A Review of Honest To God by John A. T.

Robinson

With two recent republications, 1 there is renewed interest in Robinson’s classic:

Honest to God. The time is thus ripe for a fresh assessment, and a consideration of

its contemporary relevance.

When SCM published the book in 1963, there was much public reaction and heated

debate. Robinson was accused of “atheism,” 2 of “sentimental meaninglessness,” 3 and

there were even calls for “Church discipline.” 4 But this was no work of an atheist,

and its meaning, though sometimes unclear, has been clear enough to those it has

inspired.

Robinson’s intention was apologetical. He was concerned that modern people were

dismissing Christianity because the church used inappropriate language and

outdated thought-forms. People were not rejecting the Gospel, they were simply

“put off by a particular way of thinking about the world which quite legitimately

they [found] incredible” (8). Reluctantly therefore, he called for a “revolution” in

Christian thinking, and began to indicate possible solutions.

His main target, following Bultmann, was imagery. 5 The Bible often speaks of God

using spatial metaphor, because it developed from contexts of belief in a “three-

1
(SCM, 2001) and (Westminster John Knox Press, 2003)
2
Alasdair MacIntyre, “God and the Theologians,” in Edwards, The Honest to God
Debate, 215-228.
3
David Boulton, in Edwards, The Honest to God Debate, 105-107.
4
T. E. Utley, in Edwards, The Honest to God Debate, 95-98.
5
Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth, chap. 1
1
decker universe, of ‘the heaven above, the earth beneath and the waters under the

earth” (11). God is “up there.” For the ancients this space was real, but the Bible

initiated a “remarkable transposition” in which “up there” was replaced by a

metaphysical “out there” or “beyond.” But now, even this metaphor causes

embarrassment. Modern people accept a closed scientific universe with “no vacant

places left” for God (11-14). Therefore, in order to reach a sceptical world, we

should abandon the “supranaturalist” idea of God as “a supreme and separate

Being” (17).

In its place, Robinson (echoing Tillich) substitutes the metaphor “depth” for God,

not as “a being beside others,” but “being-itself,” or “ultimate reality.” This vision

has impact, for Being-itself coheres with the depths of everyone’s life; with our

“ultimate concern, of what [we] take seriously without reservation” (22). But this is

neither humanism nor pantheism. Humanism sacrifices God’s transcendence by

reducing theology to anthropology (50); pantheism denies God’s personhood (130).

For Robinson, fundamentally orthodox, God is personal: “reality at its very deepest

level is personal” (48), and transcendent: “the eternal Thou is not to be equated

with… man or nature” (53). Nevertheless, this personal-transcendent God is not

separate, not (recalling Bonhoeffer) Deus ex machina, 6 existing beyond the world,

in the gaps left by science, or at the edges of our psychological problems. Rather,

God is “the ‘beyond’ in the midst of our life”(47).

6
Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 90-93
2
This vision is foundational to the book. The Incarnation’s seeming contradictions,

that Jesus was “fully God and fully man, and yet genuinely one person” (65), tend to

resolve in Docetic (Jesus only seemed human) or Ebionite (Jesus was not Divine)

directions. But Being-itself offers mediation. It transforms kenotic theory: no longer

does the pre-existent Word self-empty of transcendence; rather, the human Jesus

empties of self-centredness, and becomes so obedient to love, as “the man for

others,” that he “lays bare the ground of man’s being as Love” (75), and thus truly

is man and God. Spiritual actions too, like prayer and Holy Communion, return to

life’s centre, once hidden in the ‘religious spaces’ of withdrawal from the world.

The ‘distance’ to ‘God beyond’ collapses to zero, God is encountered in the stuff of

life, and prayer becomes “penetration through the world to God” (97). Finally, the

supernatural God’s absolute moral law, which put principle before love, is itself

subordinated to the Ground of Love, and thus made sensitive to life’s exigencies

(105-21).

___________________________________

Robinson’s vision is at once appealing and perplexing. Certainly, the idea that God

is Being-itself has force, for ‘a Being beside others’ seems to contradict our

intuition that everything requires unitary explanation. But how he understands

Being-itself is unclear. On the one hand, God is personal, “eternal Thou” in relation

to “finite Thou” (53). But on the other, God is not “an almighty Individual… with…

consciousness and will”(132). But this seems contradictory.

