there is space within Christianity for those with such a view. Orthodox Christianity has always been circumspect about the afterlife and it is difficult to sort out what has been merely been taken over from Greek philosophy. Some will want to go on believing in some sort of afterlife, but can there not be a place for followers of the Way of Jesus who do not? For those who believe that this life is all we have and don't look for an eternal reward? What an opportunity for the Church of England's Liturgical Commission to produce a new funeral rite!
For Luther reason was the Devil's whore. For some Cupitt is the Devil (not his whore or merely his chaplain) and Cupitt wanted to call his book The Devil's Dictionary. Some may well think about his ideas and be afraid, very afraid. His publishers have given the book a more homely, commonplace title and Cupitt hopes it may be kept by the bedside and turned to when one turns in. His idea is that one thought may turn to another, until his way of thinking sinks in and the reader discovers and recognises a world already familiar.
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