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Speaking to God in Australia: Donald Robinson and the Writing of An Australian Prayer Book (1978)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2017

R. J. W. Shiner
R. J. W. Shiner*
Affiliation:
Shenton Park, Australia
*
*9 Rankin Rd, Shenton Park, Western Australia, Australia6008. E-mail: rory.shiner@gmail.com.
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Abstract

Archbishop Donald Robinson (b. 1922) had a distinguished career as a New Testament scholar and senior churchman. As a New Testament scholar, he emphasized the linguistic and cultural distance between what Barth called ‘the strange new world of the Bible’ and our own. However, as a senior churchman, Robinson was required to traverse the distance between the Bible and twentieth-century Australians. Through his episcopal leadership, and notably through his work in producing An Australian Prayer Book (1978), Robinson faced the challenge of speaking to Australians about God, and finding the words by which Australians might speak to God. This article will explore the ways in which a prominent scholar and churchman grappled with the linguistic and cultural challenges of speaking about God and to God in contemporary Australia, understood against the background of the crisis of (ir)relevance faced by Australian churches in the decline of the 1960s and 1970s.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 53: TRANSLATING CHRISTIANITY , June 2017, pp. 435 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2017 

Archbishop Donald Robinson (b. 1922) had a distinguished career as a New Testament scholar and senior Australian churchman.Footnote 1 He emphasized the linguistic and cultural distance between the world of the New Testament and our own, resulting in what were often daring and original claims about the New Testament and early Christianity. He was fond of telling students he could take them to the moon (exegetically speaking), but he could not promise to bring them home again.Footnote 2 However, as a senior churchman and public figure, Robinson was required precisely to bring the Christian scriptures ‘home’ to contemporary Australians. Through his critical work in producing An Australian Prayer Book (1978) and through his leadership roles, Robinson faced the challenge of speaking to Australians about God, and finding the words by which Australians might speak to God.

This work of translating the faith in Australia occurred during a religious crisis for the churches precipitated by rapid cultural changes across the Western world in the 1960s.Footnote 3 Christian leaders scrambled to diagnose why Australians were now disengaged with the churches and their message, and to offer solutions. Indeed, the public ‘secularizing’ discourse of Christian leaders in Australia, as Sam Brewitt-Taylor has argued in the British case, may itself have been a contributor to the process.Footnote 4 In Australia the crisis was augmented by a national debate on Australian identity in a context where (to use the trifecta from Hugh Chilton's recent study) ‘British’, ‘White’ and ‘Christian’ were increasingly abandoned as plausible sources of identity.Footnote 5

Much of the diagnostic work of Christian leaders centred around a perceived failure to translate Christian Scripture, liturgy, thought and praxis into language contemporary Australians could understand and to which they could relate. Australian Christians, it was argued, had failed to give people a language in which they could speak authentically about God and to God, and were being punished for their failure to translate with shrinking churches.

It is easy to cast an Evangelical and conservative figure like Robinson as a non-combatant in the battle for relevance of this era. However, his leadership and liturgical work represented, in their own way, a creative response to this cultural crisis. Though Robinson's catholic and urbane approach to scholarship can appear aloof from the contextual demands of the day, this article will argue that he was not a conservative looking to preserve a British identity, or a liberal seeking to reform church dogma, or even a radical seeking to translate faith into modern idiom. He was – cautiously, idiosyncratically and not always successfully – making a principled and interesting contribution to the translation and contextualization challenges of post-Christian Australia.

