Search

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.

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

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.

A modern-day cleansing of the temple takes place as this author tracks down the major objections to and criticisms of the Christian faith. Many, perhaps most, of the great critics of Christianity have rejected it largely on moral grounds. What Dean Cupitt planned was a study of these moral criticisms with an evaluation of how strong they yare. What emerges from his study is a picture of how confused and complex the Christian tradition is. Christianity has lost moral authority, he discovers, not only by teaching the wrong moral principles, but also by teaching too many different ones. What is needed is a moral purge of the Christian tradition itself. Dean Cupitt suggests some of the lines such a purge should take: The harsh old anthropomorphic story theology must go.; Much in the ascetical tradition is simply morbid and should be end.; The doctrine of male supremacy that is causing much feminist finger-pointing today must be subdued.; A more genuinely liberal theology may be able to renounce physical and, even more importantly, psychological terrorism; but only if the old authoritarian imagery is discarded, imagery which suggests that the church, in its heart of hearts, would like to take the world back into the cruel past.; Christianity's alliance with the state led it to make a mistaken claim that it could underwrite or validate moral principles; in reality, it crowns them.; Theology must abandon the notion of a single, authoritative, orthodox faith, and there must be higher standards of intellectual honesty in church life. Moral criticism of the condition of contemporary religion is the first step in renewal, and Dean Cupitt's book is an excellent starting point for anyone seriously interested in the Christian faith and its future. -Publisher

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.

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.

Rejecting Christian doctrines and metaphysics in favour of the religious consciousness which characterizes human identity, Cupitt "takes leave" of God by abandoning objective theism.

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.