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Doubts about Doubt: Honest to God Forty Years On*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Abstract
Honest to God, published in 1963, was one of the most public religious bestsellers of the twentieth century. Because it was written by an Anglican bishop it was especially controversial. Yet there are questions that remain and this article highlights seven such questions which draw attention to weaknesses in the book. An alternative proposal is offered here. Robinson had his finger on a real problem in postwar British church life and, in a measure, theology. I believe the problem was mostly or largely caused not by the New Testament and historic Christianity itself, but by the way in which the post-Enlightenment world had assimilated and re-expressed the Christian faith. What Robinson referred to when speaking of supraor supernaturalism belonged within an essentially Deist or Epicurean framework, and he was struggling with the unwelcome consequences of people being unable to relate to their absentee landlord, and simultaneously puzzling over the fact that some people did not find this a problem. The huge popularity of his book shows that he struck a chord with a great many people. The tragedy of Honest to God, as I perceive it, is that Robinson did not see that what he was rejecting was a form of supernaturalism pressed upon Christianity by the Enlightenment; that he did not therefore go looking for help in finding other ways of holding together what the classic Christian tradition has claimed about God.
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- Copyright © SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) and The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust 2005
References
1. Robinson, J.A.T., Honest to God (London: SCM Press, 1963)Google Scholar. References to Honest to God are taken from this edition and are given in parentheses in the text.
2. Robinson, J.A.T., But That I Can't Believe (London: Collins, 1967).Google Scholar
3. Wilson, A.N., God's Funeral (London: John Murray, 1999).Google Scholar
4. See, e.g., Robinson, , Honest to God, pp. 15, 138–39.Google Scholar
5. See, too, MacIntyre's remarks about Bonhoeffer, quoted by Williams at p. 165 of Robinson, , Honest to God, 40th Anniversary Edition.Google Scholar
6. Though one might have supposed that a person so described would recall that in Greek the complement does not take the definite article, so that in ‘the word was God’ we would expect what John wrote, i.e. theos rather than ho theos (p. 71).
7. Robinson, J.A.T., The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology (London: SCM Press, 1952).Google Scholar
8. See Douglas Hall's comments and references in Honest to God, 40th Anniversary Edition, p. 146.Google Scholar
9. MacIntyre, A., Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).Google Scholar
10. Robinson, A.W., The Personal Life of the Christian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
11. It is not clear to me, I might add, whether either of them intend to distinguish this from ‘supernaturalism’, and if so in what way, but I will assume that the two words mean more or less the same thing.
12. Neiman, S., Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
13. Barth, K., The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Hoskyns, E.C.; London: Oxford University Press, 1933).Google Scholar
14. I find Robinson's brief remarks about revelation on p. 128—Christ as the disclosure of ultimate truth—at best inadequate for anything like this task.