Responding to the Crisis

After the religiously propitious 1950s, the 1960s witnessed a sudden and dramatic decline in church attendance and Christian influence in Australia. From the perspective of the churches, it was a ‘religious crisis’. Responses were varied. For liberal and progressive Christians, the crisis was an opportunity to revise traditional doctrine and practice.Footnote 6 Conservatives like Robinson's episcopal predecessor Marcus Loane (1911–2009) fought gently but persistently to see a Christian and British identity preserved in the Sydney diocese. Archbishop Loane was deeply reluctant to see his own Church of England in Australia abandon its English heritage, its Prayer Book or the King James Bible, all of which he saw as a bulwark against theological compromise as well as sources of spiritual vitality.Footnote 7

In his recent doctoral work, Chilton has drawn attention to the creative responses of the Jesus People movement of the 1970s. It was a response at once conservative in theology and radical in practice. The Jesus People argued that the churches had failed to translate the Christian faith into idioms and language to which average Australians could relate. They longed to see ‘the gospel becoming real in the Australian context’.Footnote 8 Gallant efforts were made to create evangelistic, liturgical and catechetical material able to get past the communications bottleneck. The movement occasionally spoke of a ‘Gum-Leaf Theology’ – a self-conscious attempt to bring Christian thought into Australian language. Uniting Church minister Bruce Prewer published his Australian Psalms and Australian Prayers, which were widely read.Footnote 9 In 1985 the biggest-selling book from the Australian Broadcasting Commission's retail outlets was The Day the Grog Ran Out and other Stories from the Big Book, a translation of popular Bible stories into the idiom of Australian slang.Footnote 10 The market seemed to vindicate the Jesus People's argument for, when Christian liturgy and Scripture were put into Australian vernacular, people appeared to respond favourably.

Donald Robinson

Despite holding senior office, Robinson is most remembered for his New Testament work, and not least the so-called ‘Knox-Robinson’ view of the Church, an interpretation of New Testament ecclesiology emphasizing the primacy of the local, gathered body of believers.Footnote 11 In the account by Moore College principal D. B. Knox (1916–94), the implication was that relationships and fellowship, rather than liturgy and polity, were at the heart of church life. Indeed, both liturgical form and denominational rules could (and, in Knox's estimation, often did) undermine authentic fellowship in churches.Footnote 12 For the generation of Sydney Anglican clergy emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, Knox's ecclesiology provided the theological vertebrae on which they could build a more accessible, less liturgical and decidedly low-church vision of ministry. They were hungry for greater freedom as they sought to evangelize a society now unsympathetic to or unfamiliar with traditional religious forms.

Robinson was also teaching and writing on ecclesiology at Moore College in the 1960s. However, despite the association of his name with the reform-conducive ‘Knox-Robinson view’, two aspects of his career seem difficult to reconcile with the changes his alleged views were helping to underwrite. Firstly, Robinson, unlike Knox, was deeply involved with liturgical work and deeply committed to the Anglican liturgical heritage. And secondly, as archbishop of Sydney in the 1980s he was locked in an increasingly unwinnable battle with many of his own clergy, who were arguing for significant change in order to meet the evangelistic challenge of the moment.Footnote 13 Many of the younger clergy were confused, perceiving that Robinson as archbishop was opposing the views he himself had taught them as his students.Footnote 14

Marcus Loane had served as archbishop from 1966 until 1982. Widely respected and revered by his clergy, he nevertheless represented a conservative leadership over a period when the groundswell for radical change grew ever stronger. Though the first Australian-born archbishop in the Sydney see (all before him had been English), he was also an Anglophile, a loyal monarchist and a firm believer that the Anglican formularies were the best possible guardians of Evangelical orthodoxy and founts of spiritual strength. He steadfastly insisted on clerical dress, the use of the Book of Common Prayer and adherence to authorized liturgy, in a period in which both clerical dress and liturgy were seen increasingly as impediments to mission.

After sixteen years of Loane's leadership, many clergy held high hopes for change under Robinson. When, as archbishop, Robinson also proved to be deeply committed to liturgical forms, it became easy to understand him as one who had in office ‘abandoned his purer teaching’.Footnote 15 Ballantine-Jones, a prominent reformist Sydney clergyman of the period, concludes: ‘Robinson was a conservative in the Loane mould’.Footnote 16 It is this conclusion I wish to dispute. Robinson may have in some senses been a conservative, but he was not simply a conservative and, if the adjective ‘conservative’ applies, he was a conservative precisely not in the ‘Loane mould’.Footnote 17 I wish to demonstrate that Robinson's apparent conservatism was not of the same genus as Loane's more nostalgic stance. Rather, it is best understood as, in its own way, a creative response to the crisis of the 1960s and should be understood alongside, rather than apart from, other contemporaneous efforts at translating the faith in the newly contested context.

