I just learned of the recent death of one of my spiritual mentors, Don Cupitt, at the age of 90. I never met Cupitt. He lived in England and I don’t believe traveled to the US. I knew him because he was a prolific writer of relatively short, digestible books, of which more than twenty are on my shelf. While they were not academic tomes, Cupitt was an academic, a Cambridge don, so his readers were wise to keep a dictionary handy.

Cupitt was also an Anglican priest. According to his obituary in The Guardian newspaper, he was an engaging speaker and an approachable chaplain of Emmanuel College, where he also taught and was later made a life fellow. The warmth of Cupitt’s personality did not deter his many Church of England opponents, however, who detested his radical theology. But his contrarian spin on Christianity is why I came to know him and got him a worldwide reading audience.

It even made him a TV star of sorts. After the success of his 1980 book, Taking Leave of God, the BBC recruited him to do a program on the modern decline of religion, which was called The Sea of Faith. The title comes from the fourth stanza of Matthew Arnold’s 19^th century poem, “Dover Beach,” where he reflects on religion’s receding like a wave on the shore.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

The series and subsequent book based on upon it were very popular. One reviewer at the time wrote that it was “hard to think that a more visually exciting film on religion has ever been made.” But as the Guardian obituary reports, the church wanted nothing to do with it.

Nancy Banks-Smith wrote in the Guardian of the programmes: “He has something interesting to say about religion to people who do not find religion interesting.” The book of the series cemented his public popularity, but a meeting to discuss the programmes at the next [church] general synod was cancelled, apparently on higher authority.

Sadly, that has been the church’s approach to many who, like Cupitt, have tried to shine a light on the inadequacy of traditional Christianity in the modern world. Rather than engage them directly, such voices have mostly been ignored in hopes they will simply go away. But what made Cupitt especially irritating was that he exposed the church’s hypocrisy because he knew his ideas were not that far from the beliefs of many church leaders. From an article on the 40^th anniversary of The Sea of Faith:

Cupitt broke with the musty hypocrisy of most Anglican liberal theology by pushing it to an extreme, thus exposing an elite agnosticism that was keeping its half-belief to itself and not letting the masses into the secret, as if out of an apparently persistent fear that they might then misbehave.

The feared “misbehavior” was, of course, that people would leave the church if they knew what their clergy actually believed. Yet, nonetheless, in the past 40 years, the long gradual exodus from churches has become a stampede.

As I have written many times before, “radical” theology and biblical studies were the norm of my seminary education. But it was all taught with the strange assumption that, while we needed to know this ourselves, we would be smart enough to know that we couldn’t actually use what we learned in our congregations. “It’ll just upset folks, you know.” As naïve ordination candidates, somehow we mostly unquestioningly went along with this bizarre strategy.

Now, to me, it’s an embarrassment and a profound regret. Which is why later finding the honesty, candor, and wisdom of Don Cupitt was such a breath of fresh air. For much of his life, Cupitt was a churchman and a prophet, warning of what lies ahead. The ship of the church is heading for the rocks, he was saying, if it doesn’t change course. But like the biblical prophets, his words fell on deaf ears.

Cupitt’s emphasis was not on the church’s need for new ideas, which were already to be found in earlier traditions. Rather, it was for the church to recognize that we lived in a different world. So, for example, scientific cosmology rendered nonsense the idea that God lived in another spatial dimension called heaven. Instead, we all know, and as one of his books was titled, that there is “above us only sky.” This is the God Cupitt “took leave of,” as he described in his most famous book. The God who was a separate “supreme” being out there somewhere.

What Cupitt knew was that even from ancient times such a God was highly suspect. As the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes said, if horses had gods they would look like horses. So, many humans made God an oversized version of themselves, existing high above them.

But in nearly every religion there has been a mystical perspective which understood God very differently. This God was not a being demanding faith and obedience but a deep experience of meaning and transcendence. Or as some have said, God is not a noun but a verb. For Cupitt, God is not known in our heads but in our hearts, and thereby becomes our means of transformation.

The mystic attempts to overcome dogma, insisting that God, Christ and heaven are not ‘up there’ but are to be found in the heart by desire, by love, by the will; that is, by a path of inner purification.

The theistic notion of God has been the means of domination and manipulation for generations. But people are over that now.

A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] … how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.

Instead, people want to experience a Sacred Reality here and now, or as Jesus said, the kingdom of God within us. Or again, as Paul is quoted in Acts, the God “in whom we live and move and have our being.” This is a God not separate from life but known in the depths of our experience. For Cupitt, this God was in everyone’s reach.

I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety.

I don’t believe Don Cupitt had all the answers. But he did ask most, if not all, of the important and, for the church, embarrassing questions. Today, people have the option of a crumbling and hollowed out “orthodoxy” or the denialism and absurdity of fundamentalism. It’s little wonder that church affiliation is in a free fall. If Christianity ever rights itself, it will be due in part to Don Cupitt’s wake-up call to recognize and separate the sacred Eternal Now from ancient humanity’s now irrelevant notion of an all too human heavenly being.

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