We met on 8 July at David Lambourn’s house. Present were David Belcher, John Challenor, George Gregg, Andrew Homer (welcome!), John Howard, David Lambourn, Andrew Teverson and Stephen Williams, with apologies from Sara Clethero and Paul Graham.
As agreed, we discussed Faiths and Beliefs in anticipation of the Oxford day conference on that subject on 12 September. David Belcher introduced the topic suggesting that behind the idea is a distinction between beliefs as propositional statements expressed in a form that is in principle either true or false; and faiths which are the values by which we live our lives and for which the test is essentially pragmatic. In everyday speech the differentiation is less clearcut and words are used more fluidly but we stayed with it for our purposes. (Judging by the reviews – no-one has read it yet – the latest book by Karen Armstrong – The Case for God – seems to be based on a similar distinction.)
We reflected on the role of religious education. It looks as though the otherwise desirable multifaith emphasis has often resulted in religions being presented as sets of propositions which can be compared and contrasted; religions are looked at from the outside from an implicitly atheistic perspective rather than in terms of their meaning for the lives and actions of their adherents. Many faith communities, it must be said, collude with this and seem much more comfortable asserting authoritative propositions (eg, the age of the universe, the authorship of the Koran).
So the question is not “what do I believe?” but “what do I do next?” It can be answered by reference to rules or by deference to authority. Or we can act on the basis of the expectations others have of us. Or we can aspire to personal authenticity, the act of will or self-expression (a leap of faith!). There are attractions in the spontaneity of free action but it is not entirely realistic. We function on the basis of what we remember or what we have learned; only an infant is rootless.
This led to thoughts about free will. It is now recognised that this is not the self-evident notion it was once assumed to be. Many of our actions are almost unconscious (and in what way is answering a call of nature is an exercise of free will?) More fundamentally, big choices are often shaped by habit and expectation. Free will is thus a myth, an idea that invites scepticism and challenge, but one that is still expedient for managing the business of everyday life.
Similarly, we may need more than spontaneous free will to make changes in our lives. We reflected on the idea of “ceremony” as a way of confirming and marking change and giving licence to move forward. Absolution, for instance, both expects and licences us to act differently. This is yet another angle on “faith”.
We may come back to this after the Oxford event. Before that is the SoF annual conference on science and religion which a number of us will be attending and we agreed to devote at least part of the next meeting to a report back. We will also pick up on the issue floated last time of reviewing the organisation and programme of these Birmingham SoF meetings.
We agreed last time that that next meeting will be on Wednesday 19 August 2009 at 1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston. The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 7 October.
14.7.09
23.5.09
Record of meeting, 20 May 2009
We met on 20 May at David Lambourn’s house. Present were David Belcher, John Challenor, Sara Clethero, Paul Graham, George Gregg, John Howard, David Lambourn and Stephen Williams.
Stephen Williams referred to informal discussions he’d had since the last meeting about future arrangements for the group and it was agreed that we should return to this at a meeting in the early autumn. We are a larger group than we used to be and it is timely that we should take stock of the frequency and content of our meetings, the way we go about things and our relationship with the national Sea of Faith network. Although I didn’t mention this at the time, I would also like to put on the table the role of group convenor. (I have been doing the job for five years and it may be appropriate to pass the role on to someone else with different ideas; I’m also not sure that it’s a good principle to combine the role with being a SoF trustee as I am since becoming treasurer last year).
David Belcher reported on progress on the regional conference now fixed for September 12 with the provisional title “Faiths and Beliefs”. We talked around it for a bit, getting our heads round the topic and raising some points which David will feed back, but it looks good. The Oxford group are in the lead role but we are cosponsors (together with Banbury and Southampton) and if people from this area are to hear about it, it will probably be down to us. We should have more details by the time of our next meeting.
David Belcher then introduced the main topic of the evening, a discussion based on his reading of David Boulton’s recent book Who on Earth was Jesus? It is a long book with the greater part taken up with a review of all the efforts to date to pin down the historical Jesus. It’s done very thoroughly and would be very useful for anyone wanting a readable summary of the material but we focussed on the later chapters where David Boulton seems to conclude that there are no conclusions. Everyone has preconceptions of Jesus and can find what they’re looking for. We can accept the probability of a few key facts about Jesus but beyond that there are so many gaps in the record and there have been so many vested interests eager to fill them that it is better to recognise that we can be certain of nothing.
We thought the quest for certainty about Jesus, even from the most academically respectable, had parallels with fundamentalism. It involves tidying up the texts to present a coherent picture, but if we think the Jesus story worth spending time on at all then we must be prepared to live with its ambiguities and paradoxes. It’s down to us to make what we can of it. As good SoF people we see Jesus as a human creation!
