By ANDREW MOORE
Introduction
Obituary notices announcing the
death of realism continue to appear in philosophical and theological works, but
what is it that is supposed to have died? The philosophical doctrine known as
realism can be expressed in terms of three characteristic sets of claims which,
though not held by all realists and opposed by some, can serve as a preliminary
formulation.2 Ontologically, the realist holds that there is a reality external
to human minds and that it exists as it does independently of the concepts and
interpretative grids in terms of which we think about it. It’s being what it is
does not depend on our conceiving it (as idealists hold), or on our conceptions
of it (as Kantians hold), or indeed on our conceiving it at all. Reality is
there to be discovered as it objectively is; it is not subjectively invented,
constructed, or projected. Hence, epistemologically, the realist holds that
reality can be (approximately) known as it is and not just as it appears to us
to be (as empiricism holds). Semantically, the realist holds that it is
possible to refer successfully to, and so make (approximately) true statements
about, reality. That is, in classical terms, the truth of a proposition is a
matter of its corresponding to reality independently of our being able to
verify or otherwise confirm it.3 Thus, when Christian faith is subjected to
philosophical scrutiny, typical realist claims are that (1) God exists independently
of our awareness of him and of our will,4 but that (2) despite this, we can
know him and that (3) human language is not an inadequate or inappropriate
medium for truthful speech about God.5 This, in broad outline, is the view
defended and argued for in this book.
Concerning the world of
macroscopic objects such as tables, chairs, and people, the realist position
might seem so obviously correct as not to need defending; for sure, in everyday
life we live as realists. In this sense, realism is alive and well; to recall
Mark Twain’s famous cable message, reports of its death are an exaggeration.
But what about the atomic and sub-atomic particles out of which present-day
science tells us the tables and chairs are made up: are these real? As we shall
see in chapter3, there are philosophers of science who deny that they are. For
them, proclaiming the death of realism amounts to persuading us that objects
many had thought to be real never were. And then consider our moral beliefs: do
we hold them in virtue of some objective moral order? Or perhaps our moral
beliefs are expressions of feelings of approval or disapproval, unconnected to
any independent moral reality – as Logical Positivists and others have held.
For them, moral philosophy has been a long wake for a dead moral realism. And,
relative to the reader of these words, is the past in which they were written
real? Again, there are philosophers who argue powerfully that it is not. What
is more, they can consistently deny the reality of the past whilst accepting
the independent reality of other people’s minds. So being an anti-realist about
one aspect of reality is not prima facie inconsistent with being realist about
other aspects of reality.7
Yet it does seem prima facie
inconsistent for a Christian who says the creed each Sunday, who prays to God as
creator and preaches stewardship of the world as God’s creation, to deny that
the creator of the world exists independently of the mind and to regard the
creed as ‘a statement of common purpose’ (DavidA. Hart 1993: 82) – with no
ontological reference beyond those who utter it. It seems even more
inconsistent for a practising Christian minister and leading non-realist
seriously to declare ‘I place the death of God around 1730’ (Cupitt 1990: 189)
and yet (one presumes) to say ‘and the love of God be with us all, evermore.
Amen’ at the end of a funeral service for a human being. So, to announce in a
theological context that realism is dead is to make a very far-reaching claim
concerning not just an abstract point in philosophy with no relevance to
everyday life but one whose ramifications go to the heart of Christianity.
