In the late 1990s, a series of biblical commentaries was launched by InterVarsity Press. The volumes released as the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture consolidated a project inspired and supervised by Methodist theologian Thomas C. Oden (1931–2016).
In late 1998, at the time of the publication of the first two volumes in the series, I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Oden about his theological and spiritual journey from a vigorous advocate of a dizzying series of progressive movements in theological studies and ecclesiastical practice to an influential champion of the post-modern effort to recover the wisdom of the Church’s first millennium. That interview was released in Volume 36 of the newly christened Mars Hill Audio Journal (the first 35 volumes released on cassettes labeled the Mars Hill Tapes) and was re-released as a Friday Feature on May 24, 2024.
In 1979, Oden wrote a book titled Agenda for Theology: Recovering Christian Roots. Ten years later he revised that work and gave it a new title: After Modernity . . . What? Agenda for Theology (Academie Books). Below are some paragraphs from that later edition.
“A plastic plumbing fixtures tycoon inherited from his Slavic uncle a baroque antique jeweled diadem of spectacular beauty and antiquity. He had been entrusted to take care of it but knew nothing of its actual value. He did not lift a finger to protect it. He considered it ‘junk.’ He hung it on an antelope horn on his mantel. Once in a while he enjoyed spinning it in the air, showing it off at employee parties, bending it out of shape, getting laughs. On certain occasions when in debt, he had been known to dig a jewel out and pawn it.
“Isn’t this much like the relationship modern persons have with classical Christianity? As heirs of modernity, we feel enormously superior to our Christian heritage. It is of little practical value to us, though we are still willing to keep it around. We would hardly feel good about throwing it away altogether, but it is little more to us than a mantel decoration or a souvenir of a trip taken long ago to Atlantic City.
“The plastics magnate had received this diadem without any struggle or cost on his part, yet it had great cultural and political significance to his immigrant uncle’s family and nation. The magnate was hardly aware that there had been a time when legions were willing to fight and die just to touch or behold this very diadem. This rule pertains: What we have received without cost is easily undervalued. What we ourselves have had to struggle to win or protect, we value more.
“Similarly, with Christianity if we are to understand its original meaning or value, we must come once again to see it through the eyes of those who have had to struggle for it and maintain it. It is from the martyrs, saints, and prophets of Christian history, more than from recent riskless interpreters, that we learn of the value of classical Christianity. Without their instruction, Christianity becomes a mere recollection, a bored nodding of the head, the source of an occasional laugh, or, in emergency, an item to pawn.
“The tycoon had a son who had always been curiously attracted to the diadem, wondered about it, and for some reason thought it was incomparably beautiful. When the son came of age, he made it his purpose to learn everything he could about the crown. To his amazement, he found that for centuries it had been passed down from generation to generation as a revered symbol of the corporate identity, dignity, and freedom of a small, struggling group of patriots who had fought against great odds for their right to tend mountain vineyards in a small, faraway land.
“Just such a discovery is taking place in Christian awareness today. The sons and daughters of modernity are rediscovering the neglected beauty of classical Christian teaching. It is a moment of joy, of beholding anew what had been nearly forgotten, of hugging a lost child.
“This is the untold story of recent Christian thought. It is hard to see because it is a search for roots, and roots are by definition underneath the surface. Popular media perceptions of religious events see only the surface, where apparently little is happening today in religious communities. But much is happening deep below the quiet façade.
“I have been astonished to discover that some of my best students, those who have most profoundly grasped the hopes of modernity, fought for its political dreams, understood its psychological interpretations, lived out its symbols, experienced its technological achievements and failures, its hedonic ecstasies and spiritual hungers — these keenest, most perceptive students are the ones most insistent on letting the ancient tradition speak for itself. They have had a bellyful of the hyped claims of modern therapies and political messianism to make all things right. They are fascinated — and often passionately moved — by the primitive language of the apostolic tradition and the ancient Christian writers, undiluted by our contemporary efforts to soften it or make it easier or package it for smaller challenge but greater acceptability.
“Finally my students got through to me. They do not want to hear a watered-down modern reinterpretation. They want nothing less than the substance of the faith of the apostles and martyrs without too much interference from modern pablum-peddlers who doubt that they are tough enough to take it straight. They do not mind occasionally hearing my opinions, but they would rather spend their valuable time listening directly to Paul’s letter to Rome, to Ireneus on heresy, to Cyprian on martyrdom, to the great ecumenical councils defining the heart of belief, to Anselm struggling to reason about God’s existence, to Luther addressing the German nobility, or to Wesley writing his journal between long days on horseback.
