I found the Methodist theologian Thomas Oden helpful in understanding the shallowness of much modern theology and finding a deep compatibility between Wesleyan theology and the fathers of the Church. One of the first books I reviewed for my “Reedings” was his After Modernity . . . What? Agenda for Theology (Grand Rapids: Academie Books, c. 1990). Having discovered that both he and his “postcritical” students hungered for “the available power of the Christian heritage rather than trendy ideas of minor modern heretics” (p. 16), he called readers to recover their authentic Christian roots in the Ancient Church, for “it is from the martyrs, saints, and prophets of Christian history, more than from recent riskless interpreters, that we learn of the value of classical Christianity” (p. 13).
In part one of the book, “The Courtship of Modernity,” Oden urged readers to reject many of our era’s most seductive proposals. To do so means discounting “modernity,” which he described as “a narcissistic hedonism that assumes that moral value is reducible to now feelings and sensory experience” (p. 31). Indeed: “Narcissism is a key mark of modernity. Myself becomes the central project of moral interest; self-enjoyment and self-development become the central goals” (p. 79). Oden knew whereof he spoke! In some deeply personal, confessional, passages he reflected on all the “movements” he had earlier joined and championed, only to find them short-lived and inconsequential. Older and wiser, he found a profoundly satisfying rootage in classical orthodoxy, mainly located in the first five centuries of Church history.
A major step on this journey was discovering biblical hermeneutics! By learning to listen to the text itself, becoming obedient to it (not the latest scholar’s interpretation of it), he found what ‘was the most improbable and difficult and revolutionary thing that has ever happened to me’ (p. 80). He discovered his real role as a theologian: listening, along with the ancients, to the Bible. Most modern thinkers cultivate novelty to celebrate their brilliance. Rather than seeking to clarify and declare the ancient texts they covet acclaim. During the last two centuries, “critical” scholars, have pretended to objectively deal with biblical materials, whereas they usually asserted, in religious terms, their peculiar generation’s prejudices, generally imposing a “naturalistic reductionism upon the New Testament texts” (p. 101). Rejecting fashionable moderns and their cavalier treatment of ancient texts, Oden prefered Origen’s abiding confidence that the Holy Scriptures are not mere human productions, but rather written by humans under the “inspiration of the Holy Spirit,” scriptures subsequently “transmitted and entrusted to us by the Will of God.”
Having cut a wide swathe through modernity’s most treasured artifacts, Oden advocated ‘The Liberation of Orthodoxy.” Long concerned with pastoral theology and praxis, he thought churchmen needed to stand strong against heresy. If the church survives, transmitting its traditions from generation to generation, its teachers must conserve the treasury of the past. So heresies must be forever highlighted and resisted. In Oden’s view, heresy basically means “self-choice”—exalting one’s personal interpretation over that of the believing community. Unlike heretical movements, orthodoxy conserves by continually asking “What in fact did the apostles teach?” (p. 162). At the heart of orthodoxy one finds not static dogmas but the living Lord Jesus Christ. At the heart of orthodox communities one finds believers loving the resurrected Christ. This, above all else, the church must sustain.
Oden closed his treatise with a somber chapter entitled “the winter temperament.” To him the cultural landscape looked like a bombed out city. All the fond aspirations of earlier times had failed and laid about like litter on an abandoned playground. The hope that sustains him was what St Augustine discovered amidst the collapse of the Roman Empire: the City of God! And insofar as Oden finds firm foundations in the same faith which shored up Augustine, he reminded us that however unsettled our times may be there is something to rest upon. For Oden, T.S. Eliot’s words (quoted by J.I. Packer in his foreword) suffice: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
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In A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir (Downers Grove, IL: Inter/Varsity Press, c. 2014) Thomas Oden set forth a fascinating and illuminating reflection on his life and scholarly career. Reading his story provides not only insight into Oden—it illuminates much about recent American history as well as amplifies timeless truths regarding the Christian Faith. In brief, he confessed: “My life story has had two phases: going away from home as far as I could go, not knowing what I might find in an odyssey of preparation, and then at last inhabiting anew my own original home of classic Christian wisdom. The uniting theme of the two parts of my life can only be providence” (p. 140).
