Honest to God

January 26, 1964
Rochester

Honest to God

HONEST TO GOD is a book which is both disturbing and comforting. It is disturbing because careful reading will open up to you not only the serious obstacles confronting varieties of Christian orthodoxy, but also the fact, somewhat shocking to religious non-conformists, that some so-called liberal approaches to religion may be as dated as the buggy and as trivial as a gossip column. In both instances I may be over-stating the degree to which this book comprehends the weakness of accepted theologies, but in neither case does HONEST TO GOD provide much assurance that any current, popular religions deal with man’s theological needs in the realities of today’s world.

A radical religious expression would have caused less of a stir if the author, John A.T. Robinson were not high in the hierarchy of the Anglican Church, Bishop of Woolwich, England, managing the ecclesiastical affairs of a busy, urban diocese. Had he not been incapacitated for three months, he admits ruefully, he would never have had time to write this small, but provocative challenge to liberal and orthodox complacencies.

Why would a bishop create a tempest, at least among many clergymen and some lay groups? He is quite candid in the preface: “I believe we are being called, over the years ahead, to far more than a restating of traditional orthodoxy in modern times. Indeed, if our faith is limited to this, we shall find out in all likelihood that we have lost out to all but a tiny remnant. A much more radical recasting, I would judge, is demanded in the process of which the most fundamental categories of 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 it has become with a way of thinking we must discard if the Gospel is to signify anything ....”

He concludes his Preface modestly, but provocatively, “What I have tried to say, in a tentative and exploratory way, may seem to be radical, and doubtless, to many, heretical. The one thing I am fairly sure is true, in retrospect, it will be seen to have erred in not being nearly radical enough.”

Let me say as positively as I can that I would not pre-empt your time to review the painful theological probings of an Anglican Bishop if I were not convinced that both the easy assurances of orthodoxy and the glib skepticisms of secularism are deficient in intellectual and moral resources to meet man’s need in this modern world.

A good way to grapple with the serious questions raised by Bishop Robinson is to read his book, HONEST TO GOD, with an attitude sympathetic to the author’s motives. If this sermon period stirs a few to read the book carefully, they will find it rewarding, although some may feel anxiety. Better still would be a study of the sources which I shall mention. Today, let me put before you just a few of the issues and affirmations of this Christian Bishop:

1)Where is God?
2)What some theologians are saying.
3)Can the Humanist or Naturalist say with any foundation that the Bishop is now on our side?
4)Is it nonsense to say that God must go, but Christ must stay?
5)Is love the ultimate reality?
6)Then my conclusion will be drawn from a sermon nineteen hundred years old.

Fist, where can God be found? The universe of the Bible was earth-centered and three-storied. God was “up there” directing stars and storms. Jesus descended into hell and ascended into heaven. God was in the sky. But the revisions of cosmology by Copernicus and his successors to our time of Einstein and his successors brought knowledge not only of the mammoth reaches of space but also that even in our little solar system, the Earth was not the center.

So more modern minds discarded the Ptolemaic idea of the earth-centered, three-storied, universe, accepted Copernican interpretations and placed God not “up there,” but “out there.” God was “out there” in his infinite wisdom, somewhere in space, somehow with the ability to intrude in earthly affairs like unto a cosmic visitor in science fiction.

The idea of God “out there” has no more validity than God “up there,” but the notion persists. Bishop Robinson believes the idea of God “out there” is a hindrance to the development of a faith with meaning. A Soviet cosmonaut made a quite unsophisticated criticism of religion when he announced triumphantly that nowhere in the succession of orbits did he encounter God. Although Bishop Robinson did not use that incident as illustration, should not the cosmonaut’s observation make one think of levels less naive?

If God is not “up there,” or “out there,” where is the Divine Reality, if there is one? The liberals and the late 19th century and early 20th century, which awareness of the cosmological difficulties of God “up there” and “out there,” turned to the idea of the immanent God – God within us. But the increased knowledge of depth psychology, with wide acceptance of the probability that many ideas of God and religion are projections of human feelings of conflict, guilt, or inadequacy, has brought about a decided lessening of belief that the inner light represents divine illumination.

Second, in order to keep in mind the scholarly sources that are causing a theological revolution in the second half of the 20th century, many names could be mentioned. But of primary influence on Bishop Robinson’s decision to explore the most untouchable of Christian assumptions are Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Just a word about each in order to be receptive to the context in which Bishop Robinson writes.

