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Preface

Here it is, for a new generation, and now the question is what you will make of it.

When the first of many editions was published on 19 March 1963 it immediately became the centre of a storm which went far beyond the usual public for theology. John Robinson’s fellow bishops spoke moderately or militantly, after or without reading it. Reviewers congratulated the author on brilliantly expressed insights, or rebuked him for a rehash of old confusions. A leader of a missionary society hailed him as a thoroughly sincere evangelist who could address the secular West, while a philosopher penetrated the sermonizing to detect an atheist. Others enjoyed or dismissed him as a phrase-maker who appealed to fellow journalists.

TV and radio programmes, ‘Letters to the Editor’ and cartoons, arguments over drinks and first, second or third thoughts after a private reading all spread the explosion’s fallout. Before long a million copies had been printed in seventeen languages. More than four thousand people wrote to the author, pouring their hearts out in either gratitude or appeal or denunciation.

At the time I served SCM Press as its Editor and was overjoyed by the sales, but also astonished: we had printed only six thousand copies for our market in those days, a modest total with two thousand for a Presbyterian publishing house in the USA. I was in a religious bookshop when a young man in black leather got off his motorbike and put his coins on the counter without a word about which book he needed. A colleague was outside a Waterloo station bookstall and watched a line of commuters reducing a pile of copies.

One cause of the excitement was that the book was being talked about before fresh supplies could be printed and distributed, and people did not like to be asked ‘you say that, but have you read it?’ Thus the Prime Minister’s office had to ask for the privilege of a copy. Another cause was that the book reached people who knew the author’s name because he was a bishop who had recently been a witness for the successful defence in a trial which had attempted to get D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover banned for obscenity. Such people could be intrigued by this latest indiscretion without being able to understand instantly a theologian who was thinking aloud about profound mysteries, but they were not all willing to be defeated easily. And even experts could need time to decide what the ambiguous book meant, perhaps after several readings. By good fortune the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, was himself a theologian. When Robinson summed up the book’s message in a pre-publication article printed in the Observer under the title ‘Our Image of God Must Go’, Ramsey received many complaints and publicly regretted ‘much damage’. But after much thought – for he, too, was honest – he often voiced regret that he had responded too hastily: Robinson had articulated questions which an introverted Church had ignored to its loss during the 1950s.

It is easier to understand Honest to God seriously if one sees that it came out of a crisis in its author’s life. (That may excuse its silences: the Second Vatican Council, for example, is not mentioned.) In it he refers briefly to his traditional background. He had been born (in 1919) in the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral, almost literally, and had decided in boyhood to follow his father as a scholarly priest in the Church of England. He had worked in Cambridge University as a New Testament scholar and college chaplain. Books had shown him an original way of looking at things – but the things he looked at were the Bible and the Church, in loyalty. As early as 1950 In the End, God interpreted language about ‘the End’ as a celebration of the ‘New Age’ already begun in the life of the Church. Then The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology and Jesus and His Coming developed the thesis that the emphasis of Jesus had been on founding the community which was now his continuing body; Liturgy Coming to Life was about making the church’s Eucharist more corporate; and On Being the Church in the World was about the duty of Christians to be together and to be bold in the completion of the Kingdom of God on earth. These were books of faith and optimism.

He might have remained in the university, working out ideas with intellectual energy, but he accepted an invitation to be more practical as a suffragan (assistant) bishop in the diocese of Southwark, covering South London, in 1958. His confidence persisted for a short time, but soon he had to accept that the Church he so loved was largely ignored in the city and its suburbs. Back trouble forced him to spend weeks in bed, thinking about this shock to his theological system and hearing the voices of German theologians who had not interested him much in Cambridge: Tillich, Bultmann and Bonhoeffer. So when I invited him to contribute to a new series of paperbacks, he replied that he would like to pull these new thoughts together, for discussion in a circle expected to be quite small and sophisticated.

The result was two books in one. It is possible to extract from Honest to God a long list of passages which seem very strange but only because they come from a bishop steeped in biblical and classical theology. It is equally possible to collect many sentences which are humbly and devoutly orthodox. He both attacks and defends ‘myth’ and ‘religion’; he both discards and uses talk about God as ‘Thou’; he says both that no action is always right and that it is always right to do the most loving thing. We have to be ‘prepared for everything to go into the melting – even our most cherished religious categories and moral absolutes. And the first thing we must be ready to let go is our image of God’. But he also concludes with a reaffirmation of his ‘basic commitment to Christ’, which ‘for most of us’ may be ‘buttressed’ traditionally – and the reference to medieval ecclesiastical architecture was no accident. So did he believe that love is god or that God is Love?

