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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.
Prior to the late nineteenth century, classical Christianity
developed no social ethics. Rather, it concerned itself with
self-purification. Christians needed only to be `in a state of
grace', unsullied and ready for the return of Christ. Muslims, in
contrast, have always attempted to Islamicize the world. Today,
many Christians and activist post-Christians are moving in that
same direction. For them Christianity no longer entails a private
practice of self-purification, but instead represents an ethical
decision to struggle patiently and lovingly towards a new `reality'
in this life. In Creative Faith, Don Cupitt argues that Christians
need to replace a heaven-obsessed theology with a new theology of
moral striving. No longer should they aim to conserve the self,
preparing for eternity: they must simply expend it, by living
generously.
If new Platos or Buddhas were to appear today, what would they say
about the nature of reality, the human condition and the way to
happiness?The period 800-200 b.c.e. the so-called Axial Age was the
time when Old World pioneering philosophers and religious teachers
laid down the basic ideas by which people have been living ever
since. Today those great religious and cultural traditions are
coming to an end. We are entering a new Axial Age.Don Cupitt
observes that this second Axial Age is one of communication.
Everything is accessible to everyone, and everyone can make a
contribution. The world is therefore made and remade not by the
individual genius, but by a change in the general consensus. Cupitt
describes the emergent religion and philosophy of the new Axial
Period in clear and accessible language. He predicts that, while it
may seem very strange at first, we will learn to love it
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.
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. About the Author The Revd Don Cupitt is a Life Fellow of
Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His books include Taking Leave of God,
The Sea of Faith and Solar Ethics were published by SCM Press and
translated into many languages.
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.
In this book Don Cupitt presents his systematic philosophy of
religion. He begins by showing what is wrong with the way the
subject is usually taught: scraps from various philosophies of the
past are selected for use in the service of an agenda controlled by
theology. Inevitably, the resqlt is,something closer to religious
apologetics than to genuine philosophy. Cupitt sets out his
alternative approach in two parts.The first is a 'democratic
metaphysics'. Cupitt describes popular systematic philosophy as
being today the most urgently needed, and yet the most neglected,
kind of philosophy. He describes his own position as combining
nihilism with radical humanism, and as 'a language-mediated radical
religious humanism'. From this, Cupitt then derives 'philosophy's
own religion': It is without dogma. It is a religion of life in
which we learn to say Yes to,,transience, to practise expressive or
'solar' living, and to be humanitarians in social ethics. r
Philosophy's own religion is the religious outlook we would come tQ
if we were to make a new beginning, and to be strictly rational. It
is not wholly novel: versions of it'crop up often in the history of
philosophy. Another version of it was the very earliest form of
Christianity, the 'kingdom theology' of Jesus and the first
generation.
What is it about religion that, despite all odds, allows it to
survive? In After God, the renowned scholar Don Cupitt considers
the fate of religion, now that we have effectively killed off our
gods. The author, a trained theologian and an ordained priest in
the Church of England, takes us through the evolution of religious
belief from the dawn of the gods to their twilight,as well as to
the morning after.Tracing the postmodern pilgrimage from
traditional belief to cynicism to faith after God, Cupitt says we
need to build a new religious vocabulary. He challenges us to see
religion less as an ideology and more as a tool kit, a set of
techniques,perhaps an art form,enhancing our lives the way that
literature and art do."A heretic's heretic" and "an atheist
priest," Cupitt has respect for both skepticism and devotion. He
neither accepts nor denies religion at face value he takes faith to
pieces, throws away what he can't use, and assembles the remainder
into new and extraordinary shapes, challenging us to creatively
reshape it, give it new language, reinvent it. After God is for
those who find it hard to be among the congregation of an orthodox
religion but who miss the discipline and rewards of practicing a
faith, and for the person who will understand Cupitt when he
writes, "I actually think that I love God more now that I know God
is voluntary. Perhaps God had to die to purify our love for him."
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.
Don Cupitt's concern is not so much the science of global warming
as it is 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.
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Lifelines (Paperback)
Don Cupitt
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R647
R537
Discovery Miles 5 370
Save R110 (17%)
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'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.'
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.
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.
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Once and Future Faith (Paperback)
Robert W Funk, Karen Armstrong, Don Cupitt, Arthur J Dewey, Lloyd Geering, …
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R628
Discovery Miles 6 280
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Many ideas once thought to be foundational to Christianity are now
known to be false due to scientific discoveries regarding the
nature of the universe and historical findings about how
Christianity began. Is Christianity doomed to irrelevance or even
extinction? How might Christianity reinvent itself so that it can
address the real concerns of people in today's world? This
collection of essays from such leading thinkers as Karen Armstrong
and John Shelby Spong addresses questions such as life after death,
the meaning of God, apocalypticism, and the significance of Jesus'
death. Contributors: Karen Armstrong, Don Cupitt, Arthur J. Dewey,
Robert W. Funk, Lloyd Geering, Roy W. Hoover, Robert J. Miller,
Stephen J. Patterson, Bernard Brandon Scott, John Shelby Spong
Christianity s classic plan of salvation was a vast myth of cosmic
Creation, Fall and Redemption. Earth-centered and supernaturalist,
it was fatally damaged by Galileo and later astronomers, and by
historians of human origins. In A New Great Story, Don Cupitt
rewrites the old grand-narrative as the story of how religion
called us out of nature and gradually made us ourselves: social
beings in an ordered world, language-using and self-aware.
