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 within the university for 30 years and was a number one non-realist thinker. His philosophy, as summarised on his website, was that “talk of God in transcendent and metaphysical terms belongs to an mental 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 yr, 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 never letting the masses into the key, as if out of an apparently persistent fear that they could then misbehave” (Features, 28 June 2024).
After studying natural sciences, theology, and the philosophy of faith at Cambridge, Cupitt was ordained in 1959. After a curacy at St Philip’s, Salford, he became Vice-Principal of Westcott House, Cambridge, before starting his long profession teaching the philosophy of faith on 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 query 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 outline “Christian Buddhist”.
The BBC present in him an interesting broadcaster, and he got here to wider attention through programmes of which the best-known were The Sea of Faith. In this series, he explored the decline of faith and asked “in what form, if any, Christian faith is feasible 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 “recommend succinctly the usual account of modernity and the decline of faith was well-known to academics but not, on the time, to most of the people, or to churchgoers, who can have been bewildered by the decline of Christian practice”, Professor Pickford recalled.
Letters poured in to the Church Times, some expressing gratitude and others hurt. “All my assumptions about Christianity were in pieces,” wrote one correspondent (Features, 15 March 2019). Among those that challenged the argument was the long run Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Later, others attributed their conversion to Christianity to Professor Cupitt’s work (Features, 28 June 2024).
The series led to the creation of the Sea of Faith Network, which continues to be lively. The Sea of Faith Archive is held at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden. Mr Cupitt’s website says that within the early Nineteen Nineties 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 many clergy in Crockford’s Clerical Directory, nevertheless.
Marking the fortieth anniversary of The Sea of Faith last yr, the theologian Professor Elaine Graham wrote that Mr Cupitt’s legacy “should encourage those that proceed to search for opportunities today to have interaction in open, critical, and honest discussion concerning the existence of God, the character of religion, and the long run of the Church” (Features, 28 June 2024).
Obituary to follow
