What is a Story?

by Don Cupitt

Western thought began with an attack on religious myth by philosophers who held that the highest truth must be non-narrative and timeless. They left a paradox to haunt for on the one hand everyone knows that stories are important to us and our religion is full of them, while on the other hand stories continue to have a bad name as myths or fictions. It has been so difficult to say just how stories convey truth that until recently theologians were still trying to 'demythologize' religious belief.
Now, however, philosophy has at last become more friendly to literature. There is talk of narrative theology and of rehabilitating story.
Don Cupitt spells out the remarkable implications of the current return of philosophical and religious thought into time and narrative. He shows how stories produce reality, the self and time, how they awaken our desires and shape our lives, and how they express our paradoxical hopes of individual and corporate redemption.

Genres: Philosophy

176 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 2012

About the author

Don Cupitt was an English philosopher of religion and scholar of Christian theology. He had been an Anglican priest and a lecturer in the University of Cambridge, though he was better known as a popular writer, broadcaster and commentator. He has been described as a "radical theologian", noted for his ideas about "non-realist" philosophy of religion.

Reviews

[Rhiannon Grant]

Like most of Cupitt's books, this builds an argument for a non-realist view of religion - here, beginning from a positive argument for fictionalism from the power of stories. It's a sensible and something convincing move although I think he overstates his case in some places (towards the end, he has a 'dismissal' of experience which works by 'reducing' it to just language - anything which might count as shared experience was always linguistic already - but trying to get rid of something by turning it into the thing you have just argued is most important is... odd). But he is a witty and interesting writer, and in works of this nature, spotting the places where one disagrees is part of the fun.

[Bill Tyne]

Thus far, there has been a lot of pseudo scientific nonsense, which is something I have learnt to expect when nonscientists lean heavily on "science," especially psychology, to support their arguments. Sadly, this tome follows in the footsteps of so many postmodern texts - sound and fury signifying nothing. I'll continue reading as I appreciate long-winded jokes and could do with a laugh.
It should come as no surprise that it got no better. To paraphrase previous criticism of postmodernist writers, "A text that denies the reality of any such thing as truth is asking you not to believe it so don't." Seductive as Cupitt's arguments may appear, they collapse torn apart by their own "logic".