An Australian Prayer Book

Robinson joined the Prayer Book Commission of the General Synod in 1962 with a decade of liturgical interest and scholarship behind him.Footnote 18 The commission reported back to the General Synod in 1966 with two draft liturgies.Footnote 19 In September 1966 news broke that among the submissions to the Synod was a revision of the Lord's Prayer including the line ‘Our bread of the morrow give us today’. The line, based on recent linguistic and exegetical work, was Robinson's. It was widely reported, with the focus on Canon Robinson – the man ‘who rewrote the Lord's Prayer’ – and a tabloid-style exhortation: ‘Leave the Lord's Prayer Alone: Man in the Street Doesn't Want Change’.Footnote 20

The 1966 General Synod set up a new liturgical commission to continue the work, again including Robinson. According to Robinson, despite the diverse churchmanship of the commission, it was an easy group of people to work with, characterized by ‘a remarkable degree of mutual understanding and friendliness’.Footnote 21 They were given the brief to continue drafting new liturgies, but a more ambitious cause gripped them: the writing of a whole new Prayer Book. Fellow commissioner and professor of Ancient History, Edwin Judge, explains:

Donald suddenly actually said to us, the ten of us sitting around the table, he said something like ‘we should write a whole new book.’ It was his idea. It was like a bombshell. We were getting nowhere, we were sick to death of variations and revisions and floundering and so on, and inertia was settling in on the commission and really frustration as to what it was all about. And he simply said . . . ‘We must write a book’ . . . Nobody had thought of that. So on the one hand, it was a truly creative moment, and nobody had told us to write a book, so we were naughty in a way, we took it upon ourselves . . . we were going to spring a surprise on our Church!Footnote 22

Robinson at the National Evangelical Anglican Congress (1971)

In August 1971 Robinson spoke at the National Evangelical Anglican Congress (NEAC) in Melbourne. His topic was liturgy, and he began by arguing that the ‘obligation to worship God is total, and is not confined to special times, places or actions’.Footnote 23 He argued that ‘liturgy’ is a dangerous word as it is likely to attach itself to a particular type of formal service, rather than to the totality of a life lived for God.Footnote 24 For Robinson, liturgical language in the New Testament invariably described ‘the ordinary deeds and words of Christians, never rites and ceremonies’.Footnote 25

These points raised the question of the nature and purpose of church services. Robinson believed that when studying the Book of Common Prayer, it becomes clear that the Reformers assumed a community such as a village, parish or even household whose life and network of relationship extended well beyond Sunday services and indeed for whom the Sunday services were not what primarily constituted them as a community.Footnote 26 The services of the Book of Common Prayer presupposed the same congregation (that is, the same people being present) and provided for that group of people a means of ‘common prayer’. In short, it envisaged a pattern of community life differing sharply from the realities of twentieth-century suburban Australia.

Robinson's 1971 NEAC lecture demonstrated that his doctrine of church did not entail an abandonment of Anglican liturgy. Robinson was persuaded of the need for a liturgy reformed, not a liturgy abandoned. Despite an emphasis on fellowship, for him the gathering of the church is nevertheless ‘to meet Christ’.Footnote 27 And the questions of engaging with, and bearing witness to, twentieth-century Australia were not questions that could be addressed simply by modernizing the Sunday service. Moreover, for Robinson, if church is primarily a meeting of the faithful, it is exactly the wrong point at which to agonize over engaging the culture. Church is not ordered so as to engage the world, but to encourage the faithful and to meet the Lord. Years later, in his 1988 synod address as archbishop, he would make his thinking explicit, calling for a ‘renewal of true worship’, convinced that ‘as Christ exercises his kingly power in the midst of his church, we may be sure that his word will run very swiftly into the world’.Footnote 28 Within this framework, Robinson was committed to liturgical reform, but he implored his fellow Evangelicals to be patient with the national Church and ‘wait for one another’ (an allusion to 1 Corinthians 11: 33) in the matter of liturgical revision.Footnote 29

