An enquiry into the ideas of space, time, immensity, and eternity Book

Don Cupitt's 'After God' was definitely an enlightening read. He gives an interesting and I would say quite convincing interpretation of religion in the past in the first part of the book, and offers some ideas for a religion of the future based on that and the postmodern condition we find ourselves in. Let's have a short look on some of these elements.

The postmodern condition we are living in is described by Cupitt as an erasure of distinctions between public and private, objectivity and subjectivity or between the dominant culture and the counter-culture. "People on the Right are very illogical if they refuse to acknowledge that everything nowadays is beginning to float on a free global market - not only money and prices but also linguistic meanings, religious truths, and moral and aesthetic values." Most religious movements try to oppose this or think they can survive (for example within the private realm or within individual subjectivity), but according to Cupitt it is not possible: "... the world of symbolic meaning in which we live is an outsideless and unanchored floating continuum. All reactions against it must use its vocabulary and are therefore part of it, and will be engulfed by it."
The conclusion at which he arrives regarding postmodernity is we should embrace it, if there is no way of beating it.

Cupitt's embrace of postmodernity results in his theory of religion and linguistics that he is elaborating in the first chapters:
"1. As both philosophy and religion have in the past taught, there is indeed an unseen intelligible world, or spirit world, about us and within us.
2. The invisible world is the world of words and other symbols.
3. The entire supernatural world of religion is a mythical representation of the world of language
4. Through the practice of its religion, a society represents to itself, and confirms, the varied ways in which its language builds its world."

To argue for this theory, Cupitt gives a broad overview of the evolution of religion which I won't trace in detail here. Very broadly speaking these are these milestones:
First there is the archaic belief in a world of spirits which exists above and about the visible world. This is then transformed by Plato into his intelligible world of general ideas or forms. Later on, Kant takes this idea of Plato's world-above and transforms it into an order of concepts in our mind. In modern philosophy (in the 1930s) this is turned into the vocabulary of our language: "... we now see from our point of view that the magical supernatural world of religion was, all along, a mythical representation of the world of language."

The new religion Cupitt finally proposes is based on a non-realist approach to religion. In this approach it is believed that God has no real or objective existence apart from human language and culture. God exists only in the sense that he is a potent symbol, metaphor or projection, which also implies that he cannot exist beyond the practice of religion. In spite of his rejection of supernaturalism, Cupitt still sees some benefits in the practice of religion and thus mentions four exemplary religious practices which are not bound to belief in an actually existing God.

In the postmodern condition we thus find ourselves in a new position: "We truly are historical agents, because through our interactions with one another we have among ourselves, and are still shaping, every aspect of the 'reality' within which we live. It is human historical action rather than divine creation that finishes the world. We can use the word interactionism for a general philosophical doctrine, namely, the view that everything, including all linguistic meanings, truths, values, and indeed reality itself, is a slowly evolving consensus product, the result of an interplay of forces in the human realm."

For some conservatives this might sound like a nightmare, but it isn't actually. If embraced and not demonized, there are so many beautiful things that can grow out of such an understanding of the world and the role we play in it. Other authors like John D Caputo manage to convey this sense of beauty of a postmodern theology even better, in my opinion, but the additional perspective Cupitt offered through this book was still very helpful.