ABSTRACT
Once upon a time — when I was a postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge — Don Cupitt told me that I was a Catholic symbolist, someone who lived within Catholicism, but without supposing that its stories and images referred to anything beyond themselves. Insofar as I thought I was a ‘realist’ in theology I was a confused, self-deluding ‘non-realist’, who could not admit to himself that he was playing a religious game. This is certainly the charge that Don later laid against me and others — the proponents of ‘radical orthodoxy’ — who, it turns out, were all once Don’s pupils. Like Don, we all now teach ‘versions of “active non-realism”’; ironic purveyors of ‘orthodoxy’ in theme-park culture. John Milbank advances the most ‘emptied-out ontology’ of all, a ‘hat trick with not even the ghost of a rabbit in it’. Catherine Pickstock performs God through liturgy; Graham Ward simply makes it all up, and I narrate God into being, pure ‘fictionalism’. 1 As such we are all ‘soundly unsound’, ‘faithfully unfaithful’ to our teacher. Well perhaps.
