Abstract
The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1963 was James S. Stewart, Professor of New Testament in New College, Edinburgh, and arguably the most popular preacher in Scotland at the time. His books of sermons ran through several editions and there are accounts of queues forming outside churches where he was due to preach long before doors were opened. His theological outlook was as conservative as his approach to New Testament studies. One of the guests of the Lord High Commissioner to the Assembly, that year the then Duke of Gloucester, was Dr Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
A couple of months earlier, the Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, had published Honest to God, trailed in “The Observer” under the title “Our Image of God must Go”. When he thanked the Archbishop for his address to the Assembly, James Stewart went on to thank him profusely for his defence of traditional Christian teaching against those who wanted to “demythologise” it. There was no doubt who was in Dr Stewart’s usually pacifist gunfire.
The Archbishop of Canterbury had been critical of Honest to God. According to Robinson’s biographer, Eric James, Michael Ramsey said it was “utterly wrong” to denounce the imagery of God in heaven, and especially critical of an article in a Sunday newspaper in which Robinson outlined the theme of his book. Later Robinson said that in the article he was “thinking aloud” and that his views were “tentative”. In that case, said the Archbishop, they should not have been expressed in such a public way.
I had two personal reactions to the newspaper article and then the book. I know now that the book was slight, and contained little (if anything) that was original except that it was written by a Bishop. As a student in a university faculty of arts in advance of studying theology, I found such tentativeness expressed from within the heart of the Church of England’s establishment liberating. I felt it freed me not to accept uncritically any institutional expression of Christian faith, to go on exploring for myself, which I did within the liberating experience of the academic study of theology in a Cambridge college and divinity faculty.
However before I could enter the world of academic theology I had to complete my arts degree in politics and history. I had the unforgettable experience of being taught in a class of two for one of the finals papers by John P. Macintosh, a brilliant political scientist who went on to become a Labour MP and died tragically young. One day we were chatting and he asked if I had read Honest to God. I said that I had and how much it had meant to me. I doubt very much if John Macintosh ever went to church, though ( perhaps because!) he was married to a minister’s daughter. He asked if he could borrow my copy, never returned it, but I always hoped had found as glimmer of insight into what mattered about Christian faith from a man sent by God whose name was John. Just as Michael Ramsey later admitted his initial reaction to Honest to God was wrong. “I was soon to grasp” he wrote, “How many were the contemporary gropings and quests which lay behind Honest to God.”