Books by Thomas C. Oden

Preaching's Best Books for PreachersBest Theological Memoir from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds BookstoreHow 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.

Oden shows that Wesley displayed a remarkable degree of internal consistency in his teachings over sixty years of preaching. The book helps readers to grasp Wesley's essential teachings on pastoral care in an accessible form so that the person desiring to go directly to Wesley's own writings will know exactly where to turn.

The early church valued the Gospel of Mark for its preservation of the apostolic voice and gospel narrative of Peter. Yet the early church fathers very rarely produced sustained commentary on Mark. In this ACCS volume, the insights of Augustine of Hippo, Clement of Alexandria, Ephrem the Syrian, and Cyril of Jerusalem join in a polyphony of interpretive voices from the second to the eighth century.

The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture does what few of today's students of the Bible could do for themselves, combing the vast array of writings from the church fathers for comment on Scripture. This supplemental volume provides never-before-available cumulative Scripture and author indexes covering all twenty-nine volumes of the ACCS.

African orthodoxy today reveals the same powerful faith that was confessed by Athanasius and Augustine seventeen centuries ago.Classic African Christian teaching in the patristic period (100750 AD) preceded modern colonialism by over a thousand years. Many young African women and men are now reexamining these lost roots. They are hungry for accurate information about their Christian ancestors. Thomas C. Oden asks readers to recapture the resonance of a consensual orthodoxy, the harmony of voices celebrating the apostolic testimony to God's saving work in Jesus Christ, witnessed to in scripture and understood best by African interpreters of the faith. In ten seminars, Oden invites discerning readers to reclaim and reaffirm Christian faith as it emerges from thoughtful conversations between contemporary and ancient African interpreters of orthodox faith. ';This new book by Tom Oden is remarkable and historic. His words challenge the worldwide church to return to the true fountain of living water, Jesus Christ. He specifically encourages us Africans to continue to seek the treasures left to us by our early church fathers and mothers in order to reshape the Christian mind now as they did in the first millennium.' The Most Rev. Dr. Mouneer Hanna Anis, Archbishop of the Episcopal/AnglicanDiocese of Egypt with North Africa and the Horn of Africa';A thought-provoking book with factual evidences emphasizing the continuity of global orthodoxy that emanated in Africa and has been nurtured by Africans from the time of Mark the evangelist to the present. People yearning to discover the intellectual and classical African Christian roots will find the book very helpful.' Thomas A. Oduro, President, Good News Theological College & Seminary, Accra, Ghana';While Tom Oden writes about Africans for Africans, The Rebirth of African Orthodoxy: Return to Foundations is also addressed to all Christians everywhere who ask, ';What is God doing in the world today?' The author proposes that the clue to what God is doing in the present is to be found in what God has done in the past, for ';the Holy Spirit has a history.' Tom directs us to look to Africa, where the ancient African Christian orthodoxy is being reborn in the African church today, making it a witness to the whole church everywhere.' Timothy W. Whitaker, retired bishop, Florida Conference of The United Methodist Church

Thomas Oden provides a modern commentary on the pastoral letters grounded in the classical, consensual tradition of interpretation. Oden uses the best and most accurate research concerning the historical, literary, and philological aspects of the pastoral letters. He addresses tough issues: the role of women in worship, problems of the rich and...

How does an infinite God relate to finite human beings? How does the death of Jesus Christ bring about human salvation? How are Christians able to actively address the world's ills while maintaining their citizenship in the kingdom of God? These are questions the church grapples with today, as it always has. Yet, according to Thomas C. Oden, contemporary theology has neglected the church's traditional answer to these questions: the doctrine of grace. All too often modern theologians either ignore the doctrine of grace or relate it to the achievement of a particular political agenda. Oden asserts that only by reclaiming the centrality of grace--defined as God's self-giving through Jesus Christ in personal encounter with the individual human will--can Christian theology be true to the gospel. In order to reclaim the doctrine of grace, the author reaches back, beyond the fragmentation of theology that took place during and after the Enlightenment. He draws upon the ecumenical consensus held by early Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant theologians, councils, and creeds regarding this cardinal Christian doctrine. By adducing this ancient unity, Oden challenges modern assumptions concerning the sources and methods of the theological enterprise and calls contemporary Christians to discern what their forebears in the faith knew to be essential to the gospel: that to be a Christian is to be formed, nurtured, and upheld solely by divine grace.

Thomas Oden calls for a radical reassessment of early church tradition by directing our attention to Africa, where a memory of St. Mark survives as the North African founder of the church in Alexandria. The result is an illuminating portrait that challenges long-standing assumptions in the West.

This series of 4 volumes is a text-by-text guide to John Wesley's teaching. It introduces Wesley's thought on the basic tenets of Christian teaching: God, providence, and man (volume 1), Christ and salvation (volume 2), the practice of pastoral care (volume 3), and issues of ethics and society (volume 4).