The Revd Dr Hugh Rayment-Pickard writes:
DON CUPITT, the radical theologian and public intellectual who died in January, aged 90 was one of the most creative and daring thinkers of his generation. He developed what he called a “non-realist” theology in which God was seen as a human creation.
Cupitt was born in Oldham, Lancashire, in 1934, into a non-religious family which had prospered through his father’s sheet-metal-manufacturing business. He received a good education as a scholar at Charterhouse and then read, first, natural sciences and then theology at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. After National Service in Cyprus with the Royal Corps of Signals, he returned to Cambridge to study for ministry at Westcott House.
Cupitt’s intellectual brilliance and his skills as a communicator had made such an impression that, after a short curacy in Salford, he was immediately made Vice-Principal of Westcott House and then Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
In 1963, he married Susan Day, a gifted linguist, teacher, and, later, a studio potter. Photographs from the Westcott House archives in the 1960s show Don and Susan as a tall and striking couple, full of youthful assurance and optimism. They raised three children in Cambridge, where Don remained writing and teaching for the rest of his life.
Cupitt was a kind and encouraging teacher who had a way of making complex ideas accessible and exciting. He never spoke an uncharitable word, and is remembered with deep affection by numerous former students.
Although Cupitt had published and broadcast extensively through the 1970s, it was the publication of Taking Leave of God in 1980 and, four years, later the television series The Sea of Faith that propelled him into the public arena. Cupitt argued that, while belief in God was no longer intellectually credible or morally acceptable, the word “God” could still be used as shorthand for our highest human values, above all for the “disinterested love” at the centre of Jesus’s teaching.
To an extent, Cupitt can be seen as part of venerable tradition of radical Anglican theologians — Hensley Henson, David Jenkins, John Robinson — who asserted that it was possible to be a faithful Christian without swallowing all of the Church’s supernatural beliefs. But Cupitt went much, much further, rejecting entirely any kind of realist theology.
The academic Establishment was resentful of Cupitt’s public success, and, in any case, disdainful of “popular” thinkers. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who wrote impenetrable theology that could be understood only by other academics, Cupitt made a virtue out of writing gripping, lucid, and accessible prose. He regarded the academic practice of detailed footnotes as “showing off”, and his books carried only minimal referencing. He was unconcerned about contributing to “scholarship”, but wanted to “democratise both philosophy and theology” and to produce original and creative books that could be read and discussed by ordinary people.
For many within and beyond the Church, Cupitt’s critique of traditional theism was refreshing and put into words their unspoken inner doubts. Ludovic Kennedy said that The Sea of Faith was one of the books that had “changed his life”. The avant-garde artists Gilbert and George were enthusiastic fans. Iris Murdoch saw Cupitt as a “brave and valuable pioneer”; but they could not agree about Plato, whom Murdoch had placed at the centre of her philosophy of The Good. For Cupitt, Plato was the author of a two-worlds cosmology that belonged to a bygone era. In Cupitt’s theology, there only ever was one world: the ordinary world in which we live and move and have our being.
Traditionalists, on the other hand, were appalled that Cupitt, an ordained minister, could espouse atheism. The Archbishop of Canterbury was petitioned (unsuccessfully) for Cupitt’s removal from office for heresy. And there were efforts to refute Cupitt in academic publications with reactive titles such as Holding Fast to God and The Ocean of Truth. For the most part, however, the ecclesiastical and academic Establishments dealt with Cupitt by ignoring him. He continued to write and publish at an astonishing rate, and won admirers around the world through the Sea of Faith network, but further academic and ecclesiastical preferment was denied him.
Taking Leave of God was the completion of a first phase of Cupitt’s thought that ran through the ’70s. From the late ’80s on — in more than 40 books — Cupitt would dedicate himself to the vast project of mapping out what theology, religion, and ethics could mean after the demise of realist theology.
It is one of the curiosities of Cupitt’s life and thinking that when he took leave of “God”, he did not also take leave of “religion”. But in his own way he remained passionately devout to a god who did not exist. As he put it, what people call “meaninglessness I call divine, and I have learnt to love it.”
In the1980s, Cupitt still had ideas about the shape of a future Church and new patterns of non-realist religious activity that would develop alongside, and eventually supersede, traditional forms of worship: local congregations would share a weekly meal led by presbyters, who would be experts in various disciplines such as theology, psychotherapy, art, and drama. The mission of this Church would be “the continuous reinvention and renewal of humanity”.
In the years that followed, however, his interest in ecclesiastical theology rapidly waned. He looked for inspiration to Buddhism and Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Spinoza. His concern now was to articulate a post-ecclesiastical “philosophy of life”, in which religion would be an art form expressing the human condition.
Jesus remained a source of inspiration for Cupitt, although strictly as a teacher like Confucius or the Buddha. Jesus was “a pioneer of modernity” who “radicalised the message of the prophets who had themselves said that . . . the law would be written on the heart”. The “internalisation of religion within the human being was already looked forward to in the Old Testament and taken forward in the New Testament”.
Despite rejecting completely any hint of transcendence or other-worldliness, Cupitt still believed in the possibility of “a kind of overspill of joy, often associated with the sense of sight and sunshine . . . a feeling of almost continuous warmth . . . which mystics often report”. Cupitt connected this with the experience of life’s transience, which he urged us to embrace: “Unattached, but loving life to the last, I am able at the end of my life to pass out into the moving flow of life in general.”
Cupitt is survived by his wife, Susan, his children Caroline (a psychologist), John (a computer scientist), and Sally (a charity-evaluation consultant), and his grandchildren.
