Archive: Back to the Future with Thomas C. Oden

Part II

The January/February 1993 issue of Good News highlighted the illuminating thoughts of Thomas C. Oden, professor of theology and ethics at the Theological School, Drew University. The following is a continuation of his interview with Good News. —the editors

You have stated we have moved beyond modernity in the American university. Yet the fundamental values of modernity you mention still characterize the university and seminary scene. How have we moved beyond modernity?

When I speak of the death of modernity, I do not mean the death of all popular expressions of modernity. They will continue to have vitality for some decades, until observers realize that modernity’s moral and rational foundations have crumbled. What I am mainly referring to is the death of the ideological foundation, the energizing spirit of modernity. The spirit has died; what we have on our hands is really a cadaver, maybe still a little warm and dressed up in a black leather jacket.

The university remains more addicted than the rest of society to the illusions of modernity. If the conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, fewer on campus have been mugged. There is a culture lag in the university. Faculties whose ranks have swelled with tenured radicals remain quite behind the curve in recognizing the limit of modernity. Outside the ivy-covered walls of the university, ordinary sufferers from modernity have long ago been forced to begin to kick its habits.

These values—reductive naturalism, autonomous individualism, narcissitic hedonism and speculative historicism—may seem to have achieved unalterable dominance in the university, but scratch the professorial surface and you will recognize their vulnerability. The heart is gone from the idyllic song of modernity. It has become a dirge with a heavy, hard metal beat.

Narcissism in the form of sexual experimentation may seem to be much alive in the university with its free condoms, gay advocacy groups, and coed dorms; but the party is over for the sexual revolution. The party-crasher is AIDS. The intellectual foundations of narcissistic hedonism are crumbling. We are living just prior to the time of its full collapse, and from this vantage point we can see that its inner structure is ablaze. We still have many popular remnants of hedonic experimentation, yet they are spawning so many human derelicts and no-win situations that the present trajectory cannot long be sustained—a little like the situation with the national debt. Condoms won’t fix the fiasco into which modernity has fornicated itself. No latex is thick enough to protect against the memory of impoverished relationships.

What about the influence of modernistic heroes such as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud?

I do not imply that Marx will have zero influence in the future; but the actual history of Marxist experimentation has so many strikes against its recovery that it will need to allow people at least a couple of centuries worth of forgetting even to venture a revival.

I do not suggest that Freud will have no influence, but the once awesome tide of Freudian moral plausibility has almost totally receded, due primarily to its poor record of therapeutic outcomes. If the Freudian project, the Bultmannian project, the Marxist project, and the Nietzschean project are all dead, then modernity is dead.

How would you describe the theological condition of the UM Church today? Are we sick or healthy?

Chronically sick, but now gradually mending. There are many brilliant scholars in UM theological education, but keep in mind that brilliance can be brilliantly destructive. There remain many healthy dimensions in the theological situation: a growing cultural pluralism, a greater variety of faces in the classroom than were present some years ago, a return to the study of primary texts of the religious tradition. But amid this achievement of cultural pluralism, we are cursed with a cancerous growth, a toxic doctrinal pluralism that lacks attentiveness to the unity of the classic tradition. The cancerous growth is our forgetfulness, our amnesia, and therefore an aspect of our sickness—if amnesia is a sickness. I believe it is.

UM theology is recuperating, like a patient recovering from a lengthy, severe addiction. Our addiction has been a self-chosen disease, a compulsive accommodation to a dying culture; and we have been desperately looking for something in the culture to make right our religious emptiness. Wesleyan theology is sick only to the extent that it has forgotten Wesley. It is not an irreversible illness. But we are finding it difficult to reverse our regnant addictions. There are frequent relapses. United Methodism mirrors the waning cultural environment to which we have been desperately accommodating for several decades. Theological educators will be called to accountability on the Last Day.

