Honest to God. John A. T. Robinson

modern urban and industrial civilization. Tillich is one of the few theologians to have broken through what he himself calls, in another connection, ‘the theological circle’. Bonhoeffer is talked of where ‘religion’ does not penetrate, and the kind of ideas he threw out have been taken up by two men, the Bishop of Middleton¹⁴ and Dr George Macleod,¹⁵ who are as exercised as any in our generation by the relation of theology to the real world. Again, I was astonished to discover how Bultmann’s ideas, for all their forbidding jargon, seemed to come like a breath of fresh air to entirely untheological students. Indeed, he had in the first instance been driven to them by the practical impossibility of communicating the Gospel to soldiers at the front. And one of my valued possessions is a copy of a letter written by Bultmann to the Sheffield Industrial Mission, setting out with a profound simplicity the Gospel as he would present it to steel-workers in a demythologized form.

      Moreover, though I said earlier that such thinking would be rejected and resented by those who had turned their backs on Christianity, I find that it comes with refreshing relevance to many who have nothing to undo. It seems to speak far more directly to their entirely non-religious experience than the traditional ‘popular’ apologetic.

      Nevertheless, despite its practical reference, such thinking is still nowhere near being assimilated or digested by the ordinary man in the pew, nor by most of those who preach to him or write for him. I believe there must come a time when in some form or another it will be so digested, and when our everyday thinking about God will have become as subtly transformed by it as by the earlier transposition of which I have spoken. But that is probably not the task of this generation. The first stage is to get it out of the world of the professional theologians into that of the intelligent thinking churchman – so that, for instance, one could presuppose that it was deeply affecting the way doctrine was taught in our theological colleges and lay training courses: indeed, I suspect that its relevance may be more immediately sensed for the development of a genuinely lay theology.

      One test is how long it takes really to become Anglicized. For it has not as yet seriously influenced the main stream of English theology or churchmanship.¹⁶ To take an extreme but not unrepresentative example, I doubt whether any sign of it could be traced in however prolonged a perusal of The Chronicle of the Convocation of Canterbury. And this is not simply a factious allusion. For I am not writing this book as a professional theologian: indeed, this is not my own academic field. I am deliberately writing as an ordinary churchman, and one moreover who is very much an ‘insider’ as far as church membership is concerned.

      I stress this standpoint because I find myself coming to so many of the same conclusions, though from a completely opposite direction, as a fellow Anglican, Dr John Wren-Lewis, a young industrial scientist and lay theologian, whose pungent criticisms of the contemporary religious scene in articles and broadcasts have attracted some attention in recent years. He has recorded his spiritual pilgrimage in his contribution to the collection of essays edited by Dewi Morgan, They Became Anglicans. Apart from the fact that we were both born in Kent within a few years of each other, our paths could hardly have been more different. I was born into the heart of the ecclesiastical ‘establishment’ – the Precincts at Canterbury: he was the son of a plumber, brought up as an outsider to the Church and its whole middle-class ethos. He is a scientist, a layman, a convert. I am not a scientist; I never seriously thought of being anything but a parson; and, however much I find myself instinctively a radical in matters theological, I belong by nature to the ‘once-born’ rather than to the ‘twice-born’ type. I have never really doubted the fundamental truth of the Christian faith – though I have constantly found myself questioning its expression.

      Yet for this very reason I may be in the better position to convince the ordinary middle-of-the-road man, who accepts without too much difficulty the things that I accept, that we really are being called to a ‘Copernican revolution’. None of us enjoys that, and I am only too conscious of the forces of inertia within myself. It is for me a reluctant revolution, whose full extent I have hardly begun to comprehend. I am well aware that much of what I shall seek to say will be seriously misunderstood, and will doubtless deserve to be. Yet I feel impelled to the point where I can no other. I do not pretend to know the answers in advance. It is much more a matter of sensing certain things on the pulses, of groping forward, almost of being pushed from behind. All I can do is to try to be honest – honest to God and about God – and to follow the argument wherever it leads.

      2

      The End of Theism?

       Must Christianity be ‘Supranaturalist’?

      TRADITIONAL Christian theology has been based upon the proofs for the existence of God. The presupposition of these proofs, psychologically if not logically, is that God might or might not exist. They argue from something which everyone admits exists (the world) to a Being beyond it who could or could not be there. The purpose of the argument is to show that he must be there, that his being is ‘necessary’; but the presupposition behind it is that there is an entity or being ‘out there’ whose existence is problematic and has to be demonstrated. Now such an entity, even if it could be proved beyond dispute, would not be God: it would merely be a further piece of existence, that might conceivably not have been there – or a demonstration would not have been required.

      Rather, we must start the other way round. God is, by definition, ultimate reality. And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like – whether, for instance, in the last analysis what lies at the heart of things and governs their working is to be described in personal or impersonal categories. Thus, the fundamental theological question consists 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’.

      What he has to say at this point is most readily summarized in the opening pages of the second volume of his Systematic Theology,¹ where he restates the position he has argued in the first volume and defends it against his critics.

      The traditional formulation of Christianity, he says, has been in terms of what he calls ‘supranaturalism’. According to this way of thinking, which is what we have all been brought up to, God is posited as ‘the highest Being’ – out there, above and beyond this world, existing in his own right alongside and over against his creation. As Tillich puts it elsewhere, he is

      a being beside others and as such part of the whole of reality. He certainly is considered its most important part, but as a part and therefore as subjected to the structure of the whole . . . He is seen as a self which has a world, as an ego which is related to a thou, as a cause which is separated from its effect, as having a definite space and an endless time. He is a being, not being-itself.²

      The caricature of this way of thinking is the Deist conception of God’s relation to the world. Here God is the supreme Being, the grand Architect, who exists somewhere out beyond the world – like a rich aunt in Australia – who started it all going, periodically intervenes in its running, and generally gives evidence of his benevolent interest in it.

      It is a simple matter to shoot down this caricature and to say that what we believe in is not Deism but Theism, and that God’s relationship to the world is fully and intimately personal, not this remote watchmaker relationship described by the Deists. But it is easy to modify the quality of the relationship and to leave the basic structure of it unchanged, so that we continue to picture God as a Person, who looks down at this world which he has made and loves from ‘out there’. We know, of course, that he does not exist in space. But we think of him nevertheless as defined and marked off from other beings as if he did. And this is what is decisive. He is thought of as a Being whose separate existence over and above the sum of things has to be demonstrated and established.

      It is difficult to criticize this way of thinking without appearing to threaten the entire fabric of Christianity – so interwoven is it in the warp and woof of our thinking. And, of course, it is criticized by those who reject this supra-naturalist position as a rejection of Christianity. Those who, in the famous words of Laplace to Napoleon, ‘find no need of this hypothesis’