Review of Current Religious Thought: November 8, 1963

In the course of one week I listened to and watched a whole Billy Graham broadcast from Los Angeles and read a book by John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, called Honest to God. This is a concatenation to be wondered at. When one ponders the gamut of Protestantism from Bishop Robinson to Billy Graham, one wonders just what Protestantism is.

Billy Graham says quite flatly, “The Bible says,” and the good bishop leaves us wondering what the Bible is, making us very uneasy about what the Bible was. The whimsical John Bald, a professor of theology from Pittsburgh Seminary, was wont to say, “They tell me Tillich speaks to our day. The only trouble is the people of our day go to hear Billy Graham.” But with the publication of Honest to God and its fabulous sale, one has the feeling that crowds of people are listening to Tillich by way of the Bishop of Woolwich.

Honest to God is a much more serious and important book than I thought it would be from its somewhat “smarty” title. One comes away with the impression that the writer is indeed honest, and toward the end of the book there is a kind of pensiveness about his own spiritual pilgrimage which is almost touching. Robinson has struggled in the deeps with his spiritual experience. He does not have easy answers, because he knows the questions are very difficult; and he carries the added burden of being an official—indeed a bishop, indeed a pastor—in a church which carries its traditions loyally and usually with great firmness. There will be those in the Anglican communion who will call him a heretic, but it is pretty hard to be a heretic in any church (try yours, for instance) in which the leaders who might pursue the heresy trial are unsure of their own doctrinal position.

Several thoughts occur to me which are relevant to bell, book, and candle.

1. Barth is completely absent from Honest to God. This says almost as much as anything can about the shift in modern theology. A good way to test a man’s importance in his own field is to see whether the field can be discussed without reference to him. Since 1930 it has been impossible to discuss theology without reference to Barth, whether pro or con. Now here is a book that doesn’t even mention him. Young theologians here and abroad are “hot” on Bonhoeffer (whose theology was never given a chance to be systematized), and the other theologians à la mode are Tillich and Bultmann. Honest to God is built on Tillich’s philosophical theology and Bultmann’s demythologizing, with illustrations now and again from Bonhoeffer.

2. Robinson seems to accept Bultmann rather uncritically. For sound criticism on Bultmann you must look far beyond the range of this article. A criticism, however, which I have so far missed has to do with the shift of the miracles from the Gospels to the early Church. The Gospels move on miracles inescapably, and we must deal honestly with miracles in a scientific day. There have been ways of explaining and ways of explaining away. Bultmann’s explanation is simple enough: the realities of the Incarnation were surrounded by the myths of the first century. The early Church created the Gospels in their present form to show in their own way what they believed about Christ. Our problem is to strip away myths to get at realities.

I remember Horace Bushnell’s famous Chapter Ten in Nature and the Supernatural and the long treatment given by Andrew Fairbairn in The Philosophy of the Christian Religion; and there have been similar treatments the burden of which has been that the character that appears in the Gospels could not have been invented. How can the Gospels tell us about one who is fully God and fully man without giving us a monstrosity—giving us instead the most attractive figure in history? If the miracles of the Gospels need to be explained or explained away, who will explain the miracle of the early Church being able to invent the Gospels? Maybe Bultmann should be demythologized.

3. Robinson refuses, in Honest to God, any God “up there” or “out there.” He prefers Tillich’s ground of being and wants us to find God in the deeps. I think we can all go along with the shift in cosmology which makes it hard to talk about “up there” and “out there,” but I don’t see quite where the change in our figure of speech to the “depths” instead of the “heights” is a great deal of help. The very fact of incarnation shows us that God has to have his rapport with us in human terms, and there is no fundamental reason why we ought to make light of our human way of expressing infinite things. Surely it doesn’t hurt us to say that the sun rises even though we know better. One says easily, “Her tears broke my heart,” knowing perfectly well that the tears were the sign and not the reality and that a breaking heart is quite a figure of speech. Don’t we know that language itself is symbolic, a way by which the word becomes flesh and dwells among us?

4. It is interesting to see the people and to talk to the people who are excited about Honest to God. It is a tempting generalization that they are attracted by the title because there have been worries and speculations about the honesty of religion in our day. This fact is its own concatenation of a lot of things we all know about; but if Robinson thinks that religion can be made palatable to 1963 any more than it was made palatable to the Roman Empire or to the Greek intelligentsia by a shift in terms, he is much misled. There is no Christianity without repentence of some kind, or strong crying and tears, and a kind of commitment to cross-bearing. These are the real stumbling blocks.

Meanwhile the tens of thousands come to hear Billy Graham. There is power in prayers to the God “out there,” and there is power in preaching from the Bible as it is, not as reconstructed by Bultmann.

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