Don Cupitt

English philosopher of religion and scholar of Christian theology. He has been an Anglican priest and a professor of the University of Cambridge, though is better known as a popular writer, broadcaster and commentator. He has been described as a "radical theologian", noted for his ideas about "non-realist" philosophy of religion

 

‘the most radical theologian in the world’ - Press report.

 

Don Cupitt Non-Realism

Don Cupitt in discussion with Stephen Batchelor and Madeleine Bunting

 

 

Born in 1934 in Lancashire, England, and educated at Charterhouse, Trinity Hall Cambridge, and Westcott House Cambridge. He studied, successively, Natural Sciences, Theology and the Philosophy of Religion. In 1959 he was ordained deacon in the Church of England, becoming a priest in 1960. In the early 1990s he stopped officiating at public worship, and in 2008 he finally ceased to be a communicant member of the church. Cupitt is married with three children, who all now live and work in London, and two grandchildren

 

After short periods as a curate in the North of England, and as Vice-Principal of Westcott House, Cupitt was elected to a fellowship and appointed Dean at Emmanuel College late in 1965. Since then he has remained at the College. In 1968 he was appointed to a University teaching post in the Philosophy of Religion, a job in which he continued until his retirement for health reasons in 1996. At that time he proceeded to a Life Fellowship at Emmanuel College, which remains his base today. He is married, with three children who all now live and work in London, and five grandchildren.

 

Don Cupitt's books began to appear in the early 1970s, without attracting much public attention. He first provoked hostile notice by his participation in the symposium The Myth of God Incarnate (1977), and then became nationally known for his media work — especially the three BBC Television projects Open to Question (1973), Who was Jesus? (1977), and The Sea of Faith (1984).

 

Cupitt's notoriety peaked in the these years of the early 1980s, his most important book of that period being Taking Leave of God (1980), which shut down his career and made him in the eyes of the Press an atheist and perhaps ‘the most radical theologian in the world’. He survived, partly because the then Archbishop of Canterbury and the then Master of Emmanuel defended his right to put forward his views. Since that time he has devoted his energies to developing his ideas in a long line of books.

 

He is currently a key figure in the Sea of Faith Network, a group of spiritual "explorers" (based in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia) who share Cupitt's concerns.

 

In his writing, and in the various societies he has tried to foster, Don Cupitt attempts to develop new thinking for a new epoch: a new philosophy, a new ethics, and a new religious thought. His thinking develops continuously and is not easy to summarize, but the best introduction to it has been given by the Australian Nigel Leaves in his recent two-volume study. The Sea of Faith TV series can be sampled on YouTube, and obtained on DVD from Sea of Faith UK; and the book is still in print. It is reasonably accessible to beginners in philosophy and theology. Readers with more time and energy should simply read Cupitt’s recent books in the order in which they were written — beginning with Impossible Loves (2007). A short crib to his ideas is provided by Turns of Phrase, 2011.

 

He has written 40 books – which have been translated into Dutch, Persian, Polish, Korean, Portuguese, Danish, German and Chinese – as well as chapters in more than 30 multi-authored volumes.

 

The Character of Don Cupitts Thinking

 

In his writings Cupitt sometimes describes himself as Christian non-realist, by which he means that he follows certain spiritual practices and attempts to live by ethical standards traditionally associated with Christianity but without believing in the actual existence of the underlying metaphysical entities (such as "Christ" and "God"). He calls this way of being a non-realist Christian "solar living".

 

Much of Cupitt’s thinking clearly belongs to the philosophical tradition rather than to theology, and the best clues to his ideas can often be given by quoting the philosophers who have been important to him at different times. In his youth, he was most impressed by Hume and Kant. Then he became absorbed in Kierkegaard, in the movement from ‘organized religion’ to ‘spirituality’, and in the classics of Christian mysticism.

 

This early period culminated in Taking Leave of God (1980), Cupitt’s last book in his Kant and Kierkegaard manner. In 1981 he became immersed in Nietzsche, and then in Richard Rorty and Mark C. Taylor. By the late Eighties he had assimilated the early Derrida and French postmodernism. During the Nineties the most obvious new development was a brief turn, around 1996/98, to Heidegger.

 

At the same time Cupitt also turned to ordinary language, and to this life. He rejects all ideas of gaining salvation by escaping from this world of ours. "All this is all there is", he says and he now sees true religion in terms of joy in life and an active attempt to add value to the human lifeworld. ‘Life’ is all that there is and all we have, and must be accepted with its limits as a package deal. We must avoid all attempts to deny or escape the limits of life — traditionally time, chance and death.

 

Recently, Don Cupitt has found views like his own in the surviving writings of Etty Hillesum, who died in Auschwitz.

 

Outside the Western tradition, Cupitt has looked mainly to Buddhism. Of his recent books, Emptiness and Brightness (2001) is the most Buddhist. He is a friend of Stephen Batchelor, who is sometimes described as his counterpart within Buddhism.

 

Future Plans

 

Don Cupitt's most recent book is The Last Testament (SCM Press, 2012). He has recently given up public activity but may write a little more yet.

 

He has slowly been developing a new book of Jesus as "the Prometheus of Morality". As Jesus opponents said, he really was a rebel, who took the power of creating morality from Heaven and gave it to us humans. Thus he opened the way to the death of God.

 

Eighteen of his recent books have been translated into Chinese, and he has enjoyed visiting two Chinese Universities. The reason for this move to the East is that, whereas in the West Cupitt is read mainly in Theology faculties and is therefore regarded as impossibly heretical, in China he is read as Philosophy and gets a much fairer hearing. Thus for Cupitt there is, paradoxically, more religious freedom in China than in the West. He is seen as writing somewhere between Christianity, Buddhism and French-style postmodernism, and his present religion of 'solar' commitment to ordinary life makes sense to many people in China, which has never been much attracted to other-worldy, dogmatic religion.

 

He has recently deposited the bulk of his archive at Gladstone's Library, Hawarden, Flintshire, CH5 3DF, UK. Gladstone's Library, which was formerly known as St Deiniol's Library, is a residential library, especially of theological books.

 

Quotations

“A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.”

 

“The Servant who really studies his Master gradually becomes like his master; gradually learns that he himself is the one who in the end does all the work and has all the power.”

 

“Those who first acquired language and tried to think the human situation were utterly overwhelmed. They could cope only by imagining that there were greater invisible beings who could and did understand and control both the human psyche and the world. (I can’t make sense of it, but I have to believe that there is a larger perspective within which it all makes sense.)”

 

“I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety.”

 

“Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.”

 

“Remember that the past fifty years has been the age of the Big Bang cosmology. We have learnt to see all reality as a slow-motion explosion, as pouring itself out and passing away, as dissemination. We live in a postmodern epoch in which there is nothing absolute, nothing permanent and nothing substantial.”

 

“The reason why Jesus got into such severe trouble was that he tried to bring into the present a construction of the world, of God and of the self that belonged to a still-remote future. He was much too far ahead of his time, and suffered accordingly.”

 

“We should be empty of clutching, empty of self, empty of all the old ideas of substance. We should be ‘lost in the objectivity of world-love’, as I have elsewhere put it; or, perhaps better, we should let ourselves be only an empty space filled with brightness. Life lived like that is ‘eternal’ life.”

 

“To love is to be vulnerable: if God loves, then God is mortal.”

Various internet sites

 

Back to Main Page