On intercessions, Robinson argued that there should be less prayer for the Queen ‘who is now a mere figurehead of government, and more for those in whose hand the real power rests’, including trade union leaders and captains of industry.Footnote 30 This is a striking comment, unimaginable on the lips of Marcus Loane. In 1971 the monarchy still commanded enormous respect, and the Queen had had a very successful tour of Australia just the year before. Robinson's position went against this mood. He also argued against introducing extempore prayer, with an instructive aside: ‘If there were evidence of a widespread gift of prayer in the churches one might be inclined to stretch the legal point’.Footnote 31 The implication was that if a widespread charisma were evident, that would be grounds to change practice. This is consistent with Robinson's 1973 address on the then-growing charismatic movement.Footnote 32 As a response to the movement it is (unsurprisingly) scholarly, but (surprisingly) irenic. Robinson approached phenomena like speaking in tongues neither with conservative cynicism nor with an aversion to supernatural phenomena characteristic of progressive Christianity.Footnote 33 He was in principle open to the supernatural claims of neo-pentecostalism, but found them wanting on specific exegetical grounds.

Reception of An Australian Prayer Book

Prayer Book revision continued throughout the 1970s, led by the two dominant figures of Donald Robinson and Anglo-Catholic liturgist Brother Gilbert Sinden.Footnote 34 By 1977 the commission was able to present a completed manuscript of An Australian Prayer Book to the General Synod. It was approved with only one vote against. It became available for use on 5 April 1978 and passed into wide use, apparently without controversy. Indeed, in a somewhat bad-tempered review, Australian literary figure Barry Spurr complained in 1981 that ‘it has already superseded [the Book of Common Prayer] in many parishes at most services’.Footnote 35

An Australian Prayer Book was the first prayer book in the Anglican world to replace ‘thou’ with ‘you’.Footnote 36 More substantially, as Judd has demonstrated, it exhibited a productive and creative engagement with Scripture.Footnote 37 Whilst the 1549 Prayer Book had included prayers for the dead, the 1552 Book of Common Prayer (on which that of 1662 was largely based) had largely abandoned them, a situation twentieth-century Evangelicals celebrated and Anglo-Catholics lamented. As Judd has argued, rather than return to 1549 or simply modernize 1662, the new book drew on the New Testament doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, producing a prayer that moved beyond both 1549 and 1662:Footnote 38

THANKSGIVING FOR THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED

We give thanks for the life and work of . . .

We praise you, Lord God, for your faithful servants in every age, and we pray that we, with all who have died in the faith of Christ, may be brought into a joyful resurrection and the fulfilment of your eternal kingdom.Footnote 39

According to Edwin Judge, the suggestion was Robinson's.Footnote 40 It allowed for the intercessor to stop short of praying for the dead whilst still affirming the congregation's fellowship with them in awaiting the resurrection together.

The book was criticized for lacking a post-British identity and for being a product of theological compromise – ‘a testament to disunity’.Footnote 41 However, as Judd has argued, it stands amongst Prayer Book revisions as a testimony to precisely the opposite: it represents a product of Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical cooperation, and is grounded, not in compromise and studied ambiguity, but rather in a genuine attempt to attend to Scripture and tradition, and in so doing to ‘wait for one another’ until agreement, and not mere compromise, could be reached. In its own way it was a testimony to growing Australian confidence – the product of people who neither self-consciously produced ‘Australianized’ services, nor timidly updated the Book of Common Prayer, but who had the quiet audacity to write a Prayer Book for Australia.

