Turning Hearts to the Fathers
A Conversation With Thomas C. Oden
Part one of two parts by Kenneth Tanner
Thomas C. Oden is Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology at the Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and an ordained United Methodist minister. In the early 1970s, this son of the liberal Protestant tradition discovered the ancient Christian writers, an encounter that reversed his theological vision. Since then he has determined to play a part in faithfully passing on the living Tradition of the Church through his ministry of writing.
Interview
Kenneth Tanner: You were a son of the liberal mainline Protestant tradition, a self-described “movement” theologian addicted to accommodating the ethos of modernity. Was there one key event or crisis that led to your ecumenical orthodox conversion or was it a string of events? What caused you to rethink your direction?
Thomas Oden: It was not a single event. It was a very slow learning process by which I began to read the ancient Christian writers. It’s very undramatic in terms of pietistic expectations about a radical momentary conversion. I grew up as a Methodist, was baptized, and entered into the stream of Christian consciousness from a liberal-pietistic angle of vision. I went on through graduate school and into academic seminary teaching without having become prepared to be a theologian even though I was functioning as a theologian for ten years or more before I began to read the ancient ecumenical writers. It took me, I believe, six or eight years to go through the cycle of that reading process. So, when people ask me about a single moment of conversion, I simply can’t point to one.
There were some important transitions along the way. I think I began to be disillusioned by my liberal assumptions in the early ’70s; actually it probably began in the late ’60s, but I didn’t recognize it as clearly as I did in the early ’70s. My commitment to liberal politics (with a very high trust in government regulatory policy) was gradually disillusioned. It was an illusion that was disillusioned. I also began to be aware of the dogmatism of my liberal colleagues and of myself as a liberal. In other words, I began to come up against the rigidity, the inflexibility and the lack of decent civil discourse among liberals. I had grown up thinking that tolerance and civil discourse were assumptions of the liberal communication process, but I came to the point of feeling that I was simply not being listened to anymore.
Tanner: It’s an interesting paradox of your journey that it was a Jewish scholar and colleague at Drew University, Will Herberg, who set you on the path toward Christian orthodoxy.
Oden: The meeting with Will was a crucial turning point for me because he had been a former Communist. He had been very deeply involved in the very kinds of socialist activism that I had also been involved in as a young man. Except he had gone much further. Will was a very key person in one of the movements of the Communist Party in the United States. He had gone through a radical pattern of reversal having been a Communist. He belatedly came back to the rabbinic tradition out of the disillusionment of that period of socialism in the ’20s and ’30s, much like the transition that Reinhold Niebuhr made. Reinhold Niebuhr was a socialist candidate for Congress in the early ’30s. He and Will and others went all the way in committing themselves to quasi-Marxist or Marxist and socialist objectives, only to disavow them.
In Will, I found a Jewish mentor with a much better rooting in the Christian tradition than I had. Not only had he educated himself about his own rabbinic and Jewish tradition, but he had also read a great deal in the ancient Christian writers and knew them well. When I met Will, I had come to Drew as a systematic theologian and Will was teaching at Drew as the professor of social philosophy. He was shocked at how little I knew about my own tradition, and he simply embarrassed and cajoled and pushed me into reading my own classic tradition. He made it necessary for me, if I was going to be in dialogue with him, to deal with those ancient sources. I wasn’t too hard to persuade because once I began to crack them I realized, rather quickly, that there’s something extremely valuable there.
Will was essentially a cultural conservative, a political conservative, an economic conservative and a religious conservative. I had never met anybody like that who was truly brilliant, who had it all over me in terms of knowledge of the ancient sources. Will was a very important partner in dialogue simply to get me into the ball game, to get me into the sources that I needed to make a theologian out of me.
Tanner: What was absent from the liberal tradition in which you were raised that kept you from being prepared as a theologian?
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
19.6—July/August 2006
The Three-Fold Cord of Imagination, Reason & Will in C. S. Lewis by Michael Ward
24.1—January/February 2011
Ruminations on the Monstrous Envy of the Soul-Devouring State by Anthony Esolen
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
The Alternate & Alternative Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft & C. S. Lewis by C. R. Wiley
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
