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The Dedicated Life

These two books are reviewed here together because they are both concerned with two themes central to faith in the 21st century: [a] In what sense is Christianity true? and [b] in what ways will it shape up in the future.

Both more or less agree on the answer to the first theme. But on the second they seem far apart. One response to the challenge of the future is somewhat crabbed and negative, the other expansive and stimulating.

Many Christians tend to speak of their faith as something which can be argued about because they know the correct version. Their blocked-off position derives  from what Don Cupitt regards as "Microsoft theology":

... the operating system - the set of beliefs and practices - that you live by and work with is "proprietary": that is, it is tied to a particular institution and its power structure.

In contrast, theology today is "Linux" or open-source:

... even the "highest" religious truth is thought of as being out in public and freely available to all. Nobody has been granted the franchise to it. You can use it, tweak it, add to it just as you please. It is not sacrosanct ...

Cupitt traces the origins of Linux theology briefly, from the early days of Western philosophy to the latter-day social changes which have been spearheaded by the United States. We once thought in terms of normative religious ideas. These are based on the idea that "the truth" is objectively out there. Some is provided by God the Creator; some is delivered to us via revelation.

The upshot is that "a tiny handful" of theologians are now radical rather than liberal. The latter try to reform and re-state ancient truths in a form relevant to the modern world. The former have realised that this is not enough. Our new culture is so different from anything which has gone before in that "... religion has to be completely reinvented".

Lloyd Geering's book is more substantial that Cupitt's, whose slim offering resembles a sketchbook rather than finished work of art.

Geering's thesis is that we must begin to recognise that we are the designers of our world. This is not to say that there isn't a "real" world out there. It's just that human beings

... are one step removed from the total universe of which we assume we are a tiny fragment. Whatever is to be understood as the genuinely "real" world is more elusive than we usually think.

To get in touch with that world we invented language. We now use it to construct "stories". By stories we mean that staggeringly complex collection of perceptions which we have fashioned into "culture" or "society". Christianity is the story which has informed Western societies about the meaning of life.

The point central to his argument, as to Cupitt's, is the dawning realisation in the West that

... no distinction was made between reality and the story. Reality was the story and the story was reality. And this was as true for the cultures which worshipped the Earth-mother as it was for Jew, Christian and Muslim, who each lived by their own story.

In other words, all we know of what's "real" is the stories we construct. The world revealed by science is itself a type of story. Although neither author mentions it, their approach was pioneered by George Kelly's "personal construct" theory in 1955. Kelly held that we all construct our perceptions of the world. At one level our constructs are derived from our cultures. At another we construct individual versions of reality from personal experience of our cultures. But

... we cannot contact an interpretation-free reality directly. We can only make assumptions about what reality is, and then proceed to find out how useful or useless these assumptions are. [1]

It is that "finding out" process which has transformed our lives in the past few centuries. We have evolved a method of gaining consensus about reality we call the "scientific method". That method has enabled us to distinguish between myth and what "really happened".

The upshot is that Christianity is faced with a radical disjunction between its story and the rapidly emerging story of post-Enlightenment humanity. Each author in his own way stresses that the disjunction is radical. It is impossible to build a bridge between the old and the new stories. 

The bad news for the Church is that the new story spells the end of dogmatic thinking, writes Cupitt. He goes further:

... in the long run ... the general assumption that in religion truth is to be defined and enforced by power and power alone, is profoundly self-destructive. It has already destroyed Protestantism, and bids fair soon to destroy Catholicism as well.

The Christian world which existed until comparatively recently, according to both Cupitt and Geering is now at an advanced stage of disintegration. One symptom is that divisions between Christians now cut right across the denominational divisions of the past. So, for example, Southern USA Baptists now share with Roman Catholics the Scripture-derived conviction that homosexuality is an unnatural and sinful state.

It doesn't require much from the average Christian to recognise this state of affairs. The problem is that any such reading these books may feel deeply threatened by this way of thinking, perhaps because they derive a sense of meaningful security from dogma. Cupitt is particularly compelling when he argues that whether or not we like it, we are being forced into what he calls a "religion without beliefs".

It is from this position that Cupitt approaches his 15 "great questions" - though I must say that at this point I was struck forcefully by a sense that he is not convinced that they are truly great. At any rate, they are reduced in their impact by a lack of sharpness, by a sense that Cupitt hasn't really faced up to the arduous task of boiling them down into a form which is truly striking.

Geering takes a similar approach to the "new story" which must replace the old if the impact of Jesus of Nazareth upon the world is to be perpetuated to any significant degree. He thinks that the new story begins with the notion of "evolution in its broadest sense of change and development from within". We have already seen the rise of seminal thinkers in this respect - Teilhard de Chardin being one of the first.

The problem is that the new story, begun by Charles Darwin and continued since by many others, lacks an ending. We are in the throes of moving from a local neighbourhood into the wide world, from a local focus to a global perspective.

Whereas Cupitt attacks Church authority for hampering his and our progress in constructing a new story, Geering is more magnanimous. There is no point in attributing fault to those who cling to the old story. It works for them. The task now is that

The whole earth must become re-sanctified in our eyes; the holy colour must change from heavenly purple to earthly green ... God is to be found in all living creatures ... calling us from a world yet to be created.

I find myself left with a most difficult problem. It's all very well to describe the total breakdown of the old Christian story. Its demise has been known for centuries, though only now is it becoming obvious. The tides of social change are slow and it has taken many decades for the change to show itself for certain.

Given that we know that a new story must come into being, how is it to happen?

Geering steers tentatively towards accepting that the new story is coming primarily from non-Christians such as those who preach and campaign about ecology and the pending destruction of the system which holds and nurtures us all. But he doesn't tackle how Christians are going to become part of the new story, how they are to perceive the Jesus story anew.

Cupitt demonstrates the same shortcoming. In his case it's more stark because he forthrightly proclaims that he is not Christian, at least not in any traditional sense. He focuses mainly on the God-story which, it seems to me, is public property. It therefore has to be rewritten by humanity at large, not just by Christians. The challenge for the Church is how to relate Jesus to a new way of perceiving the world. The question is how to rewrite the Jesus story.

If that can't be done - and neither author has got anywhere near it - then a large question mark arises over the survival of Christianity in any form but a benighted community, closed off in its own dogmatic ghetto where only the theologically clean may live.

I'm convinced that such is the power of the fundamentals of the old Christian story that it can and will be re-written. But the greater part of the task lies before us.
_________________________________________
[1] Inquiring Man, D Bannister & F Fransella, Penguin, 1971

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