Robinson on Translating Scripture

In his wider New Testament scholarship, Robinson's whole project was centred on re-introducing students to what Karl Barth described as ‘the strange new world within the Bible’.Footnote 42 Like Barth, he saw his role not as translating the ancient text into modern idiom, but to bringing modern people to the ancient text, in all its strangeness and otherness. To do so required preserving the sense of distance between the Bible's world and our own.

In a 1979 review of the Good News Bible, Robinson provided some important clues to his thought.Footnote 43 He continued to hold the view that there existed within Australia a sizeable constituency of Anglicans who, despite a perhaps tenuous personal connection with the Christian faith, could be won back and who, if won, would expect the Church to which they came back to look something like the Church they had left.Footnote 44 This view contrasted sharply with that of younger clergy who believed the task was no longer to win back the lost sheep, but to gather new ones.Footnote 45 Continuity, both in liturgical reform and in Bible translation, had a pastoral imperative for Robinson.

However, it was not his purpose to make the liturgy or the Scripture sound ‘normal’ – either to returning ‘sheep’ or to as yet unbelieving Australians. His consideration of the ‘dynamic equivalence’ translation method employed in the Good News Bible is instructive.Footnote 46 He saw the effort to evoke in the contemporary reader the same reaction to the text which its original readers would have had as both ‘impossible and misguided’. As he explained:

. . . it is not possible to produce the identical reaction, since our whole presuppositional background is so different from that of the first readers. Salvation is of the Jews, and the aim of translation is to enable us to understand how that salvation appeared to a Jew, not to show how the Jew would have thought had he been an Englishman.Footnote 47

Robinson's headline-making proposal for the Lord's Prayer is an instance of such thinking. ‘Our bread of the morrow give us today’ is not an effort at making the Lord's Prayer more immediate, but more strange. As such, it is an invitation to enter into a world and way of thinking not our own.

Robinson felt the evangelistic situation in Australia was confused by using church services as an evangelistic platform, and found it bemusing that, even when neutral ground was chosen for gospel proclamation (such as a showground or a public hall), Christians still had a tendency to ‘dress up the proceedings to appear as much like a Christian assembly as possible’. Does this mean, he asked, ‘that we really have no frontier with the genuine non-Christian today, of the kind St Paul had when he spoke at Athens?’Footnote 48

For Robinson, it seems, evangelism in the 1970s was not too radical, but not radical enough. It failed to come to terms with the specific challenges of speaking to non-believers, rather than addressing people who were Christian but ‘not Christian enough’.Footnote 49

Conclusion

Donald Robinson thought deeply about the task of translating and commending the gospel to an increasingly secular and post-Christian Australia. He was not a radical. He did not promote the radical discipleship of the Jesus People, nor the house church movement of his former student, New Testament scholar Robert Banks,Footnote 50 nor even the more radical implications of his post-liturgical colleague D. B. Knox. And yet, he did (with the Jesus People) worry that insisting on ‘churchly’ modes of evangelism (like the Billy Graham Crusades) meant Christians had ‘no frontier with the genuine non-Christian today’; he did (with Banks) agree that current patterns of church and community life could not deliver the sort of intimate community envisaged in the New Testament. Moreover, he agreed with Knox that worship embraced all of life and that fellowship, the communion of the saints, was at the heart of our purpose in being ‘churched’.

If he was not a radical, neither was he (simply) a conservative. A Cambridge education made him more cosmopolitan than Anglophile.Footnote 51 He was not nostalgic for empire. He produced the first Anglican Prayer Book in the world to dispense with Elizabethan forms of address. He suggested a radical recasting of the Lord's Prayer, and encouraged a mode of evangelism in which churchly forms were set aside and evangelists were genuinely sent out, and the laity were encouraged to ‘go in peace to love and serve the Lord’ in their places of calling.

