Article: Tom Wright on 'Honest to God'

Ed: One of the most important events to take place in post-war England was the 1963 publication of Honest to God by John A T Robinson, then the Bishop of Woolwich. This surely sits alongside Darwin's Origin of Species as one of those 'books that changed everything but most people never really read'. Contrary to what the publishers, SCM, expected, Honest to God became a runaway best seller, helped by being serialized in a daily paper.

In 2005, Tom Wright had an article published critiquing Robinson's work, 'Doubts about Doubt: Honest to God Forty Years On', and Fulcrum have now reproduced it on their website here.

The enormous significance of Robinson's work makes this article worth reading, though it is quite dense. If I have a criticism of his own critique, I think Wright makes rather too much of how Robinson's work could have been improved theologically and overlooks the way that Honest to God actually impacted society in the 1960s, not through its content, but through what it seemed to be saying to many people at the start of that critical decade, namely that "A bishop of the Church of England doesn't believe what we don't believe either."

Nevertheless, Wright's is a good article, and I commend it.