Honest To God…Revisited

Many of us at St Cuthbert’s are of sufficiently “mature years” to remember the stir caused by the publication of a small book entitled “Honest To God” written by John Robinson, then Bishop of Woolwich. The book brought modern Christian scholarship out from the academic cloisters and into the church pews. For some it posed a threat to their cherished certainties; for others it lit up a hopeful path into the future.

A short quotation from the Preface captures the spirit of the book:

“…I believe we are being called, over the years ahead, to far more than a restatement of traditional orthodoxy in modern terms. … A much more radical recasting, I would judge, is demanded, in the process of which the most fundamental categories of our theology – of God, of the supernatural, and of religion itself – must go into the melting.”

This was nearly half a century ago. Since that time, attempts to recast Christianity in a new mould, consistent with modern knowledge and understanding of the world, have largely been beaten back into academia by a massive tide of fundamentalisms – of scripture, of tradition, of dogmas or of authority.

The scholarship has continued, however, and an important strand of this work has been pursued with dedication by Bishop Jack Spong of the Episcopal Church (USA). We have an opportunity to hear him speak in Edinburgh on 18 October. He is an accomplished communicator, and his passionate commitment to Christianity is sure to shine through his talk. But his message is tough. In the Preface to his most recent book “Jesus for the Non-Religious” he says: “The choices before the Christian world are clear to me. We can pretend that there is no problem with the continued use of the literalized, dated and inoperative language of our faith, change nothing, and the result will be that Christianity will die. The other choice is that we can develop a whole new way of seeing Jesus and conceptualizing God that will lay the groundwork for a radical reformulation of what we call Christianity.”. His book takes off from this starting point.

Both Robinson and Spong speak in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets who saw their beloved nation and its religious practices going adrift and who preached a sometimes harsh message to their compatriots. I believe we need to listen to what Bishop Spong is saying to us today.

George Haskell