Reluctant radical
Writing nearly 40 years ago, the then Bishop of Woolwich in South London was charitably tentative in exploring new ways of viewing traditional Christianity. He thought that what he wrote might "... seem to be radical, and doubtless to many heretical." But he was fairly sure "... that in retrospect, it will be seen to have erred in not being nearly radical enough".

Neither Robinson nor his publishers had any idea that Honest to God would create the furore it did. The controversy stirred up by the book raged for some years in the mid-sixties. It is now a mere whisper from the past. The Bishop himself is dead.

A colleague of Robinson remarked later that wave after wave of bitter criticism broke over the bishop after the publication of Honest to God. Another wrote, 

The fame - or notoriety - brought upon him ... was, I know, a great surprise to him, and I don't think it should be held against him if a popular paperback intended simply to set people thinking has been found ... to be in some ways muddled and unoriginal.

The book certainly contains little or no truly first-hand thought. It is a summary of the thoughts of others, primarily of Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer seasoned by the author's observations. Robinson stresses again and again throughout that he is not challenging authority but merely attempting to stimulate the faithful to think about tradition.

That a highly-placed Christian asks questions and tentatively proposes answers isn't new and wasn't new then. Why then the storm of debate, accusation and vilification which the book stimulated? 

The answer can be found in the social situation in which publication took place. It's commonplace to observe that the 1960s were a time of startling transitions. The contents of Honest to God were not striking in themselves. Robinson was clear that in academia "... anything I have to say is very familiar and unoriginal." But the climate was right and the book took off in a big way.

Robinson thought that there was only one issue - whether these "familiar and unoriginal" questions 

... remain on the fringe of the intellectual debate or are dragged into the middle and placed squarely under men's noses.

He was right. People read his offering and sensed that it spoke deeply to them. It was the social climate, the clear and simple language of the book, and the hierarchical position of the author in the Church which stimulated rapid sales of more than a million copies of Honest to God. 

The book also triggered a severe backlash from his fellow bishops and many others. The then Archbishop of Canterbury criticised Robinson on television (without consulting him first). In a later public address the Archbishop Ramsey wrote, 

I was especially grieved at the method chosen by the Bishop for presenting his ideas to the public [which] caused public sensation and did much damage. Many of us who read the article [in a newspaper] and its slogans might not have had the opportunity or the necessary brains for reading the book referred to.

The Archbishop's tone is revealing. He expects questions to be raised in the privacy of the Church's back rooms, among those who can handle them without shock and dismay. The sensibilities of the faithful are damaged by questions and tentative answers. Why? Because by implication they don't have the "necessary brains" to deal with such matters. 

The patronising  attitude of Archbishop Ramsey is striking. He was a man who didn't like being pressed about awkward matters - as I can testify, having been once severely put down by him when honestly trying to express my doubts about prayer.

What of Honest to God now, some four decades later? As a book it has long since left centre-stage. The issues Robinson raised are still being discussed. In some ways, the debate has advanced and become clearer. The public response to authors like John Spong and Richard Holloway witness to an ongoing hunger amongst ordinary people, not necessarily for cast iron answers, but for the growth and new life which open debate stimulates.

What I think is striking is the continuing inability of the Church's power-structures to adjust to what is becoming plainer by the day - that only when Christians are honest before God will they be taken seriously by the world at large. 

The current climate of internal squabbling over the non-issue of homosexuality is a good example. Likewise, the instant negative reflex of Church leaders about the burning matter of assisted dying is highly damaging. And the Church's belated and half-hearted response to environmental challenges provokes a weary exasperation in those who have been struggling for decades against establishment opposition.

And behind all that lies a stubborn, irrational and Spirit-denying refusal to consider that Christian teachings need radical reworking. This challenge is not recent. It arises from a series of paradigm changes which began three centuries or more ago. Refusal to change has caused a substantial exodus of good Christian people from the Holy Land of traditional Christianity into the secular wilderness - a sort of exile in reverse.