Born in 1931 and reared in Altus, Oklahoma, Oden absorbed and still celebrates many aspects of the high plains frontier culture that nourished him. Joining the Cub Scouts as a boy, Oden embraced their Motto: “Do your best,” and “memorized the Scout law, which says ‘A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.’ These ideals have never been erased from my consciousness” (p. 20). Devout members of the Altus Methodist church, his parents not only attended services but began each day with devotional readings from the “Upper Room” and said grace before meals. As a zealous youngster, he “became maximally involved in the youth activities of the Epworth League for Methodist young people, where I received ever-expanding doses of social justice aspirations” (p. 31).
Entering the University of Oklahoma in 1949, Oden qualified for a unique “Letters” program that enabled students to choose their course of studies in literature, history, and philosophy. He read many of the “greats”—Shakespeare, Plato, et al.—but found himself most drawn to the Marxism and was “a Marxist utopian dreamer for a decade before I learned the vulnerabilities of Marxist theories” (p. 42). He also decided, while at OU, to enter the Methodist ministry and became active in denominational activities, including summer camps more devoted to social justice than personal redemption. “I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment” (p. 50). Still more: “I found Saul Alinsky’s teaching of socialist pragmatism and political opportunism extremely useful as I made plans to co-opt religious structures as instruments for the fundamental transformation of society” (p. 53).
He then entered Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology and served as youth minister for a nearby Congregational church. He read voraciously and plunged energetically into ecumenical endeavors (especially promoting the World Council of Churches). Determined to pursue a PhD, he went to Yale University, where he worked with H. Richard Niebuhr and some of the most distinguished luminaries in the Protestant world. He also embraced, without much thought, the “demythologizing” approach to Scripture personified by Rudolph Bultmann. Finishing his PhD course work, he returned to SMU and earned for himself a reputation as a “situation ethicist,” fully committed to a “what’s happening now” existential agenda. Joining the faculty at Phillips Graduate Seminary in Enid, Oklahoma he churned out books championing every thing from Rogerian psychology (with its emphasis on “unconditional love”) to existential ethics to socialist economics to radical feminism. Traditional Christian doctrines, such as the Incarnation and Resurrection, he either ignored or “professed” with inner reservations evacuating them of substance. But during a year spent studying in Europe, he read Wolfart Pannenberg and discovered significant flaws in both Bultmann and Karl Barth. He also became disillusioned with Freudian psychoanalysis (long a mainstay in his understanding of and prescriptions for pastoral psychology).
Back in America, sitting on a Houston bench during an Earth Day march in 1969, he fully felt “a revulsion against the self-preoccupation, narcissism and anarchy” that had characterized his adult years. Sitting on that bench, he picked up his copy of the Book of Common Prayer. “I read out loud: ‘Almighty Father, who has given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may always serve thee in pureness of living and through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’ My eyes filled with tears as I asked myself what had I been missing in all my frenzied subculture of experimental living” (p. 126).
His “change of heart” synchronized with his 1970 move to Drew Theological Seminary in New Jersey, where, as a tenured professor of theology, he began to learn theology! One of his colleagues, Will Herberg, a “brilliant, diminutive, forceful, bearded Russian Jew” both accelerated Oden’s growing disillusionment with Marxism and prodded him to seriously study authentic Christian thought. Herberg told him that he “was densely ignorant of Christianity.” Indeed: “Holding one finger up, looking straight at me with fury in his eyes, he said, ‘You will remain theologically uneducated until you study carefully Athanasius, Augustine and Aquinas.’ In his usual gruff voice and brusque speech, he told me I had not yet met the great minds of my own religious tradition” (p. 136). Suitably chastised—and admirably open to Herberg’s wisdom—Oden turned his life around by turning to the classic sources of the Christian tradition. “Soon I reveled in the very premises I had set aside and rationalized away: the preexistent Logos, the triune mystery, the radical depth of sin passing through the generations, the risen Lord and the grace of baptism” (p. 138).