This led on to a broader discussion of Truth with the suggestion that it has become an idol. There are technological truths which we rely on for the conduct of our everyday lives but sometimes the pursuit of truth seems to be about fixing ideas which should be kept open. At its best science is about establishing truth by eliminating what is false and is therefore always open-ended (we should generally have a clearer idea of what is false than of what is true). What we think we know is always provisional (a concrete example being aspirin which we continue to use even though we now have a completely different understanding of how it works).
Scepticism is a virtue, prompting the question of how it is to be fostered. It is often seen as an adult quality but children are moving towards adulthood from the time they are born and should be helped to develop habits of scepticism. More often the assumption is that children require certainties, something well demonstrated in the practice of churches. The church infantilises even its adult adherents so that the questioning common to theological students is so rarely shared with the laity.
We have already set the date of our next meeting Wednesday 8 July 2009 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston. We agreed to explore our understanding of “Faiths and Beliefs” in anticipation of the September regional event. The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 19 August.
Stephen Williams referred to informal discussions he’d had since the last meeting about future arrangements for the group and it was agreed that we should return to this at a meeting in the early autumn. We are a larger group than we used to be and it is timely that we should take stock of the frequency and content of our meetings, the way we go about things and our relationship with the national Sea of Faith network. Although I didn’t mention this at the time, I would also like to put on the table the role of group convenor. (I have been doing the job for five years and it may be appropriate to pass the role on to someone else with different ideas; I’m also not sure that it’s a good principle to combine the role with being a SoF trustee as I am since becoming treasurer last year).
David Belcher reported on progress on the regional conference now fixed for September 12 with the provisional title “Faiths and Beliefs”. We talked around it for a bit, getting our heads round the topic and raising some points which David will feed back, but it looks good. The Oxford group are in the lead role but we are cosponsors (together with Banbury and Southampton) and if people from this area are to hear about it, it will probably be down to us. We should have more details by the time of our next meeting.
David Belcher then introduced the main topic of the evening, a discussion based on his reading of David Boulton’s recent book Who on Earth was Jesus? It is a long book with the greater part taken up with a review of all the efforts to date to pin down the historical Jesus. It’s done very thoroughly and would be very useful for anyone wanting a readable summary of the material but we focussed on the later chapters where David Boulton seems to conclude that there are no conclusions. Everyone has preconceptions of Jesus and can find what they’re looking for. We can accept the probability of a few key facts about Jesus but beyond that there are so many gaps in the record and there have been so many vested interests eager to fill them that it is better to recognise that we can be certain of nothing.
We thought the quest for certainty about Jesus, even from the most academically respectable, had parallels with fundamentalism. It involves tidying up the texts to present a coherent picture, but if we think the Jesus story worth spending time on at all then we must be prepared to live with its ambiguities and paradoxes. It’s down to us to make what we can of it. As good SoF people we see Jesus as a human creation!
This led on to a broader discussion of Truth with the suggestion that it has become an idol. There are technological truths which we rely on for the conduct of our everyday lives but sometimes the pursuit of truth seems to be about fixing ideas which should be kept open. At its best science is about establishing truth by eliminating what is false and is therefore always open-ended (we should generally have a clearer idea of what is false than of what is true). What we think we know is always provisional (a concrete example being aspirin which we continue to use even though we now have a completely different understanding of how it works).
Scepticism is a virtue, prompting the question of how it is to be fostered. It is often seen as an adult quality but children are moving towards adulthood from the time they are born and should be helped to develop habits of scepticism. More often the assumption is that children require certainties, something well demonstrated in the practice of churches. The church infantilises even its adult adherents so that the questioning common to theological students is so rarely shared with the laity.
We have already set the date of our next meeting Wednesday 8 July 2009 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston. We agreed to explore our understanding of “Faiths and Beliefs” in anticipation of the September regional event. The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 19 August.
13.4.09
Record of meeting, 8 April 2009
We met on 8 April at David Lambourn’s house. Present were David Belcher, John Challenor, Paul Graham, George Gregg, John Howard, David Lambourn, Andrew Teverson and Stephen Williams (welcome to George and Andrew) with apologies from Sara Clethero and Simon Mapp.
Stephen Williams and David Belcher gave brief updates on the national conference in July and on the more local “roadshow” being planned for the autumn. We then moved on to our planned topic for the evening: “Easter”.
We noted the prevalence of spring festivals in most religions and cultures of the northern hemisphere, even if Christianity got it at second-hand from Passover. Ideas of renewal, new life and fresh beginnings resonate with the time of year, while the Christian and Jewish stories express an added force as their narratives begin with the experience of death and despair before the eventual triumph. They have a dramatic quality which is picked up in the theatricality of their celebrations (and not just in the purely religious rituals – a secular event like the Good Friday performance of the St Matthew Passion has a sense of occasion about it).
