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
Preface to the first edition
It belongs to the office of a bishop in the Church to be a guardian and defender of its doctrine. I find myself a bishop at a moment when the discharge of this burden can seldom have demanded greater depth of divinity and quality of discernment.
For I suspect that we stand on the brink of a period in which it is going to become increasingly difficult to know what the true defence of Christian truth requires. There are always those (and doubtless rightly they will be in the majority) who see the best, and indeed the only, defence of doctrine to lie in the firm reiteration, in fresh and intelligent contemporary language, of ‘the faith once delivered to the saints’. And the Church has not lacked in recent years theologians and apologists who have given themselves to this task. Their work has been rewarded by a hungry following, and there will always be need of more of them. Nothing that I go on to say should be taken to deny their indispensable vocation.
At the same time, I believe we are being called, over the years ahead, to far more than a restating of traditional orthodoxy in modern terms. Indeed, if our defence of the Faith is limited to this, we shall find in all likelihood that we have lost out to all but a tiny religious remnant. A much more radical recasting, I would judge, is demanded, in the process of which the most fundamental categories of our theology – of God, of the supernatural, and of religion itself – must go into the melting. Indeed, though we shall not of course be able to do it, I can at least understand what those mean who urge that we should do well to give up using the word ‘God’ for a generation, so impregnated has it become with a way of thinking we may have to discard if the Gospel is to signify anything.
For I am convinced that there is a growing gulf between the traditional orthodox supernaturalism in which our Faith has been framed and the categories which the ‘lay’ world (for want of a better term) finds meaningful today. And by that I do not mean there is an increasing gap between Christianity and pagan society. That may well be so, but this is not the divide of which I am speaking. For it is not a division on the truth of the Gospel itself. Indeed, many who are Christians find themselves on the same side as those who are not. And among one’s intelligent non-Christian friends one discovers many who are
