Don Cupitt and the Future of Christian Doctrine

'Don Cupitt and the Future of Christian Doctrine' by Stephen Ross White, SCM Press, 1994. Reviewed by Lloyd Geering, SOF NZ Newsletter #9, November 1994

The author is an Anglican Dean in Ireland. He agrees that Cupitt "is a major theologian whose radicalism must be seriously reckoned with...he has opened the way forward to a new kind of theology. The world he has shown us is one which theology must enter if it is to retain any semblance of intellectual respectability". "Cupitt is attempting to relate the areas of personal faith, intellectual discovery, and the world in which these must live, in a manner intelligible to, and believable by the temper and mind-set of his age and culture".

White first surveys Cupitt's work and does so reasonably sympathetically. Then, secondly, he subjects them to criticism and expounds in response a more orthodox understanding of God which he calls one of "critical realism".

In this reviewer's opinion he does so quite unconvincingly having failed to grasp the significance of the points Cupitt has made. It cannot therefore be recommended.