“[T]he time has come,” Don Cupitt writes in Creative Faith, “to rescue Jesus the moral teacher from what his own followers have made of him. […] [T]he Jesus of history…needs to be heard again.” Then we might see that “the infinitely-precious, still-vigorous tradition of humanitarian ethics…derives ultimately from his teaching.”
A life fellow and former dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Cupitt, often described as a “radical theologian,” became a priest in the Church of England in 1960, but ceased to be a communicant member in 2008. “I seem to have moved from standard Western Christian faith to an eclectic Christian philosophy of life,” he wrote in 2017; it’s a notion with which he overtops his own website. There, he goes on to herald “true religion in terms of joy in life, and an active attempt to add value to the human lifeworld.”
The Free Library found Creative Faith to be “as informed and informative as it is inspired and inspiring.” In it, he “argues that Christians need to replace a heaven-obsessed theology with a new theology of moral striving. No longer should they aim to conserve the self, preparing for eternity: they must simply expend it, by living generously.”
Creative Faith: Religion as a Way of Worldmaking
By Don Cupitt
Polebridge Press, 2015
