Honest To God caused a furore when it was published forty years ago, but this should be seen in its historical perspective.

In the past the British people has been deeply conservative by nature, and this holds good for religion and theology. While radical thinkers abroad abounded, Britain tended to be old-fashioned about its religion. Attempts to bring Christian thinking up to date, and to make it credible in terms of contemporary thought, have usually produced scandal.

When Essays and Reviews in 1869 made a moderate protest against orthodox rigidity (which one contributor called a 'system of terrorism'), a violent reaction set in; and the same shock waves recurred at all later attempts at restatement. For example an Anglican bishop was excommunicated for casting doubt on some of the Old Testament, and a Professor of Theology was sacked because he found eternal punishment incompatible with the love of God. It is within this context that Honest to God must be understood.

Whereas in Germany and in the United States theologians (like Niebuhr and Tillich) continued to try to restate Christian truths, the Church of England in the 1960s was rather as it had been before the Oxford Movement, smug and self-satisfied, buoyed by the boom in religion after the Second World War.

Some of us in Cambridge had reacted mildly against this by the production of Soundings, but John Robinson, who had left Cambridge for Southwark, and who tended to favour extreme solutions, reacted far more vigorously when faced with the realities of inner city unbelief; and the result was the Honest to God explosion.

In so doing he released a log jam of radical thinking, which has often produced the kind of radicalism which leads to atheism, like Cupitt's Sea of Faith and this in turn, with the rise of hard line Evangelicals, has brought a tragic polarity into Anglican religion.

But John Robinson was not a radical in that sense. He understood the word literally, as 'going back to roots'. A devout and committed Christian, with a deservedly fine reputation for pastoral care, he decided to show the proofs of his book to his friends. We knew it would create a stir, but we thought it worthwhile. I think this was right, for he helped many more than he shocked, and his concern for truth and integrity is manifest.

But nowadays, looking back, the book seems rather tame, because life has moved on.

Post-modernism seems to result in everyone feeling free to produce their own version of the faith, however bizarre. By contrast, Honest to God was a brave book by a responsible mainline churchman, bringing fresh air into stale theological thinking.

As a result of this book, John Robinson's career in the Church was blocked by the Establishment, though he never complained. While Frederick Temple despite contributing to Essays and Reviews ended up at Lambeth Palace, Robinson returned to Cambridge where he produced valuable books of scholarship, although with changing fashions few are nowadays cited.

If he had been able to progress in the Church, he might have brought great blessings to us all. In fact his blackballing is one of the better arguments for disestablishment.

+ Hugh Montefiore