We pondered the variable date of Easter. It defies our customary calendar by being tied to lunar cycles; it is in that sense out of our control and demands that we be humble in embracing the experience of renewal and regeneration.
The power of the Easter/Passover/etc stories is their ability to move from the particular to a universalisation of human suffering and the hope of the new. But does that mean that they are available only to “believers”? From a SoF perspective we would want to celebrate and own these myths as the products of human creativity meeting human needs and aspirations but the structures for marking the season are largely in the control of institutions wedded to supernaturalism (less obviously perhaps in the case of Passover where Judaism can exist independently of belief). The supernatural is highly valued by those who believe in it and can be personally beneficial and therapeutic (although also serving to justify evil actions) but the potential of “Easter” is lost if it cannot be shared without dogma. Only art and music have made that a possibility; we ended back with Bach and an exuberant recording of one of his Easter cantatas (BWV 66).
We had referred at times during the discussion to the history underlying the Easter story and to David Boulton’s book Who on Earth Was Jesus?. David Belcher, who is currently reading it, offered to introduce it at our next meeting with the help of anyone else who may have read it by then. Offer accepted!
As previously arranged that meeting will be on Wednesday 20 May 2009 at 1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston. The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 8 July.
Stephen Williams and David Belcher gave brief updates on the national conference in July and on the more local “roadshow” being planned for the autumn. We then moved on to our planned topic for the evening: “Easter”.
We noted the prevalence of spring festivals in most religions and cultures of the northern hemisphere, even if Christianity got it at second-hand from Passover. Ideas of renewal, new life and fresh beginnings resonate with the time of year, while the Christian and Jewish stories express an added force as their narratives begin with the experience of death and despair before the eventual triumph. They have a dramatic quality which is picked up in the theatricality of their celebrations (and not just in the purely religious rituals – a secular event like the Good Friday performance of the St Matthew Passion has a sense of occasion about it).
We pondered the variable date of Easter. It defies our customary calendar by being tied to lunar cycles; it is in that sense out of our control and demands that we be humble in embracing the experience of renewal and regeneration.
The power of the Easter/Passover/etc stories is their ability to move from the particular to a universalisation of human suffering and the hope of the new. But does that mean that they are available only to “believers”? From a SoF perspective we would want to celebrate and own these myths as the products of human creativity meeting human needs and aspirations but the structures for marking the season are largely in the control of institutions wedded to supernaturalism (less obviously perhaps in the case of Passover where Judaism can exist independently of belief). The supernatural is highly valued by those who believe in it and can be personally beneficial and therapeutic (although also serving to justify evil actions) but the potential of “Easter” is lost if it cannot be shared without dogma. Only art and music have made that a possibility; we ended back with Bach and an exuberant recording of one of his Easter cantatas (BWV 66).
We had referred at times during the discussion to the history underlying the Easter story and to David Boulton’s book Who on Earth Was Jesus?. David Belcher, who is currently reading it, offered to introduce it at our next meeting with the help of anyone else who may have read it by then. Offer accepted!
As previously arranged that meeting will be on Wednesday 20 May 2009 at 1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston. The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 8 July.
2.3.09
Record of meeting, 25 February 2009
We met on 25 February at David Lambourn’s house. Present were David Belcher, John Challenor, Sara Clethero, Paul Graham, John Howard, David Lambourn, Simon Mapp and Stephen Williams.
As agreed we discussed The Meaning of the West by Don Cupitt (and had an interesting and stimulating conversation, even though several of us had not got round to reading it yet, myself included). For those who had, it is clearly an important book engaging us with significant ideas, and perhaps one of Don Cupitt’s most important books to date.
Inevitably, when several of us are quite familiar with a lot of Cupitt’s work, a new book is looked at not just for what it says but for what it tells us about the progress of his thinking. It was suggested that The Meaning of the West is in some ways more orthodox (unless it’s orthodox thinking catching up) but it also includes Cupitt’s final abandonment of the prospect of church-Christianity ever being reformed to speak relevantly to the modern world. Instead his central theme is that the West has been shaped by Christianity in spite of the Church and that in fact it is only with the collapse of the Church (and of ecclesiastically authorised theology) that the true progressive message of Christianity has been able to be realised in the contemporary west. It is as though a hidden thread has preserved what is best in the words of Jesus (on social justice, the rights of women etc -– a kingdom rather than a church) notwithstanding the efforts of institutional Christianity to suppress it.
