Obituary. Don Cupitt 1934-2025, from the President of the Sea of Faith in Australia Inc.
Dr Neville Buch
Australians thinkers are both sadden and joyful at the passing of Don Cupitt (1934-2025). Sadden as it is a reminder of our own losses in death. Joyful as Cupitt’s contribution to the philosophy of religion might now be realised, fuller and with mature thinking.
I was among the founders of the Sea of Faith in Australia Inc. (SoFiA) in 1995, and the moment of time was particularly important for me and my friends as it is also the 30th anniversary of the Brisbane Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. We were breaking into Australian public discourses with Cupitt’s philosophy of religion, and, indeed, his philosophy of secularity.
He had proven that the model of secular theologies had not collapsed during an era of the shameful attack on Peter Berger by those who did not know the first thing about theology, religion, and secularity. Amateur critics. Cupitt and the Sea of Faith movement would know of such criticisms, but, unfortunately, without open academic debate.
The high point for the SoFiA came in the year 2000 when Cupitt did engaged in debate/discussion with Australian religious philosopher, David Tacey, in the Melbourne’s The Future of Religion Conference. The moment felt like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s declaration:
‘I come too early’, he then said; ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder need time; the light of the stars needs time; deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge University Press),120.
Image: David Tacey
It is not that we agreed with all of Cupitt’s propositions, nor that we had to. For myself, I was not comfortable with Cupitt’s presentation of the anti-realist thesis. Religious talk is metaphorical and that is what I ultimately took as Cupitt’s anti-realism. As a philosopher, Cupitt is among the schools of thought which reject metaphysics. However, it is neither here nor there as to what a believer wishes to believe. Metaphysics can remain as a language game from the Wittgenstein-reading Cupitt. Indeed, a few of us would depart company in the Cupitt vision when Cupitt heads down the Rortyan pathway, in attempting for a completely (total) level playing field between science and religion. I do not agree philosophically. Somehow the level playing field has to take in account the realism of hierarchical status, which populist thought can not remove, no harder it tried. SoFiA is an open forum, and their are other views, other friendly criticisms of Cupitt. Greg Spearritt, our SoFiA Web-editor once said in a fuller and fair treatment of Cupitt’s thinking:
In one of Cupitt’s earlier works (there are so many!) he makes it clear that he doesn’t want disciples following his philosophy of life. He says something like “this book shouldn’t just be cast aside, it should be thrown, with force!”. He’s looking to stimulate thought, though of course he has a point of view and like all authors is attempting to persuade. His whole project, however, is to say we should do our own thinking, not take our beliefs from those with claims to some special knowledge. (Of course we should consider ‘expert’ views, but we should never concede our autonomy.)
I don’t believe Cupitt’s God is a dead God. Rather, talk of God for him is an entirely human activity unrelated to any metaphysical being (which, if it exists, is entirely unknowable: if you wish to assert there is something beyond human language, please explain it in something other than human language, since all language is humanly-created and we cannot get ‘outside’ it any more than a wave can be taken out of the ocean). Our entirely-human talk of God (or gods, or any other sacred referent), however, can be useful; and positive in Cupitt’s view. Clearly it can also be destructive, especially with the old naive realist understandings of a celestial tyrant, understandings which continue to blight the lives of many with ideas of guilt, sin and punishment.
To put this another way: our ideas of God are obviously cultural constructions. Many, perhaps most, people on the planet have conceptions of God or gods that are very different to those western Christians have. Cupitt notes that once you have observed how all cultures project their beliefs onto the universe and then claim the universe backs them up, you can no longer do this for yourself. (Indeed, on the question of God, even within western Christianity – and even within a given church congregation! – there will be a high degree of heterodoxy.)
I don’t see Cupitt as particularly fatalist. Yes, our lives are cultural constructions and within any culture there is a limit to the roles available to us to play. However, Cupitt is in favour of us performing our own lives, of taking charge and choosing our roles, of performing them with vigour and ‘burning out’ (solar ethics). I suspect he’d endorse Neil Young’s ‘Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)’ in which he sings – in reference to the punk rock movement – “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”. (I seriously doubt Cupitt has listened to much Neil Young, however, let alone punk rock!)
