Honest to God

Оглавление

John A. T. Robinson. Honest to God

Отрывок из книги

Preface by David L. Edwards

Preface to the first edition

.....

In some moods, indeed, I wonder. But I know in my own mind that these are questions that must be explored. Or rather, they are questions that are already being explored on many sides. The only issue is whether they remain on the fringe of the intellectual debate or are dragged into the middle and placed squarely under men’s noses. I know that as a bishop I could happily get on with most of my work without ever being forced to discuss such questions. I could keep the ecclesiastical machine going quite smoothly, in fact much more smoothly, without raising them. The kind of sermons I normally have to preach do not require one to get within remote range of them. Indeed, such is the pressure of regular priorities that I should not have been able, let alone obliged, to let them occupy my mind for long enough to write this, were it not that I was forcibly laid up for three months. But they were questions that had long been dogging me, and I felt from the beginning the spiritual necessity laid upon me to use this period to allow them their head.

The only way I can put it is to say that over the years a number of things have unaccountably ‘rung a bell’; various unco-ordinated aspects of one’s reading and experience have come to ‘add up’. The inarticulate conviction forms within one that certain things are true or important. One may not grasp them fully or understand why they matter. One may not even welcome them. One simply knows that if one is to retain one’s integrity one must come to terms with them. For if their priority is sensed and they are not attended to, then subtly other convictions begin to lose their power: one continues to trot these convictions out, one says one believes in them (and one does), but somehow they seem emptier. One is aware that insights that carry their own authentication, however subjective, are not being allowed to modify them.

.....