Don Cupitt – författare

'If you are one of those who persist in thinking that the old questions about the meaning of life, however badly framed they were, had something important behind them, then the answer offered here is that there is indeed such a thing as the religious life, that it has a variety of different possible shapes or courses, and that there is something important to be learnt from a consideration of the map of life as a whole. There is not just one linear track running through three or four stations, as used to be thought in the past, but there are at any rate a large number of stations and a web of lines connecting them. I have set them out (in a necessarily simplified form) in a diagram on the cover and after the Contents page as a kind of Metro map of the spirit. The idea is that after the book has explained the map, you may be able to find on it the life-route you have yourself followed so far.'

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.

Western thought began with an attack on religious myth by philosophers who held that the highest truth must be non-narrative and timeless. They left a paradox to haunt us: for on the one hand everyone knows that stories are important to us and our religion is full of them, while on the other hand stories continue to have a bad name as myths or fictions. It has been so difficult to say just how stories convey truth that until recently theologians were still trying to 'demythologize' religious belief.Now, however, philosophy has at last become more friendly to literature. There is talk of narrative theology and of rehabilitating story.Don Cupitt spells out the remarkable implications of the current return of philosophical and religious thought into time and narrative. He shows how stories produce reality, the self and time, how they awaken our desires and shape our lives, and how they express our paradoxical hopes of individual and corporate redemption.

Don Cupitt reinterprets the traditional doctrine that the world has been created out of nothing by the divine Word. He shows how recent developments in thought have led to the rediscovery both of nihilism and of the creative power of language. Cupitt undertakes extended examinations of the relation of thought to language and of the relation of God to language - all in an effort to make intelligible a major worldview that has begun in philosophy, and which must now be applied also to religion. The consequence of all this is that divine and human creativity come to be seen as coinciding in the present moment. The creation of the world happens all of the time, in and through us, as language surges up within us and pours out of us to form and reform the world of experience. Reality and the conquest of nihilism are, in fact, effected by language, and the way is thus opened for a new 'creationist' conception of religious truth and life. This book offers a philosophy of religion for the future and a genuine alternative to pietism and fundamentalism.

Don Cupitt describes time-pessimism as the spiritual disorder of the age, and its cure as the prime task of postmodern religious thought. We must redeem and revalue time, transience and this mortal life of ours. He believes that it can be done. It really can be done.

In this new book, for the first time Don Cupitt sets out his own systematic philosophy of life. He is reviving an old question: how far in the direction of religious belief, and eternal happiness, is it possible to go on the basis of reason alone? His 'expressionist' philosophy leads him to conclusions that are both very startling and more positive than his critics might expect, and in an Appendix he sketches their theological corollaries. In effect, he is providing the new 'ultralight' Christian humanism with its philosophical background and its world view.

Don Cupitt's ethics may seem strange and furious; but he says that this is a religious ethic to fit the truth about the world and our own life as we now understand it.

When Don Cupitt was struck by a very brief yet violent religious experience he wrote a note about it on the spot. Now in retrospective analysis of that moment he develops a postmodern vision of the world and the human condition.

In his Everyday Speech books, Don Cupitt is introducing a new empirical way of doing theology by showing from ordinary language what religious outlook currently belongs to us all. In The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech he showed from current idioms how life itself has recently become the new religious object. Now in this new book he studies our use of the terms It and It All, to show how ordinary language sees the human condition. The answer turns out to be a form of radical religious humanism: language seeks to affirm and defend the integrity of our human converse by resisting the constant pressure of life's threatening impersonal backdrop, It All.

In this book Don Cupitt presents his systematic philosophy of religion, describing his own position as combining nihilism with radical humanism , and as a language-mediated radical religious humanism. From this he derives philosophy's own religion.

This was the book which first garnered international celebrity and notoriety for its author and which fire-started a debate about the supernatural claims of Christianity. Rejecting Christian doctrines and metaphysics in favour of the religious consciousness which characterises human identity, Cupitt 'takes leave' of God by abandoning objective theism. Because he remained an ordained priest of the Church of England, the author attracted considerable attention and criticism for his position. Indeed, Keith Ward, now Oxford's Regius Professor of Divinity, wrote an entire book - Holding Fast to God - which attempted to counter Cupitt's views. Whatever one thinks of the author's beliefs, Taking Leave of God contributed to one of the most important theological discussions of its time.

