The Meaning of the West

Today, Western culture rules the world, but understandings of what it is are oddly contradictory. The Vatican claims that the West owes everything to the Catholic Church, its oldest institution, but the European Union currently defines its core-values in purely-secular Enlightenment terms. Third-World critics attack the West for being irreligious and morally decadent, while at the same time they successfully demand Christian behaviour from it, in the form of repentance for the past and generous aid in perpetuity. To sort all this out, Don Cupitt proposes a reinterpretation of Christian history, arguing that the meaning of the West is not Catholic Christian but radical Christian. The original Jesus was a secular figure, a utopian teacher of ethical wisdom. After his martyrdom his followers personified his teaching in him and promoted him to Heaven, while postponing the earthly realization of his new world until his return at the end of history. Thus transformed into a religion of deferred salvation, 'Christianity' flourished for some fifteen centuries, but it always knew that its final fulfilment would be on this earth., and from the Enlightenment the decline of the Church was also the beginning of Christianity's extraordinarily successful afterlife as modern Western culture. The Pentecostal dream lives on in our multi-ethnic liberal democracies, Jesus' ethic lives on in our modern humanitarianism and in the welfare state; and the Christian spirituality of stringent selfexamination lives on in our critical thinking and our spirit of perpetual striving for betterment. Indeed, Cupitt argues that the core of Western culture is simply the old Christian spirituality extraverted. Today, Christian supernatural doctrine is dead, but the secular 'West' is Christianity itself now emerging in its final, 'Kingdom' form.

Don Cupitt is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.