Short review: Why the Church Needs Her Memory

Andrew Wilson: Spirit and Sacrament / Thomas C Oden: A Change of Heart

Two rather different books. Although I like Andrew very much, I didn’t expect to like Andrew’s book, having something of an inbuilt resistance to church traditions and, I hope, a rejection of the form of religion without the power. And I suspect the readers most influenced by Spirit and Sacrament have been non-charismatics and not the other way around. Nevertheless, the insights, the impulse towards restoring memory, and of course, acknowledging that even newly planted charismatic congregations do in fact begin to build a ‘liturgy’ – a regular form of worship in our church services – were interesting (no, not in that dismissive, ‘How interesting…’ way). I reckon this crisp, highly readable, sometimes funny, short book may be the perfect gift for your non-charismatic friend. His chapter arguing for the continuance of the biblical gifts of the Spirit is superb.

Thomas Oden is now something of a legend. My first encounter with him was in his astonishing book ‘How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity’. It is a true stunner. I couldn’t put it down and have recommended it continuously since. Many of the earliest patristic theologians and church teachers were African, and their intellectual rigour shaped European Christianity. Intellectual and theological rigour, with permanent global influence on the Christian church, moved from Africa to Europe. In the earliest centuries it wasn’t just from the Middle East to the South, or Europe to the South, but from Africa into the North. We’ve forgotten this, or not been told it clearly. We still have the idea that Christianity arrived in Africa in the 19th Century. Read the book. 

This volume – A Change of Heart – is Oden’s autobiography and traces his growth out of nominal, liberal, political thinking, as a professional theologian, to his thorough conversion largely through rediscovering the early church fathers – many of whom were African. He discovered that, rather than evangelicalism being an aberration, that in fact the theologically aware evangelicals were actually harmonising with the consensual classical Christianity of the first few centuries. How had the church somehow lost this memory? His story culminates in his acceptance by the evangelical community and his attempts to unite widely differing church traditions and denominations through a rediscovery of patristic orthodoxy. Again, fascinating stuff, and I am longing to somehow get hold of the Ancient Christian Commentary on the Bible (some 30 volumes – I’ve been longing for several years now), and have ordered several more theological and historical books by Oden. Please start with ‘How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind’. It is utterly gripping. 

This biography will serve you if you’re keen to see how the seminaries buttressed an anti-biblical mindset through the 60s and 70s, and how God can break through to the mind and heart of one of its champions. This review is too long already, but I must add some quotes. The point of both books is: the church needs her memory whether charismatic or scripturally orthodox, and preferably both.

Wisdom from Thomas Oden (US spelling retained)

As a professional theologian in the 1960s

‘I was finding that the confessional glue that had held the modem ecumenical movement together was becoming leftist politics just at the time I was in the slow process of recognizing their disastrous consequences. All of this poured out of my heart in an instant during that protest march when I finally grasped that I was in the wrong place.’

‘I was finally coming to understand that my generation of ecumenists had deeply disrupted the fragile unity of the body of Christ in an attempt to heal it. I felt to some extent personally responsible. I had been party to tearing down church institutions that could not easily be replaced and moral traditions that would take decades to rebuild. ‘

‘My generation of idealists had been uncritically convinced we could build something better, more faithful, more humane than all that we had received from all of the previous generations. I could see that what was emerging was nothing like what we had anticipated.’ 

The return to genuine Christianity

‘I had been enamored with novelty. Candidly, I had been in love with heresy. Now I was waking up from this enthrallment to meet a two thousand year stable memory.’ 

‘THE DREAM OF UNORIGINALITY
The tombstone said “He made no new contribution to theology.” In the season of Epiphany 1971 I had a curious dream in which I was in the New Haven cemetery and accidentally stumbled upon my own tombstone with this puzzling epitaph: “He made no new contribution to theology?.” I woke up refreshed and relieved.’

‘I had worked hard to get an education, but now I had to work even harder to overcome the education I got.’

‘I was going through a cycle of learning, unlearning and relearning. That is best seen in my joyful reception, then in my sophisticated rejection, then later in my embracing the hymns of my childhood. When I first sang them, I knew naively that God had come in the flesh. Then I learned that God had not really come in the flesh but rather in some symbolic sense acceptable to modern assumptions. At last I learned to recover the uncomplicated truth that God precisely becomes human in the flesh, dies for me, rises again and saves me from my sins. All these are viewed by consensual Christianity as historical events.’

‘After rediscovering the ancient Christian writers, my mind has steadily focused on making no new contribution to theology, but to adhere closely to the unchangeable, irreversible and unalterable apostolic tradition.’

‘Evangelicals have continued to flourish, living out of a history of revivalism that has often been thought to be philosophically immature or historically naive. But now evangelical, charismatic, Baptist and Pentecostal traditions are rediscovering the actual twenty centuries of the history of the Holy Spirit. Among the children of the Great Evangelical Awakening, a reawakening in orthodoxy teaching is emerging, in part grounded on consensual exegesis.’

Finally, some comments on the African contribution to global Christianity

‘The further I pursued the Africa thesis, the more I confirmed that out of early Africa came Christianity’s most brilliant early intellects (Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement and Origen) and texts (philosophical, religious and moral) that would put a permanent stamp on Western European culture, and would come to dominate much of Western thought. This African priority was recognized and acknowledged in the fourth century by Cappadocians (Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus), Syrians (Ephrem), Greek writers (Evagrius Ponticus), and Romans (Rufinus), but the African roots of these consensual teachings were later disregarded, not remembered by Europeans.’

The last word: Read Thomas Oden!

[All Oden quotes from Thomas C Oden (2014), A Change of Heart. Downers Grove, IL, IVP]

©2023 Lex Loizides. Church History Review