Is there ‘extinction’? I fully expect so, but it didn’t bother me before I was born, so I assume it won’t once I’m done with this life. What is there to become extinct anyhow? I’m no Buddhist but I think they’re on the right track with anatta, the doctrine of no-self. Susan Blackmore wrote a book on near-death experience (worth a read; see the excellent short video of an interview with her) in which she explained the experiences people have during the process of brain death (involving anoxia) in terms of the models of self-as-separate-to-the-world that we have constructed throughout our lives breaking down. ‘Self’ is a construction, not an essential reality. (In Buddhist terms it’s a ‘conventional’ truth, not an ultimate one.) When our sense of self breaks down, we commonly have an experience of bliss, a mystical experience of oneness with everything. That, says Blackmore, explains why many who have had a near-death experience no longer fear death and can have a changed outlook on life. There is, she says, no reason to fear death: there is no-one here to die.
Image: 2000 Melbourne SoFiA Conference, Duncan Park, Greg Spearritt, Neville Buch
If it was not the controversy over philosophical Buddhism, there was also controversy over postmodernism:
I shall propose that if we can’t beat postmodernity, we should embrace it. I am proposing a considerable redefinition of religion, a redefinition that (to adopt the Christian vocabulary) will bring us closer to the Kingdom than to the Church, closer to the Sermon on the Mount than to any sort of orthodox theology, and will make it very short-termist in outlook. Unlike the secular theologies of the 1960s, it will “aestheticize” religion, in the sense that it sees religious living in terms of artistic practice and symbolic expressions. As redefined here, religious life is an expressive, world-building activity through which we can get ourselves together and find a kind of belated, or retrospective, happiness.
Don Cupitt, Solar Ethics (SCM Press), Chapter 2.
Cupitt’s teaching about religion can be put into four main strands, thus:
1. Religion is not true in the realist sense. Religious language does not correspond to entities that exist;
2. Understood from an non-realist standpoint religion is a system of signs and symbols that we create to make sense of the world;
3. Religion should be a way of finding happiness within this world. It should be about spirituality rather than dogma, about action rather than belief;
4. Solar ethics is an example of what religion can be in the postmodern world.
Image: Don Cupitt at the 2000 Melbourne SoFiA The Future of Religion Conference
In my sociological history research in Australian ‘religion’, Cupitt launches the cognition:
1. Cupitt’s critique importantly points to the alignment of cultural Christianity and traditional dogma; an alignment that even the neo-orthodox dislikes. I believe this is the problem of *theological* realism which I do not see can be dismissed;
2. Theological realism is different ‘modern realism’ (a catch-bag, umbrella term) is different to theological non-realism. It seems to me historically that members of congregations flick from one positions to another;
3. Daniel Pals points out ten theories of religion (2021). Which conception of ‘religion’ are we talking about?
However, it was our leading member, the late Nigel Leaves who describe Cupitt’s contribution much better (a biography of Cupitt, Odessey on the Sea of Faith, 2004) and suggests that there are seven stages to his thought:
- Stage 1 (1971-1979) Negation Theology (we can only know what God is not and can say nothing meaningful about ‘him’ – fairly mainstream);
- Stage 2 (1980-1985) Non-realism (words like God do not need to correspond to existing entities to be meaningful);
- Stage 3 (1986-1989) Anti-realism and postmodernism (there is no objective world, there is only what we create);
- Stage 4 (1990-1997) Solar ethics and expressionism (the authentic religious life is one of expressive outpouring);
- Stage 5 (1998) The Turn to Be-ing (life involves creativity, religion can help nurture that creative becoming);
- Stage 6 (1999-2000) Ordinary Language (the language people use reveals the ‘religious’ beliefs that they hold. Idea of ‘Life’ replacing the idea of God);
- Stage 7 (2000 onwards) The Religion of the Future (this life is all there is, embrace it!).
Don Cupitt embraced life (1934-2025).
There is one benefit in death for those left beyond. We will see The Don’s legacy now shine brighter. As Hegel said, “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”.
Image: David Tracy engaging Don Cupitt at the 2000 Melbourne SoFiA The Future of Religion Conference.
Featured Image:
Rather than a bibliography of Don Cupitt’s books, here are the links to his BBC Sea of Faith series, which makes the historical connections in the Sea of Faith movement:
Neville Buch
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