What do you think?
Rate this book
Radical Theology
According to Don Cupitt, radical theology is a personal struggle for a new and better kind of religion following the loss of the older sort of popular, traditional, ecclesiastical faith. It is, he says, inevitably, highly autobiographical. This set of eighteen unpublished or little known published essays which document his gradual radicalization over the last thirty years open a window onto the progression of his thought and demonstrate his long held desire to come up with a message that can reach and influence ordinary people. Because, in Cupitt s judgment, the real radical theology is your own voice, if you can but find it.
145 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
1 person is currently reading
25 people want to read
About the author
Don Cupitt
74 books15 followersDon Cupitt was an English philosopher of religion and scholar of Christian theology. He had been an Anglican priest and a lecturer in the University of Cambridge, though he was better known as a popular writer, broadcaster and commentator. He has been described as a "radical theologian", noted for his ideas about "non-realist" philosophy of religion.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 26, 2024
A COLLECTION OF WRITINGS FROM THE ENTIRE COURSE OF CUPITT’S CAREER
Don Cupitt (born 1934) is an English philosopher and theologian, who was an Anglican priest from 1960 until he resigned in 2008; he taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge since 1965. He has written many books, such as Taking Leave of God; Radicals and the Future of the Church; After All; After God: The Future Of Religion; Reforming Christianity etc.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 2006 book, “After twenty-five years or so of being … described as---‘a radical theologian,’ I’m beginning to wonder what that phrase means… the very idea of ‘radical theology’ is uniquely Christian and says something very important about where religious thought stands today, and what it must go through… Radical theology tempts people to hope they can make a very big splash with only a very small talent. Radical theology rests on the old and basically ‘theological’ belief in a ready-made objective Truth out there, a Truth that… [is] all-conquering and indisputable. But alas, in the more important matters… there is no readymade, unarguable Truth sitting out there waiting for the hour when it is due to be revealed. The most that a rational person can set out to do is to join the ongoing public debate… and influence the evolving consensus of public opinion.” (Pg. 1-2)
He continues, “There remain reasons why I persist with theology and am not ashamed of the label ‘radical theologian.’ Radical theology is… written by people who have experienced the breakdown of popular, orthodox dogmatic faith, and have been compelled to discover the scarce and very extreme terrors and joys of real religious thought. The radical theologian is a person… who has padded through a moment of violent discontinuity, and has struggled to remake or rediscover faith on the far side of the loss of faith… We are on our own. There is no other way of religious truth except by working it out for ourselves by studying philosophy… On my view, then, radical theology is a personal struggle for a new and better kind of religion on the far side of the loss of the older sort of popular, traditional, ecclesiastical faith. It is, inevitably, highly autobiographical. One writes progress reports. (Pg. 4-5)
He explains, “The whole body of my writing, over about four decades now, has been an attempt at radical theology. I have been trying to discover and spell out something that might serve us today as true religion. But my writings have been both voluminous and (understandably) very unpopular, with the result that my ideas are not well understood even in England, my own country. In this present book I have collected some eighteen shorter pieces, written between 1972 and the present day, that have so far ether not been published or have appeared only in rather out-of-the-way places.” (Pg. 9)
He continues, “One cannot realistically hope for ‘success,’ but one can at least stick it out and try to leave a body of work big and varied enough to cause the Church lasting irritation. To that I’ll add… [that] creative religious thinking can be the source of extraordinarily intense happiness. I’d even say that creative religious thinking just IS true religion. That is why I maintain that the religious society of the future will not have any creed: instead, it will supply an environment in which people are emboldened to develop out of themselves their own religious outlook…” (Pg. 12)
In a 1988 essay ‘Religion Without Supernaturalism,’ he outlines, “The points on which I guess we may agree are five: First, we all believe that religion matters a great deal to society…. Secondly, we would not be here unless religion mattered to us individually… Thirdly, we are people for whom the religion that matters most is that of the Jewish-Christian tradition… Fourthly, whether we actually call ourselves Christian or not, we do already find ourselves committed to many things that are distinctively Christian…. which brings me to the fifth and last of our points of agreement. We are in varying degrees exasperated that the Church insists on handicapping herself by remaining needlessly locked into a world-view that is well over 300 years out of date. Why should we have to be time-travellers in order to go to church?” (Pg. 15-17)