Paul Tillich, a native of Germany who came to America in the thirties, a refugee from Hitler’s Nazism is the best known theologian in America and probably in all parts of the world dominated by Christian thought. Bishop Robinson writes of the great influence on his that in a sermon of Tillich’s published in 1949, “Depth of Existence,” (p.21): “... it opened my eyes to the transformation that seemed to come over so much of the traditional religious symbolism when it was transposed from the heights to the depths.” God, Tillich was saying, is not a projection ‘out there,’ an Other beyond the skies, of whose existence we have to convince ourselves, but the Ground of our very being .... “The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translated it, and speak of the depths of your life, the source of your being, of your ultimate concern.”

Of particular impact on Robinson was Tillich’s injunction, (p. 47), “you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. Indeed, the line between those who believe in God and those who do not bears little relation to their profession of the existence or non-existence of such a being.”

Rudolf Bultmann is another name one cannot omit when considering HONEST TO GOD. Famous New Testament scholar of Warburg, Germany, Bultmann proposed that the gospel stories in their entirety accrue from the mythological concept of a three-storied universe. Not only the spectacular miracles – virgin birth and resurrection are myths, but also the entire fabric of gospel is to be understood as part of an antiquated world-view. Bultmann, who coined the term, “demythologizing,” to describe his approach, maintained that only when this mythology is discarded can the gospel have meaning for modern man.

The third man is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born 1906, a determined anti-Nazi who was arrested in 1963 for implication in the plot to kill Hitler. Although never tried, Bonhoeffer was sent to prison camps for two years, then strangled by the SS by special order of Himmler on 4/9/45 a few days before the camp was liberated by U.S. Army forces; no one knows his grave. Of Bonhoeffer’s writings, most influential are letters from prison and one paragraph outlining a book he never lived to write. Bishop Robinson seems profoundly moved by Bonhoeffer’s interpretations, being particularly stimulated by Bonhoeffer’s belief that what is most needed is Christianity without religion, (p. 36-7)

“Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. In questions concerning science, art and even ethics this has become an understood thing which one scarcely dares to tilt at anymore. But for the last hundred years or so it has been increasingly true of religious questions also: it is becoming evident that everything gets along without God and just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, what we call ‘God’ is being more and more edged out of life, losing more and more ground.”

Perhaps an indication of why Robinson’s book has caused considerable dismay as well as approval can be seen in the Bishop’s approval of a young scientist, Dr. John Wren-Lewis, whose trenchant criticisms of prevailing religious beliefs, along with a thought-out return to the Anglican Church have stirred much interest in England:

“For example, Christian writers whose positive views, as far as I can judge, very similar to my own, even though they use different language to express them, still feel constrained to produce ‘refutations’ of the Freudian case against religion, although in fact a very large proportion of what passes for religion in our society is exactly the sort of neurotic illness that Freud describes, and the first essential step in convincing people that Christianity can be true in spite of Freud is to assert outright that belief based on the projection-mechanisms he describes is false, however much it may say, ‘Lord, Lord.’ It is not enough to describe such beliefs as childish or primitive, for this implies the true is something like them, even though much more “refined” or “enlightened,” whereas in reality nothing like the ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ I was brought up to believe in can be true. It is not merely that the Old Man in the Sky is only a mythological symbol for the Infinite Mind behind the scenes, nor yet that this Being is benevolent rather than fearful: the truth is that this whole way of thinking is wrong, and if such a Being did exist, he would be the very devil.”

Next, I would observe that there may be many among our liberal churches who would seize upon the notion that Bishop Robinson is really a Humanist or a Naturalist, under the disguise, unconsciously assumed, of a heavy-handed and abstruse re-working of such comforting Christian words as “Christ,” “Being,” “Cross,” “Redemption,” with the consequence that all Christian meanings have been drained from the sounds of the words of faith. I do not believe this to be so. We are not likely to see him seeking a secular job or a Humanist church. As we shall see, Bishop Robinson sees the Divine reality as love; God is love; this is the Ultimate Reality beyond all the conditionings of cosmic time and human experience. But he distinctly points out that he does not believe love is God. In other words, he is not content to rest in the belief that all values are human values occurring because of human experience. He would likely hold humanistic beliefs to be conditioned by a particular world-view, and those beliefs will become antiquated when that world view becomes antiquated, as all world-views do. As he writes, (p. 125), “In the pagan world it was – and still is – a matter of the main of [mental] images. For us it is a question of much more of mental images – as one after another serves its purpose and has to go.” Perhaps you wold differ in so appraising the author’s basic approach, but one of our obligations (in the words of Roger Hazelton), is to “examine carefully the ground we stand on and the distance from it to the places where other people actually live.”

Fourth, one of the heavy blows that Bishop Robinson delivers against traditional Christian views is his affirmation about Jesus Christ. This, too is an indication that not by any means should the Unitarian Universalists Association expect a letter of his applying for ministerial fellowship. The point of view he advocates can be highlighted by a question, “Is it nonsense to say that God must go, but Christ must stay.”

