Don Cupitt and Atheist Christianity
Prophecy or Heresy?
The entertaining highlight of my summer was finding myself in a small seminar tent in a wet and muddy field in a corner of the Northamptonshire countryside. I had come with numerous other devotees of Greenbelt, the annual Christian arts festival, to hear Don Cupitt, a “clandestine” guest to the festival. Emotions were high: “he should never have been allowed near an evangelical festival”, some of my friends argued, “he’s so arrogant”, or “he’s no more of a Christian than the Ayatollah Khomeini.” For myself Cupitt was witty, charming and exhiliaratingly provocative.
What Cupitt had come to argue was that the church must get rid of all her supernatural beliefs. Like it or not it was a necessity if Christianity was to survive into the next century as anything more than an outdated, irrelevant curiosity. We stood the risk of becoming, he said, like a witchdoctor he stumbled across casting out evil spirits in Africa; there, Cupitts hosts told him because people liked the sense of nostalgia and continuity with the past but essentially redundant, because if anyone really got ill they would be off to the hospital like a shot.
The supernatural since the seventeenth century has been gradually eschewed from different departments of life. If the crops fail we no longer assume God is angry with us, if we get ill we know there are good medical reasons, a study of psychology tells us that our personal disposition has a complex scientific explanation. It is no longer a matter of how we are getting on with God.
People now inhabit a quite different universe from one where God determines whether or not the sun should shine each day. We live our lives, whether we care to admit it or not, by a set of rational, secular and scientific laws. So Christianity must make the transition, stop making reference to an objective, external God and realise God is a purely human creation, an improvisation, a product of evolving histories and cultures.
Such a change is morally imperative; our notions of God have become too repressive, coercive and life denying. We take what is good out of ourselves and project it on to a supernatural God. Traditionally, God is good whereas we are worthless and sinful.
To Cupitt the advent of Feminism spells the death of God. Western monotheism is inherently patriarchal. God is male, our priests are male, the tradition has been written as a male story. The background Western culture on which our religion is founded is based on the dichotomies of man = reason, woman = passions. Man is seen as active and strong, woman is passive and weak.
“Religion”, Cupitt states is “just applied sexism.” We should learn from feminism and give up the desire for one truth and rejoice in the proliferation of many truths.
Religion, then, Cupitt claims becomes like art. Christians are artists, creators of truths. We give up the notion of a divinely ordained hierarchical universe that we just slot into. We have always created ethics. Witness the advent of anti-racism and Feminism in the post war world.
The task then is to redefine our vocabulary — God demythologised becomes the symbol of our values. Cupitt argues we have always done this anyway. Christianity is like Shakespeare: the Mercant of Venice is interpreted differently by various directors and it can never have the same meaning after the holocaust. As with the Mercant of Venice, there can be no final definition of Christianity.
An illustration of transforming vocabulary was apparent when one concerned Greenbelter asked: “What do you think of being born again?” Cupitt replied gleefully in his lively epigramatic style, “I rather like that one. Yes Christianity is about being born again; from fear to love, prejudice to understanding, selfishness to concern.”
Stirring stuff. But the problem with Cupitt is that much of his ideas rest on his theory of language. Words — and by that our symbolic vocabulary too — do not refer to external realities but derive their meaning in relation to other words. Language (meanings, inferences) are always shifting. Cupitt is an anti-realist — you cannot get outside language to tell me what reality looks like. Hence notions of objective God and absolutes in ethics are absurd, we cannot speak of timeless essences because we have no timeless vocabulary with which to express them. Now I am not a philosopher and doubtless one hundred realists could stand up tomorrow to refute Cupitt.
It may be that religions are historically and culturally contingent but should that lead us to conclude we create God? Perhaps history is a process of discovery, moving closer to God, to a more consistent position, removing the aspects of faith we now find repugnant?
Another criticism might be made that Cupitt is too elitist. How does his theology relate to those who are not priveleged enough to be at university? Try telling a hungry Costa Rican who has just been turfed off his land by the burger company that there are no “certainties.”
Cupitt would not see this as a fundamental criticism. People once believed the world was flat. This was a popular world view but few argue that today. Similarly we may be in a period of change to a post-modernist atheist christianity. But this remains up to us in the church. Perhaps the growth in Transendental Meditation type religion illustrates the need for spirituality in advanced industrial society without a concomitant demand to assent to “Twenty unbelievable supernatural propositions before Breakfast” (Mark Corner).
Cupitt’s beliefless Christianity, where we all play our part in building the kingdom of God, could perhaps offer the liberation people want. Alternatively churches may hang on to their patriarchal authoritarianism and Christianity may drift into further cultural obscurity. Cupitt would say this is no false dichotomy, the choice is up to us.