There is a lot that is attractive in this idea, but in our discussion we weren’t sure that it all stood up. This “West” seems to belong in post-war northern Europe inspired by Beveridge-style welfare states and collective reconstruction; few Americans would recognise it and much of that spirit has been superseded in Europe. The Meaning of the West is less an achievement to be celebrated than the basis of a critique to be applied to the world we find ourselves in. It was also felt that insufficient regard was paid to the multifaith character of the modern west and that the book presumed the superiority of Christianity. If, however, Christianity is able to take this surprising turn at this late stage in its history, we should be open to similar surprises in other faith traditions. A criticism from the opposite direction was that the book’s focus on the institutional “Church” overlooked other long established forms of Christian organisation such as Quakerism with its consistent social agenda; and even the Church is still a force for social action in particular localities.
We noted the tendency throughout Christian history for the person of Jesus to be reinterpreted to reflect the preoccupations of the age. We cannot objectively recreate the historical Jesus but must always rely on our own and others’ images of him. Making sense of the message of Jesus is therefore at least partly an exercise of the imagination. It was pointed out that the period of the emergence of the West was marked not just by innovative science and philosophy but also by the arrival of the novel (Descartes and Cervantes were contemporaries -– David L recommends The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera). In that context, the story of the West is about the creation and reinvention of new narratives. This thought prompted us to think about the significance of writing and still more of printing. The written record fixes thought -– without it fundamentalism probably couldn’t exist. On the other hand writing gives the writer space to depart from the rigidity and discipline of an oral tradition and introduce something new. In fact we need both writing and live interpretation (“leapfrogging”); at its best a sermon was about interpretation but sadly has become an object of ridicule.
Whatever our criticisms, The Meaning of the West certainly succeeds as an imaginative reinterpretation of Christianity and deserves the kind of discussion we gave it. Those who haven’t read it will now probably want to.
For our next meeting just a few days before the event, we agreed to discuss the meaning of Easter. No-one could suggest a single book or reference for us to focus on so it was left to us separately to sort out material that might be relevant. That meeting will be on Wednesday 8 April 2009 at 1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road Edgbaston.
The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 20 May.
PS The latest edition of Sofia is now out and with it literature for the 2009 Conference. There is also a review of The Meaning of the West.
As agreed we discussed The Meaning of the West by Don Cupitt (and had an interesting and stimulating conversation, even though several of us had not got round to reading it yet, myself included). For those who had, it is clearly an important book engaging us with significant ideas, and perhaps one of Don Cupitt’s most important books to date.
Inevitably, when several of us are quite familiar with a lot of Cupitt’s work, a new book is looked at not just for what it says but for what it tells us about the progress of his thinking. It was suggested that The Meaning of the West is in some ways more orthodox (unless it’s orthodox thinking catching up) but it also includes Cupitt’s final abandonment of the prospect of church-Christianity ever being reformed to speak relevantly to the modern world. Instead his central theme is that the West has been shaped by Christianity in spite of the Church and that in fact it is only with the collapse of the Church (and of ecclesiastically authorised theology) that the true progressive message of Christianity has been able to be realised in the contemporary west. It is as though a hidden thread has preserved what is best in the words of Jesus (on social justice, the rights of women etc -– a kingdom rather than a church) notwithstanding the efforts of institutional Christianity to suppress it.
There is a lot that is attractive in this idea, but in our discussion we weren’t sure that it all stood up. This “West” seems to belong in post-war northern Europe inspired by Beveridge-style welfare states and collective reconstruction; few Americans would recognise it and much of that spirit has been superseded in Europe. The Meaning of the West is less an achievement to be celebrated than the basis of a critique to be applied to the world we find ourselves in. It was also felt that insufficient regard was paid to the multifaith character of the modern west and that the book presumed the superiority of Christianity. If, however, Christianity is able to take this surprising turn at this late stage in its history, we should be open to similar surprises in other faith traditions. A criticism from the opposite direction was that the book’s focus on the institutional “Church” overlooked other long established forms of Christian organisation such as Quakerism with its consistent social agenda; and even the Church is still a force for social action in particular localities.
We noted the tendency throughout Christian history for the person of Jesus to be reinterpreted to reflect the preoccupations of the age. We cannot objectively recreate the historical Jesus but must always rely on our own and others’ images of him. Making sense of the message of Jesus is therefore at least partly an exercise of the imagination. It was pointed out that the period of the emergence of the West was marked not just by innovative science and philosophy but also by the arrival of the novel (Descartes and Cervantes were contemporaries -– David L recommends The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera). In that context, the story of the West is about the creation and reinvention of new narratives. This thought prompted us to think about the significance of writing and still more of printing. The written record fixes thought -– without it fundamentalism probably couldn’t exist. On the other hand writing gives the writer space to depart from the rigidity and discipline of an oral tradition and introduce something new. In fact we need both writing and live interpretation (“leapfrogging”); at its best a sermon was about interpretation but sadly has become an object of ridicule.
