Quotes from Thomas C. Oden

My views on wealth redistribution were shaped largely by knowledge elites who earned their living by words and ideas--professors, writers, and movement leaders. Like most of the broadminded clergy I knew, I reasoned out of modern naturalistic premises, employing biblical narratives narrowly and selectively as I found them useful politically. The saving Grace of God on the cross was not in my mix of life changing ideas.

In college I lost the capacity for heartfelt, extemporized prayer. I would have considered it gauche to pray spontaneously aloud with other college sophomores. I had also left behind my love the church's Scriptures, prayers, and especially its hymns, but I always knew they would be there if I went back to find them.

While the memory of guilt is far from pleasant (like 'wormwood and gall'), it has the curative intent of restoring us into an awareness of the constancy of God's love, new every morning. God's mercy is not spent even with our worst misdeeds.

I now understand that I would never have been able to become a plausible critic of the absurdities of modern consciousness until I myself had experienced them. I did not become an orthodox believer or theologian until after I tried out most of the errors long rejected by Christianity. If my first forty years were spent hungering for meaning in life, the last forty have been spent in being fed. If the first forty were prodigal, the last forty have been a homecoming.

There reigns in the broken human heart a feeling of discord, a lack of congruence between what is and what ought to be (Augustine, Conf. 5).

Many of Wesley's ultramodern interpreters are focused on accommodating Wesley in ways congenial to contemporary audiences. Some have entirely recast Wesley in terms of liberation theology or process theology or gender studies in a way that leaves Wesley himself only vaguely recognizable. My mission is to let him speak for himself in his own language to modern believers

Until the end of the 1960's I do not recall ever seriously exchanging ideas with an articulate conservative. They were there, but not on my scope. I systematically avoided any contact with those who would have challenged my ideology.

God foreknows the use of free will, yet this foreknowledge does not determine events. Rather, what God foreknows is determined by what happens, part of which is affected by free will.

The incarnation is God's own act of identification with the broken, the poor, with sinful humanity.

Faith's premises are felt to be so valuable that they deserve the best intellectual reflection possible to confirm argumentatively what faith already knows inwardly

God's way of being alive is distinguishable from other forms of life. Plants, animals, and humans enjoy life at different scales of consciousness, movement, and self-determination. But in all plants, animals, and humans, bodily life ends in death. From the moment of conception, the processes of decay and death are at work in our bodies. Not so in God's life. God's life is eternally alive. God's life is not only without end but without beginning.

Into your hands, 0 Lord, we commit ourselves this day. Give to each one of us a watchful, a humble, and a diligent spirit that we may seek in all things to know your will, and when we know it may perform it perfectly and gladly, to the honor and glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Gelasian Sacramentary

Lord, inspire us to read your Scriptures and meditate upon them day and night. We beg you to give us real understanding of what we need, that we in turn may put its precepts into practice. Yet we know that understanding and good intentions are worthless, unless rooted in your graceful love. So we ask that the words of Scripture may also be not just signs on a page, but channels of grace into our hearts. Origen FURTHER

Questions about God's existence, self disclosure, saving action and almighty power reminded me of my inadequacies. For me the theo in theology had become little more than a question mark. I could confidently discuss philosophy, psychology and social change, but God made me uneasy.

Just as God stepped out of his nature to become a partaker of our humanity, so we are called to step out of our nature to become partakers of his divinity" (Hilary of Arles, Intro. Comm. on 2 Pet. 1.4).

Biblical teaching called for cohesive families whose happiness was based on the bonding of one female and one male in a durable relationship of covenant fidelity in love, committed to protect the life and well-being of their offspring. Fatherless children were the strongest argument against hedonic sexual experimentation.