Robinson takes this up when remarks that "It will doubtless seem to some that I have by implication abandoned the Christian faith and practice altogether." He continues, 

... unless we are prepared for the kind of revolution of which I have spoken it [Christianity] will come to be abandoned ... we have to be prepared for everything to go into the melting - even our most cherished religious categories and moral absolutes.

If Bishop Robinson has not been heard by the establishment, he has been heard by many ordinary people. I suspect that many have left the hallowed cloisters because they too have not been heeded.

My God or yours?
Robinson begins by addressing the paradigm (a word coming into use at the time he was writing) of God as "out there" or somehow "above" the universe. He rightly points out that this concept of God tends to remain part of our mental furniture even though we no longer think of reality in these terms.

How, he asks, to avoid losing God completely if we jettison what is no longer a useful way of imagining God? Will the ordinary person be able to make the transition? I think the answer of the past 38 years is, "Yes" - though it often means not remaining in the official Church structures.

The 1960s saw the beginnings of the wider debate about what's now loosely called "postmodernism". If you're anything like me, you are bewildered by the obscurity of postmodern jargon. It's too early to tell if it will fade away like a Boojum, or take comprehensible form and eventually change our perceptions. But I suspect that Robinson's questions about God are in the process of being answered in a way he couldn't have guessed at.

It seems to me that the postmodern God is being increasingly thought of as our creation. Robinson seizes upon the metaphor of God as the "ground of our being", a non-traditional image elaborated by Tillich. As a metaphor it is no longer one of separation and distance ("out there" or "in heaven") but of solidity and depth. 

When we worship "God" we give worth to - or, as we would now say, give special attention to - what we think is ultimate in our lives, the ground of our being. But unlike supposedly sacrosanct traditional metaphors, it is postmodern in the sense that it is a metaphor deliberately invented to convey meaning to contemporary minds. If this is good, why not a host of other non-traditional metaphors? 

What Robinson has got wrong is his defence of what he calls myth. He assumes, as do many, that the "myth" of creation and the "myth" of Eden, for example, have always been understood as metaphorical constructions. I have come across this assertion more than once. But I have never encountered sound evidence that this was in fact so.

On the contrary, it seems to me that what we call myths were actually objectified in the sense that most thought that "this, or something very like it, actually happened." To this day, many millions address the Bible, the Koran and the Hindu deities as reflecting reality, as recording history in the sense that certain events really happened. What sophisticated scholars call "myth" is for them objective truth (though not "objective" in the sense that Westerners use the word). 

Robinson doesn't face up to the hard truth that most biblical myths are more than mere metaphors to the majority of Christians even today. For that reason they can and must be dispensed with except as relics of another way of understanding reality. At best they can be taken only as picturesque ways of helping us grasp aspects of the world as seen through modern eyes.

Church leaders in the years following the publication of Honest to God essentially washed their hands of Robinson's ground-breaking book. I know of no evidence indicating that the Church of England hierarchy has taken on board the problems he publicised, never mind any solution. 

In effect, the Honest to God debate continues outside the Church. As I write there is a distinct movement towards a postmodern consensus that God is a human construction, that we continually envisage God in terms which convey meaning to each new era. Robinson would not and could not have foreseen this response. Christian exiles eagerly seize upon the utterances of those few Church authorities brave enough to raise their heads over the parapet.

And, need I say it, the Church is fighting yet another rearguard action to preserve its pre-modern traditions.

God in heaven!
Robinson was a scholar of the New Testament whose PhD thesis was described by his tutor as perhaps the best he'd ever assessed. It is therefore hardly surprising that the discussion in this book of theism is vulnerable to attack by experts in a subject not his. And attack him they did - apparently unconscious that Honest to God had not been written for them.

The fundamental question is how "God" can be both an Unknowable Absolute and simultaneously an entity with whom one can have a personal relationship. Robinson, rightly in my view, picks the only viable alternative, what he calls "naturalism". The latter requires that we do away with the supernatural (Robinson calls it "supranaturalism"). Naturalism 

... identifies God, not indeed with the totality of things, the universe, per se, but with what gives meaning and direction to nature.

