When I was a young woman and beginning my journey into religious studies I came upon the Bishop of Woolrich’s writings because they were so controversial at the time and, as a result, his little, thin book Honest to God was brought to my attention.

His writing made so much sense to me and to my peers.  My professors at the time, even though they were of a conservative bent, understood well the quality of his work and encouraged serious consideration of his book and that of others who similarly forge new appreciation and clarity within our Faith. 

In God’s time a half century is but a pebble.  For me, Robinson’s words are as helpful now as they were then and I know that, while I can appreciate the anthropomorphic imaging of God by understanding its roots in its developing monotheism Judaic tradition, I continue to find that he, along with thologians such as Tillich and Bonhoeffer, speaks to my heart and subjective condition.

Now years later, theologians have reviewed his book and pointed out that many in the church in his day did not want to take a serious effort to even understand what they purported to believe, let alone deal with the discrepancy between those beliefs and religious conventions, versus the way the church’s members lead their daily lives.  But as society became more jostled by modernity, this discrepancy has become a concern, and continues as a constant focus of contemporary criticism as well as cause for self-examination by those who are faithful.  (Read, for example, The Purpose-Driven Life). 

Theologian Rowan Williams critiqued Robinson’s work for its lack of theological depth and not adequately taking into account trinitarian doctrine, thereby reducing the contemporary theological view of God to that of an “inactive, crude and vague supraworldly agent.”  My own conclusion is that as simplistic and perhaps naive as Robinson’s book may have appeared to contemporary theologians, it was prophetically foretelling the Lambeth storm that is waging now on Rowan’s doorstep.

The following from John A T Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, ‘Honest To God’ (SCM, London: 1963)

For in place of a God who is literally or physically ‘up there’ we have accepted, as part of our mental furniture, a God who is spiritually or metaphysically ‘out there’. (p. 13)  But suppose such a super-Being ‘out there’ is really only a sophisticated version of the Old Man in the sky? Suppose belief in God does not, indeed cannot, mean being persuaded of the ‘existence’ of some entity, even a supreme entity, even a superior entity, which might or might not be there, like life on Mars? (p. 17)

God, [Paul] Tillich was saying, is not a projection ‘out there’, an Other beyond the skies, of whose existence we have to convince ourselves, but the Ground of our very Being. (p. 22)  Rudolph Bultmann …in ‘New Testament and Mythology’ … when he spoke of the ‘mythological element in the New Testament he was really referring to all the language which seeks to characterise the Gospel history as more than bare history like any other history. … the mythological language of pre-existence, incarnation, ascent and descent, miraculous intervention, cosmic catastrophe, and so on … make sense only in a now completely antiquated world view. … the entire conception of a supernatural order which invades and ‘perforates’ this one must be abandoned. But if so, what do we mean by God …. and what becomes of Christianity? (p. 24)

God is, by definition, ultimate reality. And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality really exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like … Thus, the fundamental theological question is not in establishing the ‘existence’ of God as a separate entity but in pressing through in ultimate concern to what Tillich calls ‘the ground of our being’…(p. 29)In Tillich’s words: The phrase deus sive natura, used by people like Scotus Eriggena and Spinoza, does not say that God is identical with nature but that he is identical with the natura naturans, the creative nature, the creative ground of all natural objects. (p. 31)

God is not ‘out there’. He is in Bonhoeffer’s words ‘ the “beyond” in the midst of our life’, a depth of reality reached ‘ not on the borders of life but at its centre’, not by any flight of the alone to the alone, but, in Kierkegaard’s fine phrase, by ‘ a deeper immersion in existence’. For the word ‘God’ denotes the ultimate depth of all our being, the creative ground and meaning of all our existence. …Tillich warns us that to make the necessary transposition, ‘you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself.’ (p. 47)

Belief in God is the trust, the well nigh incredible trust, that to give ourselves to the uttermost in love is not to be confounded but to be ‘accepted’, that Love is the ground of our being, to which we ultimately ‘come home’. … And the specifically Christian view of the world is asserting that the final definition of this reality, from which ‘nothing can separate us’, since it is the very ground of our being, is ‘the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’. (p. 49) … Bonhoeffer insists … ‘The transcendent is not infinitely remote but close at hand.’ (p.53)

The question of God is the question whether this depth of being is a reality or an illusion, not whether a Being exists beyond the bright, blue sky, or anywhere else.  Belief in God is a matter of ‘what you take seriously without any reservation’, of what for you is ultimate reality. (p. 55)  The New Testament says that Jesus was the Word of God, it says that God was in Christ, it says that Jesus is the Son of God; but it does not say that Jesus was God, simply like that. (p. 70)

Bonhoeffer .. [wrote] … To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, penitent or a saint), but to be a man. It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.’ (pp. 82-83)

…(we remember it was) asked by the crowds of Jesus when he began his public ministry: ‘What is this new teaching?’ And so it has always been … Paul was dismissed as a setter forth of strange gods, Socrates was condemned as an ‘atheist’.  Every new religious truth comes as a destroyer of some other god, as an attack upon that which men hold most sacred…For the Christian gospel is in perpetual conflict with the images of God set up in the minds of men, even Christian men, as they seek in each generation to encompass his meaning…. But as soon as (these images of God)…become a substitute for God, as soon as they become God, so that what is not embodied in the image is excluded or denied, then we have a new idolatry and once more the word of judgement has to fall.

… the beginning is to try to be honest – and to go on from there. (p. 141)