Christian Faith for Handing On

Oppenheimer

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781630871086
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Human beings have to ask how faith is possible, in this mixed world of trouble and joy. A safe universe with no scope for adversity would be a mechanical toy, not a creation. A glorious universe will be a place where troubles have eventually been overcome.Christians believe in one God, who is three Persons. God the heavenly Father took the risk of making a real world, full of living people capable of happiness. Jesus Christ, God the Son, came as a human being to take responsibility for creation. He suffered and died; and he rose from death to vindicate the whole enterprise and show that creation can and will be made good. People are not left to work out their own faith but are invited to belong to the church, in order to keep in touch with God the Spirit. They are to behave as God's children, not by rule-bound conformity but by grateful response to the glory of God the Holy Trinity.

Part I

Believing

1

Terms of Reference

Som unknown Joys there be

Laid up in Store for me;

To which I shall, when that thin Skin

Is broken, be admitted in.

Thomas Traherne, “Shadows in the Water”

Thomas Traherne called to mind what it was like to be a child, by telling how in his “unexperienced Infancy” he was fascinated by the reflections he could see in puddles. He met another world “By walking Men’s reversed Feet”; but he could not reach the people he could see down there, upside down in the water. “A Film kept off that stood between.” He could imagine earth and heaven as two adjacent but separated worlds, with hope that there might in due course be a way from the one to the other.1

If one looks at fish in an aquarium, the same image comes to life. They cannot see out. Looking into the side of the tank at their level, through the water up to the surface, what one sees is an opaque boundary, like a silver ceiling. But people above the fish tank can look down into the water and see the fish swimming about in their everyday world below.2

We cannot see out of the aquarium of human life, but it appears to be lit from above and some of its contents seem to have arrived from elsewhere. The analogy is not supposed to provide proof that beyond the limits of our sight there is a heaven full of people, where we shall one day be admitted in. What the image offers is not a claim but a disclaimer: a hopeful way of acknowledging our present ignorance, so as not to be defeated by it.

A dead goldfish will float to the surface of the water and somebody will take it away. It will not aspire to be reborn up above in a different environment, breathing our air. The image of human beings inhabiting a fish tank is what used to be called a “conceit,” a bright idea which should be life-enhancing and even illuminating, but is not meant to be taken too solemnly. It can suggest to would-be Christians who need encouragement a practical notion of one-way visibility.

Not all Christian believers are as limited in their vision as fish in an aquarium, and some have had experiences of being “caught up to the third heaven”,3 but most people have in common our ordinary inability to see out. At times when prophecy is muted, when the good news is coming through faintly and it is too easy to believe that this life is all there is, a whimsical image may help to banish despondency.

The disclaimer announced by making a start with swimming fish underlies all the arguments of this book. I do not imagine that I can see out of the fish tank into the world beyond. I have to start more prosaically from where I am and look around from my own particular point of view. Since the inhabitants of our world are far more diverse than fish in a tank, I must not dogmatize about what other people may be able to see, but I can report on what the universe looks like to me. A Christian who has been living in the aquarium and wondering about reality through eight decades need not suppose that she ought to claim some supernatural vision, but she should by now have something to say to commend the faith she does hold. The fish tank provides the terms of reference. The perspective of an argumentative octogenarian is the less fanciful starting point.

How can someone who belongs to the twentieth century and inevitably looks backwards presume to look forwards, and say anything constructive about Christian belief in the twenty-first century? The fatal phrase “When I was young” can foster a downhearted frame of mind. The assumptions people make now seem to have changed; the church looks irrelevant, especially on a Sunday morning; intelligent good people are not so much incredulous about the Christian faith as ignorant about what they are supposed to believe; the things that mattered in one’s youth are discounted . . . How are the children of the millennium going to finish the sentence, “My grandmother used to say . . .”? When I was taken to church as a child, it was a worrying thought that the congregation seemed to consist entirely of elderly ladies. When they had gone, would Christian belief die out? As time went by, I realized that every new generation is aging. Congregations still seem to consist largely of elderly ladies; and now I have become one of them. I have the responsibility to encourage the people following on now and not to put difficulties in their way. Taking stock of my position is not a matter of supposing that I know best. It is a matter of identifying a quantity of data that has gradually accumulated and which needs sorting out to make it more readily available.

