Above Us Only Sky

By Don Cupitt

Where prescientific ages saw Heaven, says Don Cupitt, we see only sky. We have given up belief in a supernatural world, and we have felt compelled to break with the received ecclesiastical form of Christianity. But the Christian spirit of critical thinking, of systematic self-criticism and perpetual reform, has spread around the whole world in modern science, technology, critical history, and liberal democracy. In Above Us Only Sky, in 27 brief slogans, Cupitt presents a systematic theology of his religion of ordinary life.

Don Cupitt is the former Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was born in 1934 at Oldham, England, and educated at Charterhouse and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied Natural Sciences, Theology and the Philosophy of Religion. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1959. From 1962-1965, he was Vice-Principal of Westcott House, an Anglican theological college in Cambridge, and became Dean of Emmanuel College in 1966. From 1968 to 1996 he also lectured in the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity. He is best known as a teacher and writer. He is often described as a “radical theologian,” or as “a liberal religious thinker.” Philosophically, he is a stalwart non-realist. A frequent broadcaster, mainly for the BBC, he has made three TV Series, one of which, “The Sea of Faith,” (1984), also gave rise to a book and to an international network of radical Christians which is still growing. In his writing, and in the various societies he has tried to foster, Don Cupitt attempts to develop new thinking for a new epoch: a new philosophy, a new ethics, and a new religious thought.