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After Modernity...What?

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The word postmodern is thrown around quite a bit. Given the nature of this post-modern age, even the term postmodern is likely to have a variety of nuances. Oden provides one interpretation. This interpretation is that postmodernity allows for a return to classical orthodoxy, i.e. the Christianity of the first millennium. So for Oden, writers such as Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, and Clement are more important to Christian theology than recent theologians who attempt to construct "new" theology. Indeed Oden is correct in that modernity kept telling us what was "relevant" and what was not. We were constantly told what we could and could not believe, despite the fact that most modern peoples probably conceived of God `incorrectly.' Thus, modernity, with its promise of human progress, ended up seeming elitist and quite irrelevant.

Oden is not a fundamentalist. His tradition might be described as something of a conservative evangelical catholic. He critiques fundamentalism, pointing out (correctly) that fundamentalism is simply just another modern movement, that only could have come out of the Cartesian/Enlightenment era. Oden also critiques the more pietistic and ultra-liberal forms of Christianity, preferring an ecumenical consensual orthodoxy as explained by Vincent of Lerins, `that which has been everywhere and always and by everyone believed.' Thus Oden proposes a return to Orthodoxy grounded in the center, one that virtually every mainline denomination and classical Christian writers can affirm. Oden is not pre-modern though. He critiques those who claim to be pre-modern, asserting that such a claim is impossible. This is why postmodern `paleo-orthodox' Christians, such as Oden, embrace modern science, critical enquiry, etc.

Overall, I think Oden has written an excellent book. He critiques modernity's methods and assumptions, and (I believe) generally avoids falling into conservative error, by being grounded in the ancient orthodox Christian writers. I think the `Vincentian canon,' while certainly appealing, is doubtful as an actual historical reality. However, as a model, it is still useful, so long as we recognize its weaknesses (as Oden does). I took issue with Oden's distaste for Vatican II. Despite its weaknesses, it brought the Roman Catholic Church into the current age, and caused them to leave behind various late-medieval practices. Generally, this is a thought provoking book, and a good angle on the postmodern age for those of us grounded in the catholic tradition.

After five years of soul searching Oden rejected liberalism and embraced the precepts of evangelical conservatism. In 1979 He first published this book under the title "Agenda for Theology." In this book he laid out his reasons for rejecting liberalism and the promises of modernity it held and began describing a new emerging postmodernity which he clearly differentiated from what he calls "ultramodernity" which so many other authors believe is postmodernism.

Oden lays down his reasons for becoming disenchanted with mainstream liberalism through the examination of where he has been in his own walk with the Lord. He presents a convincing agenda for theology which is the rediscovery of the teachings and precepts of the ancient church and the theologian's task to boil theology down to the pastoral office. Oden argues that it is the teaching office of the church which is the thumbtack, or linchpin, which holds the entire discipline of theology to those it hopes to serve. The importance of this office and the duties it is to perform needs to be rediscovered, he maintains, and the biblical role of the pastorate needs to recover its soul and spirit within the biblical precepts of its origin.

This book is a good read for anybody who wants to understand the collapse of modernism, the emergence of postmodernism, and the role that theology and theologians are supposed to fill within the church.

Since writing this book, Oden has been following through with the agenda for theologian's office which he first laid down in this book producing a fine series of books about the duties and responsibilities of the pastoral office; writing what may emerge as the best 20th century systematic theology; continuing to develop and articulate the emerging postmodern climate as an opportunity for the church rather than something to be feared (Two Worlds); all the while attempting to drag what has been called "an incurably liberal denomination," the UMC, back to the orthodox center.

If you want to learn about postmodernism, this book is your starting point.

Written with a more moderate to liberal audience in mind, Oden seeks to make a case for returning to a kind of "Postcritical Orthodoxy" in this postmodern world. He advocates the "consensual Christian tradition" of the first millennium, before Medieval, Reformation and Enlightenment developments which have managed to twist and turn a proper examination of Apostolic Christianity. Oden calls for a return to a Christ-centered and robust ecclesiology rooted in the Church Fathers. He believes that this vision will encompass and inspire to renewal the broad spectrum of believing Christians in the world today. A highly recommended work for anyone needing to re-think the first things of their faith.