Thenceforth he devoted himself to following the rule of St Ireaneus of Lyons: invent no new doctrines! He realized that by endeavoring to do so during the first half of his life (promoting “vast plans for social change”) he had inadvertently but tragically “harmed many innocents, especially the unborn. The sexually permissive lifestyle, which I had not joined but failed to critique, led to a generation of fatherless children. The political policies I had promoted were intended to increase justice by political means but ended by diminishing personal responsibility and freedom” (p. 145). Guilt-ridden, especially for teaching a situational “social ethics to young pastors” and providing them “a rationale for their blessing convenience abortions” while ignoring the intrinsic evil of the act, he turned to God for solace. What God said in response was simply: “no excuse. I had been wrong, wrong, wrong” (p. 157).
Oden’s “change of heart” quickly led to a change in his publications. He worked to bring theological studies back to the classic, “consensual” position of the Church’s first five centuries. Despite his best efforts, Oden had little influence in Methodist circles or even in his own institution, which continued its leftward drift during the ‘80s. He became “a lonely voice” for the orthodox Christian tradition “amid a chorus of indignant advocates” (p. 184) of whatever was newest and most “cutting edge” in academia. Especially belligerent at Drew were the radical feminists who vindictively targeted him (despite his lengthy record of supporting women’s rights) for opprobrium. As feminists gained control of the seminary, they promoted a radical agenda composed of “gender language, abortion rights, reproductive rights and sexual ethics” (p. 186).
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In his final days as a professor at Drew Theological Seminary, Thomas Oden published Requiem: A Lament in Three Movements (Nashville: Abingdon Press, c. 1995) to register his “affectionate anguish” over both seminary education and the state of mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. Having discovered and sought to make available the great resources of the classic Christian tradition, he styled himself a “young fogey” so committed to the truth of the past that he was considered “old-fashioned” by the legions of “modernists” now controlling mainline institutions. “As a former sixties radical,” he confessed, “I am now out of the closet as an orthodox evangelical (yes, you read me right—orthodox evangelical)” (p. 15). Explaining “the feast I left” Oden recounted an incident in his seminary’s chapel devoted to worshipping the goddess “Sophia.” The woman presiding at the service described Sophia as “a strong, proud, creative goddess within the biblical tradition,” a “divine saving figure” immanent “in all things, waiting to be discovered.” At that moment Oden “felt just a little (for the first time in my life) like the apologists of the second century must have felt when confronted with the challenge of attesting the Lordship of Christ amid a pagan pantheon of Greco-Roman deities” (p. 29). Though this kind of service is, Oden insists, quite limited to radical hyperfeminist circles, it does in fact represent powerful currents within contemporary Christianity.
The fact that a goddess, Sophia, could be worshipped in a Methodist seminary points to the tarnished state of theological education in America. To Oden, the culprit in the story is Secularization, an “interloper” who has stolen the doctrinal, liturgical and devotional riches of the church. Mainline seminaries have aided and abetted this secularizing process, wedding themselves to a “modernity” (what Oden calls “mod rot”) that is already passing away. They have provided a safe place for trendy, tenured radicals who worked closely with ecclesiastical bureaucracies to promote “change” in the church. Self-consciously “liberated” and socially engaged, they generally considered themselves “doctrinally imaginative, liturgically experimental, disciplinarily nonjudgmental, politically correct, multiculturally tolerant, morally broad-minded, ethically situationist, and, above all, sexually lenient, permissive, uninhibited” (p. 34). Consequently: “It seems worth noting that the liberated seminary at its zenith has finally achieved a condition that has never before prevailed in Christian history: Heresy simply does not exist” (p. 46).
In addition to the seminaries, Secularization afflicts the ecumenical organizations which once promised to unite Christians and make more effective their witness. In his younger years, Oden invested much time and energy in ecumenical endeavors, but in time he became disillusioned with them. In particular, they were dominated by elite planners, bureaucrats determined to save the world through political processes! As “political idealists,” they “care far less about the classical Christianity of the grassroots church than about their ideals and programs and blueprints for reforming the denominational networks” (p. 92). Quite apart from organizations such as the WCC, a real ecumenical movement (orchestrated by the Holy Spirit rather than bureaucrats) has brought conservative Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox together, affirming their belief in ancient creeds and uniting to oppose the “culture of death” most evident in abortion-on-demand.
