The Jewish Affirmation

The Faith of the Prophets has gone the way of a social eschatology, says the author, which is no solution to the complexities of being Jewish

When the Right Reverend John Robinson, Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich, declared in 1963 that “Our Image of God Must Go,” he started a controversy in ecclesiastical and popular circles in England that made him a best-selling author in an area where books are usually consulted but not bought or read. Of course, he and some of his Anglican colleagues came to that conclusion because they felt that the Church had failed to keep up with the latest developments in sex, delinquency, and social protest. When the message crossed the Atlantic, the Episcopal cousins of the Anglican divines drew the conclusion that if the times were awry—if boys grew their hair to shoulder-length, and Negroes were denied their civil rights in the fever belt of the Mississippi Delta—then God must go. It seems never to have occurred to the framers of this monumental non sequitur that if religion had failed its parishioners, it was not for lack of social causes to be engaged in, but for that sheer lack of spiritual faith it is the business of the professionals in the Church—priest, rabbi and minister—to espouse and to nurture. When the Bishop no longer believes in God, why should the parishioner go to church? The notion that priest and rabbi go into the streets with the demonstrating mobs in order to be part of the Zeitgeist fails to take into account the fact that if religion is in crisis, if it has failed to fulfill man’s spiritual needs, it is perhaps more a reflection of its attempts to keep up with the times than to ignore them.

MG

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Max Geltman

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The Faith of the Prophets has gone the way of a social eschatology, says the author, which is no solution to the complexities of being Jewish

When the Right Reverend John Robinson, Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich, declared in 1963 that “Our Image of God Must Go,” he started a controversy in ecclesiastical and popular circles in England that made him a best-selling author in an area where books are usually consulted but not bought or read. Of course, he and some of his Anglican colleagues came to that conclusion because they felt that the Church had failed to keep up with the latest developments in sex, delinquency, and social protest. When the message crossed the Atlantic, the Episcopal cousins of the Anglican divines drew the conclusion that if the times were awry—if boys grew their hair to shoulder-length, and Negroes were denied their civil rights in the fever belt of the Mississippi Delta—then God must go. It seems never to have occurred to the framers of this monumental non sequitur that if religion had failed its parishioners, it was not for lack of social causes to be engaged in, but for that sheer lack of spiritual faith it is the business of the professionals in the Church—priest, rabbi and minister—to espouse and to nurture. When the Bishop no longer believes in God, why should the parishioner go to church? The notion that priest and rabbi go into the streets with the demonstrating mobs in order to be part of the Zeitgeist fails to take into account the fact that if religion is in crisis, if it has failed to fulfill man’s spiritual needs, it is perhaps more a reflection of its attempts to keep up with the times than to ignore them.