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Hymns Ancient & Modern - Don Cupitt

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78 pages

English

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Considers the traditional Christian ideas of the hereafter against modern beliefs, arguing that we need not the New Testament message but a Last Testament for the Last World that we live in.

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Publié par	Hymns Ancient & Modern
Date de parution	21 avril 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780334048916
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0487€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Last Testament
The Last Testament
Don Cupitt
© Don Cupitt 2012
Published in 2012 by SCM Press Editorial office 3rd Floor, Invicta House, 108-114 Golden Lane, London, ec1y otg , UK
SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity) 13A Hellesdon Park Road Norwich NR6 5DR, UK
www.scmpress.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978-0-334-04622-6 Kindle edition 978-0-334-04623-3

Originated by The Manila Typesetting Company Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRo 4YY
Contents
Preface
Part One: The Gospel
1 Dispensations
2 The Fountain
3 Poetical Truth and Common Life
4 Living in the Last World
5 Forgetting the Self
6 Impressionism and Expressionism
7 Lifestyle
8 Our World
9 Solarity

Part Two: Epistles
10 A New Method of Religious Enquiry
11 What’s the Point of It All?
12 On the Meaning of Life
13 What’s Happening to Religion?
14 The Religion of Ordinary Life
15 The Ethics of Value Creation
Preface
In New Testament times and for long afterwards – perhaps even until the late twentieth century – many or most people saw this present life of ours as preparatory. They hoped for a better hereafter, perhaps after death in the case of the individual, or in the long-term historical future on earth, in the case of the human race as a whole.
Today we have lost those old hopes. We seem to regard our funerary rites as simply giving closure to the individual life. Nobody sees funerals as occasions for serious repentance in the face of impending divine Judgement. As for the communal hopes, whether religious, or liberal, or anarchist, or socialist, it seems today that we’ll be lucky if we can achieve long-term sustainability by strictly controlling population and consumption. Progress is dead.
Either way, it seems that from now on we must learn to see this present life in the present social world as being our last. Our present human life-world is not being orchestrated towards a long-awaited climax and fulfilment. On the contrary, it is end-less and outside-less. It goes on and on like a soap opera, but we’ll never arrive at anything radically different. It goes on, but it’s not going anywhere special. Nor are we.
If that is so – and I am sure that it is – the question arises of whether the traditional goals of religion are ‘immanently attainable’: that is, they can be realized now, and within this life. Can we achieve a state of eternal happiness or blessedness in the here and now? In the past both Christians and Buddhists have held that it is indeed possible for a few exceptional saints to reach Enlightenment, or the Vision of God, within their own lifetimes, but might it ever be possible to democratize that idea within a future religion of ordinary life?
What are we asking for? I think few people doubt that it is possible to be enraptured by art, by the beauty of the natural world, and by what people call ‘the joys of life’. But we need also to find a way of reconciling ourselves to life’s transience, a way of persuading human beings to get on with each other better, and a way of seeing this world as a satisfactory theatre for effective moral action.
For years I have been trying to spell out an answer to this question about a secular religion that really works and can reach the heights; an answer that will satisfy not only me, but some others too. The best I have done may be found in two very short books, the Solar Ethics of 1995, and The Fountain of 2011. In this book I try to go a stage further, by arguing that our modern science-based industrial, and now globalized, civilization is so different from anything that came before it that it forces us to move on spiritually by a whole dispensation. In terms of Christian theology, this means that we must move on from the age of the Church (an age in which people saw this present world as penultimate) to the promised age of the Kingdom of God on earth (an age in which people can see their present life as being their last). Along these lines we may be able to show that the secular religion we need can be created out of what remains of Christianity – and is indeed the old faith’s long-awaited fulfilment.
This seemingly odd suggestion turns out surprisingly effective. It prompts us to think that religion all along, and ever since its remote beginnings, was a way of reconciling ourselves to life and to each other. Belief in a spirit-world and in life after death was needed in the past, because it helped to make life intelligible and bearable in times when most people’s lives were short, uncertain and harsh. But today the enormous development of modern knowledge, and of the technologies of modern medicine, communications and so on, have done much to make us less dependent upon the protection of a postulated supernatural order. More than the people of any previous period, we have come to ourselves and are able simply to love life just as it is.
In Part 1 of The Last Testament are some short essays that attempt to bend some traditional Christian ideas into the required new shapes. The new ideas presented are intended to be just true, and in a way that everyone already knows, so that I can claim no personal credit for them. I am only their ‘presenter’, or editor, and I formally disclaim any personal copyright in the text. I am determined to avoid the portentous pastiche biblical tone of the many writers who, since Nietzsche’s Zarathustra , have attempted to write a new and updated version of the New Testament. (How could Nietzsche, of all people, have made such a mistake?) So these little essays are not scriptures, nor are they to be regarded as an individual’s art product. They are meant to be the merest platitudes, and interesting chiefly for the way they show that nobody before now has ever really attempted to describe a religion that is simply true , with no mystique of the Catholic type that is designed to bamboozle the poor punters. In religion people ordinarily desire and expect to be overawed by tradition, by priestly power, by sheer size, and by illusory consolations. In short, by the Baroque. But here let us try if we can to persuade ourselves to be interested in the simple philosophical truth of the matter – and no more than that. Just religion, without self-deception.
In Part 2 of this book I present some public lectures, position statements written for various audiences during the past decade. They are occasional and personal, which is why I compare them with the canonical Epistles.
‘A New Method of Religious Enquiry’ – Chapter 10 – was written for the Highlands Institute in Highlands, North Carolina, and delivered on 26 September 2005.
‘What’s the Point of It All?’ – Chapter 11 – began as a Summer School lecture at Cambridge in 2004, and was subsequently published in the journal Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Vol. 4(2), pp.149–58 (2005).
‘On the Meaning of Life’ – Chapter 12 – was a public lecture for the University of Leuven, Belgium in March 2004.
‘What’s Happening to Religion?’ – Chapter 13 – was written for the First National Conference of Sea of Faith in Australia and delivered at Wollaston College, Claremont, near Perth WA, in September 2004.
‘The Religion of Ordinary Life’ – Chapter 14 – quotes a systematic summary from Above Us Only Sky (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2008). In the form reprinted here, it was delivered in various places – including Steyning, Sussex – during the next 18 months.
‘The Ethics of Value-Creation’ – Chapter 15 – was written as one of the annual Sea of Faith lectures I used to give at the National Conference which is held each year in Leicester, UK. This one dates from July 2005.
All these pieces are, I suppose, exercises in popular communication because they have to be. I don’t believe in any revelation or special supernatural communication of religious truth, and I reject many other associated ideas. For example, it used to be held that the most important kind of religious truth is beyond the scope of unassisted human reason. It has been specially communicated to us by God, via an angel, to a prophet who has written it down in a holy book. The religious community guards the book and its officers teach the correct interpretation of it – and so on. Today I don’t believe a word of all that. In the Last World, today’s world, religious truth is in fact obvious, and freely available to everyone. In a sense, you already know it perfectly well. My job is only to use philosophical method, and various forms of popular communication, to try to bring real religious truth imaginatively to life. Your life. I have to try to persuade you to give up a lot of old and outworn ways of thinking so that you can learn a new, secular, everyday way to religious happiness. You know it all already, but I have to try to give an extra shove.
I have made five or six attempts to write a last book, but they all turn