If Robinson's work is assessed on whether he was able to find a language to restore a principle of common prayer to Australian Anglicanism, or on whether he was able to stem the tide of Australians leaving the churches, or on whether he was able to win back disengaged Anglicans, he failed on all counts. But, since the 1960s, so has almost everyone. The purpose of this article has not been to argue that Robinson's proposals were vindicated, but merely that he should be understood, not as a conservative (‘in the mould of Loane’) or reactionary, but as one of those who saw the post-1960s moment, felt its significance and responded creatively, sensitively and with principle.

Footnotes

1 Vice-principal of Moore College 1959–72, bishop of Parramatta 1973–81, archbishop of Sydney 1982–93.

2 Robinson, D. W. B., ‘Origins and Unresolved Tensions’, in Gibson, R. J., ed., Interpreting God's Plan: Biblical Theology and the Pastor (Adelaide, 1997), 1–17, at 6.

3 See Brown, Callum G., ‘What was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s?’, JRH 34 (2010), 468–479. On the specific impact in Australia, see Hilliard, David, ‘The Religious Crisis of the 1960s: The Experience of the Australian Churches’, JRH 21 (1997), 209–27. Hilliard dates the ‘1960s’ in Australia as beginning either with the visit of the Beatles in 1964 or the committing of troops to Vietnam in 1965; Tom Frame sees a period of ‘growing disinterest’ in religion from 1966; Chilton talks of the ‘long 1960s’ extending well into the 1970s: see, respectively, Hilliard, ‘Religious Crisis’, 210; Frame, Tom, Losing My Religion: Unbelief in Australia (Sydney, 2009) Kindle edn, ch. 4; Hugh Chilton, ‘Evangelicals and the End of Christian Australia: Nation and Religion in the Public Square 1959–1979’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2014), 84.

4 See Brewitt-Taylor, Sam, ‘The Invention of a “Secular Society?” Christianity and the Sudden Appearance of Secularization Discourses in the British National Media, 1961–4’, Twentieth-Century British History 24 (2013), 327–50. Chilton applies this analysis to Australia, arguing that the public statements by Christian leaders about ‘secularization’ and ‘crisis’ in this era were ‘somewhat overstated’ and ‘became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy’: Chilton, ‘Evangelicals and the End of Christian Australia’, 34.

5 Footnote Ibid.

6 Hilliard, ‘Religious Crisis’, 211–12.

7 On Loane, see Blanch, Allan, From Strength to Strength: A Life of Marcus Loane (Melbourne, 2014). On his response to the religious crisis, see Chilton, ‘Evangelicals and the End of Christian Australia’, 223–58.

8 Athol Gill, quoted in Chilton, ‘Evangelicals and the End of Christian Australia’, 272. See, for example, Smith, John, Advance Australia Where? (Melbourne, 1989); Garvin, Mal, Us Aussies: The Fascinating History they didn't tell us at School (Melbourne, 1992).

9 Prewer, Bruce, Australian Psalms (Adelaide, 1979); idem, Australian Prayers (Adelaide, 1983), both cited in Chilton, ‘Evangelicals and the End of Christian Australia’, 291–2.

10 See Chilton, ‘Evangelicals and the End of Christian Australia’, 16.

11 ‘Knox’ is a reference to D. B. Knox, principal of Moore College 1959–86. See Knox, D. B., ‘De-mythologizing the Church’, in Birkett, Kirsten, ed., D. Broughton Knox: Selected Works, 2: Church and Ministry (Sydney, 2003), 23–34; Robinson, Donald, ‘The Church in the New Testament’, in Bolt, Peter and Thompson, Mark, eds, Donald Robinson: Selected Works, 1: Assembling God's People (Sydney, 2008), 212–21.

12 See D. B. Knox, ‘The Biblical Concept of Fellowship’, in Birkett, ed., Knox: Selected Works, 2: 57–84; idem, ‘Church, the Churches and the Denominations of the Churches’, ibid. 85–98.

