Oden Change of Heart

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8308-8019-5
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

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 the general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture and the Ancient Christian Doctrine series as well as the author of Classic Christianity, a revision of his three-volume systematic theology. His books also include The African Memory of Mark, Early Libyan Christianity, and How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind. He was the director of the Center for Early African Christianity at Eastern University in Pennsylvania and he also served as the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology at the Graduate School and The Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Oden, Thomas C.

Leseproben

1

The 1930s

Prairie Dawn

Dust Bowl Beginnings

Jackson County. The flat land made me aware of the big sky. From the top of the water tower you can see for miles. My childhood was spent in a small town in the short grass country of Oklahoma. The town of Altus sits in the middle of windy wheat fields and silently grazing cattle.

Nearby are ancient granite mountains in the distance that turn purple in the late evening sun. The Navajo Mountains are about six miles away to the east and the Quartz Mountains fifteen miles to the north. The Oklahoma red granite mined there is the oldest and finest anywhere.

Before statehood this was fertile grazing land for nomadic Native American tribes like the Comanche and Wichita, who once roamed these plains looking for buffalo. Finding and collecting arrowheads was my first venture into the world of discovering that ancient hidden world. I felt the privilege of holding a bit of history in my hand.

During the frontier years from 1866 until statehood in 1907, six million Longhorn cattle rambled through our county grazing on prairie grasses all the way from Abilene, Texas, to Abilene, Kansas, on the Old Western Trail. Our family acquired the deed to some property that touches the slopes of one of the Navajo Mountains where the North Fork of the Red River meanders south as if it were looking for Texas. It became a place for family retreat, natural wonder, conservation and exploration for turtles, wildflowers, and an occasional porcupine.

Altus was as far from the centers of power as you could get in Oklahoma, hidden away in the extreme southwestern corner of the state. The dirt roads in the county were often impassable after the prairie thunderstorms. After World War II a few were asphalted. Many nearby towns that were once thriving have virtually disappeared. Only a few lonely remains of farmhouses still stand. Many rural churches and schools have almost vanished as well, and some are used for barns or storage.

Everything in Altus was within walking distance. It was an eight-block walk to get a haircut downtown and a three-block walk to the park, tennis courts and high school. Beyond that was a sea of wheat fields and cattle ranches.

No one famous or wealthy lived in my hometown. They were farmers, laborers and small-town folk. Life was not easy, but the love we had in our family felt like all we needed. We did not think of ourselves as restricted or left behind. This was the center of the world so far as I was concerned. We lacked nothing essential.

Everyone knew that if they were going to make something of their lives, they would have to do it for themselves. No one attributed success or failure to a person’s environment or external causes. They assumed that most outcomes were due to the effort of the person or lack of it. If someone messed up, we would more likely ponder how a hurtful habit might be a lesson for us to avoid.

A “can do” spirit was what most clearly characterized that independent and confident small town. But the lack of rain and an abundance of dust depleted farm incomes. That led to many homeless men on the move looking for odd jobs. Strong and good men on the road to somewhere would knock on our door needing food, but they were always willing to work for it. Even though they were on the move, all we needed to know was that they were persons who had fallen on hard times and were hungry. We never turned any of them away. My mother would always find something to feed them, usually what we would be eating that day.

They were not asking for anything more than leftovers or a cup of coffee or a few crackers or bread. I never remember them asking for money, probably because there was almost no money circulating. Often business exchanges occurred by bartering goods or services. Mom often reminded me that each one of those people in need was made in God’s image. They were people portrayed in the movies as hobos, but we never used that word. I knew they were hardworking people who couldn’t pay their mortgages and had to leave good farms as the banks were foreclosing on them and disrupting long-laid plans.

Dust storms were a regular part of my childhood. I can still smell and feel the looming approach of a thousand foot high wall of heavy gray dust rolling in unexpectedly. We would all run inside to try to seal the windows with newspapers we attached by pins and masking tape to keep as much dust as possible out of the house.

We conserved and reused everything. In that sense most everyone in our town would have been considered ecologically minded by necessity, but without any fancy words. We carved many of our own toys. When the rubber on the slingshot broke, I would look for an old inner tube and a tree branch to start over and make a new one.