Whatever our criticisms, The Meaning of the West certainly succeeds as an imaginative reinterpretation of Christianity and deserves the kind of discussion we gave it. Those who haven’t read it will now probably want to.
For our next meeting just a few days before the event, we agreed to discuss the meaning of Easter. No-one could suggest a single book or reference for us to focus on so it was left to us separately to sort out material that might be relevant. That meeting will be on Wednesday 8 April 2009 at 1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road Edgbaston.
The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 20 May.
PS The latest edition of Sofia is now out and with it literature for the 2009 Conference. There is also a review of The Meaning of the West.
17.1.09
Record of meeting, 14 January 2009
We met on 14 January at David Lambourn’s house. Present were David Belcher, John Challenor, Sara Clethero, John Howard, David Lambourn, Simon Mapp and Stephen Williams, with an apology from Paul Graham. David Belcher reported back briefly on the London SoF Conference where he had been especially impressed with the contribution of Mohammed Aziz.
As planned, we went on to share our choices of poetry and prose, covering a range of material although as someone suggested at the end we could probably have done a bit less and allowed time for some things to be repeated. However, we can always look them up! This is what was read:
John Brackenbury: “And on Clear Days, France”, with the challenging first line “Where we are is the only vantage point”
Alan Bennett: the discussion between Hector and Timms on the value of poetry from The History Boys
Thomas Hardy: "The Impercipient”
Dylan Thomas: extract from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
David Hart: “Naming, my friends”
T S Eliot: extract from “The Dry Salvages” (...we have to think of them as forever bailing, setting and hauling...not as making a trip that will be unpayable for a haul that will not bear examination)
Robert Graves: “Broken Images”
Stevie Smith: “Why are the Clergy...?”
Günter Eich: “Messages of the Rain”
Brian Patten: “So Many Different Lengths of Time” and also “Devilment”
Dylan Thomas: extract from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (read with an impressive accent)
W H Auden: “In Memory of W B Yeats”
Dylan Thomas: “The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower”
David Hart: “Holding the Moment Steady”
A lot of SoF discussion reflects the importance of language as marking the limit of our capacity to think and communicate, but an evening spent sharing such a range of creative writing brings home just how complex and subtle the idea of language can be. David Hart’s tentative exploration of words, and Dylan Thomas’s exuberant syntax are just the most obvious examples.
For our next meeting we will return to more customary fare, and as provisionally agreed we will look in more detail at Don Cupitt’s The Meaning of the West. As arranged, that meeting will be on Wednesday 25 February 2009 at 1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston.
The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 8 April. We’ll agree the subject next time but may want to look at some other stuff from Don Cupitt (Radical Theology, Above Us only Sky) or at the work of Theodore Zeldin.
As planned, we went on to share our choices of poetry and prose, covering a range of material although as someone suggested at the end we could probably have done a bit less and allowed time for some things to be repeated. However, we can always look them up! This is what was read:
John Brackenbury: “And on Clear Days, France”, with the challenging first line “Where we are is the only vantage point”
Alan Bennett: the discussion between Hector and Timms on the value of poetry from The History Boys
Thomas Hardy: "The Impercipient”
Dylan Thomas: extract from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
David Hart: “Naming, my friends”
T S Eliot: extract from “The Dry Salvages” (...we have to think of them as forever bailing, setting and hauling...not as making a trip that will be unpayable for a haul that will not bear examination)
Robert Graves: “Broken Images”
Stevie Smith: “Why are the Clergy...?”
Günter Eich: “Messages of the Rain”
Brian Patten: “So Many Different Lengths of Time” and also “Devilment”
Dylan Thomas: extract from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (read with an impressive accent)
W H Auden: “In Memory of W B Yeats”
Dylan Thomas: “The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower”
David Hart: “Holding the Moment Steady”
A lot of SoF discussion reflects the importance of language as marking the limit of our capacity to think and communicate, but an evening spent sharing such a range of creative writing brings home just how complex and subtle the idea of language can be. David Hart’s tentative exploration of words, and Dylan Thomas’s exuberant syntax are just the most obvious examples.
For our next meeting we will return to more customary fare, and as provisionally agreed we will look in more detail at Don Cupitt’s The Meaning of the West. As arranged, that meeting will be on Wednesday 25 February 2009 at 1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston.
The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 8 April. We’ll agree the subject next time but may want to look at some other stuff from Don Cupitt (Radical Theology, Above Us only Sky) or at the work of Theodore Zeldin.
