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      The Religious Question

      Suppose that we were to feel the need to make an entirely new beginning. We would have to set aside all our received religious traditions and ideas, and begin instead with a universal and purely rational account of the world and the human condition. We aim to be as strict, as up-to-date and illusion-free, as well-informed and as clear-eyed as it is possible to be. Then we ask: Is it possible to join up all the various strands in this account by bringing them under a great unifying symbol that will both make us happy just to be parts of all this, and also will show us how we should live?

      Yes, I answer. In modern thought, especially since the 1960s, people’s outlook has become almost completely non-metaphysical. Our life does not rest upon or within any fixed framework, whether of metaphysical principles or eternal values. There is only all this’ - and all this is just an ambivalent stream of appearances, continually pouring out and passing away. Everything is on show, and there is only the passing show. Everything is contingent, everything is temporal, everything is interconnected, everything is ‘relative’, everything is mediated to us by, and remains suspended within, the endless shifting movement of our language, and everything is transient. We humans are simply part of the general flux of all things, ourselves continually pouring out into expression and passing away; but our speciality is that our creative outpouring feeling, as it mingles with everything, continually strives to interpret the world by reading it, turning it into language and evaluating it. Around ourselves we generate a value-rich communal human life-world, the house of meaning that we live in, but it is never quite as stable as we might wish, because we are continually debating it, revaluing it, and renegotiating it as we go along. In my own jargon I call our life thus viewed ‘the fray’, and insist that most of us love it - and quite reasonably so, there being nothing else. For us, our world has to be the world - for which the slogan is: ‘All this is all there is’.

      The world in which we human beings live today is thus a post-metaphysical world in which there is no eternal, enduring and objective Being, no objective and unchanging Truth, and no objective and finally authoritative standard of Value. Everything is permanently in flux, pouring out and passing away - and yet also on the table, being negotiated. Everything is always on the move, loved by some and contested by others.

      How has all this happened? Until after the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution, most of us (at least in Christendom, Jewry and Islam) thought in terms of a metaphysics of substance. We tended to think of everything first and foremost as a noun, and only secondly started to think of it as doing a bit of verbing. Our assumption, derived ultimately from Greek (and perhaps before that, from Bronze-Age) thought, was that reality is an ordered array of real things, things that are relatively independent, with stable and unchanging natures. Both in the case of being and in the case of truth, we tended to equate objectivity with independent reality and with timelessness. Real being was unchanging, and the idea of time only came in when one was forced to consider something as getting mixed up with other things, and so becoming liable to corruption. Meanwhile, time was on the back burner, in obscurity. If we wanted to think about temporality, we took up something we pictured as ready-made, and mentally dropped it into flowing time just as one drops a stone into a river. Its being in time was just a contingent extra fact about a thing. Especially in the case of human beings, our life in time was like a short period of service overseas. I was my simple and immortal rational soul. Then for a lifetime I was united with a body that was subject to time and - ‘therefore’ - to corruption. Then it was time for me to be demobbed, and I came back home to eternity with much relief. I was back with God and the angels, in the blessed state of timelessness and eternal life. Soma sema, the body is a tomb, they said: bodily life here below is a state of ‘temporary temporality’, a state of alienation and institutional entombment, such as I knew when I was a numbered man, a young National Service officer serving his term overseas from 1955 to 1957. Have you noticed in modern English that the word ‘time’ is used to mean ‘a stretch, a term of imprisonment? That is how the old metaphysics of substance led us to think of time. It gave us the idea of life after death as a consolation and a release; but this life? - this life was a drag, a burden. One would be glad to be freed from it.

      When did everything change? Nothing is certain in the history of ideas, but roughly speaking it was during the eighteenth century that the great discovery of time took place. People gradually began to think that Moderns like Sir Isaac Newton had surpassed the achievements of the Ancients, and therefore that human beings generally might be capable of superseding their own past. The ideas of a universe in ceaseless motion, of historical change, of historical period, and of an evolving ‘climate of opinion’ or ‘spirit of the age’ soon followed. More and more, we begin to think of ourselves as being embedded not in eternity but in our own historical period. Looking back, I recognize that the 1950s Cupitt was still orthodox, eternity-oriented and unreconstructed. In world-view he was even a Neo-Thomist, and quite different from the questioning Sixties Cupitt, who was learning fast from Kant and Hume, Mansel and Kierkegaard. And so on, until by the mid-Nineties I was coming into my own final outlook and trying to draw all the threads together. I was beginning to understand that although my own ideas seem final to me, in the sense that this is as far as I am ever going to be able to take

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