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Defense
of the Orthodox View of the Second Coming of Christ In Response to the Teachings
of Full Preterism | Jerusalem
earthquake seen as "finger of God" | Ramp's
Collapse Foreshadows Greater Temple Mount Disaster | Program
Schedule | The passion of the Christ - Mel
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Christ's
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of Matthew

John
A.T. Robinson
(1919-1983)

Anglican bishop | New
Testament scholar

Redating the New
Testament (1976) | Jesus and His Coming (1967) | The Body
(1952) | A.T. Robinson
Remembered | J.S.
Spong

(On Christ's Second Coming)
"The parousia is clearly
understood, not as a separate catastrophic occurrence, but as a separate
pervasion of the daily life of the disciples and the Church.  The
coming is an abiding presence." [Jesus and His Coming
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), p .176]

(On Revelation 11:1 ; Early Date of Revelation)
"It is indeed generally agreed
that this passage must bespeak a pre-70 situation. . . . There seems
therefore no reason why the oracle should not have been uttered by a
Christian prophet as the doom of the city drew nigh." (Redating the
New Testament pp.. 240-242).

"It was at this point that I began to ask
myself just why any of the books of the New Testament needed to be put
after the fall of Jerusalem in 70. As one began to look at them, and in
particular the epistle to the Hebrews, Acts and the Apocalypse, was it
not strange that this cataclysmic event was never once mentioned or
apparently hinted at (as a past fact)? (Redating, p.
10).

"One of the oddest facts about the New
Testament is that what on any showing would appear to be the single most
datable and climactic event of the period ¾ the fall of Jerusalem in
A.D. 70 ¾ is never once mentioned as a past fact. . . . [T]he silence is
nevertheless as significant as the silence for Sherlock Holmes of the
dog that did not bark". (Ibid., p. 13.)

(On the Forty Years and That
Generation)
"I believe
that John represents in date, as theology, not only the omega but also
the alpha of New Testament development. He bestrides the period like a
colossus and marks out its span, the span that lies between two dramatic
moments in Jerusalem which boldly we may date with unusual precision.
The first was when, on 9 April 30, 'early on the Sunday morning, while
it was still dark,' one man 'saw and believed' (Jno. 20:1-9). And the
second was when, on 26 September 70, 'the dawn of the eight day of the
month Gorpiaeus broke upon Jerusalem in flames.' Over those forty years,
I believe, all the books of the New Testament came to completion, and
during most of that period, if we are right, the Johannine literature
was in the process of maturation." (p. 311)

(On the consequences of the
needed re-dating of the New Testament
books)
"the rewriting of many
introductions to - and, ultimately, theologies of - the New
Testament."

"Coming - presence" (Parousia) of Christ should not be seen as future
events, but as a symbolical mythological presentation of "...what must
happen, and is happening already, whenever the Christ comes in love and
power, whenever are to be traced the signs of His presence, wherever to
be seen the marks of His cross. `Judgement DAY' is a dramatized
idealized picture of everyday" (His in the end... Clarke, London, 1950
Pg. 69). Again I will quote the words of Robinson. "...Did Jesus ever
use language which suggested that He would return to earth from heaven?
A critical examination of the data leads him to answer `NO'. Jesus'
sayings on the subject really express the twin themes of vindication and
visitation. e.g. His reply to the high priest's question whether or not
He was the Messiah (Mark 14:62+): `1 am: and you will see the Son of man
sitting at the right hand of power: and coming with the clouds of
heaven'. In Math 26:64 and Lk.22:69 a word or phrase meaning from now
on' or 'hereafter' is inserted before `you will see"' (Jesus and His
coming - S.C.M., London 1957).

WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID

"Robinson, the reknown late Bishop from England begins this book, "I
thought I would see how far one could get with the hypothesis that the
whole of the New Testament was written before 70." That, of course, was
the year in which the Roman army sacked and burned the Temple of
Jerusalem. As it turns out, Robinson got much further than he ever
expected, and that on a journey made more impressive by his lack of any
predisposition toward a "conservative" point of view.

