Don Cupitt: theological pioneer?

Abstract

This final article in a three-part series exploring the contemporary significance of the theologian and philosopher of religion Don Cupitt examines the extent to which he might be considered a ‘theological pioneer’. There are three possible areas of innovation: Cupitt’s work on non-realism, his adoption of postmodern philosophy and his advocacy of a religion of everyday speech. In each of these, Cupitt carried out ground-breaking work, but it is less clear whether his ideas have exercised a significant and lasting influence. While the Sea of Faith television series (1984) generated a substantial popular following, his work has not been widely adopted or developed by successive generations of theologians or scholars of religion.

In this third article in our series exploring the contemporary significance of the theologian and philosopher of religion Don Cupitt, we examine the extent to which Cupitt can and should be considered a ‘theological pioneer’. The question will be investigated in three parts: first, his advocacy of Christian non-realism, made famous in the book Taking Leave of God (1980) and popularized in the BBC television series The Sea of Faith (1984); and second, his adoption of the norms and conventions of continental post-structuralist thought – particularly that of the philosopher Jacques Derrida – and Cupitt’s application of these ideas to Christian theology. Finally, we will consider his later work on religion in what he termed ‘everyday speech’, and its implications for theological language and expression.

We suggest that, in each of these areas, Cupitt demonstrated innovative and original thinking, for which his work might be considered pioneering. Despite this, however, Cupitt’s work has not achieved significant long-term impact, either in the academy or in the Church. While the TV series generated a popular following and resulted in an organization dedicated to his thought, the Sea of Faith Movement, there is no identifiable academic school that could be said to be Cupitt’s heir. Even so, this is not to say that his long-term influence cannot be discerned, albeit not as he would have probably hoped or envisaged. The group associated with the brand of theology known as Radical Orthodoxy, some of whom studied with Cupitt at Cambridge, certainly owe a debt to Cupitt’s critique of theological liberalism while departing considerably from his solution to reject much of orthodox Christianity. So the question of Cupitt’s lasting legacy still remains. Are the theological ideas for which he stood of any significance and worthy of recovery?

Christian non-realism

The publication of Taking Leave of God was a major turning point in Cupitt’s career.

His construction of a contemporary Christianity, without what he regarded as the outdated metaphysics of traditional Christianity, had its roots in his previous studies of via negativa mysticism and in the quest for the historical Jesus. ¹ It marked his final repudiation of theological metaphysics based on the objective existence of ‘an actually existing independent individual being’ ² in favour of a ‘non-realist’ understanding of God. After Kant, Cupitt considers the language of God to be a ‘regulative ideal’, not descriptive of a supernatural reality. Since there is no objective reality, religion is not ‘true’ in the sense of representing the world, but has worth by virtue of the moral world it enables us to construct. We should regard ‘God’ as a metaphor, an imaginative construction or personification that embodies the very best of humanitarian ideals.

This is conditioned by Cupitt’s contention that traditional theism is a denial of the modern aspiration to steer ‘a course through life of one’s own choice’, and people’s wish to ‘live their own lives, to make their own choices, and to determine their own destinies’, ³ and by his earlier criticism of traditional Christian doctrine as being untenable in the face of modern scientific knowledge. But while a metaphysical God may have become anachronistic, people still yearn for moral commitment and religious practice. And the language of ‘God’ can still be the symbolic centre or focus for this, since Cupitt argues that one can be a person of faith without having to accept the supernatural claims of traditional theism. Religion has often been about surrender of personal autonomy and obedience to dogma and spiritual authority, but it should be about integrity, holiness and liberation. ⁴

Cupitt’s main thesis – that it was no longer reasonable to subscribe to Christian metaphysics in the light of modern science and that God should be recognized as a human creation – was not particularly novel. ⁵ What was distinctive about Cupitt’s argument in Taking Leave was that he made it not as a secular philosopher or social scientist but as a religious professional and ordained priest, that he made it as an insider suggesting not that religion therefore needed to end but that it needed to be reformulated to take account of progress in scientific and rational thinking. ⁶ Cupitt’s pioneering contribution was more to make the case for his version of theological non-realism, a faith based on personal autonomy and independently chosen ethics and spirituality, which was both inspired by the Christian tradition and the best hope for its future. ⁷

