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Confessions of an ex-liberal theologian

Confessions of an ex-liberal theologian

Last updated on: July 5, 2016 at 10:43 am by Gene Veith

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Confessions of an ex-liberal theologian 2016-07-05T10:43:17-04:00 Gene Veith

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Thomas C. Oden is a prominent theologian who formerly was a major practitioner of liberal, modernist theology. But then, after reading the Church Fathers, he did an about face, turning to orthodox, historical Christianity. He tells his story in A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir.

This is the most stimulating and illuminating book that I have read in a long time, giving an inside look at the construction of liberal theology, explaining what happened to mainstream Protestantism, and describing in novelistic detail how a prominent scholar came back to an authentic Christian faith.

Reading this book, published a couple of years ago, was an especially strange experience for me because Oden’s background and mine are so similar! Though he is 20 years older than I am, our experiences have been so similar or at least parallel that reading about them is like reading about my own life.

Oden grew up in small town, rural southwest Oklahoma; I grew up in small town, rural northeast Oklahoma. Both of us and our families were active in mainline Protestant denominations, Methodist, in his case, and Disciples of Christ in mine. We both went to the University of Oklahoma, majoring in Letters (literature, philosophy, history, and a classical and a modern foreign language). We had some of the same professors and hung out at the same places. We went to the same congregation, McFarlin Methodist Church, which Oden said “introduced me to political radicalism.” He met his wife at Wesley Foundation; I married my wife at Wesley Foundation. We both went into academic careers. His first position was at Phillips University, the Disciples college and seminary, where I used to go for youth programs. He was rescued from liberal theology by studying the early church; I was rescued from liberal theology by studying the Reformation.

You wouldn’t think that Oklahoma in the 1950s and 1960s was a hotbed of religious radicalism, but it was. Oden observes that the radical pastors being put into the rural parishes learned to use traditional-sounding language, while meaning something much more modern. They still talked about “salvation,” “the gospel of Jesus Christ,” and “the kingdom of God,” but were really talking about a leftist utopia. But in youth gatherings, especially on the state level, the political indoctrination was explicit. Church camps, district youth rallies, and the state and national organizations—all of which both Oden and I attended—were all about civil rights, world peace, social justice, and (sometimes) Marxist revolution.

Here our paths diverged. I had read Mere Christianity and other books by C. S. Lewis and writers like him, such as G. K. Chesterton. I knew that Christianity rested on doctrinal truths, such as the deity of Christ, and I came to see that the theological liberals of my church were rejecting those truths. Later, in grad school, I would read the Bible, our local Disciples congregation would go through an evangelical renewal, and I became involved with Christian groups on campus. My dissertation research into 17th century religious poetry had me reading Reformation theologians, and, once I got my first academic job, returning as Oden did back to Oklahoma for a time, my wife (who was on the spiritual pilgrimage with me) and I were catechized into the Lutheran church.

Oden, though, went all in with the new theology. He was ordained as a Methodist pastor, where he served a rural Oklahoma parish that he loved, but then he was off to Yale and then to Phillips as a theology professor. He was first entranced with existentialism and the way Rudolf Bultmann demythologized the Bible. Oden published some ground-breaking work on existential ethics. He then became interested in the new psychoanalysis, applying the techniques of psychological counseling to pastoral care and the Christian life. Oden says that he coined the term “unconditional love,” a phrase that has gained currency in contexts ranging from evangelical sermons to country music. He also pioneered the use of “encounter groups” in Christian settings, applying the techniques of group therapy to Bible studies and “fellowship groups.”

How I hated those! In youth group activities, we would have to get into groups and spill our guts to each other, sharing our darkest secrets and more embarrassing insecurities, whereupon all of the members of the group would affirm each other, and we would experience “unconditional love,” amounting to a religious experience. These encounter groups became so ubiquitous in the 1970s that they showed up in business “team-building” meetings and even in college classrooms, which replaced learning actual material with “learning experiences” based on group exercises. I couldn’t stand this sort of thing, introvert that I am, and they only confirmed my dislike for liberal theology and my resistance to “group work” when I became a college teacher.

But Tom Oden was way into all of this. His academic career was taking off. He writes about glorious sabbatical leaves full of travel and visits to famous icons in his field. In a sabbatical in Europe, culminating in a road trip with his wife and kids through battle zones to Israel, Oden hung out with Bultmann, Hans Gadamer, and Wolfhart Pannenberg. But when he dropped in on a dying Karl Barth in his hospital room, he was taken aback when the famous theologian took issue with his work and warned him that he must face the Judgment of God.

His academic success and scholarly acclaim led him to a professorship at Drew University, where he continued to make a name for himself. But then a friend and colleague, the Jewish conservative Will Herberg, challenged him. You never read Augustine and Athanasius? And you call yourself a theologian? You don’t know your own religion.

Shaken, Oden took up the challenge. He read Augustine, Athanasius, and the other fathers of the early church. Here he discovered a Christian consensus that staggered him. He realized that he and his counterparts, in sincerely trying to save Christianity by recasting it for the modern world, were missing the point. The questions he had been struggling with already had answers. It isn’t a matter of interpreting Scripture; Scripture interprets us. It isn’t a matter of our saving Christianity; Christianity—or, rather, Christ—saves us. In place of the ecumenism that downplays doctrine and reduces Christian diversity to a lowest common denominator, Oden found a catholicity that includes the various Protestant traditions.

Today’s academic careers are centered around coming up with something “new.” Oden resolved henceforth to write nothing new in theology. And yet, his appropriation of the ancient church for our contemporary age seemed new all the same. He wrote After Modernity—What?, a book helpful to my own writings on Postmodernism, arguing that the modernism that dominated the 20th century and that gave us progressivism, materialism, and liberal theology is over. Dismissing the current wave of relativists as “hyper-modernists,” Oden argues that to be truly post-modern is to become open, once again, to the past, bringing its insights—particularly its theological insights—into the contemporary world.

Oden was snubbed by his old friends and experienced the academy’s wrath for violating the tenets of political correctness. But he made new friends, including conservative theologians that he never knew even existed. These included J. I. Packer, Richard Neuhaus, and Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict II.

In consultation with these luminaries, he began a huge scholarly project, the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. This would include comments from the church fathers on virtually every text of the Bible. To pull off this mammoth undertaking, Oden worked with scholars from virtually every Christian tradition—including Missouri Synod Lutherans, some of whom played important roles in the project—and brought it to completion.

Finding that many of the most important church fathers were from Africa (Augustine from Carthage in present-day Libya; Athanasius from Alexandria in Egypt), he also founded the Center for Early African Christianity, which is helping Africans resist Islam and is contributing to the flourishing of African churches.

In recent years, Oden has moved back to Oklahoma for a bucolic retirement. And so have I.

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