Review of Thomas C. Oden’s A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir, (IVP Academic, November 2014) Hardcover, 384 pages, $30.58.
One reason Thomas C. Oden wrote A Change of Heart was “to alert people to question the realism of those collectivist and unexamined illusions.” The “illusions” and collectivism Oden refers to is a fashionable abandonment of the truth and Christian orthodoxy within academia, especially by mainline Protestant seminaries. This abandonment of classic Christianity led to the rise of Marxist liberation theology, sexual libertinism, and the radicalized parish pulpit. Oden offers a fascinating reversal to this popular trajectory. Once himself a mouthpiece for the kind of radicalism that has wrested much of mainline Protestantism from its vibrant roots, Oden has since vowed to “contribute nothing new to theology.”
“A Change of Heart” is a reflective memoir that begins in Oden’s rural Oklahoma hometown. Born in 1931, he vividly recalls the devastating Dust Bowl and a world torn apart by war. From an early age, Oden decided his “future had to be with books and ideas, not muscle and sweat.” He began to see the Church as an instrument for revolutionary change. “I preferred the radicals. Liberals talk,” declared Oden. Explaining his early ways, he says:
My views on wealth distribution were shaped largely by knowledge elites who earned their living by words and ideas—professors, writers and movement leaders. Like most broadminded clergy I knew, I reasoned out of modern naturalistic premises, employing biblical narratives narrowly and selectively as I found them useful politically. The saving grace of God was not in the mix of life-changing ideas.
Oden received his doctorate from Yale University and served on Yale’s faculty. He had other teaching positions at Phillips University, Southern Methodist University, Drew University, and Eastern University. Oden wrote some of the liberal Methodist curriculum that influenced Hillary Clinton’s transformation from a young Goldwater girl to liberal ideologue. “Her educational trajectory was remarkably parallel to mine with Yale, Methodist Student Movement activism, experimental ecumenism and Chicago style-politics as prevailing features, which were always leftward politically,” declares Oden. They both devoured the writings of Saul Alinsky and dreamt of radical social change through the Church. This theology of political empowerment would soon infect much of Oden’s own United Methodist tradition.
By the end of the 1960s Oden had grown disillusioned with radicalized religion and its empty promises. Oden explains, in the next two paragraphs, the transformation he experienced at an Earth Day event in Houston, Texas:
I sat on a park bench near the amphitheater to a read a handout copy of “Socialist World” a propaganda piece of which I hadn’t seen a copy in several years, but its themes were all too familiar to me. The paper was saturated with labor-left messianic rhetoric. I thought back two decades to my Norman Thomas days, when I actually was a socialist. I felt overcome with embarrassment that I had come so close to being trapped in that world. As the tumultuous decade was coming to a close, life on the cutting edge was draining me. I was experiencing a revulsion against self-preoccupation, narcissism and anarchy. For some reason I had in my pocket that day my India paper edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which I had purchased at Blackwell’s Bookstore in Oxford. I turned to the collect for the day. Under the shade of the majestic gnarled tree 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 to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may always serve thee in pureness of living and truth; through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” My eyes filled with tears as I asked myself what I had been missing in all of my frenzied subculture of experimental living.
Oden admits he did not engage seriously with any conservatives until the 1960s. A Jewish faculty member at Drew University named Will Herberg, a onetime communist activist turned conservative, challenged his scholarship. Herberg told Oden he was “ignorant in his Christianity.” The blow was no doubt severe for an esteemed scholar and theologian already noticed by the likes of Rudolf Bultman and Karl Barth. Herberg, who often wrote for National Review and Russell Kirk’s Modern Age, challenged Oden to carefully read through Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas.
Herberg saw in Oden somebody who desperately needed to be grounded in ancient wisdom. “Could it be that I had been trampling on a vast tradition of historical wisdom in the attempt to be original?” asked Oden. He credits the Jewish Herberg for doing more for his spiritual life than any Christian he had known.
Thus begun a transformation that would produce some of the greatest work in recent classical Christian thought. “As I took a deep dive into the early church fathers, they corrected my modern prejudices.” For the next five years Oden committed his time to a rigorous study of patristic sources. “I had been in love with heresy. Now I was waking up from this enthrallment to meet a two thousand year stable memory.” He called his not-so-new theology “Paleo-orthodoxy.” He wished now that his tombstone would read, “He made no new contribution to theology.”
Oden worked tirelessly to bridge the gap between a broken modern world and the answers that flow from the ancient apostolic witness and tradition. “The patristic writers reveal an amazing equilibrium in their cohesive grasp of the whole course of human history through the sacred texts,” declares Oden.
Oden defended his own denomination’s evangelical witness and doctrinal standards from attack. At Drew University, he challenged much of the faculty, who were immersed in radical feminism and Sophia goddess worship. Oden was an integral part of launching the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church, an endeavor to strengthen and return Methodism to its rich evangelical and Wesleyan witness. Brilliantly, Oden notes, “Since God’s Word is addressed to all humanity, orthodox Christianity embraces a scriptural inclusivism that is much broader than a politically correct inclusivism.”
He took heart in the fact that many of his students at Drew were hungry for classic Christianity and not the stale agenda-driven theology that had shaped so many scholars from his own generation. Oden sums up the appeal:
Modernity has only lasted less than a dozen generations, while orthodox Christianity has already flourished for more than four hundred generations and shows no sign of fatigue. Yet orthodoxy seems like a newcomer in the university and to the cultural elites, since that is where it has been most forgotten.
While he has kept his commitment of adding nothing new to theology, Oden’s theological contribution is immense. He has worked with and been friends with influential theologians such as Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Wolfhart Pannenberg, J.I. Packer, and Richard John Neuhaus. Oden, an observer at Vatican II, had been present for much of the critical theological events and occurrences of the 20th century. Oden is the author of significant works such as The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, Agenda for Theology, and a three volume Systematic Theology. Perhaps his most enduring legacy is as general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary Series. Oden credits his discussions with then Cardinal Ratzinger in the 1980s as a factor in helping launch the idea for a monumental patristic commentary of Scripture. Many experts believed the Ancient Christian Commentary Series was a logistically impossible undertaking, but many confessing Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians now cherish the exhaustive work.
It is abundantly clear that much of the contributions of Oden’s liberal colleagues are already long forgotten, while his contribution has proved to be truly ecumenical and timeless. My first introduction to Oden was as a young seminary student at Asbury, where I was shaped by his three volume “Systematic Theology: The Living God,” “The Word of Life,” and “Life in the Spirit.” “The Word of Life” is an enduring and almost daily part of my devotional meditations on the work, person, death, and eternal life of Christ. To follow Christ is so often an experience in suffering, which is something Oden has also experienced. Readers of A Change of Heart will benefit from his words and wisdom on the topic.
Oden’s memoir, deep with thought, is a significant contribution from an enduring and brilliant theologian. Oden’s words and witness offers hope to a world and even our churches that are broken and in disarray. “The seed of the Word was being planted precisely within the fertilized soil of ever waning cultures,” declares Oden.
Oden’s life has come full circle, and he has returned to his native Oklahoma. After many theological and ideological left turns, Oden has found purpose and peace in a return to the ancient Christian witness and patristic thought. But Oden shows such a return is an essential journey for all of us fatigued by unfulfilling and agenda-driven theology. At the end of his preface to “Word of Life,” Oden quotes Henry Vaughan’s “The Retreat” as a fitting suggestion for our theological journey:
O how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track! . . .
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move.
Ray Nothstine is a graduate of the Asbury Theological Seminary and lives in Jackson, Mississippi.