13 On the conflicts and reforming programme in the diocese of Sydney in the 1960 through to 2013, see Bruce Albert Ballantine Jones, ‘Changes in Policy and Practices in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney 1966–2013: The Political Factor’ (PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2013).

14 Footnote Ibid. 34, 45.

15 ‘It was said by some that by accepting consecration that B[isho]p Robinson had, in practice, abandoned his purer teaching’: Raymond E. Heslehurst, ‘The Doctrine of the Church and the Diocesan Mission: A Preliminary Examination of the Doctrine of the Church as expressed in the Synod Addresses of Bishop D. W. B. Robinson 1982–1992’ (unpublished paper presented to the Senior Common Room of the Richard Johnson College, 2004), 1; available on request from the author at: .

16 Ballantine-Jones, ‘Changes’, 45.

17 For examples of recent work stressing the continuities in Robinson's approach, see Judd, Andrew, ‘When Pa Met the Queen’, Anglican Historical Society Journal 58 (2013), 32–49; idem, ‘Donald Robinson and the Imperfect Unity of An Australian Prayer Book (1978)’, Lucas: An Evangelical History Review 2nd ser. 6 (2013), 113–44; Heslehurst, , ‘Doctrine of the Church’; Rory Shiner, ‘An Appreciation of D. W. B. Robinson's New Testament Theology’, in Bolt, Peter and Thompson, Mark, eds, Donald Robinson: Selected Works, Appreciation (Sydney, 2008), 9–62; idem, ‘D. B. Knox’, in Jensen, Michael, ed., The Church of the Triune God: Understanding God's Work in his People Today (Sydney, 2013); Jensen, Michael, Sydney Anglicans: An Apology (Sydney, 2012), Kindle edn, ch. 6.

18 Robinson, D. W. B., ‘The Date and Significance of the Last Supper’, Evangelical Quarterly 23 (1951), 126–33, idem, ‘Apostleship and Apostolic Succession’, Reformed Theological Review 13/2 (1954), 33–42, idem, ‘The Meaning of Baptism’, in Bolt, Peter G. and Thompson, Mark D., eds, Donald Robinson, Selected Works, 2: Preaching God's Word (Sydney, 2007), 227–51, idem, ‘The Church in the New Testament’, St Mark's Review 17 (1959), 4–14; idem, ‘A New Baptismal Service: A Criticism’, in Bolt and Thompson, eds, Robinson, Selected Works, 2: 334–50.

19 Judd, ‘Robinson’, 118.

20 ‘Leave the Lord's Prayer Alone: Man in the Street Doesn't Want Change’, The Sun, 14 September 1966; ‘Sticks Out Like Granny's Teeth: Why I Rewrote Lord's Prayer’, The Sun, 15 September 1966; ‘Anglican Lord's Prayer: Protests on New Version’, Daily Telegraph, 15 September 1966; ‘Lord's Prayer’, Daily Telegraph, 16 September 1966; ‘Lively Prayer Debate Expected’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 1966; ‘Cartoon’, The Australian, 16 September 1966; ‘Why the Canon Rewrote Prayer’, The Australian, 15 September 1966; all citations from Judd, ‘Robinson’, 121 n. 39.

21 Ibid. 125; see also Robinson, Donald, ‘The Church of England in Australia’, in Buchanan, Colin, ed., Modern Anglican Liturgies 1958–1968 (Oxford, 1968), 297–320.

22 Judd, ‘Robinson’, 127.

23 Donald Robinson, ‘Liturgical Patterns of Worship’, in Bolt and Thompson, eds, Robinson: Selected Works, 1: 318–36, at 318.

