Stuart Mill once sensibly put it, where Jesus was right and we can see that he was right, we can simply thank him and move on. We don’t need to keep him as an authority; indeed, his own doctrine forbids us to treat him as an authority. As he says, you are not a fully moral person until your living has become completely wholehearted, autonomous and spontaneously generous. You must reject any and every kind of ethics of law, because no external constraint upon your behaviour can ever make you a truly moral being. You must live from and by your own heart, and you must go beyond ordinary ‘justice’.
For this reason, I admire Zarathustra’s saying‘Don’t follow me: follow yourself!’ I admire the Buddhist saying: ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!’ And I admire the saying of Jesus; ‘What goes into you can’t defile you: what comes out of you can.’ Out of the remote past, we hear a voice commending the sort of frank, direct and warm love of life and of the fellow human being that might nowadays be described as ‘emotional intelligence’.
A further difficulty about the name of Jesus is this: all our ancient faiths are infected by the old belief in verbal magic. ‘Ours is the One True Faith because we address the right God by the right name, using sacred passwords and powerful spells given exclusively to us by him.’ Most radical theologies in the West since Hegel have recognized the need to give up supernatural beliefs, but I guess that nobody - other than, perhaps, Hegel himself - has sufficiently recognized the need to give up the claim to possess the exclusive franchise: ‘You worship God in your way, and I worship him in his.’ But I do give up that claim, which is why this is only a secular theology. It’s all true, because it makes no non-rational claims and it does successfully meet what is today our most urgent religious need; but it is not the One True Faith. The very notion of a single form of words that gets It All absolutely right is wrong, deeply wrong. Sadly, therefore, I have had to give up the name of Jesus, because it has for so long been claimed that he is the only Way to God and that the Church is entirely justified in setting up roadblocks where it takes fees, as we travel along the Way.
Some of my most recent books (The Old Creed and the New, 2006; Impossible Loves, 2007; Above Us Only Sky, 2008; The Meaning of the West, 2008; Jesus and Philosophy, 2009; Theology’s Strange Return, 2010; and A New Great Story, 2010) have been casting about, looking for the best way to frame a final brief statement. Here it is then - though no doubt I shall soon start to feel very dissatisfied with it. My chief problem during this past 40-odd years of very intensive thinking and writing has been that we humans now seem to be permanently stuck with a restlessly dissatisfied critical mentality that can never be content with anything for long. I have been experimenting furiously, looking for a new religious outlook in an age in which it is perhaps no longer possible for any of us ever to find a permanent spiritual home.
And so, farewell… for now, at least. Thanks to the members of Sea of Faith, and to Linda Allen.
D.C.
Cambridge, 2010
1
The Religious Question
Suppose that we were to feel the need to make an entirely new beginning. We would have to set aside all our received religious traditions and ideas, and begin instead with a universal and purely rational account of the world and the human condition. We aim to be as strict, as up-to-date and illusion-free, as well-informed and as clear-eyed as it is possible to be. Then we ask: Is it possible to join up all the various strands in this account by bringing them under a great unifying symbol that will both make us happy just to be parts of all this, and also will show us how we should live?
Yes, I answer. In modern thought, especially since the 1960s, people’s outlook has become almost completely non-metaphysical. Our life does not rest upon or within any fixed framework, whether of metaphysical principles or eternal values. There is only all this’ - and all this is just an ambivalent stream of appearances, continually pouring out and passing away. Everything is on show, and there is only the passing show. Everything is contingent, everything is temporal, everything is interconnected, everything is ‘relative’, everything is mediated to us by, and remains suspended within, the endless shifting movement of our language, and everything is transient. We humans are simply part of the general flux of all things, ourselves continually pouring out into expression and passing away; but our speciality is that our creative outpouring feeling, as it mingles with everything, continually strives to interpret the world by reading it, turning it into language and evaluating it. Around ourselves we generate a value-rich communal human life-world, the house of meaning that we live in, but it is never quite as stable as we might wish, because we are continually debating it, revaluing it, and renegotiating it as we go along. In my own jargon I call our life thus viewed ‘the fray’, and insist that most of us love it - and quite reasonably so, there being nothing else. For us, our world has to be the world - for which the slogan is: ‘All this is all there is’.
The world in which we human beings live today is thus a post-metaphysical world in which there is no eternal, enduring and objective Being, no objective and unchanging Truth, and no objective and finally authoritative standard of Value. Everything is permanently in flux, pouring out and passing away - and yet also on the table, being negotiated. Everything is always on the move, loved by some and contested by others.
How has all this happened? Until after the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution, most of us (at least in Christendom, Jewry and Islam) thought in terms of a metaphysics of substance. We tended to think of everything first and foremost as a noun, and only secondly started to think of it as doing a bit of verbing. Our assumption, derived ultimately from Greek (and perhaps before that, from Bronze-Age) thought, was that reality is an ordered array of real things, things that are relatively independent, with stable and unchanging natures. Both in the case of being and in the case of truth, we tended to equate objectivity with independent reality and with timelessness. Real being was unchanging, and the idea of time only came in when one was forced to consider something as getting mixed up with other things, and so becoming liable to corruption. Meanwhile, time was on the back burner, in obscurity. If we wanted to think about temporality, we took up something we pictured as ready-made, and mentally dropped it into flowing time just as one drops a stone into a river. Its being in time was just a contingent extra fact about a thing. Especially in the case of human beings, our life in time was like a short period of service overseas. I was my simple and immortal rational soul. Then for a lifetime I was united with a body that was subject to time and - ‘therefore’ - to corruption. Then it was time for me to be demobbed, and I came back home to eternity with much relief. I was back with God and the angels, in the blessed state of timelessness and eternal life. Soma sema, the body is a tomb, they said: bodily life here below is a state of ‘temporary temporality’, a state of alienation and institutional entombment, such as I knew when I was a numbered man, a young National Service officer serving his term overseas from 1955 to 1957. Have you noticed in modern English that the word ‘time’ is used to mean ‘a stretch, a term of imprisonment? That is how the old metaphysics of substance led us to think of time. It gave us the idea of life after death as a consolation and a release; but this life? - this life was a drag, a burden. One would be glad to be freed from it.
When did everything change? Nothing is certain in the history of ideas, but roughly speaking it was during the eighteenth century that the great discovery of time took place. People gradually began to think that Moderns like Sir Isaac Newton had surpassed the achievements of the Ancients, and therefore that human beings generally might be capable of superseding their own past. The ideas of a universe in ceaseless motion, of historical change, of historical period, and of an evolving ‘climate of opinion’ or ‘spirit of the age’ soon followed. More and more, we begin to think of ourselves as being embedded not in eternity but in our own historical period. Looking back, I recognize that the 1950s Cupitt was still orthodox, eternity-oriented and unreconstructed. In world-view he was even a Neo-Thomist, and quite different from the questioning Sixties Cupitt, who was learning fast from Kant and Hume, Mansel and Kierkegaard. And so on, until by the mid-Nineties I was coming into my own final outlook and trying to draw all the threads together. I was beginning to understand that although my own ideas seem final to me, in the sense that this is as far as I am ever going to be able to take