Thomas C. Oden > Quotes

“There is a quality of lightness, easiness, and in some sense blatant unseriousness that pervades Classical Christianity's dialogue with modernity. The Christian intellect has no reason to be intimidated in the presence of later-stage modernity. Christianity has seen too many 'modern eras' to be cowed by this one.”
― Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity...What?

“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.”
― Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley's scriptural Christianity

“God's holiness is not an unloving holiness, and God's love is not an unholy love. It is only by keeping these two primary moral qualities of the divine being closely related that we may rightly behold the character of God. (p. 98)”
― Thomas C. Oden, The Living God: Systemic Theology: Volume One

“If God absolutely and pretemporally decrees that particular persons shall be saved and others damned, apart from any cooperation of human freedom, then God cannot in any sense intend that all shall be saved, as 1 Timothy 4:10 declares. The promise of glory is conditional on grace being received by faith active in love.”
― Thomas C. Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace

“Faith itself is an act of human willing enabled and disciplined by grace.”
― Thomas C. Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace

“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.”
― Thomas C. Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace

“Modern ecumenism rightly began in mission, but then lapsed into a merger mentality, then defensive bureaucracy, and finally into unrepresentative forms of extreme politicization.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Turning Around the Mainline: How Renewal Movements Are Changing the Church

“Modernity has only lasted less than a dozen generations, while orthodox Christianity has already flourished for more than four hundred generations and shows no sign of fatigue. Yet orthodoxy seems like a newcomer in the university and to the cultural elites, since that is where it has been most forgotten.”
― Thomas C. Oden

“The good news is that the seeds of God’s good news are planted already in every dying culture.”
― Thomas C. Oden, A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir

“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.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Pastoral Theology: Essentials of Ministry

“Experiential sanctification is an ongoing process of daily rededication, reconsecration, mortification, and vivification of the whole person to God. It calls for believers to live out their baptism in time so as to allow new challenges and circumstances to draw them further on toward the fuller reception of grace and the deepening of purity of heart”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“The church that weds itself to modernity is already a widow within postmodernity.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Requiem: A lament in three movements

“Theology is the study of God. The study of God is simply to be enjoyed for its own incomparable subject, the One most beautiful, most worthy to be praised. Life with God delights in its very acts of thinking, reading, praying and communing with that One most worthy to behold, pondered and studied, not for its written artifacts or social consequences but for the joy in its object.”
― Thomas C. Oden, A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir

“Christian faith has gained confidence that God will not reveal himself in a way contrary to the way he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Contemporary cultures present no tougher challenges to Christianity than did the fall of Rome, the collapse of the medieval synthesis, the breakup of the unity of Christendom in the sixteenth century, or the French Enlightenment. Christian teaching today must be pursued amid a similar collapse of modern assumptions.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“In prayer humans speak and God listens. In revelation God speaks to human hearers. In this way scripture and prayer feed the dialogue between humanity and God.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“BECAUSE OF PIETY’S PENCHANT for taking itself too seriously, theology does well to nurture a modest, unguarded sense of comedy. Some droll sensibility is required to keep in due proportion the pompous pretensions of the study of divinity. I invite the kind of laughter that wells up not from cynicism about reflection on God but from the ironic contradictions accompanying such reflection. Theology is intrinsically funny. This comes from glimpsing the incongruity of humans thinking about God. I have often laughed at myself as these sentences went through their tortuous stages of formation. I invite you to look for the comic dimension of divinity that stalks every page.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Scriptures are not to be pitted against the Spirit. Scripture can be understood only through the same Spirit whereby it is given.31 The Scriptures, inspired by the Spirit, form the written rule by which the Spirit thereafter leads us into all truth.32”
― Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley's Teachings, Volume 1: God and Providence

“Faith is not a meritorious cause of election, but it is constantly attested as the sole condition of salvation. Faith merely receives the merit of atoning grace, instead of asserting its own merit. God places the life-death option before each person, requiring each to choose. The ekletos are those who by grace freely believe. God does not compel or necessitate their choosing. Even after the initial choice of faith is made, they may grieve and quench the Spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:19).

Faith is the condition under which God primordially wills the reception of salvation by all. “He chooses us, not because we believe, but that we may believe; lest we should say that we first chose Him” (Augustine). Faith receives the electing love of God not as if it had already become efficacious without faith, but aware that God’s prescience foreknows faith like all else.

In accord with ancient ecumenical consent, predestination was carefully defined in centrist Protestant orthodoxy as:

'The eternal, divine decree, by which God, from His immense mercy, determined to give His Son as Mediator, and through universal preaching , to offer Him for reception to all men who from eternity He foresaw would fall into sin; also through the Word and Sacraments to confer faith upon all who would not resist; to justify all believers, and besides to renew those using the means of grace; to preserve faith in them until the end of life, and in a word, to save those believing to the end' (Melanchthon).”
― Thomas C. Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace

“God’s holiness without God’s love would be unbearable. God’s love without God’s holiness would be unjust. God’s wisdom found a way to bring them congruently together. It involved a cross”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“The study of God requires intellectual effort, historical imagination, empathic energy, and participation in a vital community of prayer (Augustine, Answer to Skeptics).”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Neither male nor female language adequately grasps the fullness of the divine reality (Gregory Nazianzus, Orat. 27; John of Damascus, OF 1.4–8).”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Cut Africa out of the Bible and Christian memory, and you have misplaced many pivotal scenes of salvation history. It is the story of the children of Abraham in Africa; Joseph in Africa; Moses in Africa; Mary, Joseph and Jesus in Africa; and shortly thereafter Mark and Perpetua and Athanasius and Augustine in Africa.”
― Thomas C. Oden, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity

“Sins that have been completely absolved on one occasion sometimes on other occasions cannot be completely forgotten or set aside. They may continue to have a ripple effect. But it is comforting to realize that they are no longer remembered by God, even if traces remain in human memory.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Corrective Love: The Power of Communion Discipline

“The moment of confession is not merely when one hears another pronounce the words: God forgives you, or 'in God's name I absolve you.' Rather it is that point at which the sinner unfeignedly experiences himself as truly judged and pardoned by God.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Corrective Love: The Power of Communion Discipline

“From beginning to end, the biblical story is the story of the creation of humanity, the fall of humanity, and the redemption of humanity.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“the unmistakable miracle: there is a consensus.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“In my seminary teaching I appeared to be relatively orthodox, if by that one means using an orthodoxy vocabulary. I could still speak of God, sin and salvation, but always only in mythologized, secularized and worldly wise terms. God became the Liberator, sin became oppression and salvation became human effort. The trick was to learn to sound Christian while undermining traditional Christianity.”
― Thomas C. Oden, A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir

“Faith does not cease being active as it undertakes the process of rigorous thinking. One need not disavow the gifts of intellect in giving thought to their Giver”
― Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology

“Protestant Christianity, whether in its liberal or conservative garb, finds itself waking up each morning in bed with a deteriorating modern culture, between sheets with a raunchy sexual reductionism, despairing scientism, morally normless cultural relativism, and self-assertive individualism. We remain resident aliens, OF the world but not profoundly in it, dining at the banquet table of waning modernity without a whisper of table grace. We all wear biblical name tags (Joseph, David, and Sarah), but have forgotten what our Christian names mean.”
― Thomas C. Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace