When Belief Fails

Extract

Given at Great. St Mary’s Cambridge on 19 February 1985

We are supposed to live in an age in which belief is harder than ever before. In fact the Dean of Emmanuel thinks that belief in any traditional form is just not possible for modern men and women. According to him, humanity in the late twentieth century finds itself alone in a disenchanted universe, the age-old props and comforts of religion have fallen away, and we are left with an austere, demanding, individual task of imposing meaning on the inane, of making ourselves and our ideals the heart of a heartless world. If we choose to call these ideals God, well and good; but when we say we ‘believe’ in God we don’t mean, the argument goes, what people in the past have meant by that. Their God was a sort of super-hero, a Dr Who figure, who made the lightning flash and the sun rise and who could be invoked to fend off the horrors of existence. This is superstition, says Don Cupitt, and so is any account of God which does not acknowledge that God is simply the sum of our human values, representing “their ideal unity, their claims upon us and their creative power”. In other words; penetrate to the heart of religion, look closely at the image in the shrine, and what you will find is not the unseen God, but a mirror. The true name of YAHWEH is Narcissus. And we have heard this before.