by Steve | Jan 12, 1993 | Archive - 1993
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.
by Steve | Jan 11, 1993 | Archive - 1993
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.