Taking Leave of God is therefore an extended critique of religious literalism and realism: that faith is about assenting to propositional facts about supernatural beings and events. But is it possible to hold Christian faith with intellectual honesty? Yes, if we think of the essence of faith as ‘purity of heart, inner integrity, active love and complete unselfishness’. ⁸ It changes the way we regard religion:

I want to put spirituality and the lived life of religion first, and then treat the doctrines as symbolic expressions of the spirituality … I say … that the spirituality, the ethics and the ritual of religion come first … The doctrines … communicate to us what the religious ideal is and how to attain it. We join in the language of worship by way of pledging our allegiance and deepening our commitment to the Christian life. ⁹

The controversy generated by Cupitt’s adoption of theological non-realism can be measured by the strength of criticism he received from senior ecclesial and academic figures. ¹⁰ For many of these critics, Taking Leave represented Cupitt’s move from a radical liberal presence within the boundaries of church orthodoxy to an extremist radical located outside orthodox Christian norms. ¹¹ Rowan Williams, a colleague of Cupitt’s in the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge at the time, produced an extended and perceptive appraisal of Taking Leave of God and its follow-up, The World to Come. ¹² In the article Williams argues that the ‘Realism’ that Cupitt rejects is something of an ‘Aunt Sally’ and that ‘a good many fairly traditional theologians’ would reject the idea that theological statements depict the nature of another world, that God can be established by objective and neutral enquiry, that spirituality and morality are tools to earn eternal reward and that eternal life refers to a permanent post-mortem existence. ¹³ Further, the absolute dichotomy between scientific objective language and ‘symbolic-noncognitive-arbitrary’ language is too simplistic, and what is meant by ‘reality’ can well be more complex and nuanced.

Williams advocates instead a form of critical realism. He argues that a ‘reality’ beyond language is possible, and likely, because the spiritual and moral life of a saint raises the possibility of this being more than a remarkable personal achievement but rather a response to something other than themselves. ¹⁴ Williams’s claim, and it is modest, is that ‘we need some vehicle (however conceptually absurd) to give expression here to the fact that “I want nothing but Jesus and to see Him at peace in Jerusalem” … means something other than “I want to be a fulfilled autonomous spiritual subject”’. ¹⁵

Cupitt read and absorbed Williams’s article, writing a short response. ¹⁶ Williams has little to say ‘in favour of theological realism’, Cupitt argues, offering ‘no classical-type metaphysical arguments in support of it’. Cupitt expresses a sense of frustration at what he sees as Williams’s timidity in the face of non-realist challenges to traditional Christian metaphysics and what might conceivably remain that is worth defending. He wonders: ‘On whose behalf is he taking up the cudgels, and why?’ ¹⁷ This question is largely rhetorical, as Cupitt elaborates, arguing that ‘Rowan Williams’ residual (and by now groundless) attachment to cosmological religion and to realism has put him on the side of Christendom against Christianity’. ¹⁸ Williams is, Cupitt suggests, too wedded to the security of a familiar and risk-free theological realism, whereas Cupitt portrays himself as one who has confronted the loss of metaphysical certainty and embraced a kind of radical nihilism. He writes:

For he [Williams] is saying that it is after all not necessary to die with Christ and to pass through the Nihil, that fearsome moment in which one loses everything, even knowledge and society. Christendom protects us from all that, for it allows us to take our faith and values from the way the world is and the powers that be. Christendom sees Christ’s gospel of dying to the world, with its corollaries of nihilism and radical freedom, as anarchic and subversive. ¹⁹

Cupitt is probably correct to highlight the gulf between his theology and Williams’s, something that also serves to indicate how far Cupitt had travelled beyond the limits of what was regarded as acceptable orthodox Christian theology. The interchange between the two also illustrates that, while they shared many philosophical assumptions in terms of the significance of realist metaphysics versus non-realist immanence, they reached very different conclusions.

