Honest to God. John A. T. Robinson

Professor Julian Huxley, expressly contrasts ‘dualistic supernaturalism’ with ‘unitary naturalism’.³ The existence of God as a separate entity can, he says, be dismissed as superfluous; for the world may be explained just as adequately without positing such a Being.

      The ‘naturalist’ view of the world identifies God, not indeed with the totality of things, the universe, per se, but with what gives meaning and direction to nature. In Tillich’s words,

      The phrase deus sive natura, used by people like Scotus Erigena 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. In modern naturalism the religious quality of these affirmations has almost disappeared, especially among philosophising scientists who understand nature in terms of materialism and mechanism.⁴

      Huxley himself has indeed argued movingly for religion⁵ as a necessity of the human spirit. But any notion that God really exists ‘out there’ must be dismissed: ‘gods are peripheral phenomena produced by evolution’.⁶ True religion (if that is not a contradiction in terms, as it would be for the Marxist) consists in harmonizing oneself with the evolutionary process as it develops ever higher forms of self-consciousness.

      ‘Naturalism’ as a philosophy of life is clearly and consciously an attack on Christianity. For it ‘the term “God” becomes interchangeable with the term “universe” and therefore is semantically superfluous’.⁷ But the God it is bowing out is the God of the ‘supranaturalist’ way of thinking. The real question is how far Christianity is identical with, or ultimately committed to, this way of thinking.

       Must Christianity be ‘Mythological’?

      Undoubtedly it has been identified with it, and somewhere deep down in ourselves it still is. The whole world-view of the Bible, to be sure, is unashamedly supranaturalistic. It thinks in terms of a three-storey universe with God up there, ‘above’ nature. But even when we have refined away what we should regard as the crudities and literalism of this construction, we are still left with what is essentially a mythological picture of God and his relation to the world. Behind such phrases as ‘God created the heavens and the earth’, or ‘God came down from heaven’, or ‘God sent his only-begotten Son’, lies a view of the world which portrays God as a person living in heaven, a God who is distinguished from the gods of the heathen by the fact that ‘there is no god beside me’.

      In the last century a painful but decisive step forward was taken in the recognition that the Bible does contain ‘myth’, and that this is an important form of religious truth. It was gradually acknowledged, by all except extreme fundamentalists, that the Genesis stories of the Creation and Fall were representations of the deepest truths about man and the universe in the form of myth rather than history, and were none the less valid for that. Indeed, it was essential to the defence of Christian truth to recognize and assert that these stories were not history, and not therefore in competition with the alternative accounts of anthropology or cosmology. Those who did not make this distinction were, we can now see, playing straight into the hands of Thomas Huxley and his friends.

      In this century the ground of the debate has shifted – though in particular areas of Christian doctrine (especially in that of the last things⁸) the dispute that raged a hundred years ago in relation to the first things has still to be fought through to its conclusion, and the proper distinction established between what statements are intended as history and what as myth. But the centre of today’s debate is concerned not with the relation of particular myths to history, but with how far Christianity is committed to a mythological, or supranaturalist, picture of the universe at all. Is it necessary for the Biblical faith to be expressed in terms of this world-view, which in its way is as primitive philosophically as the Genesis stories are primitive scientifically? May it not be that the truth of Christianity can be detached from the one as much as from the other – and may it not be equally important to do so if it is to be defended properly today? In other words, is the reaction to naturalism the rehabilitation of supranaturalism, or can one say that Julian Huxley is performing as valuable a service in detaching Christianity from the latter as we now see his grandfather was in shaking the Church out of its obscurantism in matters scientific?

      This is the problem to which Bultmann has addressed himself. And he answers boldly, ‘There is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age.’⁹ The New Testament, he says, presents redemption in Christ as a supranatural event – as the incarnation from ‘the other side’ of a celestial Being who enters this earthly scene through a miraculous birth, performs signs and wonders as an indication of his heavenly origin, and after an equally miraculous resurrection returns by ascent to the celestial sphere whence he came. In truth, Bultmann maintains, all this language is not, properly speaking, describing a supranatural transaction of any kind but is an attempt to express the real depth, dimension and significance of the historical event of Jesus Christ. In this person and event there was something of ultimate, unconditional significance for human life – and that, translated into the mythological view of the world, comes out as ‘God’ (a Being up there) ‘sending’ (to ‘this’ world) his only-begotten ‘Son’. The transcendental significance of the historical event is ‘objectivized’ as a supranatural transaction.

      I do not wish here to be drawn into the controversy which Bultmann’s programme of demythologizing has provoked.¹⁰ Much of it has, I believe, been due to elements in his presentation which are to some extent personal and fortuitous. Thus,

      (a) Bultmann is inclined to make statements about what ‘no modern man’ could accept (such as ‘It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and believe. . .’) which reflect the scientific dogmatism of a previous generation. This gives to some of his exposition an air of old-fashioned modernism.

      (b) The fact that he regards so much of the Gospel history as expendable (e.g. the empty tomb in toto) is due to the fact that purely in his capacity as a New Testament critic he is extremely, and I believe unwarrantably, distrustful of the tradition. His historical scepticism is not necessarily implied in his critique of mythology.

      (c) His heavy reliance on the particular philosophy of (Heidegger’s) Existentialism as a replacement for the mythological world-view is historically, and indeed geographically, conditioned. He finds it valuable as a substitute for the contemporary generation in Germany; but we are not bound to embrace it as the only alternative.

      One of the earliest and most penetrating criticisms of Bultmann’s original essay was made by Bonhoeffer, and to quote it will serve as a transition to his own contribution. ‘My view of it today’, he writes from prison in 1944,

      would be not that he went too far, as most people seem to think, but that he did not go far enough. It is not only the mythological conceptions such as the miracles, the ascension and the like (which are not in principle separable from the conceptions of God, faith and so on) that are problematic, but the ‘religious’ conceptions themselves. You cannot, as Bultmann imagines, separate God and miracles, but you do have to be able to interpret and proclaim both of them in a ‘non-religious’ sense.¹¹

       Must Christianity be ‘Religious’?

      What does Bonhoeffer mean by this startling paradox of a non-religious understanding of God?¹²

      I will try to define my position from the historical angle. The movement beginning about the thirteenth century (I am not going to get involved in any arguments about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (under which head I place the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and manages in science, social and political affairs, art, ethics and religion) has in our time reached a certain completion. Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. In questions concerning science, art, and even ethics, this has become an understood thing which one scarcely dares to tilt at any more. But for the last hundred years or so it has been increasingly true of religious questions also: it is becoming evident that everything gets along