Although Christian denials of
realism about God may seem inconsistent with professing Christian faith, they
reflect not just academic fashion but also lively currents of opinion in
contemporary church life. The Sea of Faith Network is a religious organization
embracing Christian and other faiths which has amongst its stated objects ‘ “to
explore and promote religious faith as a human creation” ’.8 According to one
of its official documents, God is not
a metaphysical entity ‘out there’. Such a God is too small. ‘He’ is no
longer credible. God is, and always was, a metaphor for the values which,
though we understand them to be generated by human culture, we have come to
think of as ‘ultimate’ and ‘eternal’ . . . Sea of Faith suggests that it is
time to ‘take leave’ of a real God ‘out there’. (Boulton 1997: 9)
In their emphasis on the
influence of culture in generating religious ideas and practices, proponents of
Christian non-realism reflect the influence of the post-Structuralist stream of
the phenomenological tradition. Important and rigorous versions of anti-realism
have been developed in analytical philosophy, but although Kant has influenced anti-realism
in analytic philosophy and Christian non-realism, his views have had less
direct impact on the formulation of the latter.9 A significant exception here
is the principal and originating force behind Sea of Faith, the British
philosopher of religion and Anglican priest Don Cupitt.10 His classic statement
Taking Leave of God (1980) has almost become a manifesto. In it he attacks
realist Christianity on the ground that objective theism is ethically,
philosophically, theologically, and culturally indefensible, and advocates its replacement
by an ‘expressivist’ reinterpretation of Christian faith. Alvin Planting a has
described his views as possessing ‘a certain amiable dottiness’ (2000: 39 n.
7), and whilst there is some truth in this, to dismiss Cupitt as an eccentric
is to miss both the depth of his learning (though this is often too lightly
worn) and the brilliance of his rhetoric, and so also the power and impact of
his opposition to religious realism.
Nevertheless, Cupitt (andmany
other members of Sea of Faith) is at pains not to be seen as either
anti-religious or as an atheist. Cupitt believes that we must take leave of the
God of realism for religious reasons.11
Religion is not metaphysics but salvation, and salvation is a state of
the self. It has to be appropriated subjectively or existentially. There is no
such thing as objective religious truth and there cannot be. The view that
religious truth consists in ideological correctness or in the objective
correspondence of doctrinal statements with historical and metaphysical facts is
a modern aberration, and a product of the decline of religious seriousness.
(Cupitt 1980: 43)
Cupitt’s expressivist Christianity is intended
to promote salvation by liberating people from the cramped, heteronomous
confines of realism’s ‘cosmic Toryism’ (1990:54) and the church’s ‘highly
bureaucratic salvation machine’ (2001: 7). Instead, he proposes an autonomous
faith in which ‘God is the religious requirement personified and his attributes
are a kind of projection of its main features as we experience them’ (1980:
85).12 ‘The religious requirement’ is ‘that we must become spirit’ (1980: 85),
and this means that ‘when we choose God we choose a demand upon ourselves which
is a priori and overriding, namely the demand that we shall become
individuated, free, responsive and purely spiritual subjects’ (1980: 88).
Cupitt is a prolific writer and his
position has changed over the years, but its broad moral and philosophical
outlines have not.14 Thus, in his agenda-setting book Reforming Christianity
(2001), he reaffirms that ‘we are thoroughgoing anti-realists, to the point of
nihilism’ (39) and advocates a return to ‘religious immediacy’ and the Kingdom
teaching of a Jesus unencumbered by ecclesiastical dogma. We must ‘give up . .
. the old belief in objective truth’. We need to learn to do without . . . the
belief that we are presented with a ready-made world, a cosmos whose reality
and intelligible order are determined from a point that is both outside
ourselves, and also outside and beyond the here and now . . . No spirit world
or transcendent entity mediates the real to us. We order the world. (30)
And because we order the world,
we need to drop ‘the belief in fixed, objective defining essences of things . .
. things are what we currently take them for’ (31). This attack on what he
calls essentialism is in keeping with the ‘constructivist’ vein in much
contemporary thought.15 For Cupitt Christianity is rather like Humpty Dumpty’s
‘glory’ in Alice in Wonderland; since it has no essence, Christianity can be
whatever Cupitt wants it to be.16 Thus, although ‘people will say that the
kingdom religion I describe is “not Christianity” ’, he replies that ‘we must
of course be utterly indifferent to that charge, because it is based on an
obsolete assumption’ (31).