Just as his non-realist ideas were generating debate, however, Cupitt’s own work took a new and further direction that did not overturn his non-realism but rather superseded it. It is his turn to postmodernism that constitutes the second area in which he might be considered a theological pioneer.

Cupitt’s postmodern turn

While Williams’s 1984 article discusses Taking Leave of God and The World to Come together, Cupitt himself chose to note a major disjunction rather than continuity between the two. Taking Leave of God, from an intellectual standpoint, is ‘strongly Kantian, and reflects the influences of Mansel’s theory that religious truth is regulative, and of Wittgenstein’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’. ²⁰ The World to Come, however, represented a new direction:

By contrast, [it] reflects the joining of hands between American and French philosophy as seen, for example, in what Rorty has lately been writing about Derrida. Standing within the post-Nietzschean tradition, it represents a new departure. Thus (if the author’s view of the matter is worth anything) Taking Leave of God rounded off what I had been trying to say for the previous dozen years, and it was followed rather than preceded by the conversion which led me to write the second book. ²¹

The conversion in question was Cupitt’s confrontation with nihilism. He describes this, in relation to the book, as seeking to help ‘its reader to die with Christ, to experience the Nihil, and to come to such a pass that he sees that there is no recourse left him but to choose the values of the Kingdom of God on the far side’. ²²

The question is whether Cupitt’s brand of postmodern theology, in which non-realism is superseded but not undone, does represent a truly pioneering contribution on Cupitt’s part. Two of his former students, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, would agree. Reflecting on Cupitt’s influence on him, Graham Ward recalls that he was introduced to Cupitt’s thinking through The Long-Legged Fly, published in 1997. ²³ It remained ‘profoundly embedded in my own thought’. ²⁴ In particular, Ward identifies Cupitt’s notion of ‘The Speaking Body’ as a seminal influence on his thinking, especially the idea of ‘“transcorporeality” and the analogical relationship between the physical, social, ecclesial, sacramental and Christic body’ that was especially important in Ward’s Cities of God. ²⁵

Similarly, Catherine Pickstock argues that Cupitt should be remembered for the way he shattered ‘the liberal compromise of the inherited, predominantly Anglican or quasi-Anglican tradition in the United Kingdom’. ²⁶ Pickstock states that Cupitt ‘encouraged a very early engagement with themes in French thought now dubbed “postmodern”’. ²⁷ Crucially, however, as Pickstock notes, not all those who were led towards postmodernism and post-structuralism through Cupitt’s work, seeing it as a powerful critique of modernist theology, necessarily emulated his embrace of non-realism. Whereas postmodern philosophy represented for Cupitt a vehicle for the continuation of his radical theological project, a focus on the linguistic as a means of further exploring his non-realism, others, like John Milbank, Ward and Pickstock, employed postmodern philosophy as a means of resisting the secularizing direction of modernity and asserting afresh the importance and, in Milbank’s case, proper hegemony of Christianity.

Postmodernism thus both demonstrates the failures of liberalism and opens the door to a contemporary expression of faith of the type Cupitt utterly rejected. For Pickstock, the answer was to find ‘much richer resources in Christian tradition’ with which to defend orthodoxy, including, perhaps especially, the return of ‘Thomistic resources’. ²⁸ Others were ‘forced to confront the modern critique of religion and metaphysics in its most virulent postmodern form’, which has led, Pickstock argues, ‘to modes of British theology of many diverse kinds which arguably are now taken more notice of abroad than any previous theological thinking in the twentieth century’. ²⁹ Pickstock recognizes that such modes of thought lead in divergent directions from those pursued by Cupitt himself. Even so, he has what Pickstock calls a ‘seminal and continuing role in theology’. ³⁰ It is, however, a strange sort of pioneering role in which Cupitt represented a strong catalytic influence but only to pave the way for a theological position he regarded as inimical to what he saw as the future of authentic postmodern religion.

