Change and basic assumptions

The article below appears in today's Irish Times.

It is an excellent article and well worth a read, especially for anyone involved in trying to say something about the Gospel.

Living with change when basic assumptions are breaking down

RITE & REASON: Our political and religious leaders are not to be envied, writes Don Cupitt .

AMIDST A blizzard of change, we require our leaders to be reassuringly cheerful and stable. They are not going to be blown off course, and they are not going to abandon any of their basic principles. They will simply apply the old principles in new ways to changing circumstances.
It seems that human beings have a deep fear and dislike of change. Preliterate, traditional societies deny historical change altogether - even in cases where we happen to know for sure that in fact they, like us, have lived in continuous adaptation to change.

In modern society, we praise some of our leaders for not changing at all. Pope John Paul II was praised for being so conservative, even though neither he nor any other modern pope is ever again going to be anything like Pope Pius XII. What counts as being conservative changes as quickly as anything else.

As for practical politicians, if they have great skill in making change painless and almost invisible, as Tony Blair did, they please us in the short run but then find themselves being attacked for "spin" and "deception".

"Spin" just means the normal skills of a democratic politician; but when a politician has those skills, people soon come to mistrust and reject him, and when like Gordon Brown he lacks those skills, they dislike and reject him too.

"Every political career ends in failure", as Enoch Powell said, meaning that all politicians eventually succumb to the pressure of our contradictory demands upon them. They cannot govern without using their verbal skills to build consensus.

They have to be flexible and accommodating - but we despise them for it, because we affect to believe in objective, timeless truth, objective, timeless standards of right and wrong.

We must know that these beliefs are mythical: but we pay the politicians to sustain our myths, and we don't want to see the machinery. (Just as we want both to have all the benefits of modern medicine, and to denounce the scientific research that alone has given us those benefits.)
The position of religious leaders is even more difficult. In normal times they, like the politicians, may be able to get away with pretending that they are doing no more than adapting and adjusting in response to surface change.

But we now live in times of very deep change, when assumptions that people have lived by for millennia are breaking down. It's traumatic. It's terrifying. "Nihilism stands at the door", as Nietzsche says. For religious leaders it is impossibly difficult, because the deep assumptions now breaking down are built into the very way their own faith has always been formulated.

Why? One of the most pervasive of all our deep assumptions is the distinction between appearance and reality, surface and depth. Out of it grows the belief that the visible world is a world of mere appearance. Beyond it is a greater, more real and timeless world, from which this world of ours is controlled. The higher world embodies all our norms of objective reality, truth and value.

When people thought this old vision was straightforwardly just true, they saw historical change as being merely superficial. Deep down, everything was timeless and nothing really changed. That was fine, in the agricultural civilisations of the past. But today the growth of knowledge has led us to see everything from the human and the historical point of view.

Everything changes. It floats unanchored on the market, with no more than the measure of truth, reality or value that the market currently assigns to it. Nothing's eternal, and nothing's absolutely fixed. Everything is humanly-posited and under continuous renegotiation.

That's post modernity, where we are now. Inevitably, our religious leaders cannot cope with it. Immersed as we are now in a constant flux of communication, our media and our artists at least show us what our new situation is. But how we are to cope with it spiritually is less clear.

Here is a beginning. We should not be so fearful about change, because the Bible itself is a record of profound historical change. It moves in time from hunter-gatherers to tribal society, from the earliest versions of the state to the great world empires, and from ethnic to universal, "catholic", religion.

The Bible even shows us the first emergence of modern selfhood, in (for example) the Epistle to the Romans. Indeed, one could say that our whole religious tradition springs from and is a meditation upon the hinge between two profoundly different orders, one old and one new. We shouldn't be so fearful about facing a similar transition in our own time.

Don Cupitt is former Dean of Emmanuel College Cambridge. Though a priest of the Church of England, he is the author of over 40 books which challenge Christian orthodoxy