Honest to God. John A. T. Robinson

There was nothing about it one could say was wrong. Indeed, it was an impressive roundabout: but one was simply not on it – and, what was worse, had no particular urge to be. To realize that after all one might not be the chief of sinners, or the only man out of step, lifted a load of secret, yet basically unadmitted, guilt. And since then I have found others – and in each situation a surprisingly large minority – who confess to the same blind spot. The traditional material is all true, no doubt, and one recognizes it as something one ought to be able to respond to, but somehow it seems to be going on around one rather than within. Yet to question it openly is to appear to let down the side, to be branded as hopelessly unspiritual, and to cause others to stumble.

      And this is only one particular instance. Indeed, as one goes on, it is the things one doesn’t believe and finds one doesn’t have to believe which are as liberating as the things one does. James Pike, the Bishop of California, is one who has admitted to finding the same. In a stimulating – and thoroughly constructive – article,⁸ which rocked the American Church and even drew the charge of heresy from the clergy of one diocese, he wrote: ‘I stand in a religious tradition . . . which really does not know very much about religion. The Roman Catholics and the Southern Baptists know a great deal more about religion than we do. And . . . I feel that many people within my own church – and some of them write tracts for the book-stalls of churches – know too many answers. I do not deny the truth of these answers; I simply don’t know as much as the authors of the pamphlets.’

      But the point I want to make is that I gradually came to realize that some of the things that rang bells and some of the things that didn’t seemed to be connected. I began to find that I was questioning one whole set of presuppositions and feeling towards another in its place. All I am doing in this book is to try to think this process aloud and help to articulate it for others. For I believe it is a process common in some form or other to many in our age. Indeed, it is the number of straws apparently blowing in the same direction that strikes me as significant. I have done little more than pick a few of them up and I am conscious that in this book, more than in any other I have written, I am struggling to think other people’s thoughts after them. I cannot claim to have understood all I am trying to transmit. And it is for this reason partly that I have chosen to let them speak, through extended quotations, in their own words. But it is also because I see this as an attempt at communication, at mediation between a realm of discourse in which anything I have to say is very familiar and unoriginal and another, popular world, both within and without the Church, in which it is totally unfamiliar and almost heretical.

      At this stage, to indicate what I am talking about, let me instance three pieces of writing, all brief, which contain ideas that immediately found lodgement when I first read them and which have since proved seminal not only for me but for many of this generation.

      The first of these in date for me (though not in composition) was a sermon by Paul Tillich, which appeared in his collection The Shaking of the Foundations, published in England in 1949.⁹ It was called ‘The Depth of Existence’ and it opened my eyes to the transformation that seemed to come over so much of the traditional religious symbolism when it was transposed from the heights to the depths. God, 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.

      The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God.¹⁰

      I remember at the time how these words lit up for me. I did what I have never done before or since: I simply read Tillich’s sermon, in place of an address of my own, to the students I was then teaching. I do not remember looking at the words again till I came to write this, but they formed one of the streams below the surface that were to collect into the underground river of which I have since become conscious. I shall return to them, as to the other influences I mention in this chapter, subsequently. Here it is enough to say they seemed to speak of God with a new and indestructible relevance and made the traditional language of a God that came in from outside both remote and artificial.

      Next, I must register the impact of the now famous passages about ‘Christianity without religion’ in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison.¹¹ I first encountered extracts from these in The Ecumenical Review for January 1952, shortly after their first publication in German. One felt at once that the Church was not yet ready for what Bonhoeffer was giving us as his last will and testament before he was hanged by the SS: indeed, it might be understood properly only a hundred years hence. But it seemed one of those trickles that must one day split rocks. Hitherto, Bonhoeffer was saying, the Church has based its preaching of the Gospel on the appeal to religious experience, to the fact that deep down every man feels the need for religion in some form, the need for a God to whom to give himself, a God in terms of whom to explain the world. But suppose men come to feel that they can get along perfectly well without ‘religion’, without any desire for personal salvation, without any sense of sin, without any need of ‘that hypothesis’? Is Christianity to be confined to those who still have this sense of insufficiency, this ‘God-shaped blank’, or who can be induced to have it? Bonhoeffer’s answer was to say that God is deliberately calling us in this twentieth century to a form of Christianity that does not depend on the premise of religion, just as St Paul was calling men in the first century to a form of Christianity that did not depend on the premise of circumcision.

      What that meant I hardly began to understand. But I knew that this was something we must learn to assimilate: the system could not simply eject it. And now after a bare decade it feels as if we have been living with it for very much longer.

      Then, thirdly, there was an essay which created an almost immediate explosion when it appeared in 1941, though I did not read it in detail till it was translated into English in 1953. This was the manifesto by Rudolf Bultmann entitled, ‘New Testament and Mythology’.¹²

      Once more Bultmann seemed to be putting a finger on something very near the quick of the Gospel message. For when he spoke of the ‘mythological’ element in the New Testament he was really referring to all the language which seeks to characterize the Gospel history as more than bare history like any other history. The importance of this ‘plus’ is that it is precisely what makes events of two thousand years ago a preaching or gospel for today at all. And his contention was that this whole element is unintelligible jargon to the modern man. In order to express the ‘trans-historical’ character of the historical event of Jesus of Nazareth, the New Testament writers used the ‘mythological’ language of pre-existence, incarnation, ascent and descent, miraculous intervention, cosmic catastrophe, and so on, which according to Bultmann, make sense only on a now completely antiquated world-view. Thus, modern man, instead of stumbling on the real rock of offence (the scandal of the Cross), is put off by the very things which should be translating that historical occurrence into an act of God for him, but which in fact merely make it incredible. The relevance of Bultmann’s analysis and of his programme of ‘demythologizing’ to the whole question of God ‘out there’ from which we started is obvious enough. If he is right, the entire conception of a supernatural order which invades and ‘perforates’¹³ this one must be abandoned. But if so, what do we mean by God, by revelation, and what becomes of Christianity?

       Theology and the World

      Now all these three writers might appear to have been raising theological issues fairly far removed from the everyday concerns of ordinary men. But what convinced me of their importance was not simply the spark they struck in myself. It was that for all their apparent difficulty and Teutonic origin they so evidently spoke not only