Bishop Robinson Says Churches Must Face Modern Challenges

John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Wool-wich in the Church of England, said last night that the church must stop "chasing its own tail" and respond to the challenge of the age we live in.

Bishop Robinson, speaking to a large audience in Sanders Theatre, and later to a small reception, stated that ours is "a genuinely and unashamedly secular world." In such an age, he asked, if a man is to become a Christian, "has he got to abandon the modern world for the equivalent of the medieval?" Christianity, he charged, has become too closely attached to particular descriptions of God which were helpful in the past but which seem incredible to many people today.

The bishop is in the United States on a month-long speaking tour to promote his controversial best-seller, Honest to God. In that book, Robinson pleaded for the re-examination of traditional statements of Christian doctrines which have become incomprehensible to non-Christians.

Last night in Sanders, he stated that the immense popularity of the book had taken him completely by surprise: "Honest to God touched a nerve. It merely articulated what a great many people had already been thinking. They felt a great sense of release on reading it, and said, 'Now at last we know a number of things which the Christian faith need not mean.'"

Bishop Robinson explained that his purpose in writing the book had been "to try as a Christian to release the power of the gospel, to try to make real for our generation the God of the Bible. Consequently he had tried to show that theology is not primarily concerned with the mythological descriptions which puzzle many non-Christians. Rather, according to the bishop, theology is about ordinary experience in depth, at the level of ultimate concern," and as such is of interest to all men.