Abstract
In this brief and clearly organised account of Christian faith and life Helen Oppenheimer writes, she says, from the perspective of an octogenarian. ‘Congregations still seem to consist largely of elderly ladies; and now I have become one of them’ (p. 5). She suggests that old age offers a vantage point from which to consider the possibility of faith, to reflect upon whether a good bit of lived experience can support continued faith in God. Being old enough to recognise and acknowledge with gratitude our debts to others may free us from our culture’s obsessive desire to be autonomous and creative. Moreover, she suspects that old age may have a kind of liberating effect. ‘Old people can risk saying what they really think’ (p. 7).
To that end she organises her discussion in three parts under three simple headings—believing, belonging, and behaving. Each section contains short chapters addressing a range of issues, and she has very nicely taken care to connect these chapters and show how each flows into the next. The individual chapters are short enough that they might well be read consecutively, day by day, for purposes of reflection and meditation.
Under the rubric of ‘believing’ she is primarily concerned to consider whether we still have good reason to hold to the faith that earlier generations of Christians believed and handed on. Her initial move is to suggest that even in our world, in which a materialistic view of the universe seems to her to be in the saddle, there are aspects of our experience for which it cannot account. If we pay close attention to human experience, we will observe, she thinks, that ‘reverent awe’ is so deeply rooted in us that it cannot easily be dismissed (p. 14). ‘Readiness to be awestruck may be a first step towards escaping from the skeptical limits drawn by scientific analysis’ (p. 16).
This appeal to the experience of awe strikes Oppenheimer as far better than (to her, doubtful) claims that moral values cannot survive without religious underpinnings. She does grant, however, that the human experience of evil seems to many people a persuasive argument against belief in God. But she observes shrewdly—a point all the wiser for not being original with her—that there would be no problem of evil if a good God did not exist. ‘It is people who believe in a good God who have to face the huge moral question about why God’s creatures should be made to suffer’ (p. 27). In the end, the answer Christians offer is, she believes, that the good God has in Christ accepted responsibility for the world he has created, ‘entering human life and bearing the burden’ (p. 60).
Hence, it is, she thinks, ‘reasonable to embrace the Christian faith as a working hypothesis’ (p. 47). Supposing this faith is true, we ask ourselves, can it then make sense of our lives and give us a faith by which to live? This move, central to her account of believing, is unconvincing to me. It would be rather like deciding to make a lifelong commitment to a potential spouse for the reason that she seemed to care about me. The commitment always outruns the evidence. She is more persuasive later when she notes that putting faith in another person is ‘something like casting one’s vote’ (p. 59).
Oppenheimer’s discussion of ‘belonging’ adds something crucial to her account. The first section on believing might have led us to suppose that the life of faith is entirely an individual undertaking, my search to make sense of my experience. In fact, however, at least if it is Christian faith we have in mind, we do not start out alone. Believing means belonging to a tradition. Within this tradition believers help each other to trust that God is truly in charge of our lives. The God she depicts is, however, rather close kin to the god of deistic belief.
That is not a criticism I offer; it is her stated view. ‘Christians need not be afraid of going a long way with deism’ (p. 85). It is crucial for her account of Christian faith that God did intervene decisively in our world ‘at one particular time’ in the person of Jesus (p. 85). But apart from that, ‘God generally lets nature develop and history run its course without continual adjustments’ (p. 85). Although she does include in her discussion of ‘belonging’ a chapter on the means of grace, this depiction of God’s activity (or relative inactivity) in our world seems to do less than full justice to the Holy Spirit whom Christ bestows upon those who ‘belong’ to him.
Finally, under the rubric of ‘behaving’, Oppenheimer discusses the nature of morality and the Christian life. A certain philosophical stance, at least as much as theological perspectives, may seem to govern her discussion here. ‘The distinctiveness of Christianity,’ she writes, ‘is not the morality that the Gospels preach but the facts that they teach’ (pp. 113-14). Perhaps so. But one would welcome here a little more discussion of the nature of Christian agape, of the place of self-sacrifice in the Christian life, or of the meaning of fidelity in Christian marriage. Likewise, she treats the Euthyphro problem rather briskly: ‘The right ways of life for human flourishing are based upon what people and the physical world are like, not on what anyone, even God, has decided to command’ (p. 115).
What, then, does Christian faith add to our approach to morality? It turns out that Kant—or perhaps, in a more English vein, Sidgwick—had it right. ‘What religious faith adds to the ethics we can all share is belief that in fact there really is a good and holy Power, … who will ultimately vindicate the moral values that belong to the well-being of the creatures we are’ (p. 116).
Here and now, we must avoid ‘reducing the Lord to a moralist’ (p. 121) and keep clearly in mind that ‘Jesus was far from encouraging legalism’ (p. 122). Although believing involves belonging to a tradition, that tradition must make place for change. ‘A good deal of Christian loyalty to unchanging tradition looks like an attempt to protect God from being let down by liberals’ (p. 123). Among the traditional views that she targets are the rejection of same-sex partnerships and the belief that procreation is an essential task in our already ‘over-populated world’ (p. 126). And, in any case, in the end the answer to moral failing is the mercy of God shown in his willingness ‘to become vulnerable and suffer alongside suffering creatures’ (p. 142).
On the whole, then, there is much food for thought (and exceptionally clear writing) in this account of Christian faith. There are some respects in which it is a little wooden. Thus, for example, Oppenheimer’s vision of the Christian world seems to be that it is divided largely between benighted fundamentalists and more open Protestant liberals. More nuance here would enrich the discussion.
For me, at least, the central structuring device—namely, that she brings to her discussion the perspective of an octogenarian—does not really work. For the most part, there is little in her account that a thirty-year-old might not just as easily have thought and written. And, in fact, in some respects her sense of what issues are central and how Christian believers should respond to them probably fits better the world Oppenheimer herself knew at age thirty than it does our world today. That, alas, is indeed a lesson for all of us as we age.