THE publication of Honest to God, in 1963, needs to be
understood against the background of that whole extraordinary
decade. As the famous verse in Philip Larkin's "Annus Mirabilis"
put it:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
From 1963 to 1969 I was a curate in Hampstead, the epicentre of
liberated young things for whom it was not too late. An explosion
of freedom after the sober '50s was expressed in clothes, music,
and occasional drugs.
What is often overlooked, however, is that this was also a very
idealistic time. Young people not only wanted to dance, and make
love: they banded together, locally, to perform acts of social
service, or went abroad with VSO.
With the advent of the Harold Wilson government in 1964, and its
re-election in 1966, there was a real belief that the world could
be changed. Against that background, it is easy to see why
Honest to God made such an impact. Throwing off the old
image of God was all part of the new heady climate of release from
all traditional restraints, and a desire for a new and better
world.
The impact of Honest to God was greatly helped by both
an article in The Observer, headed "Our Image of God Must
Go", and the notoriety of Robinson as a result of his participation
as a defence witness in the Lady Chatterley trial.
The book sold in vast numbers and became a huge talking-point
for anyone who was remotely interested in religion. Its main themes
can be simply stated. First, we had to move away from spatial
imagery - especially the idea of God "up there" - and learn to
think of the transcendence of God in new ways.
In fact, one suggestion in the book, to think of God in the
depth of our relationships, still used spatial imagery, as did Paul
Tillich's reference to God as "The ground of our being". Another
linked theme was to heighten awareness of the mythological nature
of much traditional thought, and, following Bultmann, to
demythologise it. A third one was to think of Jesus not in terms of
Greek philosophical thought, but as "The man for others".
A fourth was to set the imperative of love at the heart of
Christian ethics, with as little spelling out of this as possible
in terms of rules. Deciding what was the most loving action
depended on the actual situation, and was to be done mainly by
considering the consequences of various courses of action - hence
the term "situation ethics".
PERHAPS most radical and challenging of all were Robinson's
quotations from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from
Prison, with their speculation that the world had now grown
up, and we had to learn to live before God, without God, in our
strengths, with a "religionless Christianity", and not just look
for his grace in our weakness and failure.
My personal view of Honest to God at the time, and
subsequently, is that it was pastorally helpful. Robinson had a
strong missionary sense, and he wanted to help people relocate God
in their own experience. I think for a lot of people he succeeded
in doing just that. And, although he drew on a number of academic
theologians, it was possible to make their thought accessible, even
to people of limited educational background.
I remember, in particular, preaching at one evensong on
Tillich's theme of God as "Ultimate concern", and a cleaning lady
who used to sit, almost hidden, right at the back, told me that it
was the most helpful sermon she had ever heard.
That said, many people found the overall theological framework
suggested by the book wanting. The then Archbishop of Canterbury,
Dr Michael Ramsey, published Image Old and New to try to
balance the debate. Those who had been influenced by Donald
MacKinnon at Cambridge were suspicious of any view of Christianity
which avoided the hard questions about the truth and falsity of
Christian assertions.
Those influenced by Austin Farrer found ways at once more
orthodox, and more sophisticated, of thinking about the
relationship of God to the world. Those caught up with
Wittgenstein, and linguistic philosophy, were involved with even
more radical questioning about whether Christian statements had any
meaning at all.
At the same time, the intellectual world and the political world
were rapidly moving on. Robinson ended Honest to God by
saying that, whatever people thought of his work, it would turn out
to be not radical enough. This proved to be the case for those who
followed Don Cupitt into the "Sea of Faith" network.
And so it did for those who argued for a Christian atheism, with
the result that a Time magazine-cover in 1966 simply had
the words on it "God is dead". Politically, it was the time of
serious Christian-Marxist dialogue, liberation theology, and Jürgen
Moltmann's theology, which prioritised hope as the wellspring for
both faith and action.
In 1968, the Professor of Mathematics of Westfield College,
where I was chaplain, went off to Paris to help man the barricades,
and, in that same year, Time produced another cover
indicating that God was up and alive, and full of hope again. It
was an extraordinary, rapidly moving decade, which, in a few years,
had left Honest to God behind.
Yet the book remains a landmark, and the challenge that faced
Robinson is even more pressing today, for those of us who speak, or
write, about the faith in a culture in which Christianity has
become a foreign language, and what goes on in church is strange,
if not alien.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford,
Gresham Professor of Divinity, and an Honorary Professor of
Theology at King's College, London. His new book The Image of
Christ in Modern Art will be published later in the year by
Ashgate.