After God: The Future of Religion, by Don Cupitt, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 143pp, £11.99 in UK
The lonely Adam who graces the dust jacket of this book, half of a Michelangelo painting, symbolises well the drift of Don Cupitt's book. A man stares into nothingness and says, We'll continue as before.
Augustine spoke of the restlessness of the human heart until it had found God. Aquinas told a Dominican colleague not long before his own death that all he had written of God wasn't worth a straw compared to the vision of God he had lately received. Nicholas of Cusa (1464) titled his book on the incomprehensibility of God, De docta ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance). Irishman John Scott (c.870) wrote of God that "he is known better by not knowing; ignorance concerning him is true wisdom. It is more in accordance with truth and faith to deny anything of him than to affirm it." And John of the Cross (1591) made the point that no one will be saved by intellectual prowess, for "at the end of the day, the subject of examination will be love".
The Christian mystical tradition lays great emphasis on the difference between God and man and on the fragility of our knowledge of God. It points up the will, the road of love as the approach route to the divine. The 14th-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing underlines this when he writes: "All rational beings, angels and men, possess two faculties, the power of knowing and the power of loving. To the first, to the intellect, God who made them, is forever unknowable, but the second, to love, he is completely knowable and that by every separate individual."
Cupitt's book in its introduction has a reference to reading the works of the mystics. His brief chapter headed "Mysticism" in no way does justice to Christian mysticism, being superficial to the point of pain. The subtleties of the lived experience of God are nowhere in evidence.
The title and subtitle of the book will be mystifying to many. What future has religion after God? No God, no religion, surely. Unless, of course, as this book seems to suggest, the religion of the future is to be an exercise in self-development. But then why call it religion? Yet, to quote our author, the religion of the future will be "religion without metaphysics, religion without creed, religion no longer focused around a power center [sic] outside ourselves, religion without a structure of authority and religion without a gathered community of people".
This severely reductionist version of religion will scarcely be recognisable to Christians as even an attenuated version of Christianity. They may also, perhaps, find it somewhat puzzling that its proponent is a Christian minister. They may find it even more perplexing that a preacher of the Good News can view Christianity so one-sidedly as to imagine it solely as a locus of extreme religious authoritarianism, in which an intensely judgmental God is the kingpin in a system of "religious terrorism".
The idea proposed in the book of a tool kit, that is, "a small set of attitudes and techniques by practising which we can grow in self-knowledge, learn to accept the transience and insubstantiality of ourselves and everything else and learn to say a whole-hearted `yes' to life", is admirable, but why call it religion? Giving this tool kit the name of religion sounds like calling the shell the oyster.
I should note in passing that Catholicism, in particular, seems to come badly out of this book's scatter-shot critiques of Christianity.
It is difficult, for instance, to see how any Christian scholar today manages to state that "the plaster image is the Virgin Mary". The purported description of Catholicism on page 113 is tendentious, dated and done in a style which predates ecumenical awareness. "Today's exhausted Roman authoritarianism" can hardly stand as a complete imaging of the Catholic Church as it now exists worldwide. Nietzsche's gibe about Catholicism as "Platonism for the masses" might have been given the context of the German philosopher's proven dislike of Catholicism evidenced in his letter to Erwin Rohde, in which he writes: "I am deeply ashamed to think I might be open to the suspicion of having anything to do with Catholicism, which I find so thoroughly detestable."
The multi-disciplinary approach of this book and its wide-ranging historical perspective, combined with its brevity, creates the sense of a lack of precision. Greater concentration of material might have avoided the aura of superficiality which the book generates.
Donal Flanagan is a theologian and journalist