Christianity s classic plan of salvation was a vast myth of cosmic Creation, Fall and Redemption. Earth-centered and supernaturalist, it was fatally damaged by Galileo and later astronomers, and by historians of human origins. In A New Great Story, Don Cupitt rewrites the old grand-narrative as the story of how religion called us out of nature and gradually made us ourselves: social beings in an ordered world, language-using and self-aware. Religious ideas, whether they build civilization or inspire criticism of it, are always leading ideas. They made us everything that we are. Cupitt sees the history of religion as culminating in the teaching of Jesus, who announced a new age in which human beings are at last fully themselves, fully reconciled to each other and to life. That message was long almost immediately, and the cycle begun afresh ...
