“If faith in divine providence were the empirical belief that at least the great majority of good people have happy endings, and at least the great majority of bad people come to sticky ends, then one can only say that such a belief is too absurd for anyone to hold and too absurd for anyone to think it worth checking by systematic counting. Faith in divine providence is not a factual belief from which we cand deduce predictions about the future course of human history…Faith in God is itself a way of overcoming evil and not a theory that evil will be overcome quite apart from faith” (Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God, New York: Crossroad, 1980, p.55).
Other provocative quotes from the book include:
“And what is God? The Christian doctrine of God just is Christian spirituality in coded form, for God is a symbol that represents to us everything that spirituality requires of us and promises to us” (p.14).
“Religion is not metaphysics but salvation, and salvation is a state of the self…There is no such thing as objective religious truth and there cannot be. The view that religious truth consists in ideological correctness or in the objective correspondence of doctrinal statement with historical and metaphysical fact is a modern aberration, and a product of the decline of religious seriousness” (p.43).
“A purely historical exegesis of the New Testament would be of no religious value to us today whatever, because the barriers to its appropriation by us are too great. That is why fundamentalist and ultra-conservative styles of religion are now so completely bankrupt. They require so much self-deception as to corrupt the soul” (p.43).
Cupitt has been accused of “atheism”, as has John A. T. Robinson, and some have even wondered about yours truly. But is this not merely symptomatic of the way those on or closer to the extreme ends of the spectrum have limited truth and existence to the objective? Cupitt seems (I’m less than half way through the book) to emphasize that there are things that deserve to be considered real which are not simply objective, observable realities – such as beauty, and love, and the number three. And for progressive Christians, the focus is not on proving that such things are real, but on living them as realities in our own lives.
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