20.11.08
Record of meeting, 12 November 2008
We met on 12 November at David Lambourn’s house. Present were David Belcher, John Challenor, Sara Clethero, Paul Graham, David Lambourn and Stephen Williams, with apologies from Michael Bennett and John Howard.
David Belcher referred to “Living with Difference” the London SoF conference on 22 November which he’ll be attending (1000-1600, Friends Meeting House, Euston Road; advert in latest Sofia). Tickets are now available on the door.
We started talking, not altogether irrelevantly, about the election of Barack Obama, before getting on to our planned topic “The meaning of the West”. The Obama story, certainly as reflected in his memoir (Dreams of my Father) seems to have both personal and global significance, and suggests a more complicated relationship between private life and public service than the distinction apparently being proposed by Don Cupitt in his Sofia piece. We inevitably referred frequently to that article during our discussion and found a lot to challenge, but reminded ourselves that it is just one chapter from a larger book and our questions may be answered elsewhere.
The Meaning of the West we took to be about the relationship between modern secular culture and the West’s religious, and especially Christian, history. Cupitt emphasises the continuity in that story (as he did originally of course in the original Sea of Faith programmes and book). Religious ideas and principles are transmuted through the Enlightenment to modern science and ethics, and contemporary civic society has been able to leave behind what is worst and embody within secularism some of the best of Christianity. That seems, at least in those direct terms, too simple, not really fair to either the pre-Christian Greeks or the post-Christian Arabs. Also while public service may share positive qualities with religion it can as easily share its negatives: ritualism has its parallels in bureaucracy. (Within the current debate about “Baby P” is the question whether procedures have helped or hindered).
Furthermore, the continuity from religion to secularism is always contested. The roots of the secular ideal within Christianity can be traced to the idea of Incarnation but the process has never had a clear run. It was arguably one of the underlying issues at Nicaea, where it lost out to Trinitarianism, and from the beginning the Church has used its clerical structures to contain and manage the challenge of a humanistic understanding of God and religion. We should not expect many within the churches to recognise Cupitt’s continuity.
Another strand in the process is the emphasis on reason and systematisation, rather than continue to hold to beliefs simply because they have always been believed. Cupitt’s example of the difference between a medieval Herbal and a modern Flora illustrates this well. However, alongside those Enlightenment virtues of reason and order, there is a place for something more expressive – Richard Holmes’ recent book The Age of Wonder sets the scientific discoveries of the late 18th century in the context of the Romantic Movement and describes a world where artists, scientists and poets inhabit the same intellectual circles.
We also wanted to set alongside the story of secularisation, one of sacralisation, a process whereby essentially secular institutions take on qualities of religion, in particular the notion of a superior authority beyond rational challenge. A positive example of this might be the Green movement, but more sinister examples lie in the history of totalitarianism (cf. Michael Burleigh), or for a more bizarre instance, Lord Dacre on the public right to invade the private lives of prominent individuals. Others would see that as simple hypocrisy, but it also illustrates the impossibility of achieving a definitive understanding of the world that can no longer be questioned. All thought happens in a social context (David Lambourn refers us to The Social History of Truth by Stephen Shapin).
The idea of a continuity between a Christian past and a secular present might be instinctively attractive to many SoF members, but the more we thought about it the notion of the West as essentially Christian looks a difficult one to sustain. There is probably a simpler narrative that brings us direct to where we are now. We agreed provisionally to return to this topic in a couple of meetings time when we should have had the opportunity to look at the whole of Don Cupitt’s book.
For our next meeting we agreed to share some significant poetry. John Howard had opened the way to this some time ago when he circulated his Desert Island Poems but we have never talked about these and other members will have poems or short prose texts that express important ideas for them. Hopefully most of us will be able to bring something.
As previously agreed, that meeting will be on Wednesday 14 January 2009 at1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston. The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 25 February.
David Belcher referred to “Living with Difference” the London SoF conference on 22 November which he’ll be attending (1000-1600, Friends Meeting House, Euston Road; advert in latest Sofia). Tickets are now available on the door.
We started talking, not altogether irrelevantly, about the election of Barack Obama, before getting on to our planned topic “The meaning of the West”. The Obama story, certainly as reflected in his memoir (Dreams of my Father) seems to have both personal and global significance, and suggests a more complicated relationship between private life and public service than the distinction apparently being proposed by Don Cupitt in his Sofia piece. We inevitably referred frequently to that article during our discussion and found a lot to challenge, but reminded ourselves that it is just one chapter from a larger book and our questions may be answered elsewhere.