3
Ironically enough, I suspect Robinson himself was a victim of spatial imagery. In

Chapter Seven, he mentions a ‘distance’ between us and God that gives us “the

independence… to be ourselves,” but that this was “objectivize[d]” into “the

pictorial image of a God ‘out there’ … a super-Individual…” (131). But this is

false: a super-Individual is not necessarily an object in any ‘spatial-image’ sense.

Perhaps, with Alston, 7 we could regard God as a “logical” object, rather than a

“thing” object, in which case God could still be a super-Individual, and

supernatural. But Jenkins identifies the main problem. Robinson’s error is to equate

the Ground-of-Love with the obviously different world of imperfect humanity and

unconscious Nature. 8 Nevertheless, maybe there is a way to retain Robinson’s

vision without contradiction. Perhaps, fundamentally, there is only Being; but Being

projects the world, and out of this complexity emerge free agents, who are thus

logically, though not ontologically, distinct from their Creator.

Thus construed, Robinson’s vision is freed from imagery and contradiction. Prayer

can be united with life - a moment-by-moment encounter with the ‘beyond in the

midst of life’ - and yet remain truly prayer; for God is not only Being-itself, but also

distinct, as are we. The I-Thou relationship is no “analogy” (131); it is real. The

Law of Love can draw strength from God’s intimate involvement in life, without

risk of losing the Law of the God who is Love. 9 And Christology can deepen: the

7
Alston, Perceiving God, 31
8
David E. Jenkins, “Concerning Theism,” in Edwards, The Honest to God Debate,
200.
9
1Jn. 4:8
4
Ground of Love is revealed through both the self-surrender of Jesus, and the self-

emptying of the pre-existent Word.

Is Robinson’s approach relevant today? His warnings about religious language and

imagery are forever instructive, but his apologetical strategy, I believe, has had its

day. Robinson hoped to “speak more ‘profoundly’ to the soul of modern man”

(132), and I appreciate that many in the Twentieth-Century were helped. That

culture was saturated with scientism, which looked blindly forward to a total

explanation of the world that would make belief in God superfluous, and Robinson

offered hope. But today’s world is different. Scientism still lives, especially on the

popular level, but postmodernism, with its “incredulity toward metanarratives,” 10 is

steadily exposing its pretensions. Polanyi has questioned science’s total

objectivity. 11 The science/non-science demarcation continues to dissolve as

inferences to non-empirical explanations multiply. 12 Ours is a climate of “many

universes,” “Anthropic Principles” 13 and “Intelligent Design.” 14 So what is needed

today? I agree with Groothuis: a cautiously evidential apologetic, making a

cumulative case, and appealing to the best explanation - God. 15 Robinson’s

[Bonhoeffer’s] warning remains. We must never limit God to the ‘gaps’ left by

10
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv
11
“[The] complete objectivity as usually attributed to the exact sciences is a
delusion…” (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 18)
12
See Meyer, “Laws, Causes and Facts: Response to Michael Ruse”, in Darwinism:
Science or Philosophy?
13
See Barrow & Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.
14
See Dembski, The Design Inference.
15
Groothuis, Truth Decay, 179
5
physical or philosophical theory (36-39). 16 But equally - maybe there is data about

God in the world 17 - we must never misuse that admonition to stifle evidence we

may in fact have.

16
See Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 106-110.
17
Jenkins, Guide to the Debate about God, 104
6
 Bibliography

Alston, William P., Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience,

(Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1991)

Barrow, John D., & Tipler, Frank J., The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, (New
York: OUP, 1986)

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters and Papers from Prison, (London: Collins/Fontana,

1969)

Bultmann, Rudolf, Kerygma and Myth, (London: SPCK, 1953) [online]

www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=426 (accessed 15.02.06)

Dembski, William A., The Design Inference : Eliminating Chance Through Small
Probabilities, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Groothuis, Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of

Postmodernism, (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP, 2000)

Jenkins, David E., Guide to the Debate about God, (London: Lutterworth, 1966)

Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trs.

G. Bennington & B. Massumi, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)

Meyer, Stephen, “Laws, Causes and Facts: Response to Michael Ruse”, in

Darwinism: Science or Philosophy?, Jon Buell and Virginia Hearn eds., (Texas:
Foundation for Thought & Ethics, 1994) [online]
http://www.arn.org/docs/meyer/sm_lawscausesfacts.htm (accessed 15.02.06)

Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, (New

York: Harper & Row, 1964)

Robinson, John A. T., Honest to God, (London: SCM, 1963)

Edwards, David L., ed., The Honest to God Debate, (London: SCM, 1963)

Other Resources

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha, tr. Bruce Metzger,
(New York: OUP, 1989)