In effect, traditional stress on the transcendence of God "... may well collapse into meaninglessness" writes Robinson. The idea of "heaven" - by which is meant the idea of a separate supernatural dimension - is, he thinks, 

... the greatest obstacle to an intelligent faith - and indeed will progressively be so to all except the 'religious' few.

Prophetic words indeed! The evidence is now incontrovertible that this is precisely what is coming about. Fewer and fewer in the West live as though traditional Christian faith means anything much in their lives. Those who do worship in a traditional way seem able to partition their minds into compartments - Church assumptions in one, and real life in another.

The author puts the matter succinctly. 

If Christianity is to survive, let alone to recapture 'secular' man, there is no time to lose in detaching it from this scheme of thought, from this particular theology or logos about theos, and thinking hard about what we should put in its place.

Alas! Here we are in the third millennium and not only has nothing significant changed in traditional Christianity, but precious little thought has been given to the new paradigms required to reach the ordinary so-called secular person in the 21st century.

The informal alliance called the Anglican Communion of which the Church of England is part appears to be reluctantly glad that its centre of gravity is shifting to the developing world. Glad because this is taken to prove the viability of traditional orthodoxy. And reluctant because Western Anglicans don't much like losing power.

The fact is that all churches are refusing to see the signs of the times. However long it takes, it is now certain the the 80/20 proportion of secular to religious people in the West will one day also be the proportion in the developing world. 

In other words, the Christian faith will increasingly be perceived as irrelevant worldwide, not just in the West. Only if the churches take seriously Robinson's challenge from the 1960s can Christianity be re-fashioned into a form which is able to capture the hearts and minds of Mr and Mrs Secular.

The prophet Jesus
If Robinson makes a major error it's perhaps that he starts in the wrong place. True, any thinking person wonders about God, tries to think a path through mysteries and apparent paradoxes which arise, and seeks to appreciate the possibility of a divine presence. But none of this is the essence of Christianity.

A person is at the heart of the Christian way of life. Without an actual, real, flesh-and-blood man who lived and died on this planet there can be no such thing as Christianity. Only one chapter of this book focuses on Jesus of Nazareth. He is called "the man for others", a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Here Robinson treads on hallowed ground. He attacks the idea of incarnation - that Jesus was a God-Man, somehow combining in himself two natures, one fully human and the other fully divine. Tradition, he points out, has always been Docetic in that it says that "...Christ only appeared to be a man or looked like a man: 'underneath' he was God." 

However hard churchmen may protest that this is a caricature of the truth, Robinson's conclusion can't be escaped. The 

... traditional supranaturalistic way of describing the Incarnation inevitably suggests that Jesus was really God almighty walking about on earth, dressed up as a man ... for a limited period taking part in a charade.

Robinson suggests that the God-man Jesus might survive as "myth". The myth is useful to "...indicate the significance of the events, the divine depth of the history." He correctly points out that in the doctrine of the incarnation, traditional Christianity breaks down. To post-Enlightenment humanity it is a nonsensical proposition. 

But, it seems to me, Robinson does not face the hard fact that history, not myth, is what makes anyone Christian. Christianity is an historical religion. It is based not upon myth but upon events which actually happened in the same way that events today happen.

Bishop John Spong proposes that we use "story" rather than "myth" to talk about Jesus. His suggestion may do, for nobody thinks a story is literally true. And a "story" can be made about history. We've had thousands of years to hallow the story form of truth. The modern novel is a good example of this. But myths have a habit of being reified. That will no longer do.

Several pages are taken up with an explanation that Jesus didn't claim anything special for himself, as if that's crucial in dismissing the incarnation. But this is essentially a detour into New Testament detail. 

Robinson eventually puts the important question: "What is Christ for us today?" 

