Don Cupitt > Quotes

“Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity.”
― Don Cupitt

“I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety.”
― Don Cupitt

“To love is to be vulnerable: if God loves, then God is mortal.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“We should be empty of clutching, empty of self, empty of all the old ideas of substance. We should be ‘lost in the objectivity of world-love’, as I have elsewhere put it; or, perhaps better, we should let ourselves be only an empty space filled with brightness. Life lived like that is ‘eternal’ life.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.”
― Don Cupitt, Crisis of Moral Authority

“Nothing out there tells us how we must live: we and we alone can now with confidence knowingly trust our own hearts, and admit that we do and must invent our own ethics.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“scientific knowledge is advanced by the systematic criticism and purging of what currently passes for knowledge, so in religion too we need to criticize and expel all the illusory and dysfunctional religious material we have inherited.”
― Don Cupitt, Above Us Only Sky

“Those who first acquired language and tried to think the human situation were utterly overwhelmed. They could cope only by imagining that there were greater invisible beings who could and did understand and control both the human psyche and the world. ‘I can’t make sense of it, but I have to believe that there is a larger perspective within which it all makes sense.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“The reason why Jesus got into such severe trouble was that he tried to bring into the present a construction of the world, of God and of the self that belonged to a still-remote future. He was much too far ahead of his time, and suffered accordingly.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“The Servant who really studies his Master gradually becomes like his master; gradually learns that he himself is the one who in the end does all the work and has all the power.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“Remember that the past fifty years has been the age of the Big Bang cosmology. We have learnt to see all reality as a slow-motion explosion, as pouring itself out and passing away, as dissemination. We live in a postmodern epoch in which there is nothing absolute, nothing permanent and nothing substantial.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“For it was only via the idea of God that we were able to develop all our ideas about a unified self, reason, a unified law-governed cosmos, sovereignty, property, supervision (Providence) and management, long-term purposes and action to attain them and so on. God taught us everything, so that we are eternally grateful to God even as we now leave him behind.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“All life is dying life – including the life of God.”
― Don Cupitt, Theology's Strange Return

“The mystic attempts to overcome dogma, insisting that God, Christ and heaven are not ‘up there’ but are to be found in the heart by desire, by love, by the will; that is, by a path of inner purification.”
― Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith

“I have no soul: I am not a substance, and there is no real me. There is only what I am able, rather uncertainly, to make of myself as I go along, and what you can make of me: that is, I am only a stream of events, a process in time, and all ideas of me are only interpretations of that process, or bits of it.”
― Don Cupitt, The Fountain: A Secular Theology

“Mystical writing was indeed the forerunner of today's radical theology and deconstruction...

Jacques Derrida can be described as an intellectual subversive whose work leads to the view that any text may be interpreted to mean almost anything, and as a mystic will.

Well, yes, mystical writing is indeed politically and linguistically subversive and always was so the mystic seeks to create an effect of religious happiness by liberating religious language from the Babylonian captivity of metaphysics. When the writing does succeed in melting God and the soul down into each other, the effect of happiness is astonishing.”
― Don Cupitt, Mysticism After Modernity

“Everything is immanent, everything comes down to one level. There is no transcendent moral order, there is no inner world within the self, and there is no other sphere of action but this common world of ours.”
― Don Cupitt

“cri de coeur,”
― Don Cupitt, Creative Faith: Religion as a Way of Worldmaking