Archive: Interview with Thomas Oden

What caused you to begin seriously re-thinking your theology?

As a 40 year old scholar I was goaded, pestered and badgered into reading the ancient Christian writers by an incomparable, caring Jewish friend—Will Herberg. A central irony of my personal story was that I did not become a decent concentrated Christian theologian until I had been accosted, arrested and admonished by a no-nonsense traditional Jew. Even after I had been teaching for 12 years in a seminary, Herberg was far more aware of the classic, consensual Christian tradition than was I who had been educated, ordained and specifically employed to be a Christian theologian.

What events were pivotal for you in recharting your course?

I got a shock when my clever, resourceful son dropped out of school during his junior year of high school. That sent a clear signal to me that I had not been earnestly listening to him as a father. The crisis with Clark placed a restraining torque on my previous liberal trajectory as a nondirective Spock-speak parent. Clark, in time, would splendidly reenter the educational sphere, to become an exceedingly well-trained, well-credentialed, hi-tech engineer.

The Supreme Court decision on abortion, weekly meetings with Will Herberg, disaffection with the McGovernizing Democratic Party and the attempt to do experimental student-centered contractual teaching with spiritually snarled student dropouts of hip culture—all these factors gradually moved me toward an incremental reversal that took 10 years (1968-78) to come full circle. Later came a penetrating dialogue with Eastern Orthodox theologians—Vigen Guroian, John Breck, Tom Hopko and David Ford – and theologians of the Roman Catholic tradition, especially Avery Dulles and Joseph Ratzinger. The Holy Spirit was not impatient in allowing me plenty of time to work through this transition, guiding me through a tangled path before coming home to classical Christianity.

The increase in abortion-on-demand caused you to rethink the values of modernity. How did this happen?

In a late-night session at the International Hotel in Geneva, while attending the 1966 World Council of Churches World Conference on Church and Society, I sat up to wee hours debating with Paul Ramsey on abortion. When, in the following year, I read Paul VI’ s encyclical on sexuality, Humanae Vitae, while I was still contending for liberalized abortion legislation, my conscience was stung, but not transformed.

The extreme 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, leaving the unborn child defenseless, finally brought me to an acutely nauseous revulsion over my own vacillating participation in abortion advocacy. Once I had crossed over the line of moral nausea, I could never return. It changed my life not only about covenant sexuality, but about the wider socialist-progressive political ethos to which I had been uncritically committed.

You have called the church back to classical Christian teaching or what some would call “Orthodoxy.” What is orthodoxy?

Orthodoxy means thinking with the ancient church about the apostolic preaching. Christian orthodoxy is textually defined by the apostolic testimony, as a fulfillment commentary on the Hebrew Bible. Christian orthodoxy is succinctly defined sacramentally by the baptismal formula (in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit), and defined confessionally by the ancient baptismal confession with its precisely remembered rule of faith as recalled in the Nicene, Apostles’ and Athanasian Creeds with their subsequent interpretations. Under heretical attack, supplementary definitions emerged in the seven ecumenical councils and in other consensually received regional councils that have held fast through the changes of Protestant reform and modern messianisms.

Classic Christian orthodoxy is that tradition that has repeatedly centered the consenting church in the early consensual interpretation of the apostolic witness. Why important? In order that anyone who comes to receive holy communion may be free to receive it as apostolically delivered, as thinking with the church so as not to receive a false rendering of the apostolic testimony, but the same testimony as that attested by the apostles. As Orthodox Judaism calls Jewish congregations back to classical rabbinic sources, and as Roman Catholic orthodoxy returns constantly to drink from the well of the Roman teaching tradition, so does classical Christian teaching among Protestants serve in our time to call us back—as did Wesley—not merely to our Protestant roots but to our pre-Protestant grounding in early Christian scriptural interpretation.

If we are firm on the primacy of Scripture, why are the consensual teachings of the first five centuries so important?

Only to make clear how the earliest church was reading Scripture. The consensual writers—Athanasius, Basil, John Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen in the East, and Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory I in the West—constantly warned hearers not to listen to these men if they spoke contrary to Scripture. They said in effect: if I happen inadvertently to say something contrary to the apostolic testimony that you have repeatedly heard in the services of worship where the Hebrew Bible and the gospels and epistles are regularly read and interpreted—if that happens do not follow me, but Scripture as interpreted by the mind of the believing church.

There is nothing in the central tradition of orthodox hermeneutics that pits tradition against Scripture. Even the oral tradition that was remembered by Basil and others was never pitted against the written tradition of apostolic writings, but only received gratefully as a complement consistent with them. There is no way to validate or argue for the orthodox tradition without continuous reference to Scripture, since orthodoxy is nothing more or less than a consensual ecumenical tradition of scriptural interpretation.

How have your colleagues at Drew and across the UM Church responded to your theological “reversal”, as you call it?

It was not a conversion of 180 degrees, but a substantial course-correction that involved a re-tracking.

Several responses predominate: Some cheer and say I wish I had said that and am grateful for your saying it. Other look at me with a vague sense of pity, and sometimes with crocodile tears, because I now have by my own admission put myself in the position of wishing to contribute nothing new to the history of theology. Too bad about Tom, they say. Once he was creative, innovative, but now he has deprived himself entirely of the privilege scholars have of creating new thoughts. Meanwhile every moment of textual listening, free inquiry and historical investigation into the ancient apostolic tradition is new for me and piled high with imaginative possibilities.

