"For the true radical is not the [one] who wants to root out all the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect; it is only too easy on these lines to reform the Church into a walled garden. The true radical is the [one] who continually subjects the Church...to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve." (John A. T. Robinson, Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich, in Honest to God, 1963.)
I first read Honest to God back in the mid-1980s as a college senior planning to head to seminary. It was a gift from my step-father. I didn't really understand the politics of Anglicanism or The Episcopal Church then but Robinson's honesty spoke to me and I felt at the time (and still feel) that a Church that could make such a man a bishop had to be doing something right.
I am re-reading Susan Howatch's Starbridge Series on the Church of England and have come to the fourth one, "Scandalous Risks." Each one of these novels focuses on a theologian from the time period of that character and this one focuses on Bp. Robinson. The quote above is the epigraph Howatch offers to set the tone for the novel.
For now I'll leave it at that, but the quote has me thinking and ruminating, so perhaps more to come.
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