Honest to God. John A. T. Robinson

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      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 to intelligent non-theologians but to those in closest touch with the unchurched masses of our 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.