In a 1989 essay on ‘Radical Apologetics,’ he states, “The job of religion now, I’m suggesting, is to give us the selflessness and the poise to survive in the modern world, and to be creative and productive people. Without religion, I believe we are threatened by pessimism, nihilism---and fundamentalism.” (Pg. 26)
In the 1980 essay ‘God Within,’ he notes, “I have used the phrase ‘Christian Buddhism.’ I do not mean that I am a Buddhist. I just mean that Buddhism is an inner discipline, it stresses autonomy, and it exalts spirituality above theological doctrine. Similarly, I would like to see Christians turn away from their obsessive attempts to convince themselves and others about objective supernatural facts. Even if we had them I do not think they would really help much… Instead, more attention should be paid to ethics and spirituality, for religious truth is in the end subjective, not objective.” (Pg. 51)
In the early essay ‘One Jesus, Many Christs,’ he asserts, “Jesus … saw himself as---an eschatological prophet who proclaimed the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. He did not make ‘claims’ for himself: he did not claim divinity, he did not claim to be the Christ, and he did not even call HIMSELF the ‘Son of Man.’ But he did regard his own work as helping to usher in the Kingdom of God, and, whatever was to happen to him, he hoped to be vindicated by the Son of Man at the end of time.” (Pg. 76)
In the 1977 essay ‘The Christ of Christendom,’ he points out, “the discovery that the ecclesiastical Christ is not to be found in a critical reading of the records of Jesus led to skepticism about the historicity of the gospels. This skepticism served to protect the ecclesiastical Christ from historical refutation. But the figure behind the gospels is not quite unreachable... enough remains of Jesus to challenge us to rethink our ideas of Christ. In doing so, we will be furthering the theological task of the modern period, that of shifting Christianity from the dogmatic faith of the Christendom period to the critical faith which is to succeed it… [This] will not take us further from Jesus: it will bring us closer to him. It will enable us to recover TRUTHS which have been largely lost.” (Pg. 106)
In his 1991 essay on ‘Religious Humanism,’ he notes, “the question now becomes: ‘Why do we need to keep any links with religion AND religious practice at all? Why don’t we just become secular humanists?’ My answer is this: because it is so humanistic, our tradition is profoundly historical… Our vision of the world and our moral and intellectual standards are … themselves cultural products… In this situation, after nihilism, we need the religious imagination and the practice of religion to help us to re-fiction ourselves… So I practice faith, I go over the ole myths and re-enact the old rituals, and I try to add a little bit to the tradition, because I now see religion as supplying us with the schooling and the symbols we need for this new task of ours… Because we do it consciously, it will be a sort of humanism, but because we know we still need communal myths and rituals, it will also be religion. We shall be religious humanists, making believe.” (Pg. 112)
This book will be of interest to those studying contemporary/progressive/Radical Christianity; and particular for those interested in Cupitt’s other books.
Don Cupitt (born 1934) is an English philosopher and theologian, who was an Anglican priest from 1960 until he resigned in 2008; he taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge since 1965. He has written many books, such as Taking Leave of God; Radicals and the Future of the Church; After All; After God: The Future Of Religion; Reforming Christianity etc.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 2006 book, “After twenty-five years or so of being … described as---‘a radical theologian,’ I’m beginning to wonder what that phrase means… the very idea of ‘radical theology’ is uniquely Christian and says something very important about where religious thought stands today, and what it must go through… Radical theology tempts people to hope they can make a very big splash with only a very small talent. Radical theology rests on the old and basically ‘theological’ belief in a ready-made objective Truth out there, a Truth that… [is] all-conquering and indisputable. But alas, in the more important matters… there is no readymade, unarguable Truth sitting out there waiting for the hour when it is due to be revealed. The most that a rational person can set out to do is to join the ongoing public debate… and influence the evolving consensus of public opinion.” (Pg. 1-2)
He continues, “There remain reasons why I persist with theology and am not ashamed of the label ‘radical theologian.’ Radical theology is… written by people who have experienced the breakdown of popular, orthodox dogmatic faith, and have been compelled to discover the scarce and very extreme terrors and joys of real religious thought. The radical theologian is a person… who has padded through a moment of violent discontinuity, and has struggled to remake or rediscover faith on the far side of the loss of faith… We are on our own. There is no other way of religious truth except by working it out for ourselves by studying philosophy… On my view, then, radical theology is a personal struggle for a new and better kind of religion on the far side of the loss of the older sort of popular, traditional, ecclesiastical faith. It is, inevitably, highly autobiographical. One writes progress reports. (Pg. 4-5)
