Honest to God. John A. T. Robinson
picture of a God ‘out there’ coming to earth like some visitor from outer space underlies every popular presentation of the Christian drama of salvation, whether from the pulpit or the presses. Indeed, it is noticeable that those who have been most successful in communicating it in our day – Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, J. B. Phillips – have hesitated least in being boldly anthropomorphic in the use of this language. They have not, of course, taken it literally, any more than the New Testament writers take literally the God ‘up there’, but they have not apparently felt it any embarrassment to the setting forth of the Gospel. This is sufficient testimony to the fact that there is a ready-made public for whom this whole frame of reference still presents no difficulties, and their very achievement should make us hesitate to pull it down or call it in question.
Indeed, the last thing I want to do is to appear to criticize from a superior position. I should like to think that it were possible to use this mythological language of the God ‘out there’ and make the same utterly natural and unself-conscious transposition as I have suggested we already do with the language of the God ‘up there’. Indeed, unless we become used to doing this and are able to take this theological notation, as it were, in our stride, we shall cut ourselves off from the classics of the Christian faith, just as we should be unable to read the Bible were we to stumble at its way of describing God. I believe, however, that we may have to pass through a century or more of reappraisal before this becomes possible and before this language ceases to be an offence to faith for a great many people. No one wants to live in such a period, and one could heartily wish it were not necessary. But the signs are that we are reaching the point at which the whole conception of a God ‘out there’, which has served us so well since the collapse of the three-decker universe, is itself becoming more of a hindrance than a help.
In a previous age there came a moment when the three-decker likewise proved an embarrassment, even as a piece of mental furniture. But in this case there was a considerable interval between the time when it ceased to be taken literally as a model of the universe and the time when it ceased to perform a useful function as a metaphor. An illustration of this is to be seen in the doctrine of hell. In the old scheme, hell was ‘down there’. By Shakespeare’s time no one thought of it as literally under the earth, but still in Hamlet it is lively and credible enough as a metaphor. But a localized hell gradually lost more and more of its purchase over the imagination, and revivalist attempts to stoke its flames did not succeed in restoring its power. The tragedy in this instance is that no effective translation into terms of the God ‘out there’ was found for the Devil and his angels, the pit and the lake of fire. This element therefore tended to drop out of popular Christianity altogether – much to the detriment of the depth of the Gospel.
But the point I wish to make here is that the supersession of the old scheme was a gradual one. After it had been discredited scientifically, it continued to serve theologically as an acceptable frame of reference. The image of a God ‘up there’ survived its validity as a literal description of reality by many centuries. But today I believe we may be confronted by a double crisis. The final psychological, if not logical, blow delivered by modern science and technology to the idea that there might literally be a God ‘out there’ has coincided with an awareness that the mental picture of such a God may be more of a stumbling-block than an aid to belief in the Gospel. There is a double pressure to discard this entire construction, and with it any belief in God at all.
Moreover, it is not merely a question of the speed of adjustment required. The abandonment of a God ‘out there’ represents a much more radical break than the transition to this concept from that of a God ‘up there’. For this earlier transposition was largely a matter of verbal notation, of a change in spatial metaphor, important as this undoubtedly was in liberating Christianity from a flat-earth cosmology. But to be asked to give up any idea of a Being ‘out there’ at all will appear to be an outright denial of God. For, to the ordinary way of thinking, to believe in God means to be convinced of the existence of such a supreme and separate Being. ‘Theists’ are those who believe that such a Being exists, ‘atheists’ those who deny that he does.
But suppose such a super-Being ‘out there’ is really only a sophisticated version of the Old Man in the sky? Suppose belief in God does not, indeed cannot, mean being persuaded of the ‘existence’ of some entity, even a supreme entity, which might or might not be there, like life on Mars? Suppose the atheists are right – but that this is no more the end or denial of Christianity than the discrediting of the God ‘up there’, which must in its time have seemed the contradiction of all that the Bible said? Suppose that all such atheism does is to destroy an idol, and that we can and must get on without a God ‘out there’ at all ? Have we seriously faced the possibility that to abandon such an idol may in the future be the only way of making Christianity meaningful, except to the few remaining equivalents of flat-earthers (just as to have clung earlier to the God ‘up there’ would have made it impossible in the modern world for any but primitive peoples to believe the Gospel)? Perhaps after all the Freudians are right, that such a God – the God of traditional popular theology – is a projection, and perhaps we are being called to live without that projection in any form.
That is not an attractive proposition: inevitably it feels like being orphaned. And it is bound to be misunderstood and resisted as a denial of the Gospel, as a betrayal of what the Bible says (though actually the Bible speaks in literal terms of a God whom we have already abandoned). And it will encounter the opposition not only of the fundamentalists but of 90 per cent of Church people. Equally it will be resented by most unthinking non-churchgoers, who tend to be more jealous of the beliefs they have rejected and deeply shocked that they should be betrayed. Above all, there is the large percentage of oneself that finds this revolution unacceptable and wishes it were unnecessary.
This raises again the insistent question, Why? Is it really necessary to pass through this Copernican revolution? Must we upset what most people happily believe – or happily choose not to believe? And have we anything to put in its place?
Some Christian Questioners
In some moods, indeed, I wonder. But I know in my own mind that these are questions that must be explored. Or rather, they are questions that are already being explored on many sides. The only issue is whether they remain on the fringe of the intellectual debate or are dragged into the middle and placed squarely under men’s noses. I know that as a bishop I could happily get on with most of my work without ever being forced to discuss such questions. I could keep the ecclesiastical machine going quite smoothly, in fact much more smoothly, without raising them. The kind of sermons I normally have to preach do not require one to get within remote range of them. Indeed, such is the pressure of regular priorities that I should not have been able, let alone obliged, to let them occupy my mind for long enough to write this, were it not that I was forcibly laid up for three months. But they were questions that had long been dogging me, and I felt from the beginning the spiritual necessity laid upon me to use this period to allow them their head.
The only way I can put it is to say that over the years a number of things have unaccountably ‘rung a bell’; various unco-ordinated aspects of one’s reading and experience have come to ‘add up’. The inarticulate conviction forms within one that certain things are true or important. One may not grasp them fully or understand why they matter. One may not even welcome them. One simply knows that if one is to retain one’s integrity one must come to terms with them. For if their priority is sensed and they are not attended to, then subtly other convictions begin to lose their power: one continues to trot these convictions out, one says one believes in them (and one does), but somehow they seem emptier. One is aware that insights that carry their own authentication, however subjective, are not being allowed to modify them.
And then, equally, there are certain other things which have not rung a bell, certain areas of traditional Christian expression – devotional and practical – which have evidently meant a great deal for most people but which have simply left one cold. The obvious conclusion is that this is due to one’s own spiritual inadequacy. And there is clearly a very large amount of truth in this. But I have not forgotten the relief with which twenty years ago, back at my theological college, I discovered in a conversation of the small hours a kindred spirit, to whom also the whole