Dad purchased a set of small leather-bound books containing the shortened versions of classics such as Hamlet, Rousseau and the ballads of Robert Burns. One of them was Emerson’s Self-Reliance. I read it at an early age, maybe ten. Because of Emerson’s book, self-reliance became a key aspiration in my search for character.

Despite everything, I considered Cypress Street the world’s best place to be. Still do. We were on no main route and seldom locked our doors. I saw pictures in the newspapers of soup lines in the cities. We much preferred to be in dust-coated Oklahoma than in a Chicago food relief line or a crowded Hooverville camp in California.

The gentle warmth of family. Almost every kid on my street came from a close-knit family at a time when family meant everything. My family’s small red brick, steep-roofed English cottage had two bedrooms, but to us it always seemed to have plenty of space for everyone. We had hideaway folding beds for visitors and family. On holidays the house could sleep as many as seventeen. That was good because we had an extended family that stretched from Tippecanoe County, Indiana, to Las Cruces, New Mexico. I was among the youngest, near the bottom of the pecking order, so I was often consigned to “sleeping at the foot of the bed.” I was always happy to be a small kid in a large family.

My small world was my big family. My identity stemmed out of theirs and I wouldn’t have been me without them. I remember my childhood much like William Butler Yeats described himself in his early days in Sligo as “a boy with never a crack in my heart.” I felt complete as a child, lacking nothing important. And I learned that delayed gratification was part of every worthy endeavor.

Growing up, I was intrigued by the stories told around our fireplace about my grandmother’s grandfather, Elijah Walker, who was the first merchant to set up a small trading post in Northern Alabama to buy and sell foods, tools and goods among the Creek Indians. Even more exciting were Civil War stories about my great-grandfather John C. Oden, whose military record shows he was captured four times in battles that ranged all the way from Richmond to Natchez. Each time—either by release or escape—he returned to his own unit, led by Colonel Thomas Bluett, after whom my grandfather was named and later I was named.

My grandmother Sallie Elisa Walker rode into Arkansas on a Conestoga wagon. Just after the Civil War, while she was still a young girl, her pioneer father, Andrew Jackson Walker, gathered up his growing family from around Talladega, Alabama, and set out for the West, where they hoped to mine for gold or find tillable land.

After several days on the road, as the wagon pulled up to the ferry on the Tombigbee River, there was a horrible accident. When the wagon tipped, Sallie’s brother Thad fell off and was crushed by the wagon wheel. Grieving, the family stopped to mourn and bury their little boy. Sallie did the only thing she could do; she climbed back in the wagon and with her heartbroken family headed due west on the rough roads toward Little Rock.

From there they headed south to Clark County, where some of their Alabama friends and family had settled. In November of 1876 they arrived at the village of Amity for what they thought would be a short stop. Heavy snows began to fall and they could not continue. They stayed in Amity, which became the ancestral home of the Oden family. Sallie grew up and fell in love with my grandfather Thomas Oden, the son of a Presbyterian minister. Their marriage united two evangelical Christian traditions which would influence their family from then on: Cumberland Presbyterian and Wesleyan Methodist.

My grandfather Clark, my mother’s father, was a railway man all his life. About the same time the telegraph was invented by Edison, my grandfather landed a job delivering newspapers on board the Indianapolis and Bellefontaine Railroad, which led to his learning telegraphy and eventually to his life as a railway agent. He moved his family from Pendleton, Indiana, gradually west to assignments in the Texas Panhandle, then to Nevada and finally back to Oklahoma.

Grandfather Clark was a loyal union man with lengthy seniority in the Brotherhood of Railway Workers, which at that time was among the nation’s strongest labor unions. Granddad’s most prized possession was his official railroad time piece, his round Hamilton watch, which he kept in his vest pocket on a gold chain. Since human lives as well as reliable arrival schedules were at stake in the railroad business, he lived by the clock. His passion for railroading was passed on to all his family, especially to his two sons, both of whom became university teachers in fields related to the technology and history of railroads.1

I inherited this same love of the railroad. I...