“This is what our students do not want to miss: a chance to experience the power of straightforward Christian testimony in the presence of a community of living faith, without heavy distortions by modern assumptions about what Christianity has recently been imagined to be. When we give them anything less, they experience a sense of dilution, a feeling that they have been cheated, that something crucial has been left out of their education.
“This cannot be explained simply as an afterburn of authoritarianism or a new flaring up of the charismatic impulse, or a hunger for a past pietism, or a nostalgia for a more stable society (although any of these influences may at times be felt). Rather, to our surprise, we are now meeting in our worshiping communities the postcritical student who has already imbibed deeply of the best wellsprings of the finest modern universities and come away thirsty, who has gone through the long smorgasbord of pop psychologies and political ideologies and various alterations of consciousness by music, chemistry, and social experiment, and who now hungers for more nourishing food. This student may know well the rigor of the scientific laboratory but is quite clear that its results will not resurrect faith or save the soul. We are dealing with a student who has been through the best the university has to offer and now is searching for a way to reconstruction, a way of return, a way of purgation.
“These students have explored the edges and precipices of the ecstasies of modern freedom and have fallen into their share of its abysses. Having painfully experienced the limits of modernity, they are now engaging in a lengthy pilgrimage in which they have at long last stumbled, almost by accident, on the texts and spiritual directions and confessions and liturgies of classical Christianity. They have grown up in a moral milieu in which that ancient Christian tradition has been either ridiculed or sentimentalized or sugarcoated or made the butt of a joke. But they know its deeper joy has hardly been touched. . . .
“The philosophical center of modernity is no dark secret. It is a narcissistic hedonism that assumes that moral value is reducible to now feelings and sensory experience. It views human existence essentially as spiritless body, sex as orgasm, psychology as amoral data gathering, and politics as the manipulation of power. It systematically ignores the human capacity of self-transcendence, moral reasoning, covenant commitment, and self-sacrificial agape.
“These axiomatic assumptions prevail among the intellectual elite that has of late become the apple of many a parson’s eye. While the mainline religious leadership should have been giving them what it distinctively has to give — namely, firm, critical resistance rooted in a historical perspective that modernity could find instructive-instead the religious leadership withheld its gift and whored after each successive stage of modernity’s profligacy. While its lusty affair with modernity has been going on for about two centuries, it has not been until the last quarter century that there has been a wholesale devaluation of the currency of Christian language, symbolism, teaching, and witness — a total sellout and bankruptcy to support the fixed habits of modern addictions.
“Young people are beginning to be vaguely aware of the depth of the sellout, the urgency to redirect the momentum, and the fatefulness of their calling at this nexus of history. The collusions are intricate. A fair amount of courage is required even to face the problem.
“The faddism of theology in the past three decades was not accidental — it was necessary if you understand theology to be a constant catch-up process, trying to keep pace with each new ripple of the ideological river. What else could theology become but faddist, under such a definition?
The same addiction that has degenerated modern art has also infected theology. The marvelous tradition of Cezanne, Braque, Picasso, and Chagall has withered into a speedway race of faddists who have placed such a high value on ‘doing something different’ (no matter what) that artistic excellence has been lost in the frantic search for novelty. An inversion of value has occurred in which the highest value is placed not on aesthetic imagination, craft, meaning, or beauty but on novelty — ‘Dadaism’ — and compulsive uniqueness. The more outrageous it is, the more ‘creative’ it is viewed by its connoisseurs, and the more boring it is to most of us. When novelty becomes the chief criterion of artistic quality, we can only chuckle at the expensive wool being pulled over someone’s eyes.
“Exactly the same has happened in religious studies with its new theologies every spring season, a wide assortment of ‘new moralities,’ ‘new hermeneutics,’ and (note how the adjectives suddenly have to me pumped up) ‘breakthroughs.’ On closer inspection, however, the reader discovers that all these views may be found in the books of decades ago, except then with mercifully fewer pretensions and less hysteria.
“We have blithely proceeded on the skewed assumption that in theology — just as in corn poppers, electric tooth-brushes, and automobile exhaust systems — new is good, newer is better, and newest is best. The correction of this distorted analogy will have a shocking effect on seminary campuses long habituated to instant theology. The irony is that these ‘most innovative’ seminaries are regarded in certain circles as better just to that degree that they follow this debilitating assumption. So the ‘best’ ones have by this logic cut themselves systematically off from sustained discourse with classical Christianity. But if Protestantism should learn again to work at the distinction between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, what effect would it have on pastoral care, Christian education, preaching, biblical studies, administrative oversight, social ethics, and so on? The possibilities are staggering.”
— from Thomas Oden, After Modernity . . . What? Agenda for Theology (Academie Books, 1990)