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Exploration into God
A Stanford University Press classic.
178 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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July 17, 2024
THE "HONEST TO GOD" AUTHOR TURNS HIS ATTENTION TO GOD
John A.T. Robinson (1919-1983) was an author and former Anglican Bishop, as well as Dean of Trinity College until his death from cancer. He first achieved fame as the author of the book 'Honest to God,' which was written in 1963 while he was still serving as a bishop in the Anglican church in Woolrich, England; there were rapidly more than 350,000 copies in print. The book championed Tillich, Bultmann, and Bonhoeffer, and suggested that "The Bible speaks of a God 'up there,'" and of a "three-decker universe" consisting of "the heaven above, the earth beneath and the waters under the earth."
He wrote in the Preface to this 1967 book, "This book is a considerably expanded version of material delivered as ... Lectures at Stanford University... in May 1966... My original intention had been to devote the lectures to the subject of Christology. But it became increasingly clear that before one could develop the theme 'God was in Christ'... one must first try to explore further the meaning of 'God'..."
He asserts, "the conception of God as a Being, a Person---like ourselves but supremely above or beyond ourselves---will, I believe, come to be seen as a human projection... The real question of God is not the existence of a Being whom we visualize as embodying these in his Person. It is whether this conviction about the ultimate nature and meaning of things is true." (Pg. 29)
He says that God-language "stands for that which by its very nature cannot finally be reduced or translated without remainder into anything else..." (Pg. 54) Later, he adds, "Words, images, or descriptions can but try to catch and express this reality---either, as it were, in terms of 'so what' or in terms of 'as if.' And both forms of translation fail if offered as adequate accounts of what God is." (Pg. 69)
More controversially, he argues that "So much of the conventional presentation of the problem of evil... assumes a Being which is 'personally responsible' for directing the course of events so as to produce the distribution of suffering we see... Such a Being is declared by the atheist to be morally intolerable, and I find myself concurring. Any human planner who foresaw, let alone designed, a flood or a landslide, would evacuate the area beforehand. I have no wish to defend such a conception of God..." (Pg. 116-117)
Ultimately, he endorses "Christian panentheism," as "fundamentally appropriate to Christianity---in a way that deism or pantheism or even theism is not---without being exclusively Christian... I also believe that the most appropriate model... for a satisfactory theology of the incarnation is a panentheistic one." (Pg. 161)
This is another of Robinson's early "exploratory" books (before he turned conservative in his later years; see his ‘Can We Trust the New Testament?’ for example).
John A.T. Robinson (1919-1983) was an author and former Anglican Bishop, as well as Dean of Trinity College until his death from cancer. He first achieved fame as the author of the book 'Honest to God,' which was written in 1963 while he was still serving as a bishop in the Anglican church in Woolrich, England; there were rapidly more than 350,000 copies in print. The book championed Tillich, Bultmann, and Bonhoeffer, and suggested that "The Bible speaks of a God 'up there,'" and of a "three-decker universe" consisting of "the heaven above, the earth beneath and the waters under the earth."
He wrote in the Preface to this 1967 book, "This book is a considerably expanded version of material delivered as ... Lectures at Stanford University... in May 1966... My original intention had been to devote the lectures to the subject of Christology. But it became increasingly clear that before one could develop the theme 'God was in Christ'... one must first try to explore further the meaning of 'God'..."
He asserts, "the conception of God as a Being, a Person---like ourselves but supremely above or beyond ourselves---will, I believe, come to be seen as a human projection... The real question of God is not the existence of a Being whom we visualize as embodying these in his Person. It is whether this conviction about the ultimate nature and meaning of things is true." (Pg. 29)
He says that God-language "stands for that which by its very nature cannot finally be reduced or translated without remainder into anything else..." (Pg. 54) Later, he adds, "Words, images, or descriptions can but try to catch and express this reality---either, as it were, in terms of 'so what' or in terms of 'as if.' And both forms of translation fail if offered as adequate accounts of what God is." (Pg. 69)
More controversially, he argues that "So much of the conventional presentation of the problem of evil... assumes a Being which is 'personally responsible' for directing the course of events so as to produce the distribution of suffering we see... Such a Being is declared by the atheist to be morally intolerable, and I find myself concurring. Any human planner who foresaw, let alone designed, a flood or a landslide, would evacuate the area beforehand. I have no wish to defend such a conception of God..." (Pg. 116-117)
Ultimately, he endorses "Christian panentheism," as "fundamentally appropriate to Christianity---in a way that deism or pantheism or even theism is not---without being exclusively Christian... I also believe that the most appropriate model... for a satisfactory theology of the incarnation is a panentheistic one." (Pg. 161)
This is another of Robinson's early "exploratory" books (before he turned conservative in his later years; see his ‘Can We Trust the New Testament?’ for example).
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