The Worst Policy
John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God
by S. M. Hutchens
One of the chief vexations faced by the liberal churchman is the charge that he is not an honest man. His religion is marked, in the name of enlightenment, by dissent and departure from the traditional beliefs of the Church, while his public face uses—it must use—the language of the Church in its public work.
In his mouth the old Christian words refer to a world of meaning quite different from that which Christians have traditionally understood them to signify. Yet he persists in calling himself a Christian, and, through his re-definition of Christianity, privileges himself to believe that he is.
He accepts church administrative and teaching posts and pastorates, with their livings, disbelieving the beliefs that brought the Christian faith into the world. On Easter he speaks of the Resurrection of Christ in firm doubt that Jesus ever, in the fashion alleged by the Gospels, came to life and rose from his grave. He buries the faithful dead whose future life, he believes, is very likely only in the memories of those who loved them. He gives seminarians to believe that the only intelligent course to be taken is the one he is following—that it is honest, creative, loving, and necessary.
Serving the Despisers
In early 1963 an English bishop, when the Bible’s supernaturalism became insupportable to his critical faculties, did not resign his office, but published a little book explaining why it wasn’t necessary. Honesty toward God and man required that he abandon the old orthodoxy. True religion, in order to be true, had to be purged of mythical elements, taking another, more reasonable and scientific course. John A. T. Robinson’s five-shilling paperback Honest to God quickly became a bestseller in England, and later the same year appeared in North America with the same result.
Reviewed not only in the religious press, but in news magazines like Time and Newsweek, its author, the bishop of Woolwich, a winsome and engaging New Testament scholar, quickly became not only a celebrity, but an icon of genial, sophisticated, liberal religion for the masses—well, not exactly the masses, with their conservatism and credulity—but at least those for whom the time was ripe for a transition from an outmoded Christianity (the kind with miracles) to a wiser, better-educated, and cultured sort (the kind without).
Time magazine correctly noted that Robinson was presenting nothing new. What he believed had been taught in the mainline Protestant theological academy for generations, the product of an apologetic orientation toward modernizing culture tracing its roots (as Grover Foley noted in his Christian Century review) back to Schleiermacher—with whom, a candidate for a theological doctorate of my acquaintance remarked, with complete seriousness, theology actually began. Early in its portentous decade, however, Honest to God appeared to answer a need on the part of many who desired to remain Christian but sit very loose to traditional prescriptions about what one must believe and confess to do so.
The ostensible problem of this book echoes that of Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion, the question of how the man who has lost his Christianity to the modern point of view (religion’s “cultured despisers”) can recover it, but this belated reviewer (who was 11 when it was published) wonders whether the deeper issue was given in the title—the question of how someone with these beliefs can, before God or anyone else, present himself as any kind of Christian believer. No reasonable definition of Christianity, any definition that makes even simple lexical sense, can “demythologize” the Scriptures and the creeds. Their contents as incarnate, as believed-in history, particularly as concern the life and person of Christ, are of the essence.
But is this book merely a historical artifact, the theological world represented by Bishop Robinson—Protestant liberalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—having lived its life and been replaced by various others? Or is it even less significant, a fad of the notorious sixties?
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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