Reluctant Revolution

For the New Testament writers the idea of a God 'up there' created no embarrassment - because it had not yet become a difficulty.

Whatever we may accept with the top of our minds, most of us still retain deep down the mental image of 'an old man in the sky.'

In place of a God who is literally or physically 'up there' we have accepted, as part of our mental furniture, a God who is spiritually or metaphysically 'out there.' But the idea of a God spiritually or metaphysically 'out there' dies very much harder. Indeed, most people would be seriously disturbed by the thought that it should need to die at all. For it is their God, and they have nothing to put in its place. For it is the God of our own upbringing and conversation, the God of our fathers and of our religion, who is under attack. Every one of us lives with some mental picture of a God 'out there', a God who 'exists' above and beyond the world he made, a God 'to' whom we pray and to whom we 'go' when we die.

But the signs are there 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. The supercession of the old scheme is a gradual one. After it had been discredited scientifically, it continued to serve theologically as an acceptable frame of reference.

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.

Tillich says, God, is not a projection 'out there', an Other beyond the skies, of whose existence we have to convince ourselves, but the Ground of our very being.

Bonhoeffer's answer was to say that God is deliberately calling us in the twentieth century to a form of Christianity that does not depend on the premise of religion (ie. the idea that deep down every man feels the need for God in some form), just as St Paul was calling men in the first century to a form of Christianity that did not depend on the premise of circumcision.

Bultmann makes the case that in order to express the 'trans-historical' character of the historical event of Jesus of Nazareth, the New Testament writers used "mythological" language of pre-existence, incarnation, ascent and descent, miraculous intervention, cosmic catastrophe, and so on, which according to Bultmann, make sense only on a now completely antiquated worldview. Thus, modern man, instead of stumbling on the real rock of offence (the scandal of the cross) is put off by the very things which should be translating that historical occurrence into an act of God for him, but which in fact merely make it incredible.

I am only too conscious of the forces of inertia within myself. It is for me a reluctant revolution, whose full extent I have hardly begun to comprehend. Robinson

In explaining his faith journey and how he got to this spot, Robinson talks as such:

The only way I can put it is to say that over the years a number of things have unaccountably 'rung a bell'; various uncoordinated aspects of one's reading and experience have come to 'add up'. Not only that, but there are certain things about the faith that have not 'rung a bell', certain areas of traditional Christian expression - devotional and practical - which have evidently meant a great deal to most people but which have simply left one cold.