A radical with firm roots

Peter Hebblethwaite

A LIFE OF BISHOP JOHN A. T. ROBINSON: SCHOLAR, PASTOR, PROPHET by Eric James

Collins, f15

John Robinson's life was transformed by a letter he received in September 1960. Rubenstein, Nash & Co, solicitors, invited him to be an 'expert witness' at the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover. He accepted with alacrity, read the novel in three days flat, went into court and declared that 'sex is something sacred, in a real sense an act of holy communion'. Some say he added sotto voce 'lower case', but it was too late. The damage had been done. CHRISTIANS SHOULD READ LADY C — BISHOP cried the Evening Standard. Henceforward Robinson was the 'notorious' Bishop of Woolwich. The permissive Sixties were launched. He was blamed for the Profumo affair and much else besides.

It was all a frightful misunderstanding. Robinson had an impeccable clerical pedigree. His father Arthur was a Canon of Canterbury. Five of his seven uncles were ordained clergymen, while the re- maining two were a missionary doctor and a schoolmaster. If he were to shake the foundations of the C of E, it would be in the confident belief that they were basical- ly sound. Never was a radical more rooted (as he liked to say).

David Reindorp says of him: 'He never feared to rock the boat, for he knew the boat was safe'. Others were less sure. They thought he was rocking the boat out of mere impishness. He seemed to be saying: `Watch me. I'll show you how jolly daring I can be, even as a bishop'. But this was a faulty impression.

He gave evidence at the Lady Chatterley trial because he imagined that here was a chance to say something about the Church's attitudes to sex. It is neither sordid nor dirty but a beautiful body- language of love. Unfortunately, that was not quite the message of D. H. Lawrence who would agree that sex was a religious experience, provided one added that it was the supreme and only religious experience available.

Robinson, who read novels only as a penance during Lent, failed to make this simple distinction and was consequently pilloried. A similar lack of perception presided over Honest to God. He did not much like the title — suggested by his wife, Ruth — because it sounded too arrogant.

But the publisher, SCM, leapt at it. Six thousand was the first print run. It sold 360,000 in the first seven months and, according to Eric James, was much read on the Southern Railway. The French transla- tion was entitled, ominously, Dieu sans Dieu.

Though it seemed new and faintly shock- ing, for Robinson it was all old hat. While chaplain at Wells Theological College in the early 1950s, he had read out to the students Paul Tillich's sermon on 'The Depth of Existence'. In his first book, In the End God . . . he had asked how it was that Christians had cheerfully contrived to demythologise the creation stories, while having nothing at all to say about the end of time and the promised Second Coming of Christ. Then in The Body, one of the best studies of St Paul in English, he had shown that for Paul the body was good, and that there was a link between the Body of Christ and the body politic. That link was interdependence. Honest to God simp- ly echoed all these concerns. It was mostly written while he lay flat on his back in hospital suffering from a slipped disc.

The trouble with Honest to God, apart from a certain philosophical looseness which the Dominican Herbert McCabe ruthlessly exposed, was that it gave the result without the process. It was like joining at midnight a conversation that had been going on since seven o'clock. Natural- ly the newcomers were baffled by what they heard.

Yet in his own mind Robinson had been perfectly consistent. The famous phrase `religionless Christianity' did not mean denying the reality of the sacred; it meant rather re-locating it. Charles Moule, Robinson's predecessor as Dean of Clare College in the 1950s, recalls Robinson leading a team of undergraduates to work on a derelict building site in Leeds. One of them, now a famous surgeon, remembers muttering repeatedly as he shovelled the cement' `the thrust of the sacred into the secular'. It was the mantra of the age, and what Robinson had to say. And if Jesus is the Lord of the world, and not just of the Church, it must be true.

I interviewed Robinson in Woolwich in July 1967. He was swinging in a hammock in the garden (no doubt because of his back pain). Ruth was wisely absent. A daughter was preparing for her A-levels. He took 20 minutes to answer each question in his grating voice. He swore he would never return to Cambridge because, after Wool- wich, it would seem 'an ivory tower'. Two years later he was back in Cambridge as Dean of Trinity, where he spent the rest of his life until his death from cancer of the pancreas in 1983.

Was he a good dean? Had he been a good bishop? Idle questions, answered here with the kind of revealing understate- ments that used to grace obituaries in the Times. Trinity soon decided that this celebrity was not 'a good college man', not really 'one of us'. His predecessor, Harry Williams, famous for his Watney's beer dispenser, had always been 'around'. Robinson went off for the vacations to write books and spend some time with his wife. This did him no good at all.

`He had forged a situation', writes Philip Buckler, one of his chaplains, 'where his presence was not always welcome, yet his absence was most often resented'. He adds that 'to call John a sensitive person would demand substantial qualification'. Dr John Polkinghorne says he was 'like a porcupine with its bristles up, walking backwards into people, totally oblivious of the offence he caused'. These were his friends.

Trinity affected not to like telly-dons with their bubble-reputations and instant utterances. Solid scholarship was what they wanted. Robinson's interest in the Turin shroud, the image Christ allegedly im- printed on his funeral clothes, suggested he was losing his grip. His increasingly con- servative view of the New Testament, culminating in the posthumously published The Priority of John, did not help. He was wounded at being passed over as Regius Professor. With his booming voice he never understood the acoustics of the combination room. He was in fact tone- deaf.

Eric James stays unobtrusively in the background, even referring to himself in the third person. Yet he is himself a survivor of 'South Bank religion', having been Vicar of St Mary's Camberwell. He regards Robinson as a 'mystery man' and, rather than aiming at omniscience, quotes extensively from friends and other witnesses.

This may seem a little faint-hearted in a biographer, but it allows him to present, with the utmost discretion, the love story of John Robinson of The Close, Canter- bury, and Ruth Grace of Anfield, Liver- pool. They first held hands on a Liverpool tram. Robinson saw his marriage as the realisation of what he had read in Martin Buber about the 'I-Thou' relationship. It taught him a lot about God. Through eros to agape. But they had their ups and downs. She had to endure what he called `the grass-widowhood of a don's wife' and sometimes fled. But she was there when he preached his most memorable late sermon on 'God in cancer'. It seems appropriate that Stephen, their only son, should have been a tree-surgeon in Clitheroe: the thrust of the sacred into the secular.