Scripture, Skepticism, and the Character of God by Neufeld Dane;

Author:Neufeld, Dane;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2019-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

6

Mansel in the Twentieth Century

If Mansel’s reputation as a defender of Anglican orthodoxy was fatally imperilled by the association of his ideas with those of Herbert Spencer, his twentieth century interpreters, in certain respects, have done little more to clear his name. This is especially true in the case of Don Cupitt, one of Mansel’s most thoughtful and attentive readers. Cupitt’s religious nonrealism, most famously published in his book Taking Leave of God (1980), bears strong Manselian themes that can be traced back clearly to his early articles on Mansel published in the late 1960s. In this respect, Cupitt is one of the few Anglican theologians to appreciate Mansel’s thought in a manner roughly akin to the presentation of third and fourth chapters in this book. Though, as is well known, Cupitt’s own thinking has developed dramatically since the 1960s, and while certain aspects of Mansel’s thought have not entirely disappeared – the practicality of religion, and the anthropomorphic character of scriptural language, for example – Mansel’s governing themes and intentions have clearly been forgotten. In 2006, Cupitt remarked that The Limits of Religious Thought is “a book that always has a few admirers – including, in the 1960s, me.”1

Mansel’s nineteenth-century critics judged his understanding of human reason to be overly constricting and exclusive of the spiritual character of human knowing. Whether in terms of the absolute, the eternal consciousness, or the incarnation, writers like Green, Bradley, and the Lux Mundi theologians were eager to articulate reality as a spiritual whole that could embrace the rapid changes and seeming progress of the modern world. However, in the twentieth century it has been Mansel’s supernaturalism and his high view of scripture that have garnered resistance. To this end, his ideas have been engaged and implemented by theologians who have sought to advance immanentist and nonrealist accounts of the Christian faith that relinquish the capacity of scripture, in particular, to meaningfully refer to the character and reality of God.

However, in this chapter I argue that the skepticism and nonrealism of Don Cupitt and much of twentieth-century Anglican theology is not a direct extension of Mansel’s skepticism but the result of a weakening confidence in scripture’s capacity to witness to God’s character and describe God’s presence in the world. This is a second form of skepticism that is easily confused with Mansel’s, but in fact it has more in common with the idealist tendency to dissolve scriptural claims into the immediacy of spiritual experience in the service of a comprehensive and all-embracing metaphysics of explanation. Yet, as argued in the preceding chapters, these varying attempts to place the Christian faith within a metaphysical scheme that could make sense of modern developments time and again stumbled over the question of God’s character as it is described in scripture. This pertained especially to the Old Testament and to atonement theology: notions of God’s anger, judgment, and even violence became difficult to place within a progressive metaphysics that demanded a moral uniformity, which, in Mansel’s terms, the Bible could not quite provide.

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