Cupitt in Cambridge

It's not my purpose to 'run a campaign' against anyone, or any church, but I know that I would feel mighty uncomfortable at Cambridge Unitarian Church.

We had a new to Unitarianism person attending at Hull going home and her nearest church would be Cambridge. Having enjoyed the full range of opinions theist and non-theist, Christian and otherwise, the Cambridge minister Andrew Brown identifies himself with Yale postliberal theology and now reports a meeting with Don Cupitt and substantive agreement with his position.

Now I have a lot of time for Don Cupitt, and he is probably theologian number one in influence over me, although there are significant points of disagreement. I do not share his philosophical base that leads to the primacy of language (I reject that, however important language may be) and then his thoroughgoing nature of non-realism, that all reality is metaphor. Where research delivers answers we would not like, language and culture might still be important but they only skew not determine. Mathematics is capable of getting spaceships to planets, and it has to be reliable, realist and not just a symbol-system. There might be economic interests determining scientific and social scientific questions, there might be inadequate or misleading paradigms of understanding, but research has the power to deliver answers contrary to what we might put as a novelist. Yes, religion is like art, and there metaphor is hugely important - so, in religion, I am a soft non-realist, but other language games harden up and they harden up because the are subservient to other realities. Science cross-cuts Christianity and history can only deal in culture and beliefs, not supernatural acts. These are ahistorical as such (yes, even history as historiography) can be ahistorical; it is not just a tale of shedding the supernatural through centuries of philosophers.

The attitude of language first and philosophy is essentially dogmatic, and thus we get this from Andrew Brown regarding the Unitarian (and Universalist) inheritance of faith:

In terms of belief a member of a liberal church such as this can only now hold our historic belief in an underlying divine unity in this weak, metaphorical way. But it is vitally important to hear the real strength found in this weakness - a weak strength that is vital to the development of a successful secular Christianity - indeed vital to the development of any kind of secular religion.

Now I actually agree with this, but the liberal Church such as this is actually going to be open to many more views than mine, and surely his; but Cupitt as a preferrer of common narratives is quite secular in outlook and is quite critical of those postmodernists who retain old forms of thought principally for the purposes of Church identity or a fantasy of Church performance, such as Radical Orthodoxy's Platonic Church.

Lindbeck's Church identity comes from a supposed ecumenical Protestant identity in the context of the Second Vatican Council, so this has little to do with Unitarianism.

My argument is that Cupitt pursues a liberal postmodernism that arrives at common general "autologous" narratives, rather than Church narratives from the inside, and that Martineau's pure subjectivity combined with collective liturgical theism is enough to collapse each into the other and produce a liberal postmodernism.

Don Cupitt has never considered Unitarianism. He values the Quakers but in my conversations he once would rather have been Roman Catholic and at another time made reference to Mark Rutherford, the fictional character based on a Victorian reading of chapel culture in the Unitarians.