The Meaning of the West we took to be about the relationship between modern secular culture and the West’s religious, and especially Christian, history. Cupitt emphasises the continuity in that story (as he did originally of course in the original Sea of Faith programmes and book). Religious ideas and principles are transmuted through the Enlightenment to modern science and ethics, and contemporary civic society has been able to leave behind what is worst and embody within secularism some of the best of Christianity. That seems, at least in those direct terms, too simple, not really fair to either the pre-Christian Greeks or the post-Christian Arabs. Also while public service may share positive qualities with religion it can as easily share its negatives: ritualism has its parallels in bureaucracy. (Within the current debate about “Baby P” is the question whether procedures have helped or hindered).
Furthermore, the continuity from religion to secularism is always contested. The roots of the secular ideal within Christianity can be traced to the idea of Incarnation but the process has never had a clear run. It was arguably one of the underlying issues at Nicaea, where it lost out to Trinitarianism, and from the beginning the Church has used its clerical structures to contain and manage the challenge of a humanistic understanding of God and religion. We should not expect many within the churches to recognise Cupitt’s continuity.
Another strand in the process is the emphasis on reason and systematisation, rather than continue to hold to beliefs simply because they have always been believed. Cupitt’s example of the difference between a medieval Herbal and a modern Flora illustrates this well. However, alongside those Enlightenment virtues of reason and order, there is a place for something more expressive – Richard Holmes’ recent book The Age of Wonder sets the scientific discoveries of the late 18th century in the context of the Romantic Movement and describes a world where artists, scientists and poets inhabit the same intellectual circles.
We also wanted to set alongside the story of secularisation, one of sacralisation, a process whereby essentially secular institutions take on qualities of religion, in particular the notion of a superior authority beyond rational challenge. A positive example of this might be the Green movement, but more sinister examples lie in the history of totalitarianism (cf. Michael Burleigh), or for a more bizarre instance, Lord Dacre on the public right to invade the private lives of prominent individuals. Others would see that as simple hypocrisy, but it also illustrates the impossibility of achieving a definitive understanding of the world that can no longer be questioned. All thought happens in a social context (David Lambourn refers us to The Social History of Truth by Stephen Shapin).
The idea of a continuity between a Christian past and a secular present might be instinctively attractive to many SoF members, but the more we thought about it the notion of the West as essentially Christian looks a difficult one to sustain. There is probably a simpler narrative that brings us direct to where we are now. We agreed provisionally to return to this topic in a couple of meetings time when we should have had the opportunity to look at the whole of Don Cupitt’s book.
For our next meeting we agreed to share some significant poetry. John Howard had opened the way to this some time ago when he circulated his Desert Island Poems but we have never talked about these and other members will have poems or short prose texts that express important ideas for them. Hopefully most of us will be able to bring something.
As previously agreed, that meeting will be on Wednesday 14 January 2009 at1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston. The meeting after that will be on Wednesday 25 February.
29.9.08
Record of Meeting, 24 September 2008
We met on 24 September at David Lambourn’s house. Present were John Challenor, Paul Graham, John Howard, David Lambourn, Simon Mapp and Stephen Williams, with apologies from Sara Clethero, David Belcher and Michael Bennett.
As arranged, David Lambourn introduced a discussion about “Rites of Passage”. These are ceremonies or performances that mark important stages in individual growth and development and conventionally have three elements: separation (from a past life), liminality (what happens during the process), and reincorporation (as a changed person). In most cases they are typically accompanied by formulaic language and actions and the wearing of special clothes. According to Wikipedia, they are becoming less common, but we recognised many contexts, and not just religious ones, where they are still significant e.g. education (starting school, graduation ceremonies), the armed services (passing-out parades), youth organisations (moving from cub to scout).
Many rites of passage are however associated with the church, including important life events like birth, coupling and death, as well as those with more a narrowly religious purpose. Arguably it is the Church’s control of these processes that has sustained its growth as an institution (Don Cupitt in The Sea of Faith writes of Joss Brooks, a 19th century predecessor in Salford, who was a rough, eccentric character, chiefly remembered for astonishingly large and chaotic mass baptisms and weddings). The contemporary enthusiasm for faith schools reflects perhaps a similar assumption of a religious endorsement if not ownership of today’s central rite of passage, the acquisition of educational qualifications.
In introducing the topic, David had focussed on the individual’s relationship with the Church. The term “rite of passage” contains a metaphor of a journey, yet the Church has no apparent way of marking intellectual development or spiritual growth; the only rites of passage after confirmation are excommunication or funerals! This is a significant issue for SoF members in churches (and many others surely) for whom religious understanding is always dynamic and changing (the underlying theme of the original Cupitt TV series). The paradox of rites of passage is that they exist to mark and celebrate individual growth and development but culminate in a return to a community to which the individual is subservient. It would be nice to think that the Church could give approval, if not necessarily celebrate, when its adherents develop new insights and understandings, but it’s hard to think of a rite of passage that could give effect to it. Rites of passage are essentially conservative and hierarchical in their function and are suspicious of innovation and imagination.
