Book Review
From a Far Country
A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir by Thomas C. Oden
InterVarsity Press, 2014
(384 pages, $40.00, hardcover)
reviewed by S. M. Hutchens
This is a widespread scenario in the education of religious leaders: The young man, and now we should include the young woman as well, enters the seminary or graduate school of religion and is confronted with something perhaps quite different than expected—not a direct denial of what he assumed Christianity to teach, but Christianity as interpreted according to the best insights of modern science and its forms of social awareness—a Christianity that well-informed modern people who tend to be its cultured despisers can find believable. Contrasted to this he would find, assumed to be retrograde and unacceptable among the intelligent and informed, the simple, popular, in its more insistent forms "fundamentalist," confessional, traditionalist, or orthodox faith in which he might know enough to recognize the faith of his forebears, along with all those who lacked the level of understanding enjoyed by members of the guild into which his teachers are now inducting him.
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S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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