The Last Testament

Don Cupitt

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780334046226
• eBook ISBN: 9780334048916
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Considers the traditional Christian ideas of the hereafter against modern beliefs, arguing that we need not the New Testament message but a Last Testament for the Last World that we live in.

14

The Religion of Ordinary Life

Almost all of religion hitherto has been based on a clear distinction between two great realms, the profane world of everyday, secular human life and the sacred world. Various bits of the everyday world were designated ‘holy’ because they mediated contact or interaction between the two worlds. Thus there were a holy land, a holy people, a sacred language, sacred writings, holy places, buildings, rituals and so on. It was somehow desperately important to secure the favour and the blessing of the spirits and gods, and the various appointed channels through which you could access divine presence, forgiveness, and grace were very highly regarded.

The question arises, why was secular life somehow unendurable or impossible without supernatural favour? Why was the mighty apparatus of religious mediation so important? Briefly, it appears that human beings were very anxious and very needy. Our ignorance, our sense of the precariousness of life, and the certainty of death were so overwhelming that almost no human being could contemplate, head-on and calmly, the facts of the human condition, and then go on to live a contented, autonomous secular life. Human beings simply could not bear to live without very elaborate protective fictions and the whole apparatus of mediated religion.

In modern times – and especially since about 1850 – everything has changed. The sacred world of religion and the everyday human life-world have merged and have become identical. It feels like the end of history, in rather the same way and for much the same reasons as the gradual decay of monarchy and caste or class society; and the emergence of liberal democracy as the last form of political organization, also feels (to some, at least) like the end of history. Indeed, you may say that in both cases what’s happened is that certain great disciplinary institutions that used to be thought of as ‘absolutes’, and as permanently necessary to human well-being, have now come to the end of their useful life. We don’t need them any more: we can manage on our own.

In the case of religion, I am suggesting that the end of religion as we have so far known it comes when people no longer need to be governed by religious law, nor to be supported by stories and beliefs about supernatural beings. Religion instead becomes immediate: it’s now about your attitude to your own life, and the way you see it as fitting into the larger stream of human life in general. It is about the way you negotiate your own deal with life and its basic conditions: its temporality, its precariousness, your freedom, and your coming death. It is about how we can find eternal joy just in the mere living of our ordinary lives. We no longer ‘look up’ in any way at all: we’ve learnt the trick of living so intensely that we do not expect ever again to be seriously troubled by the old fears.

This event is forecast in the Bible, for example in the prophet Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant and in the account of the Day of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles, and also by the long tradition of talk about the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. In the later Christian tradition the secular realm begins to assert itself in the late Middle Ages, in seventeenth-century Protestantism in countries like Holland, and above all in the emergence of liberal democracy and the middle-class leadership of industrial society after the French Revolution. After about 1870, with rising prosperity and better sanitation, ordinary urban life is suddenly innocent, and different. But perhaps the most striking recent manifestation of ‘the new religion of life’ was the height of protest-and-pop youth culture in the late 1960s. Tradition and the authority of the older generation died, and Europe became a whole lot more secular than before. Organized religion has been in galloping decline ever since.

Elsewhere I have argued that one of the best ways to convince sceptics of the reality of the changes I am describing is to study the flood of new idioms about life that have entered the language in the last forty years. It seems undeniable that a great deal of religious attention has now been transferred from God to life. Life itself – as we see in the later writings of the critic F. R. Leavis – has become the religious object. I need to come to terms with life, I need to gain control over my own life, I need to live my own life in my own way, I need to enjoy what people call ‘the feeling of being alive’, and I need to love life intensely, and live it to its fullest. A kind of heroic, courageous faith in life and a determination to engage with it and make the most of it is the gateway to victory over anxiety and death, and will show us how we can find ‘life-satisfaction’ in making our own modest contribution to the building (and also the renewal) of the common human life-world.

That’s the agenda, in brief. I don’t need to write any apologetics for this new universal human religion, because it is now quietly slipping into place all over the world. It needs no help from me, nor from anyone else. But I do want to present its ‘systematic theology’ as shortly and as clearly as I possibly can, so that people can see a little better what we are losing, and what we are gaining. Here then is a very brief outline, with a few marginal comments. As you read it, remember that my claim is that most or all of this you already know. I’m not pretending to be introducing anything at all odd or unheard-of. What I am presenting is already mostly platitudinous.

Life

1Life is everything.

Life is the whole human world, everything as it looks to and is experienced by the only beings who actually have a world, namely human beings with a life to live.

