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John A.T. Robinson

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Religious figures and
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   Dr John Arthur Thomas Robinson ( 1919 in Canterbury, England– December
   5, 1983) was a New Testament scholar, author, and former Anglican
   bishop of Woolwich, England. He was a lecturer at Trinity College,
   Cambridge and later Dean of Trinity College until his death in 1983
   from cancer. Dr Robinson was considered a major force in shaping
   liberal Christian theology. Along with Harvard theologian Harvey Cox he
   spearheaded the field of secular theology.

   Robinson wrote several notable books, the most famous being Honest to
   God in 1963. Robinson's own evaluation of Honest to God, found in the
   subsequent Exploration into God stated that the chief contribution of
   this work was its successful synthesis of the work of seemingly opposed
   theologians Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

   Robinson proposed abandoning the notion of a God "out there", existing
   somewhere out in the universe, just as we have abandoned already the
   idea of God "up there", the notion of the old man up in the sky. In its
   place, he offered us the idea of God as the depth of our being and
   existence. Honest to God caused a storm of controversy as the first
   publication by a leading churchman which asked the question

          "Now that we have rejected the ancients' view of God living in a
          material heaven above the actual sky what does God's existence
          mean?"

   While the bulk of his ideas have become integrated with the more
   liberal circles of Christian thought, he is considered an extremist by
   some. As is often the case with iconoclasts who question traditional
   thinking, his ideas are considered anathema by Barthian evangelicals
   and by those whose concept of a supernatural God supersedes other
   theological concerns.

   Although Robinson was firmly within the camp of liberal theology, he
   did challenge the work of colleagues in the field of exegetical
   criticism. Specifically, Dr Robinson examined the New Testament's
   reliability, because he believed that very little original research had
   been completed in the field during the period between 1900 and the mid
   1970s. Concluding his research, he wrote in his work, Redating the New
   Testament that past scholarship was based on a "tyranny of unexamined
   assumptions" and an "almost willful blindness".

   Robinson concluded that New Testament was written before AD 64, partly
   based on his judgement there is little textual evidence that the New
   Testament reflects knowledge of the Temple's AD 70 destruction. C. H.
   Dodd, in a frank letter to Robinson wrote: "I should agree with you
   that much of the late dating is quite arbitrary, even wanton, the
   offspring not of any argument that can be presented, but rather of the
   critic's prejudice that, if he appears to assent to the traditional
   position of the early church, he will be thought no better than a
   stick-in-the-mud." Robinson's call for redating the New Testament was
   echoed by subsequent scholarship such as John Wenham's work Redating
   Matthew, Mark and Luke: A Fresh Assault on the Synoptic Problem. Other
   subsequent works calling for redating of some or all of the gospels
   were written by such scholars as Claude Tresmontant, Gunther Zuntz,
   Carsten Peter Thiede, Eta Linneman, Harold Riley, Bernard Orchard.

   In relation to the four gospels dates of authorship, according to
   Norman Geisler, "Robinson places Matthew at 40 to after 60, Mark at
   about 45 to 60, Luke at before 57 to after 60, and John at from 40 to
   after 65." Robinson went on to state that the book of James was penned
   by a brother of the Jesus Christ within twenty years of Jesus’ death,
   that Paul authored all the books that bear his name, and that John, the
   apostle, wrote the fourth Gospel. Dr. Robinson believed the result of
   his investigations argued for the rewriting of many theologies of the
   New Testament.

   Robinson was also famous for his speech in the House of Lords against
   the censorship of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

   Two books have been written about Dr Robinson: A life of Bishop John
   A.T. Robinson: Scholar, pastor, prophet by Eric James and The Roots of
   Christian Freedom: The Theology of John A.T. Robinson by Alistair Kee.

Books by Robinson

     * The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology, 1952
     * Jesus and His Coming: The Emergence of a Doctrine, 1959
     * On Being the Church in the World, 1960
     * Honest to God, 1963, John Knox Press. reprint edition: ISBN
       0-664-24465-3, 40th anniv. edition 2003: ISBN 0-664-22422-9
     * Exploration into God, 1967
     * But That I Can't Believe!, 1967
     * In the End...God: A Study of Last Things, 1968
     * The Difference in Being a Christian Today, 1971
     * The Human Face of God, 1973
     * Redating the New Testament, 1976
     * Truth is Two-Eyed, 1979
     * Wrestling With Romans, 1979
     * The Roots of a Radical, 1981
     * Where Three Ways Meet, 1983

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