Such believers illustrate the emergence and worth of what Oden terms “Postmodern Paleo-orthodox Spirituality.” It is a spirituality deeply rooted in the Ancient Christianity best expounded by Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley. “Christian orthodoxy in its ancient (paleo) ecumenical sense is summarily defined sacramentally by the baptismal formula (in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), liturgically the by the Eucharistic event, and doctrinally by the baptismal confession with its precisely remembered rule of faith as recalled in the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds, and their subsequent consensual interpretations” (p. 130). Despite having been shunted aside by liberals and modernists during the past 200 years, it retains an abiding strength clearly evident for 20 centuries. Modernity, Oden believes, is collapsing, though dinosaurs proclaiming its wonders still stalk the halls of academic and culturally powerful institutions. But Paleo-orthodoxy will survive and prosper simply because it is eternally true and will provide its adherents with eternal life, now and forever. Routinely declared dead and gone, this classic Christianity revives and flourishes again and again, for: “Life lived in Christ does not waste time resenting the inexorable fact that each culture like each person dies. Sanctifying grace offers beleaguered cultural pilgrims the power and means of trusting fundamentally in the One who proffers this ever-changing, forever-dying historical process” (p. 130).
Young Evangelicals in particular seem committed to exploring and expounding this ancient tradition. Thus Oden, having begun his life within a family still rooted in orthodoxy, has returned to the basic tenets of its creeds. With T.S. Eliot he has clearly discovered the timeless truth that “In my beginning is my end.” Consequently: “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions / That seem unproptitious” (“East Coker,” in Four Quartets).
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Anyone looking for a comprehensive discussion of doctrine with a resolutely “back-to-the-Fathers” brand of thinking will benefit from reading Thomas Oden’s trilogy: The Living God: Systematic Theology: Volume One (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, c. 1987); The Word of Life: Systematic Theology: Volume Two (San Francisco: Harper & Row, c. 1989); and Life in the Spirit: Systematic Theology: Volume Three (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, c. 1992). Oden sought to formulate an ecumenical, consensual theology—“an ordered view of the faith of the Christian community” (I,ix), mutually acceptable to Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant believers. Amidst a world culturally collapsing it’s time to rediscover the common roots of the various traditions which will equip Christ’s Church to move rightly into the uncertainties of tomorrow. That requires us to find guides who are not so much up-to-date as they are dateless, less avante-guarde than guarding the gates, less attuned to the times than in touch with the past. Oden insists that the core doctrines of Christianity were effectively defined during the first 500 years of Church history and are best discerned in the biblical and classical documents preserved from antiquity. We need nothing new! What we need is a renewal of what’s true!
In The Word of Life he reflected: “By the middle of the 1970’s the idea had gradually begun to dawn upon me with increasing force that it is not my task to crate a theology. Newman taught me that the deposit of truth is already sufficiently given, fully and adequately. What I needed to do was to listen. But I could not listen because I found my modern presuppositions constantly tyrannizing my listening” (II, p. 219). But in time he learned to listen, largely by discarding contemporary theology, which proved bankrupt. The ones he learned to hear were the biblical writers and Early Church Fathers. His resolve to hear them provides both the strength and weakness of Oden’s work: the vast collection of quotations and citations provides us a wealth of valuable information, but it also makes for ponderous reading too much of the time. That the title of each volume of his systematic theology includes the word “life” indicates the theme which binds together the entire study. God the Father gives life as Creator, for “God is uncreated, necessary, one, infinite, immense, eternal being, the life of all that lives” (I, p. 52). God the Son came to save us not simply “through assent to doctrine but through union with the living Christ” (II, p. 434). Indeed: “The ancient ecumenical testimony is that Jesus now lives so as to engender life in us. His living presence is the real energy and force and dynamic and power of historic Christianity and present Christian life” (II, p. 435). God the Spirit, as defined at Constantinople in 381 A.D., is “the Lord and giver of life” and gives it to all that lives. “Merely to be alive is to be endowed with life by the Spirit of God” (III, p. 36). In the judgment of Cyril of Jerusalem, something radically new transpired at Pentecost as the believers ‘were baptized completely” in the Holy Spirit—a fresh draught of God’s Presence which instilled a “‘sober drunkenness, deadly to sin and life-giving to the heart’” (III, p. 67).
Oden sought not to be “original” or “creative” but to faithfully distill and explain the essential traditions of the Church makes these volumes most valuable. And he did so effectively.