Honest to God

Christian Century, August 23, 2003

I APPLAUD the overdue intellectual history regarding Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson's 1963 book Honest to God (Centurymarks, July 26). If the bishop had read Dietrich Bonhoeffer in theological continuity with his earlier writing he could never have misinterpreted him so badly. Robinson's hijacking of Bonhoeffer to promote a "death of God theology" began the "creative misuse of Bonhoeffer." Bonhoeffer would have categorically rejected Robinson's interpretation of "religionless Christianity" as a move toward Feuerbachian dumbing down of theology to anthropology.

Johnston McKay's statement equating "clarification" with "falsification" of Christianity is a welcome epitaph for modernity's distortion of Christian faith until it is unrecognizable either as Christian or as faith. Might it not also be time to come clean about the distortion of the faith by Rudolf Bultmann, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich? Their demythologization, ethics-without-the-church and correlation projects created space for a centrifuging of "Christian" from 20th-century mainline theology. As a result we're left with a North American church which is at best Gnostic and at worst more aligned with Jeffersonian democracy and capitalistic consumerism than with an ecclesiology that might be considered Christian.

Paul O. Bischoff

Chicago, Ill.

I was disappointed with the dismissive piece about assumed after-effects of John Robinson's Honest to God. Although I was a Presbyterian elder for years before reading the book, I credit it with my becoming a Christian in any real sense. I can't imagine that many people would characterize his ideas as "clear, simple and unambiguous," but careful reading brings the reward of having one's faith and understanding enlightened beyond imagining, I am always delighted when I find yet another person who, like me, experienced Christianity coming alive in the pages of Robinson's work.

Patricia M. Fort

DeLand, Fla.

Johnston McKay blames the decline of the church in the United Kingdom and Europe on John Robinson's Honest to God. This claim falls somewhere between the ludicrous and the pathetic. In how many churches of England have the concepts of Robinson been clearly and consistently enunciated?

N. T. Wright reports that students who arrive at Oxford announcing their atheism are not rejecting Robinson's (and Paul Tillich's) ground of being; they are rejecting instead the tired old concept of a superman in the sky--a concept that continues to be proclaimed in the majority of churches on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the problem the English church has with Robinson is not that he spoke, but that so few people listened.

A. J. Good

Roanoke, Va.