The Notorious Bishop

I’ve been an Episcopalian all my thinking life, and a liberal for most of it. On politics and in our common humanity, I still am — God loves us all, no exceptions. But somewhere along the way, I came around to a more conservative view on theology’s supernatural claims. I want to explain how, because I think the path matters.

It started with a book.

In 1964, I bought Honest to God at the bookstore at the Washington National Cathedral. At that time, the bookstore was a temporary wooden structure, the cathedral itself still unfinished. Next to the cash register, there was a stack of Bishop Robinson’s books, and I picked one up to take a closer look.

“I wouldn’t buy that if I were you,” said the cashier. “He’s an iconoclast.” Then, leaning close and half covering her mouth, she whispered, “I hear tell he doesn’t believe in God.”

I wanted to ask why, then, they were selling it at the cathedral. Instead, I said, “I’ll take it.”

John A. T. Robinson was a suffragan bishop in Woolwich, tucked into the industrial southeast of London — not exactly where you’d expect a theological earthquake to begin. But in 1963 he wrote Honest to God, and the Church of England shook. The Archbishop of Canterbury distanced himself. Fellow bishops muttered about heresy. And the book sold — eventually more than a million copies, which is not what happens to quiet works of careful doctrine.

What Robinson argued was simple enough to be dangerous. The old mythological framework had to go: God up there, intervening from outside, working miracles on demand. Modern people couldn’t believe it, and serious Christians, he insisted, shouldn’t need it. He wanted a faith stripped of its scaffolding — honest about what it was actually claiming. To half the Church it felt like liberation. To the other half it felt like surrender.

I bought into it completely. Many progressively-minded Episcopalians and other Christians of a certain generation did, too.

***

The theological tradition Robinson was drawing on runs from Paul Tillich, the German-American theologian who became perhaps the most serious religious thinker of the twentieth century. Tillich’s phrase — the one Robinson carried into Honest to God and that Bishop John Shelby Spong would later make famous in the Episcopal Church — was God as the Ground of Being. Or sometimes, Being-Itself.

The insight is real, and worth taking seriously. Tillich wasn’t saying God is a very large and powerful being living somewhere above the clouds. He was saying God is not a being at all — God is the condition that makes being possible, the depth and source of everything that exists. Not a person up there, adjusting events like a celestial repairman, but the ground under everything.

Robinson picked this up and made it accessible. Spong made it famous. And for a generation of educated Episcopalians, myself included, it felt like liberation — a way to be rigorously modern and genuinely Christian at the same time.

But here is what I could never quite get past.

If God is the Ground of Being — a condition, a depth, a source — what does it mean for God to act? Grounds don’t intervene. Conditions don’t hear prayers. You can speak of such a God with great warmth and even call him Love, but you’ve described something that looks, on close inspection, very much like the deist’s God: the watchmaker who wound the watch and walked away. Present at the beginning, perhaps, but not in any robust sense, the sustainer of what came after.

The deist’s God created. The theist’s God creates and sustains — present, active, capable of acting in ways that exceed our ordinary categories. The Ground of Being framework is trying to be theism. Tillich would have insisted he was a theist. But the logic pulls the other way. And Spong’s God — to say it plainly — looks a great deal like the deist’s God dressed in warmer language.

Which is fine, if that’s what you believe. But it should be said plainly. We are, after all, a broad church, a big tent church.

The cashier’s whisper, it turns out, was pointing at something real. As long as I embraced Robinson’s theology, I carried a low-grade doubt about the existence of God that I couldn’t quite shake. The distance between God is the Ground of Being and there is no God is shorter than it looks. You can close it gradually, without ever noticing you’ve moved. Kierkegaard’s leap was more like a hop and a skip.

***

John Shelby Spong always claimed Robinson as something like a mentor, and for decades that lineage seemed clean and obvious: Robinson opens the door, Spong walks through it, the rest of us follow at a respectful distance.

But Robinson did something that complicates that story considerably.

In January of 1976, he wrote a letter to Father Peter Rinaldi, a Catholic priest who had become one of the most prominent American voices on the Shroud of Turin. Robinson wrote:

“You won’t know me, though you may know me by name as the notorious bishop who wrote Honest to God and therefore about the last person to be a believer in the Shroud, if that is the right word! But for a long time I have been very much impressed by the evidence that there is here something that cannot easily be explained away.”

He knew exactly what this looked like. The author of Honest to God — the man who had argued for a Christianity stripped of mythology and miracle — was writing to a Catholic priest about a burial cloth that, if authentic, would be the most extraordinary physical artifact in human history. He called himself the last person anyone would expect. And he wrote anyway.

The following year he spoke at a Shroud conference in Albuquerque:

“If in the recognition of the face and hands and feet and all the other wounds on the Holy Shroud, we, like those who knew Him best, are led to say, ‘It is the Lord!’ — then perhaps we may have to learn to count ourselves also among those who have ‘seen and believed.’ But that, as St. John makes clear, brings with it no special blessing — rather special responsibility.”

