Cupitt proposes to "give up the idea that God exists." In the same breath, however, he proposes "that we should nevertheless believe in God (or, at least, come to see that the idea of God is still of use in helping us to become ourselves and to live well.)" (28) The postmodern condition of "the new global technological culture" compels Cupitt to advance this double-edged proposal. (x) The onslaught of the postmodern culture, he says, is rapidly ending the major religious traditions that arose in ages past and lasted until our time. This ending, in his view, is irreversible.
Cupitt came of age in the 1950s in an England that had not yet absorbed the Nietzschean message of the death of God. "God, grace, eternal life, and the unchanging identity of one's immortal soul were completely real to us." (viii) His catalog of the revolutionary forces that demolished this perceived reality during his adulthood is concise but comprehensive. (Yet, at the same time, it skims too lightly over the collapsing of the modern self as modernism played itself out.)
First, cheap mass travel and mass economic immigration destroyed the solidarity of European "monocultural states." Diversity became commonplace. Second, a mass consumer society replaced traditional communities. Mass media "and the mysterious business of fashion" drove it. The intellectual interest in "language, communication, display, packaging, signaling, style, image, and symbolic exchange" bred this change and fed on it. (viii) Third, scientific advances and new technologies developed a cosmology that rendered religion irrelevant. (ix)
Cupitt touches also on other familiar traits of postmodernist society. The public realm is ubiquitous and comprehensive ("It engulfs everything, including values, private life, selfhood, and the counterculture" (x)--a refrain reminiscent of Fredric Jameson's culture of late capitalism). The subject or self has come to appear "lighter" than before, unable to stand up under the weight of sheer personal faith that is unsupported by the culture. It can find no viable hiding place. (xiii)
Cupitt squares off in a world where traditional belief in both matter and spirit no longer prevails. He chooses not to fight this shift but to live with it. To make it more palatable for his readers to accompany him in his grand surrender, he gives a linguistic interpretation of the history of religions. Through ages of belief, Cupitt argues, God and religion were the reflection in language of humankind's own subjectivity--"the mirror in which we look to become ourselves." (33) Greek philosophy aided this reflexive process: if one could argue with God, one could affirm one's own subjective authenticity. ("God did create us--at least in the sense that we became ourselves by first postulating and then slowly gaining the courage to argue with our gods." [42])
Like so many other stories of the modern western world, Cupitt's turns on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and those who followed him in the nineteenth century. In Kant's writings, he sees the essence of the old objective order of God turned into "a framework of categories and concepts"--that is, into language. (46) Cupitt, following Ernst Cassirer, finally sees religion as a symbolic system, which once saw absolute meaning in words attributed to the divine.
Cupitt then explains the decline of faith in the symbolic order and the rise of linguistic analysis and the "death of God" in the 1950s and since. He consoles himself by observing that the old religion was always what modern analysis has revealed, a symbolic linguistic system. This permits him to acquiesce in the decline of belief and to advance his prescription for a religious life in the aftermath of God's death.
The finding that God was a linguistic construct devised by humans does not turn Cupitt into a cynic when he regards the God of ages past. Gods of all sorts were indispensable to the organization of civilization before modern times. However, God has had to die, along with other "absolute presuppositions" embedded in religious tradition. These presuppositions in sum make up the "mirror of nature" that postmodern thought has rejected--the notion that there is an objective world containing objective truth, linked directly to a real God. "There is a great and final Answer to the mystery of our existence, out there, awaiting us." (59) Such was the heart of the belief that existed before the death of God. Cupitt provides a valuable summation of the root assumptions that prevailed until the present period, from which the above quotation comes. It covers the assumptions made about life, the binary contrasts ("The spiritual world above is in every way better and greater than this material world below." [60]), being and value, and causality (59-61).
