Taking Leave of God

Don Cupitt

Description

Rejecting Christian doctrines and metaphysics in favour of the religious consciousness which characterizes human identity, Cupitt "takes leave" of God by abandoning objective theism.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 16 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334053552
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.
© Don Cupitt 1980 Preface © Alison Webster 2001
ISBN 978-0-33402-840-6
First published in 1980 by SCM Press This edition first published 2001 by SCM Press 9–17 St Albans Place, London N1 0NX
SCM Press in a division of SCM-Canterbury Press Ltd
Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey
To my parents
Contents

Preface by Alison Webster
Preface by the Author
1 Introductory: The Spirituality of Radical Freedom
2 The Decline of Objective Theism
3 The Charge of Reductionism
4 Creation and Theological Realism
5 Worship and Theological Realism
6 Doctrine and Disinterestedness
7 The Meaning of God
8 How Real Should God Be?
9 Is the Religious Ideal Attainable?
10 Faith as an Act of the Will
11 The Justification of Faith
12 The Triumph of the Religious Consciousness
13 Conclusion
Notes
Index of Names
Preface
My first reading of Taking Leave of God in 1984 was like falling in love with a big idea. And that experience (as those who share such a capacity will agree) is both exhilarating and life-changing, rivalling that of falling in love with another human being. Nearly.
The reading was not purely about ideas though. Cupitt’s esteemed ‘disinterestedness’ was far away in this encounter between myself – a young student fresh from school – and the personality-imbued collection of radical ideas which Taking Leave of God somehow symbolized. In the wake of his Sea of Faith TV series, Don Cupitt was a star. Or as near to one as it’s possible for a Cambridge academic to be. And we loved him: big presence, impressive, funny, fascinated and fascinating. But most important of all, at that time and in that place, he was the best communicator and the best party-giver. So to those of us who knew no better, the sniping of his more traditionalist rivals (‘ Taking Leave of God ? Taking leave of your senses more like’) seemed like professional jealousy on the part of those for whom the term ‘entertaining lecture’ was mere oxymoron. Sampling Cupitt was like tasting forbidden theological fruit.
So was it worth it? And how does it look twenty years on?
Taking Leave of God quickly gained a reputation as a negative book – one which ‘undermined the faithful’ by outlining all those things that must now be disbelieved. But that is a travesty. For Taking Leave of God is positive, passionate and visionary. Cupitt’s is a voice that speaks for a rich religious life and a creative spirituality. In 1980 it came, clearly, from one who loved, cherished and valued both, and who loved his own tradition, though was clearly in conflict with it. It was the upbeat, ‘can-do’ optimistic spirit of Taking Leave of God that attracted me and kept me in pursuit of what Cupitt called ‘the religious ideal’. His approach perfectly suited one who was studying theology because she believed passionately that it was the only subject of ultimate importance, the only subject worth the effort.
His point? That to embrace ‘heteronomous’ religion won’t do because it is simply not good enough. The core of Taking Leave of God is summarized thus:


There is no such thing as objective religious truth and there cannot be. The view that religious truth consists in ideological correctness or in the objective correspondence of doctrinal statement with historical and metaphysical fact is a modern aberration, and a product of the decline of religious seriousness. Religious truth is not speculative or descriptive, but practical, (p. here )
Thus Cupitt termed theological realism ‘a crude mistake’ (p. here ) and dismissed the question of God’s existence outside of faith’s relation to God as being ‘of no religious interest’ (p. here ).
For many readers this approach amounted to unforgivable reductionism. But to others of us it was liberation – a route into a new way of being religious. The attraction was its exactingness and its simplicity: ‘Christianity is not a cosmic hypothesis nor a theory about the world but a categorical demand that one should change one’s whole life’ (p. here ). Here was a job to be done, a quest to be embraced – and one which demanded courage. The possibility of embarking upon that quest felt like a rite of passage to religious adulthood. It was scary, and there was little on offer by way of divine reassurance: ‘God offers me nothing that I can clutch to myself . . . I can only love God completely disinterestedly’ (p. here ). This was a religious journey for those who like to travel light. Attractive, perhaps, only to those with a certain nomadic tendency.
Rereading Taking Leave of God in 2001, it is strikingly ‘of the 80s’. Personal integrity is equated with autonomy; individual freedom is advocated as the highest good, and Cupitt regards with near contempt any form of obedience to external beings or value systems. Very much in line with the cultural and political backdrop of the time, Cupitt observes with apparent approval that, ‘So far as world-view, spirituality and values are concerned everyone in our culture now puts together a personal package’ (p. here ). This was a theology very much of its age. But, as Cupitt might say now, ‘Of course. How could it be otherwise?’ That was the whole point.
Nevertheless, Taking Leave of God had within it the seeds of a philosophical theology that could and did take us beyond 1980s’ individualism. On almost the very last page Cupitt says, ‘Persons all have life-stories, and indeed you may say that a person just is a story’ (p. here ). Here are the beginnings of a direct reversal of the notion that ‘there is no such thing as society’, a reversal which culminates in his latest book (at the time of writing!), in which he states, ‘there cannot be a solitary, autonomous and self-sufficient person . . . to be somebody you have to have a life-history, you have to be in language and you must be part of a We’ ( Philosophy’s Own Religion , SCM Press 2000, p. 105).
There is another key aspect of Taking Leave of God worth highlighting – less often the focus of assessments of it, but very much the explanation of the uproar which it caused in church circles. That is, Cupitt’s searing critique of institutionalized Christianity and its tendency to make the individual believer insignificant: ‘a true believer, takes his own insignificance so completely for granted that he is scarcely even aware of how deeply he despises himself. He is a nobody and his highest happiness lies in glorifying one who is somebody’ (p. 170). He explores the politics of religious doctrine and the way in which it functions sociologically: ‘Religion is a tool for keeping other people in order. We project the divine outwards precisely in order to make religion an efficient control system’ (p. here ).
The politics of theology, and of institutionalized Christianity, were further expounded for me later and in more detail by feminist and Black theologians (amongst others). But at the time Cupitt’s insights were acutely penetrating and changed forever my regard for the institution of the church. But again, Cupitt’s critique was inspired not merely by negativity, but by an unquestionably positive vision of what religious humanity could be, at its best. He was clear about the kind of people we might become if only we could create a truly liberating faith: ‘Religion has to give one wit, levity and command; religion that makes the believer dull, benighted and obtuse is not spiritual and has to be rejected’ (p. here ), and,


We seek to escape from a self that is mean, narrow, darkened, acquisitive, trapped in the world and terrified of death, and we seek to become autonomous, free, creative, universally-loving and disinterested spirit that has gained release from bondage to sin and death. (p. here )
Along with this vision for humanity goes a stunningly positive vision of the divine:


God is the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden at the centre of the religious life. The religious claim and demand upon us is God’s will, the drama of the religious life within us is God’s activity, and the goal of the religious life before us is God’s nature. (p. here )
In Taking Leave of God Cupitt set himself an agenda of exploration which continues still. It encompasses, amongst other things, the reconceptualization of religious language as expressive rather than descriptive; the pursuit of ethics as humanly created not externally imposed; the possibility of a religious life which sits credibly with the modern (and now post-modern) world of communication, science and technology. Most significantly of all, however, he bridges the gap between theology and other disciplines. Drawing upon cultural studies, history, continental philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics and communication studies, Cupitt attempts to draw academic theology out of its isolation. In Taking Leave of God he characterizes the institutional church as ‘a museum’, and theologians as ‘scholarly museum curators’. Twenty years later, I’m not sure that much has c