His conclusion is that there is no compelling evidence - indeed,
little evidence of any kind - that anything in the New Testament canon
reflects knowledge of the Temple's destruction. Furthermore, other
considerations point consistently toward early dates and away from the
common assumption (a prejudice with a seriously circular foundation)
that a majority of early church authors wrote in the very late First or
early-to-middle Second Century under assumed names. Whether or not one
agrees with every word of Robinson's analysis, he makes his case well
and should help all New Testament students rethink the presuppositions
that underlie much of what is currently written about First Century
Christianity." (Redating the New
Testament at Presence Books)

"In the field of eschatological studies, no topic seems thornier than
that of the resurrection, regardless of the particulars of one's
perspective. A great deal of misunderstanding about the resurrection in
"preterist" circles stems from our tendency to see the concept of "body"
largely in dualistic terms that do not reflect Paul's way of thinking.
This is especially true of Paul's discussions of resurrection, and a
recovery of the Hebrew understanding of body will go a long way toward a
proper understanding of resurrection in first-century corporate terms.
To this end, John A.T. Robinson's 1952 classic The Body: a study in
Pauline theology is a valuable contribution to the literature
surrounding Transmillennial® thought as much as his book, Redating
the New Testament. "One could say without exaggeration that the
concept of the body forms the keystone of Paul's theology," contends the
author. Robinson's own eschatology does not embrace complete
fulfillment, yet this quality reprint of this classic book in Pauline
studies provides the serious student a missing piece of the puzzle of
Pauline eschatology." (The Body at Presence
Books)

Robinson, A.T.
Remembered

By the Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong
Bishop
of Newark

One of the great mentors of my life was an English bishop
and New Testament scholar named John Albert Thomas Robinson. He burst
into public awareness in the United Kingdom in the late fifties when he
testified before a commission seeking to ban the novel Lady Chatterley's
Lover. For a bishop to favor Lady Chatterley titillated the English
media who love juxtaposing religion with sexual expose. People were not
aware at this time that this Bishop of Woolwich was also a serious
student and a prolific, if not yet well known, writer.

In 1962 a
back ailment required that John Robinson be confined to bed for a number
of months. His fertile and imaginative mind was freed from other
distractions and he wrote a little book called Honest to God that
appeared on the bookstands in 1963. It made the controversy about Lady
Chatterley's Lover look pale by comparison. This book forced people to
recognize that the language of traditional religion was not a language
that people believed today whether they continued to use it or not. An
advance story in London's SUNDAY OBSERVER trumpeted the headline,
"Bishop says the God up there or out there will have to go." Thus, the
Church was launched into what came to be known as the "Honest to God
Debate," and John A. T. Robinson became a household word in the
English-speaking world.

That little book sold more copies than
any religious book since Pilgrim's Progress. It was translated into
dozens of languages. It was discussed, not just in religious circles,
but in pubs, on golf courses and over bridge tables. It brought religion
out of the churches and planted it firmly on Main Street.

One
would think that the leaders of the churches would have welcomed such an
initiative, but that would be to misunderstand the nature of
institutional religion. The religious establishment, instead, recoiled
defensively. Every would-be theologian rushed into print to denounce
this book. Calls were issued for Bishop Robinson's resignation or for
him to be deposed for heresy. A book of reactions to Honest to God was
published to keep the waves rolling. It revealed just how deeply John
Robinson had touched the hot buttons of religious fear that the
traditional defenders of the faith struggle to conceal.

The
echoes of this debate reached my ears in my small-town parish in
Tarboro, North Carolina. I did not rush to read the book. Reviews
indicated that it quoted extensively from Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, and Paul Tillich. I was quite familiar with these thinkers
and so I dismissed the book as a popularizing effort of no great
significance. Nonetheless I placed the book on my reading schedule, and
finally got to it in 1965.