Years ago Tom Oden, professor of theology and ethics at Drew University, published Agenda for Theology: Recovering Christian Roots. Recently he has revised and republished the book titling it After Modernity . . . What? Agenda for Theology (Grand Rapids: Academie Books, c. 1990). Having discovered that both he and his "postcritical" students hunger for "the available power of the Christian heritage rather than trendy ideas of minor modern heretics" (p. 16), he calls readers to recover their authentic Christian roots in the Ancient Church, for "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" (p. 13).
In part one of the book, "The Courtship of Modernity," Oden urges us to reject many of our era's most seductive proposals. To do so means discounting "modernity," which he describes as "a narcissistic hedonism that assumes that moral value is reducible to now feelings and sensory experience" (p. 31). Indeed: "Narcissism is a key mark of modernity. Myself becomes the central project of moral interest; self-enjoyment and self-development become the central goals" (p. 79). Oden knows whereof he speaks: in some deeply personal, confessional, passages he reflects on all the "movements" he earlier joined and championed, only to find them short-lived and inconsequential. Older, and wiser, he has found profoundly satisfying rootage in classical orthodoxy, especially
that of the first five centuries of Church history.
A major step on this journey involved making a transforming discovery: proper hermeneutics! By learning to listen to the text itself, becoming obedient to it (not the latest scholar's interpretation of it), he found what "was the most improbable and difficult and revolutionary thing that has ever happened to me" (p. 80). He discovered his rightful role as a theologian. He discovered that for the first thousand years of Church history theologians listened to and obeyed the text.
Today, however, rather than seeking to clarify and declare the ancient text churchmen cultivate novelty. During the last two centuries, "critical" scholars, which Oden tackles in Part Two, "The Critique of Criticism," have pretended to objectively deal with biblical materials. In fact they usually asserted, in religious terms, their peculiar generation's prejudices, thus imposing a "naturalistic reductionism upon the New Testament texts" (p. 101). Rejecting fashionable moderns and their cavalier treatment of ancient texts, Oden prefers Origen's abiding confidence that the Holy Scriptures are not mere human productions, but rather written by humans under the "inspiration of the Holy Spirit," scriptures subsequently "transmitted and entrusted to us by the Will of God."
Having cut a wide swathe through modernity's most treasured artifacts, Oden turns in Part Three, "The Liberation of Orthodoxy" to his more constructive agenda. Long concerned with pastoral theology and praxis, he thinks churchmen today need once again to stand strong against heresy. If the church survives, transmitting its traditions from generation to generation, its teachers must conserve the treasury of the past. So heresies must be forever highlighted and resisted. In Oden's view, heresy basically means "self-choice," preferring one's personal interpretation over that of the believing community. Unlike heretical movements, orthodoxy conserves by continually asking "What in fact did the apostles teach?" (p. 162). At the heart of orthodoxy one finds no simple lists of static dogmas but the living Lord Jesus Christ. At the heart of orthodox communities one finds believers loving the resurrected Christ. This, above all else, the church must maintain.
Oden closes his treatise with a somber chapter entitled "the winter temperament." As he looks around, the cultural landscape looks somewhat like a bombed out city. All the fond aspirations of earlier times have failed and lie about like frozen litter on an abandoned playground. And "the most revealing nexus of these failures, I think, lies in the impotence of modernity to sustain interpersonal covenants, to nurture responsible commitment in enduring associations and intimacies" (p. 195). This is most glaringly evident in the failure of secularized marriages which are often entered into as "little more than a cost-benefit calculus, not a solemn promise in the presence of God" (p. 195).
The hope that sustains Oden, I suspect, is what St Augustine discovered amidst the collapse of the Roman Empire: the City of God! While he doesn't stress that correlation, his message is akin to that of the great African saint. And insofar as Oden finds firm foundations in the same faith which shored up Augustine, the ancient OrtOhodox way, he reminds us that however unsettled our times there is something to rest upon. For Oden, T.S. Eliot's words (quoted by J.I. Packer in his foreword) suffice:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

