“The question of personal vocation asks poignantly: Who am I? What distinctive mission am I called to undertake? Each of us must ask these questions and prayerfully seek to answer them.
“I have come to a deeply held conviction that it is only from one’s unique history of suffering that one can define accurately one’s own calling. Only from a particular history of special anguish and personal travail can one come to know how God is calling one to be present to the suffering world even as God the Son has become present to it. This has a social analog: it is only out of a social or institutional history of distress that the special vocation and mission of a culture, nation, or institution is rightly understood.
“Even though I did not know it clearly in my earlier days, I now think that my vocation has been from the beginning to become an advocate of classic Christian orthodoxy. My decision to advocate for orthodoxy evolved against the almost unanimous advice of my friends and university colleagues. I do not think that I would have learned the depth of this vocation had I not traveled this circuitous path. My vocation has grown directly from my own hunger for roots, my failed search for roots in modernity, my thirst for historical grounding beyond my former world of compulsive faddism, my native radicalism. It is perhaps an exaggeration to call this a history of suffering, but it was certainly an anguished trajectory. My early striving was essentially a moral search for virtue, goodness, and social justice. Only later did it become a recognition of God’s search for me.
“A keen awareness of final judgment gives me an entirely different frame of reference for accountability. As an example of that shift in perspective, the single most decisive reversal that my new vocation required of me came in a sudden but overwhelming wave of moral revulsion against the very abortion-on-demand laws that I once advocated. In the sixties, teaching seminary ethics classes, I showed young pastors step-by-step arguments for the legitimacy of abortion. After 1973 those arguments backfired upon me as I disavowed the situation ethics on which they were based. Now my conscience calls me to be pro-choice before conception and pro-life thereafter.
“Some old friends still wonder why I changed my mind. I suspect that they will never get it. The irony is that I changed only by moving closer to that which is unchanging. I plod steadily toward that which alters in no way, the still point of the turning world. The one-time change in my vocation centered in the steady, slow growth toward orthodoxy, toward consensual classic Christianity with its steady refractions of continuity, catholicity, and apostolicity. I had to find the depths and dregs of faddism before I could come to that centered equilibrium, which implies a growing distaste for novelty, heresy, anarchy, pretensions of discontinuity, revolutionary talk, and nonhistorical idealism.
“When the Lord tore the kingdom of Israel from Saul, Samuel declared: ‘He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind.’ God’s constant, attentive, holy love is eternally unchanging. It is my stance toward God that has changed, in my slow awakening to the bright immutability of God’s responsive covenant love. Yahweh must have laughed in addressing the heirs of the old rascal Jacob with this ironic word: ‘I the Lord do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.’ If God’s purposes were constantly revisable, how could the faithful rely upon them? Still it is so: ‘Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.’ The change in my personal history rests on recognition of the unchanging character of God, making every season sweet.
“One who walks in this way bends to Coleridge’s winter benediction:
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
“Some might counter that what happened to me is just the usual result of ordinary psychogenetic development. That is a polite way of reminding me that I am growing older, which I am grateful not to have to deny.
“My vocation has become clearer as the years go by: to study the unchanging God without something else to do, some pragmatic reason or result. This is what I feel most called to do: simply enjoy the study of God — not write about it, not view it in relation to its political residue or imagine that my opinions will have some visible social effect. The joy of inquiry into God is a sufficient end in itself, not only a means to some practical consequence.
“Dear old friends keep asking: Why are you merely studying God? Why aren’t you out there with ‘our side’ on the streets making ‘significant changes’ (which usually means imagined revolutions)? I explain to them that I am now repenting a lot of the changes for which I earlier labored. I am in fact out there on the street in the most serious way I know: by staying close to books and texts. Those who see no connection have not understood the vocation to the life of learning. I do not love the suffering poor less by offering them what they need more.
“Plain theology delights in its very acts of thinking, reading, praying, and communing — not for the effects, written artifacts, or social consequences of those acts (though they have profound social consequences), but for the beauty of their subject. Spirit-blessed theology seeks One who is more than a means to an end for social change, although I can think of no act that has more enduring political significance than life with God. The study of God is to be simply enjoyed for its own unique subject: the One most beautiful of all, most worthy to be praised.”
— from Thomas C. Oden, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity (HarperCollins, 2003)