Honest to God and the Discourse on Patriarchy in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

On 17 March 1963 the Observer ran a feature article titled "Our Image of God Must Go" that outlined the main ideas of a forthcoming book. Bishop John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God was published three days later, its first edition selling out in a week. Within a year it sold over 300,000 copies, within a decade over 1,000,000. No religious publication other than the Bible sold as well in Britain. The Bishop of Woolwich became a national celebrity. The BBC devoted radio and television programs to Robinson's ideas; the popular press caricatured his theology in its headlines; magazines outlined his life and ideas in feature articles. Thousands of individuals sent letters of approbation and condemnation (Clements 178-79; James Life 115-16). Robinson rejected the image of God as a patriarch in heaven or, as he put it, "an Old Man in the sky" (HG 18). This traditional spatial metaphor survived from an earlier era, he wrote, before modern science exploded the three-decker universe of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Christian theology found itself on the defensive as scientific fact overwhelmed traditional religious cosmology. By the 1960s satellites and other space probes evacuated the concept of "God in His Heaven." "Now it seems there is no room for him," Robinson wrote of the archaic representation of the Deity, "not merely in the inn, but in the entire universe: for there are no vacant places left" (HG 13-14). Modern thought transcended the image of God as an anthropomorphic projection of the Father, the paterfamilias of lost childhood. Sigmund Freud demonstrated the psychological origins of this archaic Patriarch and, like Friedrich Nietzsche earlier, abandoned it. "Inevitably it feels like being orphaned," Robinson declared (HG 18). Borrowing from Paul Tillich and others, Robinson portrayed God as the "Ground of our Being" and the "Beyond in our Midst" (HG 44, 53). "Belief in God is the trust, the well-nigh incredible trust, that to give ourselves to the uttermost in love is not to be confounded but `accepted,' that Love is the ground of our being, to which ultimately we `come home'" (HG 49). This Supreme Being was at once personal and abstract: God became defined by agapic affiliations that reflected, however imperfectly, a transcendent reality, not unlike a Platonic Form. As Robinson acknowledged, some found such transcendence difficult to grasp. At the same time, however, he retained a characteristic Protestant bias by grounding authentic religion in a deeply personal encounter, the love of one individual for another or for God. Invoking Martin Buber, the subject of his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, Robinson deemed this encounter an I-Thou relationship (HG 53). "How does one pray to `ultimate reality?'" The Times asked (qtd. in Edwards 99). Robinson answered this question by transforming prayer into a deflected transaction among humans: "My own experience is that I am really praying for people, agonizing with God for them, precisely as I meet them and really give my soul to them" (HG 99). Again Robinson surrounded a secular encounter with traditional religious nomenclature. Heavily influenced by the martyred German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Robinson suggested that "worldly holiness" removed the barriers between the religious and secular world. Whatever revivified Love, the Ground of our Being, ought to be considered worship: "Anything that fails to do this is not Christian worship, be it ever so `religious'" (HG 88). Within this theology Jesus became a "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" (HG 76). Jesus embodied the Unconditional in the Conditional, the Transcendent Love of God in an individual who walked on earth. He was "self-emptying" (HG 74), surrendering himself to others completely and accepting fallen humanity in Grace. Honest to God provoked enormous controversy. Typical of the book's harshest critics, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that Robinson's muddled theology too easily assimilated the destructive arguments of religious skeptics. …