Archive: Back to the Future with Thomas C. Oden

This eminent UM theologian exchanged the faddish illusions of modernity for the richness and power of the ancient apostolic traditions.

Thomas C. Oden teaches theology and ethics at the Theology School, Drew University. He is arguably the preeminent theologian in the United Methodist Church today, and certainly our most prolific writer.

In his After Modernity … What? (Zondervan, 1990), a revision and reworking of his Agenda For Theology, 1979, Oden cites the bankrupt state of modern liberalism and calls for a return to classical Christianity.

Oden insists, persuasively, that theologians in recent decades have assumed that in theology—as in corn poppers and automobile exhaust systems—newer is better and the newest is best. We have it just backward when it comes to theology and moral philosophy, Oden contends.

In November 1992, Oden’s Life in the Spirit was published by HarperCollins. This massive work (584 pp.) is the third in Oden’s three-volume systematic theology.

What follows is adapted from After Modernity … What? which will help the reader understand Oden’s own journey back to classical Christian orthodoxy. Having wandered in the byways of modernity for many years, Oden is well equipped to offer a devastating critique of today’s faddish theologies in which pastors and theologians run to “keep pace with each new ripple of the ideological river.” In the words of J.I. Packer, Oden sees “regress to orthodoxy as the true way forward.” Indeed, back to the future!

The final portion below comes from Oden’ s Preface to his Life in the Spirit The reader will find both the three-volume set and After Modernity … What? irreplaceable and lifetime resources. —the editors

If we are to understand Christianity’s original meaning or value, we must come once again to see it through the eyes of those who have had to struggle for it and maintain it. 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.

The sons and daughters of modernity are rediscovering the neglected beauty of classical Christian teaching. It is a moment of joy, of beholding anew what had been nearly forgotten, of hugging a lost child.

I have been astonished to discover that some of my best students are the ones most insistent on letting the ancient tradition speak for itself. They have had a bellyful of the hyped claims of modern therapies and political messianism to make all things right. They are fascinated—and often passionately moved—by the primitive language of the apostolic tradition and the ancient Christian writers, undiluted by our contemporary efforts to soften it or make it easier or package it for smaller challenge but greater acceptability.

Finally, my students got through to me. They do not want to hear a watered-down modern reinterpretation. They want nothing less than the substance of the faith of the apostles and martyrs without too much interference from modern pablum-peddlers who doubt that people are tough enough to take it straight.

The present mood of academic theology is boredom. Admittedly, theology has managed to gain a modest status in the harsh world—a chair here or there in a sprawling tax-supported university. For half-a-century, theologians have been earnestly longing and wishing and even praying (well, that might be an exaggeration) for a little more respectability in the eyes of modernity.

So teachers of religion have developed huge upwardly mobile professional societies that are carbon copies of other professional societies. The field has even managed to obtain a convenient name-change—from “theology” to “religious studies.” Even amid its apparent secular successes, the question lingers: How is theology to find true happiness in the modern world? What is theology now to do with its newfound freedom from Holy Writ, and revelation, and church, and antiquity?

The “Movement” Theologian

In order to sharpen my portrayal of theology’s amiable accommodation to modernity, I will describe a particular individual, an ordained theologian whom I have known for a long time, and whose career until recently can only be described as that of a “movement person.” In his pursuit of movements, his overall pattern was diligently to learn from them, to throw himself into them, and then eventually to baptize them insofar as they showed any remote kinship with Christianity, and then to turn to another movement.

Now well into middle age, our subject took his first plunge into “movement identity” at 16 when he joined the United World Federalists to promote world government through various educational and church groups. From 1954 to 1966 he was much involved in ecumenical debate, promotion and organization. His deepening involvement in the civil rights movement began at about 17 and four years later was intensified by his attendance at the national NAACP convention in 1953; and by subsequent participation in marches, demonstrations, pray-ins, sit-ins, letter campaigns and other forms of political activism.

More than a decade before the Vietnam War, our “movement theologian” was an active pacifist, struggling to motivate the anti-war movement during the difficult McCarthy days. The fact that he understood himself as a democratic socialist and theoretical Marxist during the McCarthy period did not make his task any easier. By the mid-1950s he was active in the American Civil Liberties Union; in the pre-NOW women’s rights movement as an advocate of liberalized abortion; and as a steady opponent of states’ rights, military spending, and bourgeois morality. His movement identity took a new turn in the late 1950s when he became enamored with the existentialist movement, immersing himself particularly in the demythologization movement, writing his doctoral dissertation on its chief theorist.

The early 1960s found him intimately engaged in the client-centered therapy movement. Later he became engrossed in Transactional Analysis and soon was actively participating in the Gestalt therapy movement. His involvement deepened in the “third force” movement in humanistic psychology. In the early 1970s, he joined a society for the study of paranormal phenomena, taught a class in parapsychology, and directed controlled research experiments with mung beans, Kirlian photography, biorhythm charts, pyramids, tarot cards, and the correlation of astrological predictions with the daily ups and downs of behavior.

My purpose in reciting this long litany is not to boast, for indeed I am that wandering theologian, less proud than amused by the territory I have covered. Rather, the purpose is to recite a straightforward description of what at least one mainline Protestant theologian conceived to be his task in successive phases of the last few decades.

So when I am speaking of a diarrhea of religious accommodation, I am not thinking of “the other guys” or speaking in the abstract, but out of my own personal history. I do not wish contritely to apologize for my 25 years as a movement person, because I learned so much and encountered so many bright and beautiful persons. But I now experience the afterburn of “movement” existence, of messianic pretensions, of self-congratulatory idealisms.