He explains, “The whole body of my writing, over about four decades now, has been an attempt at radical theology. I have been trying to discover and spell out something that might serve us today as true religion. But my writings have been both voluminous and (understandably) very unpopular, with the result that my ideas are not well understood even in England, my own country. In this present book I have collected some eighteen shorter pieces, written between 1972 and the present day, that have so far ether not been published or have appeared only in rather out-of-the-way places.” (Pg. 9)
He continues, “One cannot realistically hope for ‘success,’ but one can at least stick it out and try to leave a body of work big and varied enough to cause the Church lasting irritation. To that I’ll add… [that] creative religious thinking can be the source of extraordinarily intense happiness. I’d even say that creative religious thinking just IS true religion. That is why I maintain that the religious society of the future will not have any creed: instead, it will supply an environment in which people are emboldened to develop out of themselves their own religious outlook…” (Pg. 12)
In a 1988 essay ‘Religion Without Supernaturalism,’ he outlines, “The points on which I guess we may agree are five: First, we all believe that religion matters a great deal to society…. Secondly, we would not be here unless religion mattered to us individually… Thirdly, we are people for whom the religion that matters most is that of the Jewish-Christian tradition… Fourthly, whether we actually call ourselves Christian or not, we do already find ourselves committed to many things that are distinctively Christian…. which brings me to the fifth and last of our points of agreement. We are in varying degrees exasperated that the Church insists on handicapping herself by remaining needlessly locked into a world-view that is well over 300 years out of date. Why should we have to be time-travellers in order to go to church?” (Pg. 15-17)
In a 1989 essay on ‘Radical Apologetics,’ he states, “The job of religion now, I’m suggesting, is to give us the selflessness and the poise to survive in the modern world, and to be creative and productive people. Without religion, I believe we are threatened by pessimism, nihilism---and fundamentalism.” (Pg. 26)
In the 1980 essay ‘God Within,’ he notes, “I have used the phrase ‘Christian Buddhism.’ I do not mean that I am a Buddhist. I just mean that Buddhism is an inner discipline, it stresses autonomy, and it exalts spirituality above theological doctrine. Similarly, I would like to see Christians turn away from their obsessive attempts to convince themselves and others about objective supernatural facts. Even if we had them I do not think they would really help much… Instead, more attention should be paid to ethics and spirituality, for religious truth is in the end subjective, not objective.” (Pg. 51)
In the early essay ‘One Jesus, Many Christs,’ he asserts, “Jesus … saw himself as---an eschatological prophet who proclaimed the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. He did not make ‘claims’ for himself: he did not claim divinity, he did not claim to be the Christ, and he did not even call HIMSELF the ‘Son of Man.’ But he did regard his own work as helping to usher in the Kingdom of God, and, whatever was to happen to him, he hoped to be vindicated by the Son of Man at the end of time.” (Pg. 76)
In the 1977 essay ‘The Christ of Christendom,’ he points out, “the discovery that the ecclesiastical Christ is not to be found in a critical reading of the records of Jesus led to skepticism about the historicity of the gospels. This skepticism served to protect the ecclesiastical Christ from historical refutation. But the figure behind the gospels is not quite unreachable... enough remains of Jesus to challenge us to rethink our ideas of Christ. In doing so, we will be furthering the theological task of the modern period, that of shifting Christianity from the dogmatic faith of the Christendom period to the critical faith which is to succeed it… [This] will not take us further from Jesus: it will bring us closer to him. It will enable us to recover TRUTHS which have been largely lost.” (Pg. 106)
In his 1991 essay on ‘Religious Humanism,’ he notes, “the question now becomes: ‘Why do we need to keep any links with religion AND religious practice at all? Why don’t we just become secular humanists?’ My answer is this: because it is so humanistic, our tradition is profoundly historical… Our vision of the world and our moral and intellectual standards are … themselves cultural products… In this situation, after nihilism, we need the religious imagination and the practice of religion to help us to re-fiction ourselves… So I practice faith, I go over the ole myths and re-enact the old rituals, and I try to add a little bit to the tradition, because I now see religion as supplying us with the schooling and the symbols we need for this new task of ours… Because we do it consciously, it will be a sort of humanism, but because we know we still need communal myths and rituals, it will also be religion. We shall be religious humanists, making believe.” (Pg. 112)
This book will be of interest to those studying contemporary/progressive/Radical Christianity; and particular for those interested in Cupitt’s other books.
Displaying 1 of 1 review