By addictions, I speak of relapses into sexual experimentation and flirtations with dying ideologies—Marxist, psychoanalytic, nihilistic, and deconstructionist hermeneutics, and the more reckless forms of liberation and process theology. Liberation theology has clearly lost its vitality with the demise of Marxism and the embarrassment of the Cuban Revolution. Process theology keeps trudging along with sporadic adherents, but few in the laity are willing to listen as they are supposed to want to. Process theology has a few brilliant intellectual apologists, but they still have a negligible effect upon the life of the church. Yet, the voices of moderation and piety among women and minorities—notably African Americans, Hispanics and Koreans—are thriving.

If we mean by the “UM theological condition” the quality of theological writing and teaching in the church, the answer is hardly encouraging. If we mean the quality of the typical believer’s daily walk in the presence of God—its honesty, sincerity and tenacity—the evidences may be more heartening. The liturgical life at Drew’s Theology School is healthier now than at any time in the last quarter century, with less fluff, fewer balloons and group gropes; more classic hymnody, better preaching. If the liturgical life of the community is reasonably stable and deepening, it is a good indication of recovering theological health—or at least proximate recovery from previous addictions.

The presence of small groups of evangelical testimony and prayer has become a flourishing, recent dimension of the current life of most UM seminaries. At Drew there are prayer and Bible study groups with considerable sustaining power.

What has been the impact of radical feminism upon the church?

According to some definitions of feminism, I am happy to be viewed as a feminist. What I mean by radical feminism, however, is that particular form of feminist ideology that is deeply shaped by lesbian ideology, or at the very least, open to lesbianism as a legitimate lifestyle (Germaine Greer, Mary Daly, Kate Millett, et al.); and by a Marxist theory of history and oppression, by which one class, male, becomes fixedly cast in the role of demonic oppressors, and the victim class is viewed consistently as oppressed, regardless of the facts. The oneness of humanity is thus divided into two classes, a guilt class of oppressing misogynists and a guiltless class of oppressed women. This is a faddish form of demonization.

Those assumptions prevail in the dying form of radical feminism. That form is not as vital today as it was 10 years ago in our seminaries. Feminism of recent years is becoming more humanized, more influenced by the central body of women, less lesbian, less Marxist, less strident and outraged, more empathic. The earlier radical feminism is being corrected by neo-feminist or counter-feminist writers like Midge Deeter, Arianna Stassinopoulos, Ellen Hawkes, Megan Marshall, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Karen Mains, and Luci Shaw.

Many more women of moderation and piety are now coming into ministry to correct the earlier exaggerations of radical feminists. Women are more frequently refusing to allow themselves to be represented by pro-abortionist, lesbian advocates and sexual experimentalists whom they recognize to be unfriendly to women’s long-range interests.

In an earlier period, when the more radical feminists had a media pedestal of unquestioned moral authority—that was unfortunately acceded to by the moderate center—they gained a position of authority in some liberal-elite bureaucracies. They became very influential in reshaping language, diminishing free inquiry and setting limits on academic freedom.

Such feminists almost succeeded in taking over some venerable United Methodist institutions, which tended to become dogmatic in direct proportion to the amount of “unresisted” influence the feminist were allowed to exert. There are some UM seminaries that likely will not survive the next quarter century because they will be far too alienated to be supported in their sexual experimentation by the grassroots church.

This primrose path has already been taken by at least one Episcopal seminary, which has openly become a lesbian seminary with virtually all women, having the lesbian sexual assumptions taken for granted as a premise. Grassroots churches are now simply refusing to allow ordinal candidates to attend this seminary.

That could happen in a United Methodist seminary, one or two, but it only has to happen in one or two in order for the rest to flee in moral revulsion. It will not happen across the board. Even with our skewed forms of representation, the UM Church is smarter than to allow its institutions to be taken over by an ideology so alien as lesbian Marxism.

In light of your analysis, what do you believe about the future?

In every moment, human freedom is being given an opportunity to respond to grace. In every moment of theological inquiry, the human desire to know God is being given a fresh possibility of responding to God’s entry into history as attested in Scripture and confirmed by ecumenical tradition, rational inquiry and subsequent committed lives. The situation as given by grace is neither sick nor healthy as such, but full of possibility which persons can respond to in a sick or healthy way.