24 Footnote Ibid.

25 Robinson extends this to the sacraments, arguing that baptism, whilst obviously a ‘symbolic’ gesture, was in the New Testament a ‘personal act and not part of corporate Christian worship’. And the eucharist or Lord's Supper was not, as Dom Gregory Dix also acknowledged, a ‘new rite’ established by Jesus, but an existing meal to which Jesus and then the early Christians gave significance. For Robinson (again citing Dix), there was ‘no need to tell men to eat bread together, or to drink wine on their festive occasions. This was their normal way of life.’ Therefore the Lord's Supper was not ‘liturgical’ as such, but essentially a fellowship meal at which the Lord is present according to his promise: ibid. 320–1.

26 Footnote Ibid. 321.

27 Footnote Ibid.

28 Robinson, Donald, ‘Presidential Address 1985’, Yearbook of the Diocese of Sydney (Sydney, 1986), 211–30.

29 Note again here a contrast with Knox, who drew the conclusion that if the local gathering is ‘church’ then the denomination, which never gathers, is not ‘church’. Denominations in Knox's view have a fundamentally ‘secular’ character.

30 Robinson, ‘Liturgical Patterns’, 330.

31 Footnote Ibid. 332.

32 Donald Robinson, ‘Charismatic Christianity’, in Bolt and Thompson, eds, Robinson: Selected Works, 2: 191–201.

33 In the early 1950s, when students from the local girls’ school asked about exorcisms, Robinson responded by inviting a missionary who had herself performed exorcism to come and address the girls. Evidently, despite a scholarly disposition, he was an unselfconscious supernaturalist: Robinson, Donald, ‘Some Rectors and Recollections’, in Fletcher, Brian and Cable, Kenneth, eds, The Parish of St Philip, Church Hill, Sydney: Three Bicentennial Lectures (Sydney, 2003), 41–62, at 60.

34 On the warm personal relations between Robinson and Sinden, see Judd, ‘Robinson’, 134–6.

35 Spurr, Barry, ‘An Australian Prayer Book’, in Martin, David and Mullen, Peter, eds, No Alternative: The Prayer Book Controversy (London, 1981), 162–74, at 162.

36 Sherlock, Charles, ‘The Anglican Church of Australia’, in Hefling, Charles and Shattuck, Cynthia, eds, The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer (Oxford, 2006), 324–32.

37 Judd, ‘Robinson’, 137.

38 For discussion, see ibid. 132–4.

39 An Australian Prayer Book (Sydney, 1978), 141.

40 Judd, ‘Robinson’, 133.

41 On lacking post-British identity, see citations in Judd, ‘Robinson’, 140 n. 115. On An Australian Prayer Book as a ‘testament to disunity’, see Spurr, ‘Australian Prayer Book’, 163.

42 Barth, Karl, ‘The Strange New World within the Bible’, in idem, The Word of God and the Word of Man (New York, 1957), 28–50.

43 Donald Robinson, ‘Translation of the Bible for Public Worship’, in Bolt and Thompson, eds, Robinson: Selected Works, 2: 53–62.

44 It is interesting to relate this to his radical revision of the Lord's Prayer suggested in the 1960s. Perhaps his views altered in the two decades of liturgical revision that followed?

45 See Ballantine-Jones, ‘Changes’, 169–96.

46 ‘Dynamic’ or ‘functional’ equivalence translation is (very simply) the attempt to translate from one language to another in a ‘thought for thought’ rather than ‘word for word’ manner. For discussion, see Carson, D. A., ‘The Limits of Functional Equivalence in Bible Translation’, in Scorgie, Glen G., Strauss, Mark L. and Voth, Steven M., eds, The Challenge of Bible Translation: Communicating God's Word to the World (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), 65–113.

47 Robinson, ‘Translation’, 55.

48 Donald Robinson, ‘The Doctrine of the Church and its Implications for Evangelism’, in Bolt and Thompson, eds, Robinson: Selected Works, 2: 106–13, at 106.

49 Chilton, ‘Evangelicals and the End of Christian Australia’, 2.

50 For Banks on house churches, see Banks, Robert J. and Banks, Julia, The Church comes Home (Peabody, MA, 1998).

51 Robinson was at Queens’ College, Cambridge, from 1947–50.

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