The book (published in 1990) is a bracing run through of philosophy, focusing on the wake of German idealism, including Derrida and Lacan, and asking what the religious and theistic implications are of accepting this philosophy. The results are anti-realism in theism, which is the same as atheism, and of treating religion as a form of paying attention and being awake, so that Christianity (but presumably any religion buying into this) becomes rather like Buddhism.
Nihilism is the belief that no ultimate explanation of the world is possible, there are only historically produced beliefs; i.e., there is no criteria to which we have access that can finally or ultimately arbitrate between philosophies; there is no outside.
(Rorty in Irony, Contingency and Solidarity prefers the term irony, because he thinks nihilism sounds too drastic. With Rortian irony we can’t help but believe in our beliefs but we simultaneously know that others quite legitimately don’t believe them.) Cupitt thinks this make realism impossible, including realist theism (or religious realism). There’s no immediate contact with anything – reality, the divine – everything is filtered through language (and so culture and history) and so it’s impossible to prove theism. This means also the end of Platonism – there are no Forms, no eternal or metaphysical objects. But Cupitt is also wary of the postmodern tendency to valorise art as a new kind of clericalism; artists will not save us any more than priests.
This is very interesting at a time when some want to resurrect the neoplatonic scheme and others want to create a Christianity without it. A key issue in this debate is transcendence: Platonism allows talk about transcendence to happen quite naturally, whereas more modern philosophies want to explain everything on immanent terms, as does Cupitt. The result for Cupitt is atheism, but there is the feeling that he fails to account for some essential features of religion. One such feature is the idea of doing something ‘for the glory of God’ rather than in order to become a more mature human being. He turns everything into being about our ego, even though that’s what he wants to avoid, yet much religious activity is not about the self at all. This is one example of a general feeling of reduction. I read the book thinking, ‘yes, that’s right,’ and yet still feel that the move to atheism is reductive, doesn’t fully explain religious experience or thought, if only because it’s just too easy.
A couple of choice quotes.
143 ‘But the God of speech is mythical. That is to say, there is no way in which God could so speak to me that there could be no doubt, either about who is speaking to me, or about what he means to tell me.’
‘All theologies, up to Bonhoeffer at least, supposed that God could communicate himself to us human beings, and could yield himself up into the hands of men while yet remaining not less than himself. God in paradosis (=traditio) would still be God; the Word of God proceeding forth would still be at his Father’s side. But we can no longer see how this could be so. For God is expression, God revealing himself to human beings, is God going out into language. And this is death for God, as it is for all of us, for it requires God to abandon his absoluteness and selfsameness and suffer dispersal into the endlessness of interpretation.’
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