Western thought began with an attack on religious myth by philosophers who held that the highest truth must be non-narrative and timeless. They left a paradox to haunt us: for on the one hand everyone knows that stories are important to us and our religion is full of them, while on the other hand stories continue to have a bad name as myths or fictions. It has been so difficult to say just how stories convey truth that until recently theologians were still trying to 'demythologize' religious belief.
Now, however, philosophy has at last become more friendly to literature. There is talk of...

For a generation after his death his surviving associates preserved good traditions about the message of Jesus. Then disaster struck: it began to be believed that he was risen, exalted to heaven, and soon to return to establish his kingdom on earth. A cult of Jesus' person and fictitious lives of him quickly followed, and the surviving traditions of his actual teaching became totally blurred - as they still are.Since then, nobody has ventured to assess Jesus seriously, as a thinker. But today, as the supernatural beliefs fade, and better reconstructions of his teaching have become available,...

For two centuries and more our culture has been secular, and no religious doctrine now plays a constitutive part in any established branch of knowledge. Yet if God is dead, he won't lie down, and reminders of the old faith still pervade our language, the built environment, our art and our literature. Most important, themes of the old theology are currently returning to us in new and strange guises. Thus God, the strict Judge who searches our hearts and demands inner integrity, returns in the critical thinking which makes everyone trained in it 'his own hardest taskmaster'. Again, the biblical...

During the past 30 years, what we used to call 'the passing show of existence' has turned into a global torrent of electronic communication and cultural change. Everywhere, Tradition is collapsing. Local fundamentalist reactions - hailed by some as evidence that 'God is back' - cannot hope to stem the flood. They are merely symptoms of faith's increasing desperation. In our time, Don Cupitt says, religion is no longer about gaining immortality, or the forgiveness of our sins: it is about becoming reconciled to our life's transience, to time and death. This ultra-clear and secular 'theology'...

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...

Do you envy the suicide bombers their firm faith in life after death? Probably not: you think they are deluded. People in the west have quite recently lost all their old ideas about a Better World Hereafter. We now accept that we are already in the Last World, the world with no further reality beyond it, and that we'd better live our life to the full while we have it. If so, then what happens to the traditional problem of Christian origins? Jesus preached the arrival of the Last World, and urged us to begin a new 'solar' kind of living. His message was one of secular fulfilment. But the...

Rewrites the narrative plan for salvation as the story of religion calling us out of nature and gradually making us ourselves.

At some point very early on in its development, Christianity split between two different pathways: one path stayed with the teaching of Jesus and the primacy of ethics, the other started with the return of Jesus and, therefore, with supernatural belief. Today, ethics has been largely sidelined, viewed as secondary or subservient to belief. Don Cupitt argues that the time has come to give ethics priority in defining and shaping religious life. As he puts it, "No longer should we aim to conserve the self, preparing for eternity: we must simply expend it, by living generously."