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.
The ground rule of the guild is that there is a categorical gulf between scientific knowledge and faith that can only be mediated by science as the superior organ for the acquisition of truth. The faith allowed to the educated is that which has passed the test of intelligent modernity, that being the only valid method of acquiring knowledge of God or anything else. The student is so impressed and intimidated by the learning of his teachers and is so attracted to the powers, pleasures, and liberties of their world—or perhaps is merely afraid that whatever attachments to traditional Christianity he retains are evidence of backwardness and, increasingly, immorality as regards resistance to an inclusive sexual ethics—that he gives answers calculated to please and becomes invested in a way of thinking that can no longer conceive of doing otherwise. For the advantage of women in religious training, the academy may safely be expected to take just as progressive a view of their aspirations to ministry as they do of everything else.
The student may notice in passing that giving the whip hand to science as it is taught by liberals in matters of religion means that much of what the comparative religions textbooks say about the distinctive historical beliefs of Christians, as well what grandma believed about Jesus, is not only not required, but is viewed as evidence of weakness or nostalgia or lack of scholarly acumen. And he (lest he be tempted to fear for his soul) has been brought to the place where it doesn't really matter any more, since he now believes that what traditional Christianity sought to establish and maintain is essentially mythology, and as such, is eminently eligible for restatement.
Ere long, the price of leaving the guild with all its advantages, not least of which is its resolute belief in its intellectual superiority, grows so high that reconsideration of the truth of its precepts, even when one might now possess the powers and perhaps even the incentive to do it, becomes almost unthinkable. Even when, at last, the teacher of liberal religion hears his Marley clanking down the stairs, casting shadows of Fezziwig's God and approaching judgment with millstones at the ready, he persists in spending his mind's life in search of a theological method and school, and in defending the "God" he has cobbled together during his career as a theologian. It is universally understood among his peers that, of the myriad interpretive pathways that offer themselves to distinguish the theologian, there is the fruit of one tree of which he may not eat, for in the day one eats thereof the mind will surely die: the tree planted in the midst of the garden, which must by all means carefully be avoided—orthodox Christianity.
Work of the Evangelist
The story of Thomas Oden followed this general and well-marked path until Will Herberg, his Jewish colleague at Drew Theological School, reached out to shake violently something that had remained hidden within him through his years as a high-ranking liberal religious scholar. The critical episode is worth recounting here:
Will was trying to show me that the errors I was making were much deeper than I had realized. I tried to defend myself. Suddenly my irascible, endearing Jewish friend leaned into my face and told me that I was densely ignorant of Christianity, and he simply couldn't permit me to throw my life away. Holding one finger up, looking straight at me with fury in his eyes, he said, "You will remain theologically uneducated until you study carefully Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas." In his usual gruff voice and brusque speech, he told me I had not yet met the great minds of my own religious tradition. . . .
Herberg reminded me that I would stand under divine judgment on the last day. He said, "If you are ever going to become a credible theologian instead of a know-it-all pundit, you had better restart your life on firmer ground. You are not a theologian except in name only even if you are paid to be one." . . . In an instant of recognition, I knew he was right. . . . That was the opening bell that led me to a bruising personal dialogue about my self-deceptions. All of its implications were not realized instantly, but my reversal began then and there on that very day, that very moment. (136–137)
Oden's A Change of Heart is an autobiography in which the theologian divides his life into two roughly equal halves, the first recounted as a kind of Bildungsroman describing the formation of a liberal theologian, and the second, beginning at the Herberg dénouement, as a return to something that in fact never really left him completely (though it was buried deep), the simpler and far more orthodox faith of his early youth. This is an account of a miracle, not only because it happens so rarely, but also because it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they then commit apostasy, since they crucify the Son of God on their own account and hold him up to contempt. But with God all things are possible. Not many who have departed as far from the Path as Thomas Oden testifies to doing can dream that one day they would write,
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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