I remember the day I first opened
this book. Vacationing on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I sat on
the beach one afternoon with Honest to God. I did not put it down until
I had read it through three times. I knew from that moment that my life
would never be the same.

John Robinson made me aware that my
childhood understanding of God would not live in my world. He forced me
to face the fact that the words of both the Bible and the Creeds sound
strange to post-modern people and that my faith had to grow or it had to
be abandoned. I began on that day the long, tortuous and, to this
moment, not yet completed process of rethinking all of the symbols of my
religious past so that I could continue to claim them with integrity. I
also pledged myself never again to use pious clichés that I clearly no
longer believed.

This book drove me first back to the Bible. I
knew that the Noah story, or the splitting of the Red Sea story, could
not be literally true, to say nothing of the stories of Jesus turning
water into wine, walking on water and ascending to the heaven of a
Ptolemaic universe that had ceased to exist with Copernicus. My church
had prepared me poorly, I discovered, to live as a believer in a
post-Copernican world, to say nothing of a world shaped by such giants
as Newton, Darwin, Freud or Einstein. The Church still lived in a world
of miracle and magic, where reward and punishment were meted out by God
according to human deserving.

Seven years later, in 1972, this
internal struggle emerged externally in the form of my first book which
was deeply shaped by the "Worldly Holiness" chapter in Honest to God. My
publisher entitled my book Honest Prayer, hoping, I am sure, to be
pulled into the Honest to God energy that was still abroad. In 1973 I
first met John Robinson. This larger-than- life man came to speak in
Richmond on the 10th anniversary of the publication of Honest to God. He
was very British, displaying little emotion. After the session I was
introduced to him. I thanked him for what his writing had meant to me. I
presented him with a copy of Honest Prayer. We talked for a while and
then we each returned to our respective lives. Five years later in 1978
John and I met again at the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Bishops
of the world. I was now one of those bishops and John, who had returned
to Cambridge to teach New Testament, was present as a consultant. Both
of us, bored by the speeches, decided to leave early and walk through
the woods of Kent to discuss the New Testament. We came across a country
pub and stopped to share "a pint." We even engaged in the pub game of
"bowls," but all the while still discussing the New Testament. It was
such a pleasant experience that we decided to repeat it each day. So
while the bishops were debating, John and I probed the gospel tradition
and I learned from his incisive mind.

In those years John and I
both continued to write books which addressed the theme of bringing the
church into dialogue with today's reality. I read everything he wrote.
John Robinson's echoes were heard in me every time I spoke and certainly
every time I wrote. When one reviewer referred to me as the American
Bishop Robinson, I was deeply touched. After Lambeth, John and I began
to correspond. I yearned to bring him to lecture to our diocesan family,
and finally he agreed. Six months before his scheduled appearance,
however, John wrote that he had received a cancer diagnosis and had only
a few months to live. He sent me a copy of the sermon he preached at
Clare College, Cambridge, the Sunday after he received the diagnosis. I
was deeply touched by it, though it made me aware of how lonely I would
be without this kindred spirit. John died in the early months of 1983.
In my grief I was pleased to be asked to write the American tribute to
him published in THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY. Someone else had recognized how
important he was to me.

I did not have either John's
intellectual training or his Cambridge PhD. Yet after his death, in a
real sense I was the only other bishop who was addressing publicly the
issues he had raised. That fall of 1983 I published a book entitled Into
the Whirlwind: The Future of the Church. It marked a watershed moment
for me from which there was no turning back. It was not that it was a
great book, but reading it today I discover that the seeds of every book
I have written since were present in its pages.

