The Cambridge academic Don Cupitt, who has died aged 90, was to many one of the most humane and inspirational radical theologians of his generation, but to others, including some at the university and in the Church of England, a clergyman who did not even believe in God. “What,” one bishop was heard to muse, “is to be done about the thoroughgoing atheism of Don Cupitt?”
The dichotomy arose because of Cupitt’s insistence that God had no objective existence beyond the minds, language and faith of believers: the deity was not a stern and patrician figure floating above the clouds nor an ethereal presence, but a precept. “I take the idea of God as something like a guiding spiritual ideal that you use to orientate your life by,” he told the Guardian in 1987. “God is our values, God symbolises the goal of spiritual life.”