The religion of everyday speech

The third area in which Cupitt might be considered a theological pioneer is in his interest in ‘everyday speech’ in which he examined the theological ideas implicit in popular culture and expressed by non-specialists. Cupitt had long believed that Christian values were present in the world beyond the Church as much as in formal creeds and doctrines. From 1999, with the publication of the first of a series, The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech, he undertook a further excursion into the presence of religious ideals in popular culture and everyday life, rather than expressed in codified, metaphysical belief. ³¹ He argued that ordinary people already embrace a non-realist, post-metaphysical world in which language expresses what might pass for religious sentiments. Such everyday speech supports his contention that spiritual and religious sentiment still persists, and that references to ‘God’ as a metaphysical or supernatural being have been replaced by and refocused around the language of ‘life’ itself.

What Cupitt identified was a shift in Western society’s religious sensibility in which people directed their attention from a fear of death and a desire to appease God to a celebration of life. The initial evidence offered in support of the argument are the road shrines to people tragically killed in road accidents. ³² Similarly, moral codes based on a foundation of metaphysics had been largely replaced by a plurality of ‘lifestyles’ and a call to authenticity, or to ‘live life to the full’. Cupitt locates the origins of such an ethic in such things as the Romantic movement and existentialist philosophers.

This demonstrates, Cupitt argues, that society has ceased to speak about God and replaced this discourse with language about life. ³³ In the ‘old order’, religion was busy preparing people for death and ensuring that eternal life was as good as might reasonably be hoped. In the new dispensation, life is celebrated here and now: ‘A solar love of life has already conquered death, and is therefore already eternal life. So you can have “eternal life” right now.’ ³⁴ What this means is that, whereas previously religious discourse was concerned about ‘God’, people now speak, in everyday language, about ‘life’. ³⁵ Echoing his work in the mid-1990s on solar ethics, Cupitt’s solution is not to long for some kind of afterlife but to embrace our immanent, material existence as the highest expression of all that is sacred. The end of metaphysics and the demythologization of religious language enable the re-sacralization of the everyday; and Cupitt continues to regard religious commitment, with its symbols, practices and rituals, as a valid framework for living.

For its time, this was a new departure in theological thinking. It coincided with the emergence of work in the study of religion that focused on phenomenological or lived experience. This, too, held that religion was less a matter of propositional or credal belief and more to do with inhabiting a world of meaning in which ideas of ‘the sacred’ were drawn from everyday life and material culture. ³⁶ This stressed religion as a way of life in which resources from the everyday world – popular images, symbols and narratives – formed the raw material from which people fashioned a set of beliefs and attitudes towards life’s most profound experiences. Jeff Astley’s work on ‘ordinary theology’, focused on theological education, had a similar emphasis on Christian formation by emphasizing everyday experience rather than doctrine. ³⁷

Linda Woodhead – another former student of Cupitt’s – has noted how Cupitt’s religion of everyday speech might be understood as both a response and a potential solution to the crisis of declining participation and belief confronting the churches in the West. ³⁸ She states that Cupitt’s ‘ordinary-language trilogy is sparkling, original, perceptive, insightful, witty and illuminating’. ³⁹ However, she critiques Cupitt’s work as lacking any kind of methodological underpinning or account of how he gathered his data. ⁴⁰ While Woodhead praises Cupitt for moving beyond a theological method solely focused on sacred texts or doctrine towards looking for ‘the sacred solely in ordinary life and language’, ⁴¹ he fails to explain, given such a strongly subjective turn in religious understanding, by what authority such sentiments and values might be considered expressions of theology at all. In other words, Cupitt’s work may be original, to a limited extent, but it lacks both methodological and theological innovation or rigour. Even so, what distinguished Cupitt’s foray into the world of lived religion was his insistence that Western culture was undergoing a profound existential turn towards a spirituality of ‘life’ as immanent and existential without the need for any theological or metaphysical underpinning.

Conclusion

Our focus on Cupitt as a theological pioneer has identified three main areas of potential influence: his work on non-realism, his adoption of postmodern philosophy and his advocacy of a religion of everyday speech. In each area Cupitt undertakes ground-breaking work, but the fact is that none of these themes find expression in a more permanent movement or school of thought that continues to pursue and develop the project. This calls into question the extent to which it can be said that Cupitt will have a lasting impact on British theological thinking and whether future generations will return to his work for inspiration.