Spong - A new Christianity for a new world: why traditional faith is dying and how a new faith is being born

Our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as those who manage our lives without God. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continuously. Before God and with God we live without God.

... God is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way in which he is with us to help us.

D IETRICH B ONHOEFFER

T here are two tasks that I hope to accomplish with this book. The first is to move forward the work begun in the last century by a man who was my mentor and my friend. His name was John Arthur Thomas Robinson. The other is the unfinished work in my own career that did not become obvious to me until I lived both with and into the response to my book Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

There is probably no person in the world of Christian scholarship with whom I have felt a closer identification than I did to John A. T. Robinson. We had much in common. He was, as I am, a bishop. Only those of us who have had the privilege of living inside the expectations of that role can fully appreciate the bond that particular shared experience created for us both. He was next an author, seeking as I have done, in book after book to bridge the gap between the Christian academy and the person in the pew. Third, he was, as I am, deeply devoted to the church that he served for a lifetime, but also like me, he was uncomfortable living inside the theological straitjackets that Christianity seems so eager to force upon people in every generation.

Robinson even broke into the consciousness of his nation, just as I did, in a public controversy that grew out of the interface between religion and human sexuality. For him it was his opposition to an effort on the part of the moral purists in the United Kingdom to ban from publication D. H. Lawrences book Lady Chatterleys Lover. For me it was the battle to bring gay and lesbian people fully into the life and love of the body of Christ. John Robinson and I, though separated by a generation, have followed remarkably similar life paths.

It was, however, his little book entitled Honest to God, published in 1963, that shaped my theological journey decisively. This book was launched with a front-page story in the Sunday Observer in Great Britain under the banner headline, Our Image of God Must Go! Robinsons life would never be the same. This book was a bold blast at the way Christianity had been traditionally understood. It was issued by one who was at that time only an assistant bishop occupying a quite secondary position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. His title was the Bishop of Woolwich. Woolwich is one of the subdivisions within the Diocese of Southwark, which basically covers the suburbs of London south of the Thames. In this book, Robinson laid out in clear and straightforward language for the average personwhether in the pew or in the Church Alumni Associationthe debates going on inside the academy. He introduced his readers to the work of Rudolf Bultmann, who was calling for the scriptures to be demythologized;Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was calling for a Christianity apart from religion; and Paul Tillich, who was insisting that God could no longer be defined personally as a being, but must be approached nonpersonally as the Ground of All Being. The response to this book was tremendous. It was discussed in pubs, with taxicab drivers, at tea, and over dinner, and even in homes where church going had long ceased to be a habit.

But almost immediately the threatened leadership of the traditional church struck back to defend its familiar and dated theological affirmations. Led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, the hierarchy decided, in the time-honored manner of defensive people, that since they could neither embrace nor deny Robinsons message, they must attack the messenger, and attack him they did.

In an outpouring of negativity unprecedented in religious circles until the Muslims put a death price on the head of Salman Rushdie, Robinson was pilloried in the press, in letters to the editor, on radio talk shows, and from the pulpits of that land. Church careers were made by ambitious clergy attacking this young bishop in the name of something called the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3), as if such a body of fixed doctrine had ever existed.

Robinson would now suffer the fate of many a brilliant spiritual leader before him. He was quickly marginalized by his church, avoided by those who once had been his colleagues, and forced to fight to maintain his reputation and integrity. His career in the church was derailed. Normally a person of his age, education, and family background would remain an assistant or area bishop for only a few years before being made the senior bishop of a major diocese. Robinson, however, was clearly destined to be an assistant bishop forever. Finally he resigned from that position in order to return to Cambridge to teach. Even at that great university the long arm of the church was still able to bring its shunning power to bear upon his life. Robinson was never elected by the Cambridge decision makers to the position of university lecturer, despite the fact that he had enjoyed that designation in the 1950s before he was appointed to the bishops office. So he lived out his career at Cambridge as the Dean of Chapel at TrinityCollege, a relatively minor position, usually filled by a recent theological graduate. He died in 1983 largely unappreciated by his church.

Because Robinson was forced after the publication of Honest to God to spend the balance of his life defending himself against the legions of his attackers, he never completed the task that he had begun in that book. Honest to God revealed quite clearly why the God-talk emanating from the church in Robinsons day was no longer credible in Robinsons world. It did little, however, except to diagnose the problem and provide a scant outline for a new direction. For this God-filled man, the issue lay not in the reality of God, which he did not question, but in the dated way in which this God had been traditionally proclaimed. Robinson had in fact made major progress in the task of deconstructing the religious patterns of our Christian past. He spelled out quite clearly the easy task of identifying what no longer works. Reconstruction, reformulating the fullness of a faith for tomorrow, however, is incredibly more difficult. Robinson clearly had this task in mind, and the hint of it was seen in his enthusiasmfor Bonhoeffers call for the church to develop a religionless Christianity, or what Robinson came to call a worldly holiness. But this reconstruction task was never completed. Perhaps it could not have been done at that moment, for it takes time for a new theological language and a new theological atmosphere to develop. Yet the seeds for much of the work I have done in this volume were present in that book. There is no doubt that John Robinson was my ancestor in faith. He was also my spiritual father in whose pathway I have deliberately tried to walk. That reality accounts for half of this books origin.