Cupitt provides an equally useful description of the postmodern worldview that has replaced the "absolute presuppositions" that preceded it. In part, he describes the world we have won as follows:
The position is that there are no absolutes or fixed intelligible essences waiting out there, able to hold at least a few of our linguistic meanings steady. On the contrary, every word in the dictionary has a history. Culture has a history. Religion, philosophy, and even logic and mathematics have histories. We do not have, and we never will have, either the standpoint or the vocabulary that would be needed to prove the truth of realism. Instead, we are caught in what some call neopragmatism, others call nihilism, and yet others describe as postmodernism. And we see that it is simply the long-term outcome of modernity (Harland 1987). The turn to the subjective and mortal human viewpoint looked enormously profitable for several centuries, but now the bills have at last come due as we belatedly realize that of course our world will in the end come to look as insubstantial and radically transient as we ourselves are. (72)
What should people do to live meaningfully after the total collapse of the "real" world of modernity and the disappearance of the major religious traditions? Cupitt does not suggest pessimism, cynicism, or the "panic" behaviors documented by Kroker and Cook and other observers of postmodern behavior. Instead, he offers an esthetic approach. The "One Great Truth" of religion having gone for good, Cupitt suggests that people create a palette of behavioral strategies--"a small personal repertoire of different truths, paths, and goals, to be utilized ad lib." (82) These he would salvage from the old religious traditions. They would be aids to the ongoing "experiment in selfhood" (82) which survives God. The linguistic symbolism that always lay at the base of religion now makes it possible to have a smorgasbord of forms at one's personal command. He offers three such strategies for us to think about--"religion as a toolkit." (90)
EYE OF GOD: We can continue to hone our behavior by imagining, when convenient, that God is still watching us. More important, we can imagine ourselves looking at the world "as if through the eye of God--that is, from the universal and ideal standpoint." (85) This is a voluntary God, not a necessary God. Cupitt says, "I actually think I love God more now that I know God is voluntary. I still pray and love God, even though I fully acknowledge that no God actually exists. Perhaps God had to die in order to purify our love for him." (85)
THE BLISSFUL VOID: This is the "cool sublime" of prayer and meditation. Cupitt suggests "the Discipline of the Void," which would draw on Buddhist meditation practice. Like imagining the eye of God, entering the discipline of the void helps us to get our life into perspective. No god need apply in order to make the Blissful Void work for you. (87-89)
SOLAR LIVING: Cupitt calls this strategy "a radically emotivist and expressionist reading of the ethics of Jesus." (90) Solarity is "living by dying all the time." (90) Of the three strategies, this one seems most fitting for the postmodern scene. It abandons the casuistic accumulation of merit and accepts the absolute that there are no absolutes. There is "nothing outside the flux," says Cupitt, and therefore, we are free to make our own meaning and values. Solar Living allows this to happen without restraint, with total and constant "outpouring" of ourselves. Cupitt here acknowledges the lack of depth in postmodern sensibility, the lack of multiple levels of meaning--and he calls it "postsainthood:"
Though I make no sense in myself, being always a bundle of conflicting forces, I can make some sense in my expression, my spoken utterance, my work, and my lived life; provided, of course, that I understand that I must keep moving on, instantly leaving behind the expressed self that I am continually producing. (90)
We almost hear Cupitt's voice among the chorus of pop music performers who take their cue from the postmodern fragmentation of whole subjects--or we hear its overtones in Bill Clinton's post-impeachment adjustments.
Cupitt concludes by anticipating one world techno-culture. He speculates on the religious perspectives that might inform it now that God has gone. These are interesting probes of a plugged-in theologian. He is seriously looking for the mysterious shape of society after the agrarian and industrial ages of humankind totally disappear. But as such they are too preliminary to merit much critical examination.
The main interest of this book, we think, is two-fold.
First, Cupitt's analysis of the death of the civilization that produced God usefully supplements purely postmodernist analyses such as those by Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and Kroker and Weinstein. His stance as a theologian adds texture and depth to what he describes as postmodern.
Second, we find a great gap between his cultural findings and his recommended strategies for coping with them. Here, his stance as a theologian seems to circumscribe what he recommends, in spite of his radical critique. In the face of civilization's apocalypse, he gives us a smorgasbord of old remedies--take your pick. When generations following his have lived without the emotional pressure of a believable "eye of God," they will find his strategy simply meaningless. We have greater confidence that the merits of "the Blissful Void" can survive, because meditation moves beyond categories in a way that reflects postmodern dynamics. "Solar Living" sounds like a blast, but without connections to a more comprehensive ethical discipline, it probably means early burnout.
But perhaps the shortcomings of his recommended strategies for life "after God" underscore the radical dimensions of the present civilizational crossroads. Nobody can tell us what to do in any persuasive way. Ride the wave, cope with the moment, stay agile, don't weigh yourself down with baggage you can't chuck--strategies abound but none seems to be adequate. Grab some of the old baggage and hang on--Cupitt's advice seems as sensible as any of the postmodern analysts and alarmists. Just as a viable postmodern politics has yet to define itself, a viable postmodern religiosity is waiting to be born. Cupitt helps us to realize that, if the newest Jerusalem ever appears, it will be one cool town.