| Book extracts: Page
1 | Page
2
 In
March of 1963, the Right Reverend John Robinson, Suffragan Bishop
of Woolwich, wrote an article for the London Observer that appeared
under the headline “Our Image of God Must Go.” Soon
afterward, a book called Honest to God, by the same Bishop, appeared.
The book and the article together touched off one of England’s
characteristically furious controversies. It also touched off
an inquiry by Ved Mehta—one of The New Yorker’s new
generation of writers—into the state of Christian theology
in the contemporary world. What resulted was The New Theologian.
 For
Mr. Mehta, Bishop Robinson turned out to be merely a point of
departure; since many of the Bishop’s ideas were popular
versions of ideas first developed by the pre-eminent theologians
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich, Mr. Mehta
began his investigation by returning directly to their work. He
went on to study the work of many other important theologians
and clergymen, particularly the so-called Christian radicals,
and held conversations with a number of them, including, in addition
to Bultmann and Tillich and Robinson, Karl Barth, Eberhard Bethge,
David Edwards, William Hamilton, Eric James, D. M. MacKinnon,
Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Michael Ramsey, Ian Ramsey, Nicolas Stacey,
Paul van Buren, and A. R. Vidler. What emerges in The
New Theologian is a brilliant report on present-day theology—specifically,
on a movement that is sometimes referred to as religionless Christianity
but that can also be seen as a movement of troubled but profoundly
religious thinkers who are groping toward a reconciliation of
Christian faith with the main secular intellectual currents of
our age. Mr. Mehta presents not only the ideas of this extraordinary
group of men but also, in stunning portraits, the men themselves.
Ved Mehta was born in India and educated in the United States and
England. In the few years since he joined the staff of The New Yorker,
he has established himself as one of the magazine’s most imposing
figures. He combines the literary exuberance of the true writer
with the intellectual rigor of the true scholar. His style is marked
by wit and sweep and fire. In an earlier book, Fly and the
Fly-Bottle, he brought these powers to bear on the minds
and personalities of many of England’s leading historians and
Oxford philosophers. In his present book, as he takes up the theologians,
he distinguishes himself once more.
Go to reviews
of this book Ved Mehta takes
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on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