2Life is all there is.

Our age is now post-metaphysical. The world of life is not dependent upon, nor derived from, any other realm, nor is there any other world after it, or beyond it.

3Life has no outside.

Everything is immanent, interconnected, secondary. Everything remains within life. When we are born, we don’t come into this world, and when we die we don’t leave it. There is no absolute point of view from which someone can see ‘the Truth’, the final Truth, about life.

4Life is God.

Life is that in which ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17.28), within which we are formed, and of whose past we will remain part. Both our ultimate Origin and our Last End are within life. Life is now as God to us.

5To love life is to love God.

Every bit of our life is final for us, and we should treat all life as a sacred gift and responsibility. We should see our relation to life as being like an immediate relation to God. We are moved and touched by the way all living things, and not just we ourselves, spontaneously love life, affirm it and cling to it.

6Life is a continuous streaming process of symbolic expression and exchange.

The motion of language logically precedes the appearing of a formed and ‘definite’ world. It is in this sense that it was once said that ‘In the beginning was the Word’.

Life and My Life

7My life is my own personal stake in life.

The traditional relation of the soul to God is now experienced in the form of the relation between my life and life in general. As, traditionally, one’s first responsibility in religion was for the salvation of one’s own soul, so now a human being’s first duty is the duty to recognize that I simply am the life I have lived so far, plus the life that still remains to me.

8My life is all I have, and all I’ll ever have.

I must own my own life, in three senses: I must claim it wholly as mine, acknowledge it, and assume full responsibility for the way I conduct it. I must live my own life in a way that is authentically mine. To be authentically oneself in this way – the opposite of ‘living a lie’ – is the first part of the contribution each of us should seek to make to life as a whole.

9Every human person has, in principle, an equal stake in life.

This principle is vital to our ideas of justice and of love for the fellow-human being. Murder and other offences against the person are almost everywhere regarded as equally serious, whoever the victim is. The love of God is love and fellow-feeling for ‘the neighbour’ – or the fellow creature – generalized without limit until it becomes the love of all life.

10In human relationships, justice is first in order, but love is first in value.

We should esteem love most highly of all; but love itself must be based on justice, not least in parental/filial and in sexual relationships. The work of justice is to clear a level space for love.

The Limits of Life

11Life is subject to limits. In life, everything is subject to temporality.

In life everything is held within and is subject to the movement of one-way linear time. Life is, as people say, a single ticket: there are no second chances or retakes.

12In life, everything is contingent.

In life, the one-way linear movement of time makes every moment final and every chance a last chance; but at the same time everything is contingent. This painful combination of finality with contingency is what gives rise to people’s talk of luck or fate. More to the point, it also follows that there are no fixed or unchanging absolutes in life. There are no clearly and permanently fixed realities, or identities, or even standards.

13Life itself, and everything in the world of life, is mediated by language.

Consciousness is an effect of the way language lights up the world of experience, and self-consciousness is an effect of the use of language to talk about itself. Thought is an incompletely executed motion of language somewhere in our heads.

14Life goes on, but my life is finite.

The only deaths we need to prepare ourselves for are the deaths of others who are dear to us. We will never experience our own deaths. So we should simply love life and say Yes to life until our last day. There is no point at all in making any other preparation for death.

Faith in Life

15When I have faith in life, love life, and commit myself to it, I have bought a package deal: life with its limits.

Whereas in traditional theology ‘evil’ was seen as a secondary intruder into an originally perfect world, and therefore as being eliminable, the limits of life, which were traditionally called ‘metaphysical evil’ or ‘evils of imperfection’, are essential to life. Unlike God, life is finite and imperfect, and has to be accepted as being neither more nor less than what it is. If I want to refuse the package, the alternative for me is ‘passive nihilism’ or thoroughgoing pessimism. For the religion of life, apologetics takes the form of an attempt to show that pessimism is unreasonable.

16The package deal of life cannot be renegotiated.

There is nobody to renegotiate the deal with. We cannot hope to vary the terms on which life is offered to us.

17Life is bittersw...

Table of contents

• The Last Testament
• Contents
• Preface
• The Gospel
• Dispensations
• The Fountain
• Poetical Truth and Common Life
• Living in the Last World
• Forgetting the Self
• Impressionism and Expressionism
• Lifestyle
• Our World
• Solarity
• Epistles
• A New Method of Religious Enquiry
• What’s the Point of It All?
• On the Meaning of Life
• What’s Happening to Religion?
• The Religion of Ordinary Life