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Thomas C. Oden Books

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Guilt free

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“In this sense every serious choice has a tragicomic dimension. For it is impossible to be a human being without choosing, and it is impossible to choose without value denials, and it is impossible to deny values without guilt. That is a very simple though, but it forms the core definition of guilt: an awareness of significant value loss for which I know myself to be responsible. Guilt is the self-knowing of moral loss.”

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“Does biblical psychology, then, merely ask us to value good things a little less? Does the Bible seek a reduction of guilt by an overall deflation of the currency of moral ideals, so we can live more comfortably with an uneasy conscience? That would exaggerate a valid point. Although the Bible holds that no finite relationship is of infinite value, it does not embrace an extreme ascetic view that the source of happiness lies essentially in the reduction of desire. Some ascetic strategies try to diminish desire and reduce all valuing so as not to allow any loss to become an overwhelming disappointment. According to this view, the less one values created goods, the happier one is. In contrast, life-affirming Christianity hopes that love, desire, and appreciation of limited values can be increased or decreased to the measure of their real proportional value. Jesus does not call for a stark reduction of all finite valuing merely as a preventative measure against disappointment. He calls for a love of good things with an awareness that they exist within the boundaries of birth and death, and are therefore under the judgment of the giver and source of all value (Matt. 6:19-21).”

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Book:Guilt free
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“Some contemporary theology has been enamored with the heady idea of an imagined freedom that functions without any law or norm or rule of obligation. The technical name for this idea is antinomianism. This yen for freedoms other than Christ's freedom has compounded the problems in pastoral theology. Pastoral practice has at times been exceedingly ready to be guided by this antinomian tendency in theology that implies: if God loves you no matter what, then your own moral responses to God's absolute acceptance make little or no difference; God is going to love you anyway, so assert your individual interest, express yourself, do as you please, and above all do not repress any impulses. It is on the basis of this normless, egocentric relativism that much well-intended liberal pastoral practice has accommodated to naturalism, narcissism, and individualism. It has therefore steered consistently away from any notion of admonition, hoping to avoid 'guilt trips.' But ironically, guilt is more likely to be INCREASED by the lack of timely, caring admonition. For if there is no compassionate admonition, we tend to hide our guilt in ways that make it worse.”

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Book:Pastoral Theology: Essentials of Ministry
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“God loves us toughly enough not to allow us to be happy with our sins. The recollection of sin rightly brings misery of conscience. How else could moral awareness be saved from sentimentality? The deepest human happiness, we learn, is grounded in holiness - God's holy love and our responsive attempts to reflect it fittingly.”

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Book:Pastoral Theology: Essentials of Ministry
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“Christian consciousness experiences itself in a curious sense as LIBERATED TO FAIL, without intolerable damage to self-esteem and without any reduction of moral seriousness. We are free to be inadequate, free to foul things up, and yet affirm ourselves in a more basic sense than the secular moralist or humanistic idealist (who can affirm themselves only on the basis of merits and accomplishments. We are free to choose and deny finite values, free to take constructive guilt upon us and to see it as an inevitable and providentially given aspect of our fallen human condition. All that we have said leads us to the pinnacle of this good news: In Jesus Christ we need no longer be guilty before God. It is only before our clay-footed gods that we stand guilty!”

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“Before whom am I guilty? Myself and my gods. But before God? I would be guilty before God IF God had not disclosed himself as forgiving, taking my place, rendering a verdict of pardon upon me. But upon that IF hinges the force of justification by grace through faith alone. For precisely amid our failure to actualize values we mistakenly imagine as ultimate, God himself continues to perceive us AS IF we were clothed in Christ's own righteousness. The Reformation formula, simul peccator et justus, meant: I am a sinner, deserving condemnation for my idolatry; but from God's point of view I am AT THE SAME TIME pardoned, regarded as if the charge against me were canceled out! the final verdict is thus not the one I give myself or the one that may be given in the courts of law or gossip or peer pressure. Rather, it is what God himself has decided about my situation, how he has regarded and perceived me. Through God's own incomparable initiative, our sin is not remembered against us, even though we may oddly persist in remembering it against ourselves.”

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“The heart of the difference between cheap-grace doctrines of guilt-free existence and the Christian gospel is this: Modern chauvinism desperately avoids the message of guilt by treating it as a regrettable symptom. Christianity listens to the message of guilt by conscientious self-examination. Hedonism winks at sin. Christianity earnestly confesses sin. Secularism assumes it can extricate itself from gross misdeeds. Christianity looks to grace for divine forgiveness. Modern consciousness is its own fumbling attorney before the bar of conscience. Christianity rejoices that God himself has become our attorney. Modernity sees no reason to atone for or make reparation for wrongs. Christianity knows that unatoned sin brings on misery of conscience. Modern naturalism sees no need for God. Christianity celebrates God's willingness to suffer for our sins and redeem us from guilt.”

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“Protestants at one time were confident that their free form of confession was a vast improvement upon Catholic private confession to a priest because it is voluntary, demystified, and not routinized. But amid the acids of modernity it has volunteered itself right out of existence. Demystification has dwindled into desacralization. The escape from routinization has become a convenient cover for the demise of repentance. The postmodern pastor is trying to learn anew to listen to the deeper range of feelings of others, without forgetfulness of the Word of God.”

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Book:Corrective Love: The Power of Communion Discipline
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“Grace works ahead of us to draw us toward faith, to begin its work in us. Even the first fragile intuition of conviction of sin, the first intimation of our need of God, is the work of preparing, prevening grace, which draws us gradually toward wishing to please God. Grace is working quietly at the point of our desiring, bringing us in time to despair over our own unrighteousness, challenging our perverse dispositions, so that our distorted wills cease gradually to resist the gift of God.”