In the Introduction of After Modernity...What?, Thomas Odem appropriately begins his apologia for the restoration of historic Christian orthodoxy with a parable. A man of great wealth inherits a diadem of great beauty and value from his Eastern European family without having any understanding of its symbolism or history. He knows it is old but thinks it useless - a sign of a backwards past. He casually displays it, makes fun of it, bends it out of shape to elicit laughs from his party guests, and now and then removes a jewel and hocks it. It is only when it is passed to his son, who has always been drawn to it, that its history is studied and revealed as a symbol of great honor and power among their ancestors - a treasure that legions once would fight and die just to possess. This diaden, Odem states, is the heritage of Christendom - only now being studied and treasured by a new generation bored with the vapid fruits of modernity.

Dividing his book into three parts, Oden begins his task with an overview of the corrosive role modernity has played in the devlopment of Christian theology. With an insatiable appetite for what is new and an uncritical belief in the inevitability of progress, those influenced by the modenist ideal see little value in the maintenance of the traditional beliefs and practices of a revealed religion. As change becomes the only constant, the idea of eternal truith becoems an "antiquated ideal" and is cast aside for a series of reconstructions of the faith - each more outlandish than the next.

But, Oden contends, the pendulum has now swung against modernity. He has noticed young students increasingly do not want the endless projections of their professors' pet theories on the Christian faith but the Christian faith of the Church unmediated by modern biases. The Church Fathers, the Medieval Doctors, the Reformers, and most of all the Apostles and Christ Himself are their teachers. They want nothing less than the faith once delivered to the saints and defended, expounded, and taught for centuries prior to the onslaught of the modern. They wish to reclaim their neglected family heirloom and to restore its lustre.

Oden points out this movement is not to be confused with other movements that rebelled against the modernist dilemma. This new orthodoxy differs from neo-orthodoxy, fundamentalism, and even the old orthodoxy (or paleo-orthodoxy) from which it seeks guidance. Neo-orthodoxy, while seeking to displace the modernist paradigm, were essentially agents for change themselves who thought the modernist program had gone awry and did not seek any return to the ideals of classical Christian orthodoxy. Fundamentalism, with all of it's emphasis on the fundamentals of the faith, defined its five fundamentals in a purely 19th century manner - in terms of historicity. It is difficult to see why the five they chose were any more fundamental than belief in the Trinity or the hypostatic union except that the movement developed under the influence of 19th century historicism. Thus fundamentalism is, via its primary methodology, a purely modernist appropriation of orthodox belief. Finally, the new postmodern (or postcritical) orthodoxy differs from its paleo-orthodox relative in that it has experienced modernism, seen some good things come of it despite its many errors, and seeks not a return to the past but a reappropriation of the past to then move forward.

Having surveyed the current dilemma, Oden then moves on to thoroughly critique the modernist approach to theology and expose its false pride and its many prejudices. Modernism, Oden states, is in clear decline and now in the endgame - the result is assured but the modernist side can't comprehend its own failures. In particular, he cites the inherent biases of its execution of the historical-critical method. In their approaches to the Biblical texts, modernist scholars massage the data in such a way as to preclude the possibility of a traditional interpretation.

Among the numerous examples Oden cites to illustrate the fallacious assumptions of modern criticism is the manner in which modernist theologians routinely apply a "principle of dissimilarity" for judging whether particular passages about Jesus are valid or the result of the ideology of editors. With this method, any passage that bears an influence from earlier Jewish beliefs or later Christian ones is automatically set aside. Yet under such a system, there is an inherent presupposition that Jesus was a figure who was completely ahistorical. He never approved of what went before nor did he bear an influence on his later followers. Such a starting point would be absurd if applied to any other major figure of history and can only serve to remove the person of Jesus from the Judeo-Christian context. Such a "Jesus" is then a blank slate upon which interpreters may project their own cultural, religious, or political biases.