Bishop Robinson quotes with approval St. Augustine’s definition that the nature of God “is as a circle whose center is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere.” The other night I quoted this to our F W & M Committee in the course of discussion of religious symbols, asking how they would represent God, so defined. After awhile, the chairman held up a blank sheet of paper, and no one disagreed.

Then Bishop Robinson points out, as religious liberals have maintained for years, that the Bible does not teach that Jesus was God. This orthodox doctrine in recent years has been more frequently required as creedal commitment for membership in Councils of Churches; but it is a “distortion of Biblical truth.”

Furthermore, the author lends his approval (p. 36) first quoting Bonhoeffer, “Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis....” Robinson adds, (p. 37), (God) “is not required in order to guarantee anything, to solve anything or in any way to come to the rescue.” Then he quotes Julian Huxley, the humanist, (p. 378) “the god hypothesis is no longer of any pragmatic value for the interpretation or comprehension of nature, and indeed, often stands in the way of better and truer interpretations. Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat.”

But if Bishop Robinson’s idea of God seems thin, his apprehension of Jesus is full-bodied. The Cross is lifted before you today as a symbol, because Jesus by his death on the cross is the key to Bishop Robinson’s faith. The affirmation is found several places, (p.74) “It is in Jesus, and Jesus alone, that there is nothing of self to be seen, but solely the ultimate, unconditional love of God. It is as he emptied himself utterly of himself that he became the revealer of the Father’s glory – for that name and that glory is simply love.” Bishop Robinson then affirms, “Jesus is the ‘man for others,’ the one in whom Love has completely taken over, the one who is utterly open to, and united with, the Ground of his being....”

(p.82) “It is the life of the ‘man for others’ the love whereby we are brought completely into one with the ground of our being, manifesting itself in the unreconciled relationships of our existence.”

Now I miss some of the steps where the author moves from his appraisal of the Christian gospel as mythology to where he comes out with this testimony about Jesus, but I cannot deny that depositing all claims to divinity of Jesus in the man Jesus was, he strikes a chord to which many of us respond.

That Robinson, like many other thinkers today, Martin Buber, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, believes that God is demonstrated in human relationships – love and [?] should be balanced[;] that he believes that Love is more than a human value, it is the ultimate Ground of Being. (P.60) God, since he is Love, is encountered in his fullness only between man and man. And this is the burden of the whole Prophetic tradition – that it is only in response and obedience to the neighbor that the claims of God can be met and known. Because the Christian expression is in terms of justice for the poor and needy, Robinson says this, “A right relationship to God depended on nothing religious; in fact religion could be the greatest barrier to it.” (p.61)

As indicated by the volume of correspondence, reviews both appreciative and critical, Bishop Robinson has started many people re-thinking theology. As I have often stated, in our societies we have a particular obligation to achieve a personal framework of belief because neither the society nor the association would or could present you with a happy creed, anxiety-proof and invulnerable to the dynamics of new experience and changing thought.

What can be concluded? 1900 years ago, Athens was one of the places where Paul was quite unsuccessful in establishing the “way.” It was also the occasion when, according to Act, he delivered one of his most famous speeches. The Athenians were not convinced when Paul had asserted that God does not live in shrines, does not need to be served by human beings.

Most people today are not greatly different. They respond to the idea of God who lives in a shrine they can attend, and in which they can serve in the shrine by sacrifice and offering.

But there may be many, perhaps some of you, who will look deeper than did the Athenians in Paul’s audience. But to find the closest approach to what is ultimately real in the meeting of person and person; to apprehend that God was disclosed by Jesus only to the degree that Jesus was the man for others, emptying himself in the self-protective defenses of the ego and the desire for acquisitions and itch for comfort; – you may not be ready to label these brash and marvelous ways “Honest to God,” but surely one ought to be willing to respond, with his own best offering of what religion is and should do. What do you think? What is your strongest loyalty?

Can we stand the glare of dazzling mystery? Or must we project our fears, feelings and anxieties upon the vast screen of the Universe and deify the projected image? Each must answer his needs out of his own experience and according to his own strength and wisdom. Some feel no need to deal with mystery, content that the faith of their fathers will provide both reason for life and values for living. Others are satisfied that humanistic values need no support beyond human rights of individual fulfillment and social duty. I respect both these bases for belief, but the first leaves me skeptical and the second leaves me unsatisfied.

Still others, and if you are interested, you may number among them, who without haste, and I hope, without presumption, seek ways to expose our private self to the light that ever shines, hoping that in ways none others can really inspect, that day in some way the eternal creative spirit will register its ineffable work upon us.