Don Cupitt Quotes

The reason why Jesus got into such severe trouble was that he tried to bring into the present a construction of the world, of God and of the self that belonged to a still-remote future. He was much too far ahead of his time, and suffered accordingly.

We should be empty of clutching, empty of self, empty of all the old ideas of substance. We should be 'lost in the objectivity of world-love', as I have elsewhere put it; or, perhaps better, we should let ourselves be only an empty space filled with brightness. Life lived like that is 'eternal' life.

For it was only via the idea of God that we were able to develop all our ideas about a unified self, reason, a unified law-governed cosmos, sovereignty, property, supervision (Providence) and management, long-term purposes and action to attain them and so on. God taught us everything, so that we are eternally grateful to God even as we now leave him behind.

Scientific knowledge is advanced by the systematic criticism and purging of what currently passes for knowledge, so in religion too we need to criticize and expel all the illusory and dysfunctional religious material we have inherited.

To love is to be vulnerable: if God loves, then God is mortal.

Nothing out there tells us how we must live: we and we alone can now with confidence knowingly trust our own hearts, and admit that we do and must invent our own ethics.

A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.

Remember that the past fifty years has been the age of the Big Bang cosmology. We have learnt to see all reality as a slow-motion explosion, as pouring itself out and passing away, as dissemination. We live in a postmodern epoch in which there is nothing absolute, nothing permanent and nothing substantial.

A belief is made religious, not so much by its content, as rather by the way it is held.

The Servant who really studies his Master gradually becomes like his master; gradually learns that he himself is the one who in the end does all the work and has all the power.

Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.

I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety.