After Modernity… What?! Part 3: What Does Thomas C. Oden Miss in His Book? On the Spirit of the Fathers and the Importance of Philosophy

This is the third installment in a five-part essay series. It may not make much sense out of context. To view the previous installment, click here. To view the first installment, click here.

WHAT CAN THE FATHERS TEACH US?

In large part, I think, Oden’s call remains the right one. Yes, we do see more young Protestants looking to the church fathers now, but their numbers are still too small. We’re still living in an age where the writings of the ancient church get ignored regularly. Yes, more theologians look to them these days; but how many pastors or regular churchgoers know their writings? I would venture to say that very few do. And our witness is really suffering for it.

The fathers and mothers of the church provide a deep and rich tradition for the church. The dogmatic fruits they produced after endless struggle and controversy are a treasure. Denying that treasure to ourselves, treating this “baroque jeweled diadem of spectacular beauty and antiquity” as “junk” – this would be a foolish mistake (Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity… What?!, 13).

But just as important as their dogmatic insights is their spiritual depth. It is not just what they taught that is essential, but how they came to their teaching. Their ardent prayer life, careful Scriptural exegesis, and solid theological reasoning – born out of the long, difficult journey to orthodoxy – provide us with the kind of solid methodological and spiritual foundation we sorely need now.

We in the church need to learn the Scriptures, yes, but we also need to learn how to read them. Christ is our rock, and the Scriptures are our firm foundation; but we must learn, with the help of the Holy Spirit and His work in human history, to properly ground ourselves on this foundation, and on this rock. If we climb to the rocky heights of the patristic mountains, then we shall find ourselves firmly set, neither swept here, nor there, by any waves of time.

THE SPIRIT OF THE FATHERS – AND WHAT THOMAS ODEN MISSES

And yet there is also a deep flaw, not in Oden’s call to the church, but in the way he imagines its execution. Despite Oden’s deep love for the fathers and mothers, he misses part of their spirit, likely because of his own experiences with modernism.

Though Oden insists that Paleo-Orthodoxy is a movement from and through modernity back to the ancients, he leaves little room for anything more than theological lessons from modernity – lessons which, in turn, seem to be primarily negative. I mean this: that in Oden’s version of Paleo-Orthodoxy, modernity only teaches us what not to do; there is no room for current or modern philosophical ideas anywhere. Classical philosophy is all we can legitimately use.

But in adopting this somewhat reactive view of philosophy we lose one of the fathers’ and mothers’ most important qualities – their willingness to carefully and astutely use the philosophy of their own day to speak about theological matters, for the sake of clarity and evangelism.

Oden shows little to no awareness of this quality in After Modernity. Instead, he tends to treat philosophy – at least of the modern kind – as though it were an enemy of good theology. To him, the use of modern philosophy in theology indicates a certain “trendiness” – always. Theologians using contemporary thought are simply trying to “get with the times,” as it were.

But surely this is more descriptive of Oden himself who, prior to his middle-aged conversion to Christian orthodoxy, joined himself to a flabbergasting number of hip theological trends as a liberal.

I’ve spent time in trendy religion programs that lacked historical depth. It’s frustrating. So I can see where Oden is coming from here, at least to an extent.

But we have to be fair to liberal theologians: many have been more rigorous that Oden himself was. Many have dedicated themselves to a particular kind of philosophy and theology throughout their entire careers; and they have done so not because they thought it was “cool,” but because they were convinced by much of the case made by the philosopher(s) in question.

Oden writes of the current method of doing Christian theology that: “having spotted an ‘emergent movement’ cresting on a distant wave, we try to imagine how we might get some small foothold for Christianity on that rolling curl so we can enjoy at least a brief ride as long as it lasts. As the torrent flows by, we then look for another emergent swell” (191). This very well describes the feel of many departments. Again, I’ve been in departments like this. But I am not sure this image accurately describes the best of liberal theology. Bultmann, Tillich, Harsthorne and others can’t be dismissed so quickly.