The Sea of Faith made a huge impact when it was first published to accompany a major television series in the mid 1980's. For a generation that was embodying the ebbing of the tide of faith, it articulated the huge intellectual and cultural shifts that had resulted in most people no longer having any connection with official religion.For many who, whilst still going to church, glimpsed horizons wider than those offered by traditional forms of religious thought, The Sea of Faith offered liberating freedom, encouraging them to have minds of their own in matters of faith.For many more who had abandoned the church, it once again made the wider question a matter of serious and worthwhile concern. Today, the Sea of Faith networks exist in Britain, Australia and New Zealand and the movement is known around much of the world. The Sea of Faith is rightly acknowledged as one of the most influential theological texts of recent years.With a preface by George Pattison

The Old Creed and the New, is Don Cupitt's return to the UK market, after a five year absence, with a successor to his earlier works, which can be seen as the next stage in his long project to modernise religious thought.Here he sharply juxtaposes the traditional Apostles' Creed of Western Christianity and the emergent creed of modern radical theology. Side by side they look amazingly different, and Cupitt carefully explains what is happening and why.The main change is that the old creed situated the believer within a huge narrative cosmology, the central myth of a great religion-based civilization, whereas the new creed merely defines the bare outlines of a modern spirituality. The difference is very great, and it is vital that we understand it clearly.Whilst in previous works Cupitt has attempted to define the real religion of modern people, and help them learn religious thinking for themselves in a post-ecclesiastical Christianity, in this book he attempts to bridge the gap between the old way of dogma and Church, and the new, plural, post-ecclesiastical kind of religion.

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 in the secular 'West' Christianity itself is now emerging in its final, 'Kingdom' form.

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.

For two centuries and more our culture has been secular, and no religious doctrine now plays a constitutive part in any established branch of knowledge. Yet if God is dead, he won’t lie down, and reminders of the old faith still pervade our language, the built environment, our art and our literature. Most important, themes of the old theology are currently returning to us in new and strange guises. Thus God, the strict Judge who searches our hearts and demands inner integrity, returns in the critical thinking which makes everyone trained it ‘his own hardest taskmaster’. Again, the biblical idea that the world is made by the utterance of language returns in modern poetry and linguistic philosophy.By assembling such reminders, Don Cupitt shows that a surprising amount of traditional Christian belief — including a new Grand Narrative, and a non-metaphysical theology — is currently returning to us in secular form.

During the past 30 years, what we used to call ‘the passing show of existence’ has turned into a global torrent of electronic communication and cultural change. Everywhere, Tradition is collapsing. Local fundamentalist reactions – hailed by some as evidence that ‘God is back’ – cannot hope to stem the flood. They are merely symptoms of faith’s increasing desperation. 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. This ultra-clear and secular 'theology' therefore centres around the image of 'The Fountain', which close-up, is all noisy, rushing transience, but when we step back becomes a healing, unifying symbol of life's perpetual self-renewal. This is religious thought with no supernatural world, and with none of the local divine names. But it works.

In 40 years of writing Don Cupitt has coined many new words and phrases to communicate his ideas, but he has written so much that critics have split him up into stages, and readers complain of obscurity. Piqued, he here represents an entertaining ‘Devil’s Dictionary’ of his own ideas, with cross-links from entry to entry guiding the reader around his system. Cupitt’s teaching is a form of religious naturalism based, not like Spinoza’s on geometrical reasoning, but upon the more biological idea of an uprush of energies pouring out into symbolic expression. He 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. Today, people no longer expect any further world after this one, and Church-religion no longer works. It is too inhibited. Instead, we need to work out, and start living out, the philosophy and the ethic of the final world, now. It is a world in which the original spirituality of the ‘inner life’ is replaced by a new religion of ‘self-outing’ and putting on a ‘good show’ – the religion of ‘solar’ generosity that Cupitt attributes to the original Jesus.

Do you envy the suicide bombers their firm faith in life after death? Probably not: you think they are deluded. People in the west have quite recently lost all their old ideas about a Better World Hereafter. We now accept that we are already in the Last World, the world with no further reality beyond it, and that we’d better live our life to the full while we have it.If so, then what happens to the traditional problem of Christian origins? Jesus preached the arrival of the Last World, and urged us to begin a new ‘solar’ kind of living. His message was one of secular fulfilment. But the Apostolic Faith, by raising him to the supernatural world, took us all a whole dispensation back, to the Penultimate World, a world dominated by supernatural fears and hopes, a world of watching and waiting under strict discipline.The new era announced by Jesus was thus aborted, probably during the late 40s. But today we need, not the New Testament message, but a Last Testament for the Last World, which is our world. Don Cupitt attempts some midwifery. It is time for the faith to be born properly, and to become public property, not a clerical monopoly.

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.

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.

Don Cupitt is best known for developing a non-realistic interpretation of Christian doctrine and an ever-more radically antirealist position in philosophy.Cupitt has sought to go beyond ecclesiastical religion to a purely this-worldly humanistic religion of life: he argues for a "kingdom" version of Christianity that will bring it closer to the original Jewish Jesus. This book contains essays written over twenty years that appear in book form for the first time.