In 40 years of writing Don Cupitt has coined many new words and phrases to communicate his ideas, but he has written so much that critics have split him up into stages, and readers complain of obscurity. Piqued, he here represents an entertaining 'Devil's Dictionary' of his own ideas, with cross-links from entry to entry guiding the reader around his system. Cupitt's teaching is a form of religious naturalism based, not like Spinoza's on geometrical reasoning, but upon the more biological idea of an uprush of energies pouring out into symbolic expression. He points out that the non-arrival of the Kingdom left the early Christians looking up vigilantly towards a better world that was yet to come. Today, people no longer expect any further world after this one, and Church-religion no longer works. It is too inhibited. Instead, we need to work out, and start living out, the philosophy and the ethic of the final world, now. It is a world in which the original spirituality of the 'inner life' is replaced by a new religion of '
The Revd Don Cupitt was a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His books include Taking Leave of God, The Sea of Faith and Solar Ethics were published by SCM Press and translated into many languages.