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Book:John Wesley's scriptural Christianity
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“Cultural relativism has used this deceit to gain power. The absolute relativists want to assert their sincere desire for dialogue UNTIL they become a majority. Then they often want to settle issues by either exclusion or coercion. They first argue for democratic fairness, but when they acquire their majority, they are tempted to turn immediately to a triumphalism that assumes that liberal justice has triumphed. From then on, dialogue about truth is forbidden, and about absolute truth is absolutely forbidden.”

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Book:Turning Around the Mainline: How Renewal Movements Are Changing the Church
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“Because cultures and languages are constantly changing and because the apostolic testimony must be attested in ever-new circumstances, it is a necessary feature of the apostolic tradition that it both guard the original testimony and make it understandable in new culture settings. Failing either is to default on the apostolic tradition. Far from implying unbending immobility, apostolicity requires constant adaptation of the primitive apostolic testimony to new historical challenges and languages, yet without altering or diluting the primitive witness.”

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Book:Corrective Love: The Power of Communion Discipline
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“Every experienced pastor knows that what the penitent heart says about itself is much more consequential than well-made truthful sentences that shout from the outside of the inner voice of conscience. No element of confession is more crucial than the discipline of listening. The attentive listener is a chosen agent of divine reconciliation. When the moment for keen listening is offered, take it as an inestimable gift.”

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Book:Corrective Love: The Power of Communion Discipline
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“Niebuhr [Oden's Doctoral adviser at Yale and leading 20th century Christian theological ethicist] wanted all of his graduate students to have some serious interdisciplinary competence beyond theology, so I chose to be responsible for the area of psychology of religion. I hoped to correlate aspects of contemporary psychotherapies with a philosophy of universal history. The psychology that prevailed in my college years was predominately Freudian psychoanalysis, but my clinical beginning point in the late 1950's had turned to Rogerian client-centered therapy. The psychology that prevailed in my Yale years was predominantly the empirical social psychologists like Kurt Lewin and Musafer Sherif. I gradually assimilated those views in order to work on a critique of therapies and assess them all in relation to my major interest in the meaning of history.”

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Book:A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
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“The Spirit of God draws or leads the sinner from one phase to another, gradually, in proportion as one is found having a disposition to responsive hearing. Grace flows ordinarily from prevenient grace through the grace of baptism through the grace of justification toward sanctifying grace leading toward consummation in glory. The power by which one cooperates with grace is grace itself. In this way God draws all to himself, eliciting a hunger for righteousness and a desire for truth.”

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Book:The Transforming Power of Grace
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“After some pondering, I made a decision that would affect all of my future work and writing in more ways than I could ever have anticipated. It was a decision between seminary and college teaching. More so it was a decision between two very different cultures of New England and the Southwest. I chose seminary teaching in Texas, which was a decision some of my colleague on the East Coast thought was foolish. From then on, as long as I was in the Southwest, I would feel the sting of the silent condescension and stereo typing by Eastern elites who disdained southwestern American culture. Many viewed as inconsequential everything that happened west of the Hudson River. What they disparaged was exactly what I loved, the easy going, unpretentious, common culture of my native landscape in Oklahoma and Texas.”

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Book:A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
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“At Vatican II my mind was growing through the embryonic beginning of a reversal of moral conscience unlike any I had known. I found myself increasingly critical of the Freudian psychoanalysis that had long shaped my interest in personal behavior change. I better recognized the long captivity of Protestant pastoral care to contemporary psychology and became a critic of the very accommodation to modern consciousness that I myself had advocated throughout the preceding decade.”

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Book:A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
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“His [brother in law Jim Hampson] appointment to the Episcopal parish in Wenham, near Gordon College brought them in close touch with leading evangelical faculty members in their pews and church leadership, including Elizabeth Elliot and Addison Leitch. They were instrumental in drawing Jim and and Sarah into the cutting edge of evangelical intellectual leadership, with friendships with Tom Howard and J.I. Packer. My ongoing relationship with Jim Packer, FitzSimons Allison and many other brilliant Anglican evangelicals would not have happened without Jim Hampson. His early influence on me in my transition from modern to classic Christian teaching was immense. While I was trying to demythologize Scripture, he was taking its plain meaning seriously. His strong preaching led him to become one of the founding sponsors and supporters of Trinity School of Ministry in Abridge, Pennsylvania...”

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Book:A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
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“Between 1946-1956, every turn was a left turn. I had to fend off temptations toward anarchism. I was more deeply drawn into the vision of an egalitarian society shaped by radical social engineering, Marxist historical and sociological interpretation, and resource redistribution. Everything imaginable seemed possible for my young mind, and I was well rewarded for my utopian thoughts by those older leaders of my church. Resistance to all those ideas simply didn't occur either on my part or on the part of people I knew, including family and friends. I was on a mission to make the world a much better place and felt empowered to actually transform our society”

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Book:A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
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“I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on a long and uncertain path. She was always more conservative than I, but she did share my basic social values and was willing at least to let me test my political follies...Whenever I read the New Testament after 1950, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises of incarnation and resurrection. That required a lot of circular reasoning for me to establish what the text said. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx) or psychosexual motives (with Freud) or self assertive power (with Nietzsche). It was truly a self-deceptive time for me, but I had no inkling of its insidious dangers.”

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Book:A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
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