Don Cupitt - Career

Career

Cupitt was educated at Charterhouse School in Godalming, Surrey, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Westcott House Cambridge. He studied, successively, natural sciences, theology and the philosophy of religion. In 1959 he was ordained deacon in the Church of England, becoming a priest in 1960. After short periods as a curate in the North of England, and as Vice-Principal of Westcott House, Cupitt was elected to a Fellowship and appointed Dean at Emmanuel College, Cambridge late in 1965. Since then he has remained at the college. In 1968 he was appointed to a university teaching post in philosophy of religion, a position in which he continued until his retirement for health reasons in 1996. At that time he proceeded to a Life Fellowship at Emmanuel College, which remains his base today. In the early 1990s he stopped officiating at public worship and in 2008 he ceased to be a communicant member of the church. Although he has been a priest, he is better known as a writer, broadcaster and populariser of innovative theological ideas. He has written 40 books – which have been translated into Dutch, Persian, Polish, Korean, Portuguese, Danish, German and Chinese – as well as chapters in more than 30 multi-authored volumes.

Cupitt came to the British public's attention in 1984 with his BBC television series The Sea of Faith, in which orthodox Christian beliefs were challenged. He is currently a key figure in the Sea of Faith Network, a group of spiritual "explorers" (based in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia) who share Cupitt's concerns.

In his writings Cupitt sometimes describes himself as Christian non-realist, by which he means that he follows certain spiritual practices and attempts to live by ethical standards traditionally associated with Christianity but without believing in the actual existence of the underlying metaphysical entities (such as "Christ" and "God"). He calls this way of being a non-realist Christian "solar living".