Don Cupitt proposes a reinterpretation of Christian history, arguing that the meaning of the West is not Catholic Christian, but radical Christian. The original Jesus was a secular figure, a utopian teacher of ethical wisdom. He argues that the core of Western culture is simply the old Christian spirituality extraverted. Today, Christian supernatural doctrine is dead, but the secular 'West' is Christianity itself is now emerging in its final, 'Kingdom' form.
Everywhere, Tradition is collapsing. Local fundamentalist reactions - hailed by some as evidence that 'God is back' - cannot hope to stem the flood. In our time, Don Cupitt says, religion is no longer about gaining immortality, or the forgiveness of our sins: it is about becoming reconciled to our life’s transience, to time and death.
Around twenty years or so after his death, the fiery and interesting Jewish teacher Jesus of Nazareth was made into the personification of his own teaching, and given an exalted cosmic status. Within a few decades he had been so completely buried by supernatural beliefs about himself that in all the years since it has been very difficult to make out his own voice, and quite impossible to take him seriously as a thinker. "Jesus and Philosophy" asks on the basis of recent reconstructions of his teaching, what was Jesus' moral philosophy? What was his world view? And, is he a big enough figure in the history of ethics to survive the end of the classic ecclesiastical beliefs about him? The author, Don Cupitt, argues that Jesus will be bigger after Christianity, which blocked the realization of just how revolutionary a figure he was.
Rejecting Christian doctrines and metaphysics in favour of the religious consciousness which characterizes human identity, Cupitt "takes leave" of God by abandoning objective theism.
Since 1980, Don Cupitt has been developing an ever-more radically antirealist position in philosophy. This book brings together for the first time essays written over 20 years that show Don Cupitt developing his highly distinctive theology.
This, Don Cupitt argues, is a new kind of theological book. It starts not from doctrine or scripture but from the rise of those sciences that bear most directly on the questions of human nature and the human condition. The idea is to find out what religious possibilities there may be in the emergent modern vision of our situation. The 'Christian doctrine of man', drawing most of its themes from the book of Genesis via Augustine, has been damaged virtually beyond repair. So a gap needs to be filled. Patching up the old will not do. 'Suppose that someone writing a textbook of psychology is told to integrate the Scientologiste beliefs into his text. He really and truly wishes to comply with this instruction, but he finds that even with the best will in the world it simply cannot be done. Thai is the difficulty that we are in. Maybe it is bad news, but shooting the messenger who brings it will not help.' So this book does not reinterpret or prune or modernize the Christian doctrine of man, or replace it with a new set of doctrines. There is no theological or philosophical anthropology, mixing existentialism, psychology and a little metaphysics. The materials come from geology and biology, psychology, social anthropology, and comparative religion. What results, forming a trilogy with Taking Larne of God and The World to Come, completes and supports a view which Don Cupitt has been presenting over a number of years. It is unlikely to leave readers unmoved. Don Cupitt is Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion in the University of Cambridge and Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Presents a Devil's Dictionary of the author's own ideas, with cross-links from entry to entry guiding the reader around his system. This title points out that the non-arrival of the Kingdom left the early Christians looking up vigilantly towards a better world that was yet to come.
At the beginning of a new millennium philosophical theology has become more contested than ever before. For over thirty years Don Cupitt has provoked theologians to consider the nature of their discipline. Taking inspiration from his work, some of the leading figures in theology address questions facing theology today.
In Jesus and the Gospel of God, Don Cupitt takes a second look at the doctrine of the incarnation, going back to Scripture itself and especially to the person of Jesus as we see him in the synoptic gospels. His declared aim is to restore the real Jesus to his proper centrality in the Christian faith, and to focus attention on the man and his message rather than on doctrines about him. He begins by making a distinction between the primitive eschatological faith and the developed dogmatic faith. The primitive faith, he believes, was at its purest in John the Baptist, Jesus and the first generation Christians. It was practical and immediate and concerned with salvation. The developed dogmatic faith was really an adaptation which took place over 22 years by which time Christians were reading back some of the new dogmas into the New Testament. Today we have to go back and begin again at the beginning with Jesus. The old religion is returning. Christianity must become again a pure religion of salvation. In thus re-examining the doctrine of the incarnation Don Cupitt leads us on a new search for the religious meaning of Jesus' message and its implications for belief in God today. He writes in his usual clear style, with a minimum of unfamiliar terms, and so produces a book which deserves a wide readership and may well take its place as one of a small number of pioneering works.
In Mysticism After Modernity, Don Cupitt argues that the extensive modern literature about mysticism has rested upon a mistake - the belief that there can be meaningful experience prior to language.
Ethics in the Last Days of Humanity is not about the science of global warming so much as the absence of a serious ethical and religious response to it. When all existing 'reality' breaks down, ethics can no longer be based on nature or religious law. Cupitt advocates for an alternative inspired by the historical Jesus.
This book was written in 1970, in the days when even the Church Times was welcoming Don Cupitt as a stalwart believer. However, as the author now points out, it is an important pointer to the future. The straitlaced early Cupitt is obviously struggling to prevent the later Cupitt from bursting out.' Its starting point was straightforward enough. Many, perhaps most of the great critics of Christianity have rejected it chiefly on moral grounds. Yet, because they have tended to suffer from an entrenched sense of their own moral superiority, Christians have never really taken this fact seriously enough and so have failed fully to understand one very important factor in the modern world's rejection of faith, The idea was therefore to outline the principal moral criticisms of Christianity, in order to discover how strong they are and what should be done about them. This was the beginning of a course which took Don Cupitt, as he himself confesses, much further than he ever expected.Many have parted company on the way at various stages; they, and those who find what Don Cupitt says speaks to them more than most modern theology, will find that these early stages, in retrospect, make fascinating reading.
This text began in the 1860s as a phrase from Matthew Arnold's picture of the decline of religion as the retreat of the tide on Dover's beach. The book has had a significant impact, for its account of historical developments and its presentation of Christian non-realism.
According to Don Cupitt, radical theology is a personal struggle for a new and better kind of religion following the loss of the older sort of popular, traditional, ecclesiastical faith. It is, he says, inevitably, highly autobiographical. This set of eighteen unpublished or little known published essays which document Cupitt's gradual radicalization over the last thirty years open a window onto the progression of his thought and demonstrate his long held desire to come up with a message that can reach and influence ordinary people. Because, in Cupitt's judgment, the real ?radical theology? is your own voice, if you can but find it.
At some point very early on in its development, Christianity split between two different pathways: one path stayed with the teaching of Jesus and the primacy of ethics, the other started with the return of Jesus and, therefore, with supernatural belief. Today, ethics has been largely sidelined, viewed as secondary or subservient to belief. Don Cupitt argues that the time has come to give ethics priority in defining and shaping religious life. As he puts it, "No longer should we aim to conserve the self, preparing for eternity: we must simply expend it, by living generously.
For two centuries and more our culture has been secular, and no religious doctrine plays a constitutive part in any established branch of knowledge. This title shows that a surprising amount of traditional Christian belief - including a Grand Narrative, and a non-metaphysical theology - is returning to us in secular form.
Sees the pond-skater as an image of religious thought in an age of thoroughgoing reductionism. It is light, resourceful, fast-moving and able to survive. It creates a world out of varying vibrations and, Cupitt argues, theology must be similarly creative.
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