ODEN GETS PHILOSOPHY WRONG

Oden’s negative relationship to contemporary philosophy is exemplified in the paragraph following that quote. He writes: “Process theology and existential theology are prototypical examples, where vast theological programs have emerged to try to bend the tradition to accommodate to a Whitehead or a Heidegger. At those points where the tradition does not easily accommodate, it is pronounced (note the absolute self-assurance of this act of condemnation) ‘irrelevant to the modern mind’” (191).

I have studied Heidegger and Whitehead closely, and have written extensively on the former, so I must comment on this sort of sentence. It is, frankly, annoying to see statements like these from Oden, who clearly has not taken much time to understand the philosophers of whom he speaks.

Heidegger makes for an especially obvious example. Oden’s entire understanding of the man who is probably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century (Wittgenstein is his only serious contender) seems to come through Bultmann, whose work exclusively reflects the early, existentialist Heidegger.

With this indirect reading in tow, Oden lists Heidegger among the modern philosophers, claiming that he is of the same type as Habermas(!), and then actually goes on to list Heidegger as an example of the following kind of sentiment: “We are not defined by traditions, as were all premodern societies. We are in the process of choosing ourselves, not allowing ourselves to be chosen by a traditionary process” (78). But this statement is miles away from Heidegger. Yes, in Being and Time (his magnum opus) Heidegger says that one must rise above the “they” (i.e., the multitude) in order to authentically respond to the call of Being (a call, by the way, not unlike that of the Christian God) – but this is hardly a claim that we can remove ourselves from tradition.

Indeed, the whole field of philosophical hermeneutics, which Heidegger virtually created with Being and Time, is built on the fundamental claim that literally no aspect of our thought or even our practical existence is removed from the traditions and meanings we inherit. Language carries the whole history of Being with it, and the whole of our history is always with us.

One need not go very far into his writings to discover this perspective. A quick perusal of his “Essay on Humanism” will quickly put this thought to rest. Or a read through “The Question Concerning Technology”.

Reading these texts, we can see that Oden’s critique of modernity in the very next paragraph has its origins in Heidegger’s own critique: “This [modern thought] gives us the special illusion of being in control, being powerful, being masters of our destiny” Oden writes. “The natural world appears to be given for our planning and manipulation and reordering” (78).

The second of those sentences could have virtually been lifted from Heidegger’s famous piece. It is Heidegger who offered the most serious and influential critique of the mechanistic, technological, planning- and manipulation-oriented character of modernity. Whoever Oden got this insight from, they were probably influenced by Heidegger.

You need only look at the following Heidegger quotes to see this:

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausforden], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such… The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit… Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example… Everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. (Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” from Basic Writings, 320, 22.)

Parts of these quotes will be opaque the first time through, but it is still fairly obvious here that Heidegger objects to “our planning and manipulation and reordering” in the world of modern technology (Oden 78). We can see this without needing any help. And this is in one of Heidegger’s most famous essays! Oden has not read Heidegger in any depth, and it shows.

Making a mistake about Heidegger is, of course, forgivable in a book like this. The real problem is that Oden makes sweeping generalizations about modern philosophers – Heidegger, Whitehead and others – whom he has apparently never seriously read. And this leads him to condemn modernity entirely without having (or at least showing) sufficient familiarity with it.

This is a major hindrance to Oden’s book and, as I will argue in the next post, it leads him to misunderstand the nature of philosophy. Philosophy isn’t just a series of musings or speculations at a given time that happily do away with whatever has come before, just because we think we have a superior idea. Philosophy is not simply a matter of whatever is current or new. Rather, philosophy is a tradition, much like theology. In the fifth installment in this series, I will go into this further! And in the next installment, I will look more closely at Oden’s misunderstanding of the relationship between theology and philosophy.

In the meantime, what do you think? Is Oden right about modern philosophy? Should theologians only read Plato, Aristotle, and a few other ancient non-Christian luminaries? Or does modern thought have important things to say? Let me know in this comments below!

DAN TATE is a writer and blogger at Christ & Cosmos. A former atheist, he’s been surprised and amazed by the God of all things, and he’s passionate about sharing the gospel in ways that respond to contemporary concerns about theology, philosophy, spiritual practice, science, art, and more. A lifelong writer hailing from Upstate New York, he has a B.A. from Allegheny College, an M.A. from Syracuse University, and an M. Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary.