A Change of Heart

Preaching's Best Books for Preachers Best Theological Memoir from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Bookstore How did one of the twentieth century's most celebrated liberals have such a dramatic change of heart? After growing up in the heart of rural Methodism in Oklahoma, Thomas Oden found Marx, Nietzsche and Freud storming into his imagination. He joined the post-World War II pacifist movement and became enamored with every aspect of the 1950s' ecumenical Student Christian Movement. Ten years before America's entry into the Vietnam war he admired Ho Chi Min as an agrarian patriot. For Oden, every turn was a left turn. At Yale he earned his PhD under H. Richard Niebuhr and later met with some of the most formidable minds of the era-enjoying conversations with Gadamer, Bultmann and Pannenberg as well as a lengthy discussion with Karl Barth at a makeshift office in his hospital room. While traveling with his family through Turkey, Syria and Israel, he attended Vatican II as an observer and got his first taste of ancient Christianity. And slowly, he stopped making left turns. Oden's enthusiasms for pacifism, ecumenism and the interface between theology and psychotherapy were ambushed by varied shapes of reality. Yet it was a challenge from a Jewish scholar, his friend and mentor Will Herberg, that precipitated his most dramatic turn-back to the great minds of ancient Christianity. Later a meeting with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) planted the seeds for what became Oden's highly influential Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. This fascinating memoir walks us through not only his personal history but some of the most memorable chapters in twentieth-century theology.

Thomas C. Oden (1931-2016) was a pioneering theologian and served as the architect and general editor for the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, the first full-scale early Christian commentary on Scripture in the last five hundred years. He was also the general editor of the Ancient Christian Doctrine series and the Ancient Christian devotionals, as well as a consulting editor for the Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity. Oden's self-described mission was 'to begin to prepare the postmodern Christian community for its third millennium by returning again to the careful study and respectful following of the central tradition of classical Christianity.' A prolific writer and seasoned teacher, Oden also served as the director of the Center for Early African Christianity at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, and was active in the Confessing Movement in America, particularly within the United Methodist Church.