Did I really write that ?: 1988 reflections revisited

A bit of autobiography will give context to my chapter ‘Truth and resistance’ in God’s Truth: essays to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Honest to God ¹ before I revisit what I wrote then.

Confirmed in a suburban London parish with 900 Easter communicants, I arrived at Oxford already an accepted ordinand. I was enthusiastically involved in my Oxford college chapel, its worship and the feverish discussion groups in the chaplain’s rooms. I was involved in university Christianity, in a joint Anglican–Methodist university mission to Sheffield and in organizing the University Mission led by Trevor Huddleston. Those were indeed different times, when college chapels and the SCM could present as vigorous a programme of religious activity and discussion as the evangelical societies.

When Honest to God ² was published during my third year, the massive public debate around the Observer article was wonderful: I could be as opinionated as I wanted and find plenty of others to join in the excitement. So I went to Evensong on the Sunday after Ascension Day expecting to hear why we didn’t need to believe that Christ ‘ascended’. As I referenced in the 1988 essay, the preacher was the noted New Testament scholar Dr George Caird. His opening was brilliant: ‘St Luke has pulled Dr Robinson’s leg, and it has come off in his hand.’ ³ Attention was grabbed – and the content of the rest of the sermon completely forgotten – except to notice that Dr Caird shared in the widespread academic and ecclesiastical disdain for Honest to God. Some reacted with ‘Robinson’s got it completely wrong’; others with ‘Surely we all realized that God isn’t literally “up there”.’ Some managed to hold both those views at once. The rapidly produced The Honest to God Debate ⁴ wonderfully exhibits the range of positive and negative reactions, alongside some heartfelt expressions of appreciation. Alasdair MacIntyre, no less, declared Robinson to be an atheist, ⁵ and with wonderful irony the collection contains the perceptive essay, ‘Concerning theism’ by David Jenkins, ⁶ himself later a lightning conductor (metaphorical and literal) as the controversial Bishop of Durham.

Confused about the debate, I was again hopeful when asked a year later, as a seminarian at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to meet Dr Robinson at Boston airport to bring him to lecture at the seminary. Sitting in the rear seat of the car, I seized my opportunity. The previous Friday’s Church Times had headlined the first massive decline in the number of candidates offering for ordination; that news made me very anxious about what might lie ahead for me. What was Robinson’s view? ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘just part of the process of secularization’ – a comment too dismissive to assuage my anxiety and one that obliterated any memory of the content of his lecture.

But within a few years of that encounter my respect for John Robinson was to become immeasurably wider and deeper. In 1969, I joined the Southwark Diocesan Lay Training Team, one of the creative initiatives Robinson oversaw as Bishop of Woolwich and one element in ‘South Bank Religion’, a remarkable network of creativity, including industrial mission, social and community action, pastoral care and counselling, non-residential theological education – to name just a few. It brought together a group of people as talented as it was intense. I didn’t overlap for very long with Robinson’s time in Southwark, but long enough to savour his radical conviction and engagement.

In my 1988 essay, written after my return to Southwark as an area bishop, I connected my experience of 1963 with Robinson’s Southwark context, and affirmed that Honest to God must be seen alongside that nexus of initiatives, headlines, activities and personnel that was ‘South Bank Religion’, and was profoundly related to what Robinson himself had declared to be his purpose in writing the book:

I want God to be as real for our modern, secular, scientific world as he ever was for the ‘ages of faith’. ⁷

Publicizing this sixtieth-anniversary conference to colleagues from those days brought reactions of deep gratitude to Robinson for far more than Honest to God, and in particular for his encouragement of active engagement with all the most important challenges of human life, in the hope of a Church whose thinking and action would be a worthy contemporary expression of the Christian movement.

In the 1988 essay I recalled a question asked at a meeting I attended as part of the Lay Training Team: ‘What has happened to all the people who read Honest to God?’ Asked around a decade after its publication, it was a ‘good question’ even then ⁸ and even more so at the time of the 1988 book; but after 60 years, how many are left to ask?

