John A. T. Robinson
Personal Information
Description
John Robinson was born in Canterbury, England, the son of a Canon of the Cathedral. He read the classics and theology at Cambridge, and then entered Westcott House to prepare for ordination. In 1946 he earned his doctorate in theology. He was summoned to Woolwich where he taught at Wells Theological College and then he moved to Clare College, Cambridge, where he became Dean in 1951. His first book, In the End, God, was published in 1950. In 1959, he became became Anglican Bishop of Woolwich. He came into public awareness in the United Kingdom in 1960 when he testified for Penguin Books in favor of the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover before a commission seeking to ban the novel. In 1962, while recovering from a back injury, he wrote the book "Honest to God" which questioned traditional theism and started an international discussion about theology. He became a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was later appointed the Dean of Trinity College, a position he held until his death. He was considered a major force in shaping liberal Christian theology. Along with Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, he spearheaded the field of secular theology and, like William Barclay, he was a believer in universal salvation.
Books
The new Reformation
The great conflict between science and religion playing out today is but the latest act in a drama that's been running for millennia. Here, one of the greatest scientists and technological innovators of the early 20th century builds a bridge between these two philosophies so often at odds. Lucidly written and frequently poetic-Pupin quotes from the Bible and respectfully deems scientists "prophets"--This is a beautiful, warmly humanistic consideration of the "new reformation" that revolutionized humanity's understanding of the laws of the universe and enabled us to find the divine in the natural world as centuries of scientific scholarship has revealed it to us.
The Body
In the end, God
This is a book about 'the Last Things', the Christian doctrine of the destiny of history and of the individual. In recent times 'the Christian hope' has become so exclusively bound up with the question, 'what happens to me when I die?', that most of what the New Testament means by it -- the final restoration of the universe in the Second Coming of Christ -- has become irrelevant and even absurd to the modern man. Since the revolution in scientific criticism, the Church as made no revaluation of its myths of the Last Things in the way it was forced to do, a century ago, in relation to the First Things. The author shows how, when this is done, the Biblical teaching comes alive in the most forcible way in face of the great secular eschatologies of our day. 'The Last Things' are seen, not as remote events at the end of time, but as the due to the final issues of life and death introduced into history since the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Exploration into God
Expanded version of lectures delivered at Stanford University in 1966, in which the Bishop of Woolwich proceeds from his "Honest to God" to seek and locate the reality represented by the word "God."