Theology: Religionless Christianity

God is in heaven, exact location not defined. His son came to earth in human flesh, preached and worked miracles, by his death redeemed man, and rose again to heaven, where he “sitteth on the right hand of God.” So say the Bible and the Christian creeds; but since the story makes no sense to many literal, science-minded men. the Right Rev. John A. T. Robinson. 43, Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, accommodatingly explains in a new book that the doctrine is mostly dubious. Published last month in a five-shilling paperback gaily titled Honest to God, Bishop Robinson’s revision of Anglican teaching has become a runaway English bestseller and has stirred up the Church of England’s loudest row in years.

Borrowed Blend. Honest to God is a blend of ideas borrowed from some of the century’s most provocative Protestant theologians. Like German Biblical Critic Rudolf Bultmann, Robinson regards the virgin birth and the heaven-above-hell-below framework of Scripture as religious myths; he argues that the essential Gospel message must be “demythologized” by liberating it from antiquated supernatural language. Rejecting the Biblical image of a transcendent God in the sky, Robinson suggests that Christians think of God the way Existentialist Theologian Paul Tillich does: as the “ground of all being.”

Fortified by such insights, Robinson believes, the church may grow into what the late German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “religionless Christianity” —a spare and stripped-down vital faith.

None of this thinking is particularly new to the theological academies, but many Anglicans were shocked that it should come from a bishop sworn to defend the church against heresy. “It is not every day,” grumbled the Church Times, “that a bishop goes on public record as apparently denying almost every Christian doctrine of the church in which he holds office.” The Manchester Guardian called it a “dangerous tract,” suitable only for theologians to read, and in a front-page editorial, London’s Daily Mail wondered “whether he should continue as a bishop.” “

Vigor & Recklessness.” But Honest to God was approved by the evangelical Church of England Newspaper, which argued that “a reading of Robinson’s book should be accompanied by a recollection of the conspicuous failure of the Church of England as a whole to make Christianity meaningful to this generation,” and deplored the “preoccupied, weary effort to keep the old machinery going.” The Rev. Peter Hollis of Birmingham gave Robinson some rank-and-file support: “I have often wondered how long we could continue to present the Gospel in traditional categories with any real effect.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury admit ted that Robinson was right in trying to find a new image of God that would appeal to those outside Christianity, but noted: “When the ordinary Christian speaks of God as being up there, he does not literally mean that God is in a place beyond the bright blue sky. He is putting in poetic language, which is the only serviceable language we have got. that God is supreme. It is utterly wrong and misleading to denounce imagery of God held by Christian men and women . . . and to say that we cannot have any new thought until it is all swept away.”