The shocker is not merely that I rode so many bandwagons, but that I thought I was doing Christian teaching a marvelous favor by it and at times considered this accommodation the very substance of the Christian teaching office.

Abortion Brings Revulsion

It was the abortion-on-demand movement more than anything else that brought me to movement revulsiveness. The climbing abortion statistics made me movement-weary, movement-demoralized. I now suspect that a fair amount of my own idealistic history of political action was ill conceived by self-deceptive romanticisms in search of power in the form of prestige that were from the beginning willing to destroy human traditions in the name of humanity, and at the end willing to extinguish the futures of countless unborn children in the name of individual autonomy. So, reflected in the mirror of my own history, I see my own generation and my children’s generation of movement idealisms as naively proud and sadly misdirected, despite good intentions.

Meanwhile, in the period before the reversal, my intellectual dialogue remained embarrassingly constricted almost exclusively to university colleagues and liberal churchmen, the only club I knew. When I later discovered among brilliant Protestant evangelicals a superb quality of exegesis, I wondered why it took so long. And when I found in Roman Catholic friends a marvelous depth of historical and moral awareness, I wondered what it was in my academic and church tradition that had prevented my meeting them, or that had systematically cut me off from dialogue with them. All these questions arose out of a vague sense of grief over lost possibilities and out of confusion that a church tradition which spoke so often about tolerance and universality could be so intolerant and parochial.

The Illusions of Modernity

The philosophical center of modernity is no dark secret. It is a narcissistic hedonism which assumes that moral value is reducible to now feelings and sensory experience. It views human existence essentially as spiritless body, sex as orgasm, psychology as amoral data gathering, and politics as the manipulation of power. It systematically ignores the human capacity of self-transcendence moral reasoning, covenant commitment and self-sacrificial agape.

While the mainline religious leadership should have been giving what it distinctively has to give—namely, firm, critical resistance rooted in a historical perspective that modernity could find instructive—instead the religious leadership withheld its gift and whored after each successive stage of modernity’s profligacy. But it has not been until the last quarter century that there has been wholesale devaluation of the currency of Christian language, symbolism, teaching and witness—a total sellout and bankruptcy to support the fixed habits of modern addictions.

The faddism of theology in the past three decades was not accidental—it was necessary if you understand theology to be a constant catch-up process, trying to keep pace with each new ripple of the ideological river. What else could theology become but faddist, under such a definition?

The same addiction that has degenerated modern art has also infected theology. An inversion of value has occurred in which the highest value is placed not on aesthetic imagination, craft, meaning or beauty, but on novelty and compulsive uniqueness. The more outrageous it is, the more “creative” it is viewed by connoisseurs, and the more boring it is to most of us.

Exactly the same has happened in religious studies with its new theologies every spring season, a wide assortment of “new moralities,” “new hermeneutics,” and (note how the adjectives suddenly have to be pumped up) “revolutionary breakthroughs.”

We have blithely proceeded on the skewed assumption that in theology—just as in corn poppers, electric tooth-brushes and automobile exhaust systems—new is good, newer is better and newest is best. The correction of this distorted analogy will have a shocking effect on seminary campuses long habituated to instant theology. The irony is that these “most innovative” seminaries are regarded in certain circles as better just to that degree that they follow this debilitating assumption. So the “best” ones have by this logic cut themselves systematically off from sustained discourse with classical Christianity.

The fundamental eros of the leading contemporary theological traditions of Bultmann, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Whitehead and Rahner is accommodation to modernity. This is the underlying motif that unites the seemingly vast differences between many forms of existential theology, process theology, liberation theology and demythologization—all are searching for some more compatible adjustment to modernity.

The agenda for theology at the end of the 20th century, following the steady deterioration of 100 years and the disaster of the last few decades, is to begin to prepare the post-modern Christian community for its third millennium by returning again to the careful study and respectful following of the central tradition of classical Christian exegesis.

Classical Christianity

Classical Christianity has never said that the believer cannot inquire into scientific understandings of reality or probe the edges of undiscovered truth or refine the methods of research to the tiniest caliber. Rather, it has celebrated the hope that all the varied dimensions of truth awaiting our discovery are more profoundly understandable, and make wiser sense, within the frame of reference of the meaning of universal history. This meaning Christians believe to be revealed in Jesus’ resurrection.

By classical Christianity (or ancient ecumenical orthodoxy), I mean the Christian consensus of the first millennium. What is orthodoxy? In brief, it is that faith to which Vincent of Lerins pointed in the concise phrase quad ubique, quad semper, quad ab omnibus creditum est (“that which has been everywhere and always and by everyone believed”). It is the faith generally shared by all Christians, especially as defined in the crucial early periods of Christian doctrinal definition.

These definitions were not written by individuals but were hammered out by synods, councils and consensual bodies. On at least seven notable occasions they met on a worldwide basis to express the universal consent of the believing church to the apostolic teaching as defined, and left as a legacy the seven ecumenical councils that have been accepted by the entire church as normative for almost two millennia.

Taken from the book, After Modernity … What? by Thomas C. Oden. Copyright© 1990 by Thomas C. Oden. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.

Thomas C. Oden is the Henry Anson Buttz professor of theology and ethics at the Theological School, Drew University. He is an ordained United Methodist minister, author of numerous books and a contributing editor of Good News.

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