Oden then moves on to flesh out his agenda for how theology should be conducted in the future. He cites the example of an exhibit of life among the Orthodox Jews to illustrate how the idea of tradition transcends a list of propositional dogmas and touches the very fabric of the believer's existence. Freed from the constrains of modernism, we may begin to appreciate how a true orthodoxy may shape the lives of believers and offer, as it has to so many in the past, life to a dying world.

A vibrant orthodoxy would not only offer the truths of the Christian faith to the world but preserve these truths within its own ranks. We must get over our hesitancty to call obvious heresy by its name but at the same time not retreat into an overly aggressive sectarianism that seeks an absence of any diversity of opinion through heresy trials to obtain an unachievable perfection. Instead we must realize their may be differences of opinion on nonessential matters while building Christian unity upon the essentials. Those who move outside the boundaries of orthodoxy must be pastorally encouraged to return to orthodoxy and properly disciplined if their errors persist but it must never take the form of a witch hunt.

Throughout After Modernity...What?, Oden offers a powerful and consistent plea for the reappropriation of the classical Christian heritage. If there is any fault with the book, it is that while he was forceful concerning the need for contact with our orthodox past, he did not go into much detail about exactly what of that past he would consider essential. There is much in the classical Christian past that is totally removed from the Evangelicalism with which he would be most associated. Despite any reservations over this understanding of essentials, the content of the book is unaffected and may be seen as a turning point in the struggle between classical orthodoxy and heretical forms of modernist theology.

It's very pleasurable to see Historical Biblical truth honestly and forthrightly encountered stimulate such powerful thought and simultaneously refute bankrupt intellectual systems. See also Millard Erickson's "Postmodernism"; "Evangelical Interpretation"; "Evangelical Left" for a fuller evaluation of philosophical, theological and metaphysical systems that feebly try to go toe to toe with an evangelical hermeneutic of the Bible and crash and burn every time. The key is who wins the competition of preconceptions, premises, presuppositions and Control Beliefs with the most plausibility given the Biblical data and reality as experienced historically.

I was flabergasted to see that Thomas Oden was recommending a turn from Modernity. On the face of it, of course, his diagnoses are correct--deconstructive postmodernism is thinly-veiled ultramodernism, with its belief in relativistic autonomy which, rather than freeing one from the constraints of isolating Modernity, only serve to fragment and degrade the connections between peple, interpretations, and belief even further. All of this is well taken, though not completely the aim of Oden's book. But Charlene Spretnak noted the exact same thing in 1991 with her work, States of Grace, and HER solution to the problem was to turn to the wisdom traditions of the world religions in the premodern era to find a way out of such postmodernism. In other words, a constructive postmodernity, rather than a deconstructive postmodernity. In this, she seems to suggest teh same as Oden. Oden sees that premodern thought can be the way forward, but his method of appropriating this paradigm is patriarchal, selective, and informed by the same rationalist evangelical Reformed thought that is the primary victim/advocate of theological untramodernity today. In other words, what we have here is someone trapped in ultramodernity by his own intelligently held presuppositions looking backwards (and forward) to a premodern understanding of belief and cuture and saying, "Boy, that sure was nice." He romanticizes the premodern period, by seeing only its male, Western, Christian manifestation, in the same way that the Romantics looked back on the "noble savages of yore" and appropriated what they thought was good about them. This makes a mockery of the subject. Oden means Augustinian when he says premodern, and forgets that history is more than 2000 years old. There are other (and vastly older) paths winding trough premodernity, and other paths though premodern Christianity than the one that leads to Oden's door.

That said, in fairness he is suggesting a way forward for Christian theology, and it is not more than 2000 years old. However, many Christian theoligans see the premodern religious understandings of the mystics and the contemplatives as ways forward in our era, and thus are able to find more than Oden finds in the tradition. Oden is an epistemological exclusivist, and doesn't see that there are other ways to understand the Christian story besides his own historicist view.

Oden asks the right question, "what now," but Spetnak (for one) gives a better answer that Christians besides the Oden-flavored brand may be better able to appreciate.