He answers, leaning heavily on Bonhoeffer, 

Jesus is 'the man for others', the one in whom Love has completely taken over.

He develops the idea further. But I couldn't, either in 1963 or now, get rid of the impression that Robinson is playing a clever word game, creating interesting verbal formulas which look good in print but don't resonate in life.

He plays his word games because, I think, he's striving desperately to avoid an ultimately unpalatable conclusion which, if he had voiced it, would in 1963 have opened him up to charges of heresy. 

The inevitable conclusion of being Christian in a non-supernatural reality, of recognising that the doctrine of the incarnation is today a verbal mind-game, is that Jesus is fully a man, nothing more. The Muslim faith is correct. Jesus was a prophet not God incarnate.

That makes him no less worthy of being our forerunner or pioneer. But it does mean that this "man for others" is not divine and would no doubt have been horrified to have been called that in his lifetime. Robinson dodges around this conclusion like a cat on a hot tin roof.

It's impossible now to probe Robinson's mind to discover if prudence prevented him drawing this conclusion, or if he was simply unable to face up to it. But there's little doubt in my mind that it's an unacknowledged outcome of the arguments he advances. 

Others have since criticised the doctrine of the incarnation - for example, John Hick and others in The Myth of God Incarnate (1993). They were condemned in a Church of England General Synod. If this view was held today by a Roman Catholic bishop, excommunication by Pope Benedict would be instant. So we can reasonably conclude that the Church has moved no further forward in this matter.

Filling the pews
Robinson doubts that "... the main function of the Church is to make or keep men religious." He's four-square behind a Church called to live and work as an integral part of society, in no way separate or distinguishable from it. 

Separation, he says, is not between the Church and society, but between society and religion. 

The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church to the judgement of the Kingdom, to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.

As it is, though, the Church is presently organised (in the 2000s as in 1963) "...to make or keep men religious."

If Robinson had been less tentative he might have taken this matter a step further. He might have pointed out the vast sums spent by the Church on keeping the pews as full as possible - surely a misdirection of money and effort. He might have wondered if religion in this context isn't itself a sort of heresy. How is it possible for the Church to support its official way of life while a single child dies of starvation, for example?

Robinson supposes that "... purging out the dead myths, and being utterly honest before God" will minimise or prevent the pilpul of doctrine and the hollow, formal worship of organised religion. If he'd lived today he would have perceived that very little has been purged, and few are able to be honest before God. Whatever his detractors and (dare I say it) his persecutors said, none could rightly deny that he cared deeply for justice and righteousness.

He hoped that one solution might be that 

... the Church must become genuinely and increasingly lay ... the laos or people of God in the world.

It seems to me that Robinson failed to perceive what might have come to him later - that the hierarchy of the Church has a huge investment in the status quo. It is extraordinarily difficult - and here I speak from personal experience - to challenge the Christian establishment without appearing brash and arrogant. Success in this respect brings instant ejection.

Nor should one expect to be listened to in the sense that those in power (and power is an entirely apposite word) are themselves asking similar questions and seeking radical answers. 

They are unable to do this honestly before God because, in the final analysis, their power rests on a claim to possessing absolute truth. Jesus, they are bound to say, is the final answer for all people in all times and in all places. Now absolute truth banishes radical questions of the sort the Bishop of Woolwich asks in this book because it can't deal with provisional, open-ended answers. 

Indeed, despite official protestations, the Church forbids any questions. To this day the Roman Catholic Church restricts questions to the better explanation of traditional doctrine. So what's the point of asking any but the questions to which you already have answers?

The only way to be the people of God in the world, then as now, is either to leave the Church or to stay in it as though one doesn't belong. John Spong calls this being a Christian in exile. Very few Christian structures and groups can rest easy with this. Which, I suppose, is why so many have drifted out of their pews, through the half-open door and into the wide world.

Honest to God has had its brief day. It was never a great book. Its strength lay in impacting the many and awakening in them a sense that God is to be found in ordinary life first and only then - if at all - in the comfortable pew.

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