That is not the language of a man dabbling in a curiosity. That is a man reckoning with something he cannot look away from. He went on to co-found the British Society for the Turin Shroud and traveled to Turin in 1978, the year when scientists were finally allowed to examine the cloth directly. At that time, the Shroud was not so widely regarded as a medieval forgery. Many serious researchers believed it might be exactly what it appeared to be: the authentic burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth.

Robinson was not retreating into superstition. He was following his honesty wherever it led.

When I learned all of this, it set off a slow process of background thinking in me that eventually led to two questions I don’t think theological liberals like to sit with for very long.

The first question is simply: Does God actually exist?

The second is: If He does, is He limited — or is He Almighty?

These sound like elementary questions, the kind you settle in Theology 101. But I’ve come to think that a great deal of theological liberalism has already answered the second question in the negative while still appearing to be open on the first. If your theology has quietly ruled out the possibility of God acting in the world in ways that exceed our ordinary categories — if miracles are, by definition, the kind of thing that doesn’t happen — then you haven’t just updated your metaphysics. You’ve made a very large claim while pretending you haven’t. You’ve bought into David Hume, who argued that no testimony could ever establish a miracle and dressed it up as theology.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying you have to believe in any particular miracle. The Resurrection, the Shroud, the wine at Cana — these are all historical questions, and historical questions are hard. Reasonable people, faithful people, land in different places on all of them.

But there’s a prior question. If God is almighty — and I’ve come to think he is — then miracles aren’t a category error. They’re not the kind of thing that can be ruled out in advance. You don’t have to believe the history. But you do have to believe the possibility.

***

I recall a fellow soldier in Vietnam in 1965. In high school, this soldier had a science teacher who was also his catechism teacher. Sister P, he called her, Penelope being too long and Penny not to her liking. She had a way of making things stick.

One evening he told several of us how she explained the miracle at Cana.

“Water into wine,” he said slowly. Then again, louder: “Water into wine.”

We were listening.

“Sister P made that miracle fascinating. She pointed out that wine is about eighty-five percent water. Only a couple of cups in each gallon need to become sugars, alcohol, and flavor compounds. But even that requires tearing water apart down to its subatomic parts and building new elements. Water has no carbon. Without carbon, you can’t have wine.”

He shifted back to Sister P. “She could make any science lesson stick. She once told us that everything heavier than hydrogen and helium —the elements that constitute us, and wine — were made in stars. She meant it literally. Stars fuse atoms in their cores throughout their lives. When they die — sometimes with a bang, sometimes with a sigh — they scatter carbon, oxygen, and iron into the universe. Everything needed for wine, bread, blood, and breath.”

“She’d walk to the front of the room, hold up an imaginary wine glass, and say, ‘Every carbon atom in this glass was born in the heart of a star that died billions of years ago. But in the realm of miracles, God Almighty makes wine instantly — without nuclear fusion.’”

He paused to let that settle.

“God doesn’t need to follow nature’s steps. A miracle isn’t a process. You can’t film it in slow motion. Nothing is mixed, baked, burned, or built. God wills it — and it is. Genesis doesn’t say God constructed light. It says he spoke it. Let there be light. There’s only before and after. No steps in between.”

He held up a finger. “Two choices. First: trust only nature, and reject miracles entirely. Second: accept the simplest answer — by God’s will alone, the result exists.”

He smiled. “When we want cookies, we measure flour, mix the dough, wait for the oven. Maybe get lucky if someone mails them to Vietnam. But if God wants a cookie — a cookie exists. He doesn’t measure anything. He doesn’t wait. It just is.”

He leaned forward. “And notice — Jesus didn’t change water into wine. Scripture doesn’t say that. It says he told the servants to fill the jars, then draw some out, and take it to the steward. The miracle isn’t the process. There is no process. It’s only the result.”

I never forgot that. Sister P, whoever she was, had done her job.

***

I owe Robinson something I don’t want to leave unsaid.

There was a time when his honesty kept me in the church. Not his conclusions — his honesty. The willingness to ask the hard questions without flinching, to follow the argument wherever it led, to refuse the comfort of easy answers in either direction. That gave me permission to think. And for a young Episcopalian carrying a cashier’s whisper in the back of his mind, permission to think was not a small gift.

In the end, the thinking led me somewhere Robinson may not have expected. Maybe somewhere he wouldn’t have followed. But I like to think he would have recognized the instinct — because it was his instinct first.

He called himself the last person anyone would expect to take the Shroud seriously. And then he took it seriously anyway. That’s not a man who had decided in advance what the answers had to be. That’s a man who was still asking.

I’ve come out in a different place than the theological liberalism he helped to shape. I believe in a God who is not merely the ground of being but the Lord of it — present, active, almighty, and capable of doing what Sister P’s student described one evening in Vietnam: willing something into existence without process, without steps, without waiting for the oven.

I believe that God hears prayer. I believe he notices sparrows. And I believe he loves us all — every one of us, whatever we are by birth or by choice — without exception.

Robinson’s honesty gave me permission to think. I’m grateful for that. And the thinking, in the end, brought me home.