Abstract

A beautifully executed limning of the men doing some of the freshest theological thinking today. With Bishop Robinson's Honest to God as his starting point, Mehta interviews Paul Tillich, Paul van Buren, Reinhold Niebuhr, Bishop Robinson, A. R. Vidler, H. A. Williams, Donald MacKinnon, A. M. Ramsey, I. T. Ramsey, Nicholas Stacey, Rudolf Bultmann, and Karl Barth. Almost half of the book is devoted to the portrait of Dietrich Bonhoeffer which emerges from Mehta's stay in Germany with Bonhoeffer's closest friend, Pastor Eberhard Bethge. The book is reporting rather than a probing of the philosophic issues, but, taken as such, it constitutes a tantalizing gateway into a world in which insight, courage, honesty, and immense confusion flourish together like plants in an untended garden.—S. A. S.