Realist Christians sometimes
ignore the role that culture, language, and institutions play in shaping
Christianity and mistakenly identify the faith with one particular cultural or
ecclesiastical manifestation of it. They can be far too committed to the view
that only one historical or doctrinal expression of the faith expresses it
definitively. But if it is true that ubi Christus,
ibi ecclesia, the kind of essentialism Cupitt attacks in the name of a
Kingdom religion based on Jesus’ ethical teaching must be false. Cupitt’s argument
gives the strong impression that he is trying to define out of existence the
construal of Christianity accepted by those who disagree with him.
Superficially, his anti-essentialism is a neat move against a Bishop wishing to
remove turbulent anti-realist priests from his diocese.17 When a Bishop
suggests to anti-realist clergy that what they are preaching and teaching is
not Christianity, these priests, armed with Cupitt’s argument, can simply reply
that the Bishop’s view is based on the outmoded notion that there is such a
thing as ‘Christianity’. But this move is unlikely to persuade. Realist
Christians can, for the sake of argument and as a rhetorical strategy, accept
Cupitt’s denial that there is such a thing and, by Cupitt’s own argument, reply
that their construction of Christianity, their historical narrative, is
different: Cupitt is welcome to his, but from a realist perspective, he is
recognizably in dialogue with what Christianity is and therefore it is still an
open question whether what he describes is ‘Christianity’.18
It is hardly surprising that the question of
whether Christianity is or can be realist has become a matter of increasing and
sometimes heated debate amongst Christians – both those who are theologically
trained and those who are not. Nevertheless, whilst Cupitt and the Sea of Faith
serve to introduce some of the themes of this book, my main purpose is not to
reply to or to refute their position, and there are two reasons for this. The
first is that Cupitt’s main argument for non-realism begins from the same
philosophical foundationalism as the objective theism to which he thinks
realist Christianity is committed. However, foundationalism suffers major
weaknesses and has had as bad an impact on arguments for realism as it has on
those against it. It therefore needs to be dealt with in its own right and will
be a significant theme of my argument throughout this work, particularly in
chapters 4 and 5. The second reason is a development of the first:
foundationalism is preoccupied above all with how we secure the foundations of
our epistemological claims. Again, because this concern has distorted the
understanding of Christian faith in both traditional and radical versions, it
helps explain why realists and non-realists often seem to argue past each
other. What is needed is an attempt to deal with the philosophical and
theological issues underlying the dispute in order to get beyond this impasse,
and that is what I undertake.
More generally, the Sea of Faith
Network and Cupitt’s work should be regarded as symptoms of a general
philosophical and cultural malaise at the end of modernity rather than as
causes of a specific and novel theological problematic. To attempt to deal with
this malaise head-on as well as to argue for the realism of the Christian faith
would make my project impossibly large since it would require both detailed scholarly
diagnosis and rigorous constructive argument. Such an attempt would also be
likely to be over-burdened by methodological considerations, which, whilst
important in their own right, might distract attention from the substantive
doctrinal considerations that ought to shape a Christian theologian’s diagnosis
and treatment of any conceptual problems, particularly those surrounding
realism. David Ford has stated‘ The question of how or whether one maintains
some sort of realism . . . is central to much current theological debate’
(1992: 209). Nevertheless, perhaps because of the historical and philosophical
scope of the problems related to the debate about realism, very few theological
works have recently been published focussing on realism as a topic in its own
right. The majority approach it in a polemical way (Cupitt is the usual
target), or via another problem (such as that of religious language, as in the
case of Janet Martin Soskice). Although he is widely regarded as an
anti-realist, the very distinguished Catholic philosopher Michael Dummett
suggested that ‘anti-realism is ultimately incoherent but . . . realism is only
tenable on a theistic basis’.20 Substitute ‘Christian’ for ‘theistic’ and that
could almost be my argument in a nutshell. Dummett has not published the paper
in which he argues this, for, as he candidly admits, ‘I do not think I know
nearly enough about the question of realism to be justified in advancing such
an argument’ (1978: xxxix).21 Those who know Dummett’s work will disagree;
nevertheless, where philosophical angels fear to tread. . .!
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