Rather than a mathematical proof, QED, of another world beyond, an old Christian should be able to offer an apologia, a progress report on the live possibility of faith. While youth is discovering new ideas, age can set about collecting and presenting ideas already given, like the householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old,4 in this case mostly old. Arranging what one has learnt and offering it to one another is not pointless wool-gathering.

The experience an octogenarian has to offer is likely to be a complex mixture of maturity gained and strength lost. If one thinks of all humanity, this particular starting point has been rare. Most human beings have never been so old. But today more people reach a time when they have not only outlived their parents and grandparents, as was to be expected, but have grown older than their parents and grandparents ever grew. Old age is nowadays a normal enough experience to serve as a introductory case study for pondering whether faith in God is borne out by life.

To begin by describing what human existence looks like, from the viewpoint of someone who has lived for a good while, can be a way of rooting theology in experience, rather than flying off into fantasy. Anyone who wants to commend the Christian faith must look seriously at the character of the world where we have to live. Longevity offers a sample of ordeals and joys, which provide a context for the question whether the universe in which we are placed can possibly be, in fact, an antechamber to heaven. The characteristic blessings and trials of age invite attention to the ordinary ambivalence of human life, which supplies the raw material for any realistic worldview. Can we really believe that it was a good Creator who placed us here? Is life too arbitrary, too pointless, indeed too grim, as people actually find it, to have been inaugurated by a good God? Can glory prevail over gloom?

Long before they grow old, human creatures have to come to terms with the passing of time, whether for celebration or regret. The compulsory experience of aging is more than an extra concluding stage. It belongs to human life all along. Aging does not begin at eighty or seventy, nor even at sixty. We have all been growing older as far back as our memories go. We keep on leaving our junior selves behind. Realizing that one is too old may start at three, four, five . . . It begins with being told not to be a baby: “You’re a big girl now.” The little brother is the one on her lap, while the older sister has the alarming adventure of going to school. As people get older the pace quickens and they add year to year rather than month to month: not “five and a half exactly” but “in his fifties.”

Human beings have assorted incompatible prejudices about what aging means. Fears of “crabbed age” and doddery feebleness compete with hopes of continuing to grow up towards respected maturity. Some of us, when we consider whether life is good, find it reassuring that the ordinary is as authentic as the ecstatic and the agonizing. If there is indeed a God who made us, God is evidently not too majestic to make room for triviality as well as grandeur.

There are small-scale benefits of aging that are not too insignificant to be counted as valid encouragements, making space for hopefulness lest gloom about our prospects should take over. There comes a time when one is offered a tolerant or even a respectful hand down the steps. It stops being compulsory to regard plunging into cold water as a treat. There are requirements, like wearing fashionable but uncomfortable clothes, which there is no need to try to meet. Better still, it is not one’s responsibility to say No to enterprising and argumentative children when really one is on their side.

Experience cannot be counted on to bring wisdom, but it may well bring prudence. One finds out how to recognize in advance some of the toes one might tread on and the foolish mistakes one might make. People who have learnt by trial and error to take more care may find that instead of being more fearful they can be braver. To be gauche is an affliction of immaturity. To grow out of feeling awkwardly juvenile may allow the fun of being a little eccentric.

The experience of aging is less uniform than ever, now that more of us live longer, growing old in variegated ways, both for ill and also for good. When people grumble about the modern world as if all its changes were for the worse, they should consider modern medicine. Keats died at 26 of tuberculosis. Jane Austen died at 42. Today they could surely have lived longer and left us more of their work. Shakespeare’s “old John of Gaunt” could be called “time-honored” in his fifties;5 and Shakespeare himself died at 52. A good many of our contemporaries have recovered from illnesses that would ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Part 1: Believing
• Chapter 1: Terms of Reference
• Chapter 2: Matter and More
• Chapter 3: The Argument from Value
• Chapter 4: Recalcitrant Reality
• Chapter 5: The Project of Creation
• Chapter 6: Question of Fact
• Chapter 7: The Hypothesis of Faith
• Chapter 8: Rational Inquiry
• Chapter 9: Gospel Story
• Part 2: Belonging
• Chapter 10: One Another
• Chapter 11: God in Charge
• Chapter 12: Christian Hope
• Chapter 13: Is Anyone There?
• Chapter 14: The Means of Grace
• Part 3: Behaving
• Chapter 15: Values, Human and Divine
• Chapter 16: The Way
• Chapter 17: Compare and Contrast
• Chapter 18: Mercy
• Chapter 19: Continuing
• Bibliography