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Angela Tilby: Don Cupitt refreshed religious discourse  

24 January 2025

But I cannot go along with the Sea of Faith movement, writes Angela Tilby

Rosie Dawson

Don Cupitt in 2019

Don Cupitt in 2019

DON CUPITT, who died on Saturday, was a hugely significant figure in English theology, who gave birth to the Sea of Faith movement after his six-part television series of 1984.

I first met Don in 1969 when I went up to Cambridge. He was then Dean of Emmanuel College, and supervised a number of fellow theology students: male ordinands, not all of whom had much interest in or capacity for theological learning. I was struck then by his patience, which went along with a slight air of detachment.

He was very tall, and stooped over us like an eagle. His sermons in Emmanuel’s chapel were always brief and often brilliant. Preaching on the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, he concluded that, if we found ourselves thanking God that we were not the Pharisee, then perhaps we should consider that the joke was on us.

Later, he invited me to write and produce a play for performance in the college chapel, which I did. It was a slightly batty T. S. Eliot-esque drama about the prophet Ezekiel and the Babylonian exile. Weird! But he was characteristically kind and supportive, if perhaps vaguely amused by it all.

His theological development as a non-realist Christian took place over a number of years. In The Sea of Faith, he argued that the decline of religious belief was inevitable and irreversible. We had to learn to live without God while developing spiritual practices that enabled us to flourish.

As an atheist Christian, he personally chose to continue to follow Jesus. But all of us could live meaningful lives, as long as we gave up expectations of anything beyond. We should live as the sun, as he wrote: almost lyrically, simply pouring ourselves out, understanding that death was an end for us, but not an end for everything. It is no great tragedy if the past is forgotten. It is only by recognising that we cannot cling on to anything, least of all ourselves, that we can find authenticity and spiritual freedom.

There is something exhilarating about Don’s prose, even when he is insisting that time is up for religion as we have known it. There can be no doubt that he both challenged and refreshed religious discourse, enabling some to worship, for the first time, with sincerity, and others to rediscover a faith more traditional than his own.

For myself, I cannot go along with the Sea of Faith movement. It seems to me that our whole culture has been taken over by the quest for self-authentication, and this has not led to a wiser or more compassionate society, but, rather, to a self-centred and amoral solipsism. Perhaps the courage to be still depends on a reality greater than ourselves — on the rock of faith rather than the sea of doubt.

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