Religious ideas, whether they build civilization or inspire
criticism of it, are always leading ideas. They made us everything
that we are. Cupitt sees the history of religion as culminating in
the teaching of Jesus, who announced a new age in which human
beings are at last fully themselves, fully reconciled to each other
and to life. That message was long almost immediately, and the
cycle begun afresh ...
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 in 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. Don Cupitt is a Fellow of Emmanuel College,
Cambridge.
Today, Western culture rules the world, but understandings of what
it is are oddly contradictory. The Vatican claims that the West
owes everything to the Catholic Church, its oldest institution, but
the European Union currently defines its core-values in
purely-secular Enlightenment terms. Third-World critics attack the
West for being irreligious and morally decadent, while at the same
time they successfully demand Christian behaviour from it, in the
form of repentance for the past and generous aid in perpetuity. To
sort all this out, 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. After his
martyrdom his followers personified his teaching in him and
promoted him to Heaven, while postponing the earthly realization of
his new world until his return at the end of history. Thus
transformed into a religion of deferred salvation, 'Christianity'
flourished for some fifteen centuries, but it always knew that its
final fulfilment would be on this earth., and from the
Enlightenment the decline of the Church was also the beginning of
Christianity's extraordinarily successful afterlife as modern
Western culture. The Pentecostal dream lives on in our multi-ethnic
liberal democracies, Jesus' ethic lives on in our modern
humanitarianism and in the welfare state; and the Christian
spirituality of stringent selfexamination lives on in our critical
thinking and our spirit of perpetual striving for betterment.
Indeed, Cupitt 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 now emerging in its final, 'Kingdom' form. Don
Cupitt is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
For a generation after his death his surviving associates preserved
good traditions about the message of Jesus. Then disaster struck:
it began to be believed that he was risen, exalted to heaven, and
soon to return to establish his kingdom on earth. A cult of Jesus'
person and fictitious lives of him quickly followed, and the
surviving traditions of his actual teaching became totally blurred
- as they still are.Since then, nobody has ventured to assess Jesus
seriously, as a thinker. But today, as the supernatural beliefs
fade, and better reconstructions of his teaching have become
available, Don Cupitt thinks we can at least question Jesus from
the standpoint of philosophy. Just how original and important is
he? What is the status of his ideas: was he a religious figure at
all, and why did he arouse such fierce antagonism? The Jesus who
emerges from this enquiry is an astonishing figure, and much bigger
than the insipid Christ of popular faith. Don Cupitt is a
philosopher of religion and the author of over 40 books. He is a
Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Don Cupitt believes that a new and truly global religious
consciousness has been quietly easing itself in around the world.
It does not need any visible organization and does not make any
non-rational doctrinal claims. It is the religion of life - a
secular, purely this-worldly, and radically-democratic affirmation
of ordinary life. Where prescientific ages saw Heaven, he says, we
see only sky. We have given up belief in a supernatural world, and
we have felt compelled to break with the received ecclesiastical
form of Christianity. But the Christian spirit of critical
thinking, of systematic self-criticism and perpetual reform, has
spread around the whole world in modern science, technology,
critical history, and liberal democracy. In ""Above Us Only Sky"",
in 27 brief slogans, he presents a systematic theology of this
religion of ordinary life, setting it against its philosophical
background, its spirituality and its relation to other faiths. It
is, he says, the legacy and the long-awaited fulfilment of
Christianity.
The Old Creed and the New is Don Cupitt's latest writing in his
on-going project to modernize religious thought. His previous works
have argued that since the Enlightenment almost every new movement
in Christianity has been neo-Conservative and authoritarian. Here
he looks to the liberal theologians of a hundred years ago who
attempted to modernize religion but were often content merely to
simplify and liberalize the creed. Today's radical theology, he
argues, contrasts by beginning to produce something so different
from traditional religion that the public may at first feel baffled
by it. Don Cupitt here 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, he argues, 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 new religion
emerges as being scarcely creedal at all: it is the practice of
'solar living'. People no longer 'look up': instead, they are
content simply to claim their own lives, to find their own way of
living them, and to live life to its fullest. Just ordinary life
itself is now the religious object - which shows the
'post-protestant' character of the new outlook. The Old Creed and
the New tries to define and situate this new kind of religion, and
encourages the reader to think about it both intellectually and
spiritually.
In this text the author 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.'
When Don Cupitt was struck by a very brief y et violent religious
experience he wrote a note about it on the spot. Now in
retrospective analysis of that moment he de velops a postmodern
vision of the world and the human condit ion. '
Don Cupitt descrubes 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, transcience and this
mortal life of ours. He believes that it can be done. It really can
be done.
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