The Cathedral welcomed a huge number of the clergy from the Diocese for the Bishop's Clergy Study Day on Thursday 20 March. The choice of date was not accidental for this day marked forty years to the day from the publication of Bishop John Robinson's Honest to God.

Designed to concentrate on the current state of play with regard to the issues raised by the book, a number of eminent theologians had been asked to come to address the gathering.

The day was chaired by Rt Rev Richard Cheetham, Bishop of Kingston, who began by introducing Colin Buchanan, Bishop of Woolwich and Martyn Percy, Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute and Senior Lecturer at Sheffield University.

Bishop Colin noted that forty years ago curates were told to ignore the Bishop of Woolwich and 'wondered how many did this now!' He said that he had got used to being the Bishop of Woolwich and that all this talk of controversy forty years ago felt strange. In looking at Honest to God's attempt to relate doctrine to contemporary thought he felt that on the whole it was luck that had made the book so popular at the time.

Martyn Percy concurred, remarking that 'when one looks at the book now one is tempted to ask what all the fuss was about'. He spoke of a book which some thought 'woolly' and which is really nothing more than 'John Robinson thinking out loud', but said it was 'a sincere and honest book'.

Questions followed in which the speakers were asked to see if there were lessons for today's world in the book and whether it had helped to make more Christians.

After coffee Don Cupitt, Fellow of Emmanuel, Cambridge, and Christopher Ryan, Dean of King's College, Cambridge, addressed the issue of God-language in 'Honest to God' and God-language now. Don Cupitt felt that John Robinson was trying to find a new language for God after Nietzsche's 'death of God' writings and spoke about the influence of Buber and Bultmann and other contemporary writers on Robinson. Christopher Ryan suggested that in many ways language was irrelevant to Honest to God as Bishop John seemed to think that he could change the way in which people spoke of things without changing their content.

He introduced a note of poetry to the day, with a wide-ranging talk encompassing Dante as well as the twentieth century. He addressed the question of whether - as Vatican II believed - you can change how something is said without changing what is said and gave a lovely picture of what he called the geology of the spirit, with the clear water of content running under the fixed form of language.

After lunch, Trevor Hart, Prof. of Divinity and Principal of St Mary's College, University of St Andrew sharpened this distinction by reminding us that we always know that the words we use to speak of God are inadequate but that we need more than silence when we speak of faith.

The concluding session took the form of a dialogue between Jane Williams and Alistair McGrath, Prof. of Historical Theology and Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Dr Williams, until recently Tutor in Doctrine at Trinity College, Bristol, gave a delightfully self-effacing and human side to Bishop Robinson.

He had, she told the audience, with the utmost professionalism slept through undergraduate and graduate papers she had read to him - and always asked the most impossible to answer questions!

Their dialogue left the audience with the challenging question: do you believe that God does anything, and in the circumstances in the world on which the day was held, it was a question as challenging as Honest to God itself.

Expanded versions of the day will be published by SCM (the publishers of Honest to God) in the autumn.