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A sinking ship
Thinking about the Church, an ancient image comes to mind. The Church is like a ship sailing a deep, broad, blue sea. We know the port from which its sailed, but we don't know where it's heading or when it will reach home port at the end of the voyage.

In previous centuries this stout ship of faith sailed the treacherous seas of an evil world. Its hull kept its crew safe from the crashing waves of sin and monsters of the spiritual deeps. The wind of the Holy Spirit kept it on course to do God's will, steered by the Great Captain whose compass unerringly saved all from dangerous reefs which might otherwise have sunk into the dark depths of corruption.

Don Cupitt's vision is different. For him the the world is our ship. The Church is an ancient, leaky hulk which has served its purpose. It has arrived in port and will soon be sent to the breakers yard. For the time being a skeleton crew remains on board, under the illusion that they are still sailing the ocean. They sing old shanties to keep up their spirits, meanwhile going through all the drills as though they were still afloat.

As usual the author doesn't pull his punches. Many previous books have earned him a reputation as a disputatious cleric for as he says, 

I remain technically a priest in good standing within the church, and although I do not officiate, I do still communicate.

He writes mainly for a Christian audience, even though his ideas might seem outrageous to many of them and 

Many or most church Christians who read this book will see it as proposing not the reformation of Christianity but the abolition of Christianity.

Part of the problem, he thinks, is that human perceptions and thought have changed radically over the past two hundred years, rendering traditional Christian metaphors and doctrines virtually incomprehensible to most thinking people. This a strange situation, he thinks, and has been brought about because 

A Chinese wall has been erected between academic theology and the church

which has now been extended to become another 

... Chinese wall within the little world of academic theology, between the New Testament scholars and the people who teach and write Christian doctrine.

The tragedy is that there is "... little discussion of the possibility of a reformation and renewal of the old faith, even at this late hour". The ship is listing badly, the rats are jumping overboard - and yet the crew goes about its business as if nothing were amiss. 

There have been, as Cupitt points out, a number of reformations in the past. But they have all been reformations of the old mediated religion to which the first Christians turned and by doing so buried the kingdom vision of Jesus beneath layers of ritual and doctrine.

The seams of the leaking ship, says Cupitt, can no longer be caulked against the incoming water. It too late to replace the rotten timbers. The rudder has fallen off. The sails are in shreds. What now needs to be reformed is not the Church but the faith itself. He adds: 

...everyone who has studied Christian origins and the subsequent history of the Early Church is nowadays familiar with the suggestion that there was nothing necessary about the way Christianity happened to develop. 

If this is true, and he would argue it is, then no form of Christianity, past or present, is sacrosanct in the face of present need. A corollary is that the Christian faith is infinitely adaptable to cultural change and the sands of time. As Cupitt points out, it's false to claim that there's a faith "once and for always" delivered to the saints. No reputable Church historian would claim such a thing - even though some ecclesiastics might.

Back to the future
The issue of a faith which is flaccid and intellectually impotent was forced in the later 19th century by the "death of God" which had the effect "... of shifting the focus of attention permanently and decisively back to this world" from the previous vision of a heavenly city of God.

The future new order can arrive only by "... going back to the beginning in order to go forwards".

Cupitt's air of certainty about what he calls "kingdom theology" is striking. Contemporary faith is 

... nothing exotic or fanciful. It is presupposed by our ordinary language now. It is what we already perceive to be the truth about our life now.

This, he thinks, is the same kingdom theology lived out by Jesus. If it's possible to be as certain as he seems to be about "what Jesus really meant" then I for one am missing something. But his emphasis is less on this and more on Kingdom theology as "... an interpretation of our own human condition" that he is lead to by philosophy.

One of his themes is that of the Kingdom as "... pure religious immediacy". Jesus lived out his realisation that the Kingdom of God is "among" or "within" us and grows secretly in us. Cupitt thinks that this implies that "... God is no longer an Other in opposition to the believer, but is fully internalised ... God is so close that he disappears. The religious world simply coincides with the life world, and everything becomes holy".

The voice of Jesus in the Gospels is a "... scratchy echo of the voice of the original" because the first followers of The Way (and therefore the writers of the Gospels) began and then elaborated "a huge new system of religious mediation ... a new religious system of just the kind he [Jesus] died opposing". 

It has taken us a long time, says Cupitt, to grasp "... how profoundly ecclesiastical Christianity has misunderstood and misrepresented Jesus."

The path back to the future is a much-travelled one. Cupitt is not the first to examine Jesus as he "really was" and to call others to live in the future in the same way as Jesus "really" lived in the past. I for one wish he had made the point that Jesus' followers did the only thing they could have done in their cultures in those times. They were not 21st century people, nor did they have Cupitt's 21st century preconceptions. 

If Cupitt has succeeded in isolating an historical Jesus to the satisfaction of secular historians (which the overall case he presents makes necessary) then my bet is he can't distill from this Jesus the elaborate philosophy he claims. Only if he accepts an historical Jesus as prototype rather than archetype is this possible. Nothing he writes here indicates that he's made this essential distinction.

He is biting about the false start he claims was made by his Christian predecessors. He writes of Jesus: 

It's amusing to think of someone who was 2 000 years ahead of his time. That is a long time to have to wait to be understood ...

- by Don Cupitt and those who agree with him, one supposes. I think he's profoundly wrong to slate the Church for having "misunderstood" Jesus for two millennia. Just as it's almost impossible for us today to construe reality as though we were 1st century or 10th century or 15th century Christians, so also it's mistaken to think that anyone of those times including Jesus could possibly construe reality as we do. 

Jesus was a man of his times, limited as were all of those times - limited not in relation to their own cultures, but certainly in relation to ours. The issue today is how, given the radical perceptual and cognitive changes which have arisen in the past 300 years, do ordinary Christians reframe their faith.

Nevertheless, provided one reads this book with this essential reservation in mind, the author's analysis of the radical differences between ourselves and all humans who have gone before including Jesus himself is illuminating. 

Put aside Cupitt's claim to have understood Jesus properly for the first time in two millennia as you read. Don't buy into statements like "The Church became monstrously oppressive and overblown as it made an idol of itself". That may perhaps be true from our point of view. But it's an unjustified accusation in terms of the cultural perceptions of those Cupitt accuses. 

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