THE Revd Don Cupitt, the Anglican priest and philosopher whose BBC TV series The Sea of Faith brought him to prominence in 1984, has died, aged 90.
A life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he lectured in the university for 30 years and was a leading non-realist thinker. His philosophy, as summarised on his website, was that “talk of God in transcendent and metaphysical terms belongs to an intellectual epoch that has long since passed. Realist doctrines of God have little or no credibility for a society shaped by contemporary scientific thought and the linguistic turn in philosophy.”
Writing about his legacy last year, the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Dr Catherine Pickstock, wrote that Mr Cupitt “broke with the musty hypocrisy of most Anglican liberal theology by pushing it to an extreme, thus exposing an elite agnosticism that was keeping its half-belief to itself and not letting the masses into the secret, as if out of an apparently persistent fear that they might then misbehave” (Features, 28 June 2024).
After studying natural sciences, theology, and the philosophy of religion at Cambridge, Cupitt was ordained in 1959. After a curacy at St Philip’s, Salford, he became Vice-Principal of Westcott House, Cambridge, before beginning his long career teaching the philosophy of religion at the university. He was appointed Dean of Emmanuel in 1965.
A series of books appeared in swift succession, of which Taking Leave of God (SCM Press) raised the question for the Church Times’s reviewer, David L. Edwards (Books, 3 October 1980), how far Cupitt, though in Holy Orders, was an atheist (a charge that had been levelled at Bishop John Robinson after Honest to God). Cupitt in that book accepted the description “Christian Buddhist”.
The BBC found in him an engaging broadcaster, and he came to wider attention through programmes of which the best-known were The Sea of Faith. In this series, he explored the decline of religion and asked “in what form, if any, Christian faith is possible for us today”. It was “hard to think that a more visually exciting film on religion has ever been made”, Douglas Brown concluded in a review for the Church Times (14 September 1984).
The series “put forward succinctly the standard account of modernity and the decline of religion was well-known to academics but not, at the time, to the general public, or to churchgoers, who may have been bewildered by the decline of Christian practice”, Professor Pickford recalled.
Letters poured in, some expressing gratitude and others hurt. “All my assumptions about Christianity were in pieces,” wrote one correspondent (Features, 15 March 2019). Among those who challenged the argument was the future Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Later, others attributed their conversion to Christianity to Mr Cupitt’s work (Features, 28 June 2024).
The series led to the creation of the Sea of Faith Network, which is still active. The Sea of Faith Archive is held at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden. Mr Cupitt’s website says that in the early 1990s he stopped officiating at public worship, and in 2008 “finally ceased to be a communicant member of the Church”. He continued to be listed among the clergy in Crockford’s Clerical Directory, however.
Marking the 40th anniversary of The Sea of Faith last year, the theologian Professor Elaine Graham wrote that Mr Cupitt’s legacy “should encourage those who continue to look for opportunities today to engage in open, critical, and honest discussion about the existence of God, the nature of faith, and the future of the Church” (Features, 28 June 2024).
Angela Tilby
Obituary to follow