Moreover, there was always more to that question than the personal faith journeys of people who have or have not read the book. The project of which the book was only ever a part concerned the Church’s institutional life as a corporate body and the society in which it is set. So I reflected:

If in 1963 it was possible to hope that a humanity come of age would pursue the possibility of a common destiny with a serious commitment to the search for common answers, the dawn of 1988 hardly seems a time when that hope is being realised. ⁹

In 1988, as now, if there was religious growth, its theological underpinning was conservative and avoided the intellectual difficulties Robinson was seeking to address; political power then was not in the hands of those pursuing a ‘social consensus that would allow a gradual increase of wealth to be used for the gradual relief of the sufferings of the poor’. ¹⁰ Plus ça change. Moreover, the situation of the Church of England as an institution was far from the one that obtained when I first started to work in the diocese of Southwark, whose then registrar, asked how long the Church of England might continue after the last person stopped attending, could reply, not entirely in jest, ‘About 50 years.’ Numerically, the parish in which I grew up had seen its 900 Easter communicants diminish to a sixth of that number and Robinson’s forecast about secularization was not now a forecast but a very stark reality, financially and numerically, as stipendiary clergy numbers reduced, parishes were amalgamated and the resulting overwork and even burnout were what was crossing my desk as an area bishop. Some of this ‘process of secularization’ would not have been a surprise to Robinson or to his South Bank colleagues: I recall a proposal for a pre-emptive 25 per cent cut in the number of parochial clergy before it was forced upon us; the proposal failed, and the reduction has happened over the years incrementally and reluctantly, out of necessity rather than with any sense of excitement at the possibility of a Church reshaped.

In 1988, I shared with many the sense that Honest to God reflected a context of financial and numerical security and opportunities that seemed by then very distant, and that was even before the word ‘safeguarding’ had assumed its present capacity to dominate the Church’s agenda. The 1988 context also had, I observed, a destructive effect on the nature and content of theological discourse. I wrote:

Most recent theological storms have not elicited the public interest, let alone the Observer headlines, of 1963, but have tended to turn into domestic squabbles within the church, allowing an opportunity for the traditionalists to have another go at the ‘liberals’. These debates have not produced a new theological language which would bridge the gap between Christianity and those outside it for whom ultimate questions are still matters of deep concern. ¹¹

Religious observance has continued to decline, and at increased speed. The religious pluralism that is now so much more evident brings huge cultural enrichment, and African and Caribbean Christians has saved many churches in the inner city from total disappearance. Yet that diversity is often used to promote further alienation from our Christian inheritance to a far greater extent than I noted in 1988. Fifteen years later, as Church of England Bishop to Prisons, I observed that it had taken the arrival and disproportionate incarceration of Muslims with their requirements about diet and showers to remind the authorities of a world in which the detail of life could be determined by religious belief. With hindsight I was remarkably complacent about the emergence of a world in which there is such ignorance of Christianity that people generally go to their deathbed without access to the words that accompanied their forebears on their last journey. They are not better off for that.

On one point, however, my convictions have if anything strengthened in the intervening years. Accepting Robinson’s claim that the most original theological point in Honest to God was ‘the holding together of Paul Tillich’s theology [of ultimate concern] with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s estimate of humanity as “come of age”’, I nonetheless demurred.

Further reflection at the time began to cast doubt on that crucial synthesis, and the pressures and attitude-changes of the intervening years have rendered it quite untenable. It appears now [in 1988] simply part of the gentle optimism of that time. ¹²

In 2023, even more so. The crises of climate emergency and democracy’s instability confirm my own sense that Tillich’s very persuasive and often moving engagement with modern humanity’s religious quest seems to speak far less well to our time than Bonhoeffer’s language and example of resistance.

Robinson sought in Honest to God a new faith-language for a new context, one I find echoing Bonhoeffer’s challenge more than Tillich’s, to find a new language, ‘perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming, as was Jesus’ language … the language of a new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God’s peace with humankind and the coming of his kingdom’. ¹³ For all the Church’s often frantic attempts to meet ‘decline’ with strategies for numerical growth, I recognize an emergent new language and the passions that animated Robinson and his friends far more where in a whole variety of contexts people accept the challenge of this time of urgency and ‘pray and do right and wait for God’s own time’. ¹⁴

King Solomon’s rhetorical question ‘Shall God indeed reside with mortals on the Earth?’ ¹⁵ had received Robinson’s practical answer in all the initiatives and engagements he had fostered as Bishop of Woolwich; he gave his theological answer a decade later in The Human Face of God, ¹⁶ his book on the person of Christ. There is no doubt in my mind that if there is an image of God that has to go, here in that evocative title is the one that abides. It is the face of the ‘man for others’ of Honest to God, God residing with mortals on the Earth.