Rites of passage are also social occasions; they imply an audience, who in turn are presumed to buy into the rationale of the event. One way of squaring that potential conflict is to modernise or customise the event and we talked a bit about funerals and what might have been lost in the rush from traditional formulae. On the other hand to persist with customary forms can put an audience in a real bind if the forms imply dogmas that are questionable or even unbelievable. The example we discussed was confirmation where the congregation can only really participate in the event by affirming credal statements that leave no space for non-literal, let alone SoF-type, interpretations. This led us to reflect on the tyranny of creeds and the irony that what are now regarded as criteria for membership were originally designed to exclude; affirming a creed or articles of faith is essentially to declare “I am not Arian/Catholic/whatever”.
Why then do we bother? In the face of the obvious recourse of simply walking away from the whole business, we recognised that traditional rites of passage still have a resonance, even if a diminishing one. This suggested a topic for our next meeting, whether what we are experiencing is a break with the past or some kind of evolution from it. It is the question often asked about the Enlightenment and is perhaps nicely summed up in Don Cupitt’s phrase “The Meaning of the West”. We agreed to look at this next time, taking as our starting point, but not restricted to, Don’s piece in the latest edition of Sofia.
As previously agreed, that meeting will be on Wednesday 12 November 2008 at 1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston. The provisional date for the meeting after that is Wednesday 14 January 2009.
As arranged, David Lambourn introduced a discussion about “Rites of Passage”. These are ceremonies or performances that mark important stages in individual growth and development and conventionally have three elements: separation (from a past life), liminality (what happens during the process), and reincorporation (as a changed person). In most cases they are typically accompanied by formulaic language and actions and the wearing of special clothes. According to Wikipedia, they are becoming less common, but we recognised many contexts, and not just religious ones, where they are still significant e.g. education (starting school, graduation ceremonies), the armed services (passing-out parades), youth organisations (moving from cub to scout).
Many rites of passage are however associated with the church, including important life events like birth, coupling and death, as well as those with more a narrowly religious purpose. Arguably it is the Church’s control of these processes that has sustained its growth as an institution (Don Cupitt in The Sea of Faith writes of Joss Brooks, a 19th century predecessor in Salford, who was a rough, eccentric character, chiefly remembered for astonishingly large and chaotic mass baptisms and weddings). The contemporary enthusiasm for faith schools reflects perhaps a similar assumption of a religious endorsement if not ownership of today’s central rite of passage, the acquisition of educational qualifications.
In introducing the topic, David had focussed on the individual’s relationship with the Church. The term “rite of passage” contains a metaphor of a journey, yet the Church has no apparent way of marking intellectual development or spiritual growth; the only rites of passage after confirmation are excommunication or funerals! This is a significant issue for SoF members in churches (and many others surely) for whom religious understanding is always dynamic and changing (the underlying theme of the original Cupitt TV series). The paradox of rites of passage is that they exist to mark and celebrate individual growth and development but culminate in a return to a community to which the individual is subservient. It would be nice to think that the Church could give approval, if not necessarily celebrate, when its adherents develop new insights and understandings, but it’s hard to think of a rite of passage that could give effect to it. Rites of passage are essentially conservative and hierarchical in their function and are suspicious of innovation and imagination.
Rites of passage are also social occasions; they imply an audience, who in turn are presumed to buy into the rationale of the event. One way of squaring that potential conflict is to modernise or customise the event and we talked a bit about funerals and what might have been lost in the rush from traditional formulae. On the other hand to persist with customary forms can put an audience in a real bind if the forms imply dogmas that are questionable or even unbelievable. The example we discussed was confirmation where the congregation can only really participate in the event by affirming credal statements that leave no space for non-literal, let alone SoF-type, interpretations. This led us to reflect on the tyranny of creeds and the irony that what are now regarded as criteria for membership were originally designed to exclude; affirming a creed or articles of faith is essentially to declare “I am not Arian/Catholic/whatever”.
Why then do we bother? In the face of the obvious recourse of simply walking away from the whole business, we recognised that traditional rites of passage still have a resonance, even if a diminishing one. This suggested a topic for our next meeting, whether what we are experiencing is a break with the past or some kind of evolution from it. It is the question often asked about the Enlightenment and is perhaps nicely summed up in Don Cupitt’s phrase “The Meaning of the West”. We agreed to look at this next time, taking as our starting point, but not restricted to, Don’s piece in the latest edition of Sofia.
As previously agreed, that meeting will be on Wednesday 12 November 2008 at 1930 at David Lambourn’s house, 28 Frederick Road, Edgbaston. The provisional date for the meeting after that is Wednesday 14 January 2009.
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