The New Theologian

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.