John A.T. Robinson (1919-1983) was a New Testament scholar who was Bishop of Woolwich and Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge. He wrote 25 books (and several have been written about him). “Honest to God” is his best known book that “exploded” into public debate in 1963.

The success and impact of Robinson’s “Honest to God” far exceeded what anyone expected when it was published in North America and Great Britain in 1963. It became “one of the most widely discussed religious writings of the century.” It helped popularize the views of three twentieth-century theologians: Dietrich Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. Robinson translated their views on God, the Bible, Jesus Christ, and the life of the Christian into a wide-ranging critique of long-established doctrinal (man-made) formulations in the church. He believed merely restating traditional orthodoxy into modern forms was inadequate. ”A much more radical recasting is demanded, in the process of which the most fundamental categories of our theology – of God, of the supernatural, and of religion itself – must go into the melting” (melting that refines gold). His main goal was to convey central doctrines of Christian faith in contemporary “non-mythological” ways.

When this book “exploded” on the scene in 1963, I was like many others who hadn’t realized that they had been waiting for such a short, simple, honest book. My original copy was soon worn out. Ch 6 ‘The New Morality’ explains why Love, not Law, is the morality Jesus taught: ‘love, and then what you will, do.’ The primacy of love is crucial. Ch 7 ‘Recasting the Mold’ relates why that which we have to put aside is what Bultmann describes as ‘mythological’, Tillich as ‘supernaturalist’, and Bonhoeffer as ‘religious’. These images need to be replaced to see clearly that “we are rooted and grounded wholly in Love’. In seven chapters, Robinson wakes up and shakes up the reader. To say “the result was a blockbuster book that drew a mass readership on both sides of the Atlantic” is an understatement by the publisher. This 40th Anniversary Edition is appended by reflections of two respected theologians. Douglas Hall, Professor Emeritus of Theology at McGill, considers its significance in North America. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, discusses its reception in Great Britain. Their essays help put this work in perspective and explore its importance for a new generation of readers. It has lost none of its honesty and power. I highly recommend this "modern classic" by John A.T. Robinson as a “must read’ - or reread as did I.