Don Cupitt

From Philosopedia

Don Cupitt (22 May 1934 - )

Cupitt, the former Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was educated at Charterhouse and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied the natural sciences, theology and the philosophy of religion. In 1959 Cupitt was ordained to the Diocese of Manchester (Church of England); from 1962 to 1965 he was Vice-Principal of Westcott House, an Anglican theological college in Cambridge, and became Dean of Emmanuel College in 1966. From 1968 to 1996 he lectured in the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity.

According to his website,

Don Cupitt was born in 1934 in Lancashire, England, and educated at Charterhouse, Trinity Hall Cambridge, and Westcott House Cambridge. He studied, successively, Natural Sciences, Theology and the Philosophy of Religion. In 1959 he was ordained deacon in the Church of England, becoming a priest in 1960. In the early 1990s he stopped officiating at public worship, but he remains technically a priest in good standing. He writes mainly for ‘liberals’ in the churches, saying to them: ‘Other writers try to formulate a position that you might be able to get away with: I show you what you really think.’

After short periods as a curate in the North of England, and as Vice-Principal of Westcott House, Cupitt was elected to a fellowship and appointed Dean at Emmanuel College late in 1965. Since then he has remained at the College. In 1968 he was appointed to a University teaching post in the Philosophy of Religion, a job in which he continued until his retirement for health reasons in 1996. At that time he proceeded to a Life Fellowship at Emmanuel College, which remains his base today. He is married, with three children who all now live and work in London, and three grandchildren.

Don Cupitt’s books began to appear in the 1970s, without attracting much public attention. He first provoked hostile notice by his participation in the symposium The Myth of God Incarnate (1977), and then became nationally known for his media work — especially the three BBC Television projects Open to Question (1973), Who was Jesus? (1977), and The Sea of Faith (1984).

Cupitt’s notoriety peaked in the these years of the early 1980s, his most important book of that period being Taking Leave of God (1980), which shut down his career and made him in the eyes of the Press an atheist and perhaps ‘the most radical theologian in the world’. He survived, partly because the then Archbishop of Canterbury and the then Master of Emmanuel defended his right to put forward his ideas. Since that time he has devoted all his energies to developing his ideas in a long line of books. He travels regularly, lecturing for the Sea of Faith Networks in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, for the Westar Institute of Santa Rosa, California, in the USA, and for the Snowstar Institute of Southern Ontario, Canada.

In his writing, and in the various societies he has tried to foster, Don Cupitt attempts to develop new thinking for a new epoch: a new philosophy, a new ethics, and a new religious thought. His thinking develops continuously and is not easy to summarize, but the best introduction to it has been given by the Australian Nigel Leaves in his recent two-volume study. The Sea of Faith TV series can be obtained on DVD, and the book is still in print. It is reasonably accessible to beginners in philosophy and theology. Readers with more time and energy should simply read Cupitt’s more recent books in the order in which they were written — perhaps beginning with After All (1994). . . .

Much of Cupitt’s thinking clearly belongs to the philosophical tradition rather than to theology, and the best clues to his ideas can often be given by quoting the philosophers who have been important to him at different times. In his youth, he was most impressed by Hume and Kant. Then he became absorbed in Kierkegaard, in the movement from ‘organized religion’ to ‘spirituality’, and in the classics of Christian mysticism.

This early period culminated in Taking Leave of God (1980), Cupitt’s last book in his Kant and Kierkegaard manner. In 1981 he became immersed in Nietzsche, and then in Richard Rorty and Mark C. Taylor. By the late Eighties he had assimilated the early Derrida and French postmodernism. During the Nineties the most obvious new development was a turn, around 1996/98 to Heidegger. At the same time Cupitt also turned to ordinary language, and to this life. He rejects all ideas of gaining salvation by escaping from this world of ours. "All this is all there is", he says and he now sees true religion in terms of joy in life and an active attempt to add value to the human lifeworld.

Outside the Western tradition, Cupitt has looked mainly to Buddhism. Of his recent books, Emptiness and Brightness (2001) is the most Buddhist. He is a friend of Stephen Batchelor, who is sometimes referred to as his counterpart within Buddhism. . . .

In 2007, he has up to four books scheduled to appear, all in China and the Chinese language. They include translations of two books that have always appeared in the West, Philosophy's Own Religion (2000) and The Great Questions of Life (2006), and also two entirely new books, Impossible Loves, and Above Us Only Sky. The reason for this move to the East is that, whereas in the West Cupitt is read mainly in Theology faculties and therefore regarded as impossibly heretical, in China he is read as Philosophy and gets a much fairer hearing. Thus for Cupitt there is, paradoxically, more religious freedom in China than in the West. He is seen writing somewhere between Christianity, Buddhism and French-style postmodernism; his present religion of commitment to ordinary life makes sense to many people in China.