In 1988 Living
in Sin? came out. That book was for me the kind of birth to the wider
public that the debate on Lady Chatterley's Lover had been for John
Robinson. Because of that book and the controversy it sparked, I
increasingly found myself occupying the space in which John Robinson
once stood and bearing the hostility he received. Now I was the most
controversial bishop in the Anglican Communion. My vocation clearly was
to transform Christianity so that it could be lived out appropriately
today. Each new book fueled this growing flame. Invitations to lecture
began to come in from across America, as well as from Australia, Canada,
New Zealand and the United Kingdom. To be a bishop leading this debate
became the heart of my vocation. Hence, I worked long hours lest I
violate either the integrity of my office or of my scholarship. I could
not walk away from the role for which everything in life had equipped
me. I have lived this role with vigor, yearning more than once to have
had John's counsel.

This past summer I returned once again to
the United Kingdom on a lecture tour. I had speaking engagements in
Yorkshire, Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Sheffield, Leeds, Milton Keynes, London
and Leicester. There were also breaks to allow us to visit family and
friends. In one of these downtimes I came face to face with John
Robinson once again.

We went to visit two friends, formerly of
St. Peter's, Morristown, who now live in a tiny, secluded village in
Herefordshire. To our amazement their next-door neighbor was John
Robinson's only brother, Edward. We spent an evening with him
reminiscing about John's career and his influence. My tour ended at a
conference in Leicester for an organization called "The Sea of Faith,"
where I debated the radical English theologian Don Cupitt. To my joy a
member of this conference was Ruth Robinson, John's widow. Once again we
spent an evening remembering John Robinson. It was as if grace had
touched me twice. The theological child of John A. T. Robinson had been
welcomed home. I have now lived and worked twelve years beyond the life
span of my mentor. I have picked up and addressed some issues that never
surfaced for him. It has sometimes been a lonely journey. Today I can
see the horizon of my career and wonder who the next John Robinson will
be.

There will always be the "John Robinson" role present in the
life of the Church. It will be welcomed by some, feared and hated by
others. But that role is always the means by which growth and the
renewal of the church is accomplished. I have been privileged to walk,
however ineptly, in these footsteps.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: THE BODY

Preface
Introduction
(1) The Old Testament
Background
1. Form and Matter
2. The One and the Many
3. Body
and Soul
4. Boundary of Self
(2) The Pauline Usage
(i) The
Concept of the Flesh
(ii) The Concept of the Body

II THE BODY
OF THE CROSS
The Human Situation
The Process of Redemption
(1)
Self-Identification
(2) Victory over evil
(3) Reproduced through
baptism

III THE BODY OF THE RESURRECTION
(1) The Extension of
the Incarnation
(2) The Origin of the Doctrine of the Body of
Christ
(3) The One and the Many
(4) Christ, the Church and
God
(5) The Old Body and the New
Dictionary of Key Greek
Terms
Index of Biblical References
Index of Names

Contents, Redating the New Testament (1976)

Preface
I Dates and Data
II.
The Significance of 70
III. The Pauline Epistles
IV. Acts and the
Synoptic Gospels
V. The Epistle of James
VI The Petrine Epistles
and Jude
VII. The Epistle to the Hebrews
VIII. The Book of
Revelation
IX. The Gospel and Epistles of John
X. A Post-Apostolic
Postscript
XI. Conclusions and Corollaries

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Date:

30 Nov 2003

Time:

09:31:19

Comments

Spong's silence about Robinson's later works, particularly on the
dating of the New Testament is, to quote Robinson "...nevertheless as
significant as the silence for Sherlock Holmes of the dog that did not
bark." Whether Robinson was correct or not is not the issue. The wonder
is that one who claimed to be so close to Robinson never mentions his
later works. In his latter years Robinson was, of course, pushing
against the edges as he had so wondrously done in "Honest To God." Yet
now it was the edges of "accepted" scholarship, not the edges of
"orthodoxy" against which Robinson was pushing. 'Tis strange, indeed,
that the good Bishop Spong was silent about this "pushing."

1996-2003 Todd
Dennis, [email-masked], (907) 455-7850