Other colleagues are put on the defensive, and decide to feel vulnerable about what I am saying, and this elicits in some an understandable frustration that sparks exasperation and anger at times. But that is a small price to pay. I have never had to suffer much for the truth, even though I am willing to die for it if need be, if the situation requires, insofar as I am faithful to my baptism, for that is what my baptism means.

I am deeply grateful to be a part of a faculty where freedom of inquiry is highly valued. There are some ways in which the freedom to inquire into religion at Drew is greater than at Ohio State University or Michigan State or other tax supported universities. I am grateful to be able to teach religion in a setting where the tradition of classic Christianity can be taken seriously as a project of intellectual and textual inquiry. I am grateful for bright colleagues very different from myself, for feminist and form critical and deconstructionist colleagues. I am grateful even for outright heretical colleagues who challenge me to be more clear about my own grounding in classical Christian teaching. I am grateful to be teaching in a university where the archival resources of the Wesleyan tradition are unexcelled anywhere in the world, a gift far beyond my deserving, and I have Paul Hardin, Jim Kirby, and Ken Rowe to thank for this.

I am a valued member of this university faculty, partly because I have been around so long (22 years), less so because colleagues believe that my trajectory is plausible for their scholarship, although they are usually willing to listen, some with seriousness; and most are willing to incorporate some aspects of it cautiously into their own projects. I think this is true of all my colleagues at Drew Theological School.

Are there elements in classical orthodoxy which evangelicals have ignored or failed to appropriate?

Evangelicals can learn much from early Christianity about sanctification of the whole of life, about walking in the way daily as informed by the grace of baptism and Eucharist. The annual cycle of seasonal celebrations of the Christian year has been all but lost by the gaunt, abstemious, puritanical side of evangelical memory. There is much that modern evangelicals have forgotten about the sanctification of time and space. Some have fixated upon “me and the Bible, and especially me,” so that what Bible reading becomes is primarily an assertion of inward feelings. This has sadly prevented readers from meeting with the history of the Holy Spirit, or learning that the Spirit has a history, and that the body of Christ being called forth in that history has unity, not simply the ‘centerless’ diversity we have been taught to look for by skeptical historiography. Beware of the “evangelical” who wants to read the Bible without the historic voices of the church, who is only willing to listen to his own voice or the voices of contemporaries in the dialogue. Evangelicals have usually been the losers when they have systematically neglected the saints and martyrs and consensual writers of the earliest Christian centuries.

Evangelical and charismatic communities are moving toward several decades of recovery of the liturgical life that they have been so deeply missing, a retrieval of the liturgical tradition that Wesley took for granted, the religion of the Prayer Book, and the apostolic tradition as recollected during the earliest Christian centuries of persecution. These communities will be profoundly reformed by classical liturgies, returning to mode of worship that were far more available in the third century than the twentieth.

What can United Methodists do to help direct our denominational seminaries a way from faddish theologies and toward classical orthodoxy?

Congregations do well to honor the tradition of freedom-of-the-pulpit, provided the preacher remains reasonably accountable to the constitutional doctrinal standards: the Articles of Religion and Wesley’s Standard Sermons and Notes Upon the New Testament. When that does not occur, when preaching inveighs against the teachings of the doctrinal standards that have since 1763 been written into Wesleyan constitutional polity, and remain even today constitutionally unamendable as restricted rules, congregations need to proceed fairly and in due disciplinary order.

Where UM theological education produces ordinands intent upon deliberately undoing the constitutionally United Methodist doctrinal tradition, the pastor-parish relations committee should think and talk and pray together about it before any peremptory moves are made. It is fitting to use the proper disciplinary avenues of communication and feed-back in our polity and constitutional system. First openly consult, then if ineffective, follow disciplinary grievance procedures, and if necessary call pastors to accountability. Meanwhile evangelicals do well not to pick away at those seminaries that are currently trying to come more in touch with the Wesleyan tradition.

Where overly tenured faculties have been formed and habituated so as to systematically block out Wesleyan and evangelical teaching, they cannot expect boundless, forbearing, ardent support from the moderate constituency. Fiscal discipline may be the only available mechanism by which recalcitrant seminaries can be taught that they must become accountable to their actual democratic constituencies and to their historic mission. Some basic reformulation of the Ministerial Education Fund may have to occur if equitable correctives are not made.

It appears that the UM Church, for all practical purposes, ignored the fact of more than 200,000 signatures to the Memphis Declaration. Will the UM bureaucracy ever respond to the grassroots voices?

I have a different take on this than the question assumes. It does not seem accurate to say that the UM Church has ignored those signatures. Some of the bureaucratic elites have tried to ignore them, but even if they expended their mightiest efforts they could hardly muster half that many signatures for their pet cause of sexual experimentation and legitimized abortion. Let them try to match it. The 1996 General Conference petitioning goal perhaps should be set at a quarter million signatures. In their petition, signers would do well to challenge the spend-and-act-up, condom-abortion wing of Methodism to attempt a signature campaign of their own. Then centrists and moderates could double whatever signatures the radicals produced.

It seems a defeatist exaggeration to say that it had no effect, but it is also unfair to the 200,000 to say that they had a lasting or absolute effect. It is destined to be a continuing struggle. The signatures affected the homosexuality issue substantively, and the abortion issue considerably, and the fiscal responsibility question to some modest degree. It was not wholly ignored.

The question premises two distinguishable entities: the UM Church and its cumbersome bureaucracy. The broader church is, I believe, responding, but the bureaucrats are tardy, and often bending only as funds are withheld.