A division was also to be seen in his public life after Honest to God. From 1965 to 1973 he wrote five books which were widely admired as substantial sequels: The New Reformation?, Exploration into God, Christian Freedom in a Permissive Society, The Difference in Being a Christian Today and The Human Face of God (about Christ). In 1979 he added Truth Is Two-Eyed after a long visit to India: this expressed great sympathy with Hindu spirituality (as he had once almost identified himself with Western secularity), but also affirmed Christ’s authoritative uniqueness. It seemed possible that he might be a latter-day Luther leading the much-needed New Reformation and he came to feel that his pastoral and administrative duties as a bishop, always faithfully discharged, did not leave him enough space. He could have become a professor in America, where he often lectured, but in 1969 he accepted the post of Dean of Chapel in Trinity College back in Cambridge. And there his life became a long anticlimax.

He found that Honest to God and its sequels had made no great impression either on his new college or on the university’s faculty of ‘divinity’. He was left without much honour as a prophet except when he travelled and was not appointed as a university lecturer for this second time. He found also that the statistics of churchgoing fell continuously and that radicalism, never exactly popular in the Church, was now in eclipse, partly because some of its best-known advocates clearly denied the reality of God and the relevance of the Christian tradition. The Student Christian Movement, which had owned his publisher and had supplied much of his favourable audience, dwindled to near extinction. The decline of what may be called the Robinsonian movement is recorded in three collections of essays: The Honest to God Debate, which I edited in 1963, Thirty Years of Honesty, edited by John Bowden (1993), and God’s Truth, edited in 1988 by Eric James who wrote the fine biography John A. T. Robinson: Scholar, Pastor, Prophet (1987). It is also to be seen in the contrast between the admiration in The Church in the Thought of Bishop John Robinson by Richard McBrien, a Roman Catholic scholar (1966), and the more critical study of Robinson’s theology by the more simply radical Alistair Kee, The Roots of Christian Freedom (1988). And perhaps the most important explanation of this decline is to be found in the title of Robert Towler’s study of the emotions: The Need for Certainty (1984). This analysed a scene of great confusion but demonstrated that to have a faith which includes much doubt is not reassuring enough for most people, whatever their faith.

From 1976 to 1983 Robinson produced books about the New Testament which aroused some interest because they were unexpectedly conservative but which failed to convince most of his fellow scholars: Redating the New Testament (1976), the more popular Can We Trust the New Testament? and (1977) the Bampton Lecturers, provocatively entitled The Priority of John (1985). The first argued that most, if not all, of the New Testament was probably written before AD 70 and the third that most, if not all, of the Fourth Gospel was probably as close to the original account as was the Gospel of Mark. The indignation felt by most scholars in that field came to a head when he also took seriously much, if not all, of the campaign supporting the authenticity of the Turin Shroud of Jesus, later proved to be a medieval fake. Meanwhile the earlier scandals connected with Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Honest to God had not been forgotten by those who were not shocked by this stoutly conservative tone in his New Testament scholarship, and he was never offered another job in the Church although he had hopes.

However, those who were more sympathetic remembered his insistence that ‘radical’ does not necessarily mean ‘revolutionary’: it may mean going back to one’s roots to see whether they are still healthy, without any prior assumption about the right answer. He did go back when he had returned to Cambridge, and he found that for him a disciple’s relationship with the Word of the God who is Love, made flesh in Jesus, was an unshaken foundation. And the criticism which now surrounded him was largely silenced by the courageous discipleship in which he confronted his dying from cancer. With more assurance than when he had seen the problems of the Church in South London, he found ‘the Beyond in the midst’ when in pain, and even ‘Love’ meeting him in the shape of premature death after many disappointments. It was twenty years after Honest to God.

So what will you make of it now?

David L. Edwards OBE

Formerly Provost of Southwark,

Fellow of All Soul’s, Oxford,

Dean of King’s College Cambridge

and former Editor of SCM Press