Thomas C. Oden: “The One Who Keeps Watch over Our Souls”

Editors Note: Eminent Methodist theologian and IRD board member emeritus Dr. Thomas C. Oden passed away on December 8, 2016. This sermon by Oden, originally published in the March 2016 Lifewatch newsletter, provides a personal overview of his spiritual journey from theological liberalism to orthodoxy, particularly in relation to his pro-life views. 

Hear the Word of the Lord from Proverbs 24:11-12: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not he who weighs the heart know it…? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it?” (RSV, emphasis added)

We are here to keep watch. Meanwhile, the Lord who keeps watch over our souls knows our thoughts and motives. We are here as Lifewatch to watch over those most vulnerable. We are here to stand before the Lord to pray for those who are being led to death, to repent for our callousness, and to pray for grace to do all we can to protect those who need our protection.

Using the Church Instrument for Political Change

I went into the ministry in 1951 at the age of 20 to use the church as a means to a political end. The end was a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. I was enamored with every aspect of the 1950s’ ecumenical Student Christian Movement, the National Council of Churches, and the utopian left wing of the Democratic Party.

Long before America entered the Vietnam War, I greatly admired Ho Chi Minh for being an agrarian patriot. All my heroes were pacifists and socialists. Who taught me this? The Student Christian Movement. All of my favorite authors were pastors, all famous names then but never heard now: Harry Ward, A.J. Muste, Norman Thomas, and John Swomley. I cared most deeply about those pacifist collectivists who never won an election or even wide acceptance in the local churches, but who held sway in the growing Protestant church bureaucracies. Those who encouraged my social illusions seemed to me to be the very best representatives of the church and the university. I felt little interest in going astray from those I trusted most. When in 1950 the Reader’s Digest attacked “Methodism’s Pink Fringe,” they were targeting the very leaders with whom I most identified.

Why I Abandoned My Patrimony

I have been asked why I abandoned my patrimony and why I changed so quickly from all that I had earlier learned about classic Christianity. Answer: I was in love with heresy. I was drawn to the great illusions of the wayward modern spirit, but carelessly ignored their consequences. As a result, I caused unintended harm, but I was less sensitive to the harm I was doing than the harm I thought others were doing to the voiceless poor.

While I imagined I was being critical and rational, I was actually ignoring my best analytical abilities. I became entrapped with a need for upward mobility in an academic environment busy generating ideas for a regulatory society. The One who keeps watch over my soul knew of all this, even when I did not.

Until the end of the 1960s, I do not recall ever seriously exchanging ideas with an articulate pro-life advocate. They were nearby, but not on my scope. I systematically avoided any contact with those who would have challenged my politics.

After years of studying how to demythologize the New Testament, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises that God becomes flesh and dies for our sins. That required a lot of evasive reasoning. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx), or psycho-sexual motives (with Freud), or self-assertive power (with Nietzsche). That was truly a self-deceptive time for me.

During the late 1960s, I began to recognize that I was not the rootless radical I had imagined myself to be. That perception surfaced in a television interview with my old friend Father Charles Curran, who was a Catholic theological expert at the Second Vatican Council. The producers expected the distinguished Catholic ethicist to take the viewpoint of classic Catholic teaching; and I, as the liberal Protestant, was supposed to argue for situation ethics. As it turned out, we found ourselves debating as if I was the Catholic and he was the liberal Protestant. They had not counted on Father Curran moving left while I was moving right.

The zenith of these popular movements of utopian idealism was, for me, the first Earth Day in Houston, Texas in 1969. This happened one year before Earth Day went national. I went to a teach-in near McGovern Lake on the first day of spring and sat on a park bench near the outdoor amphitheater to read. My reading material was a copy of the Socialist World, a propaganda piece I had not seen in several years, but its themes were all too familiar to me. The paper was saturated with labor-leftist messianic rhetoric. This caused me to think back two decades to my Norman Thomas days when I had actually been a socialist. Looking at that paper caused me to be overcome with embarrassment at the realization that I had come so close to being trapped in that world. With the tumultuous decade of the Sixties coming to a close, I understood that life on the cutting edge was draining me. At that moment, I experienced an unnerving revulsion against my own recklessness.

In addition to that piece, for some reason, I had in my pocket that day my India paper edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. I turned to the Collect for the Day. Under the shade of a majestic, gnarled oak tree, I read out loud: “Almighty Father, who has given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification: Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may always serve thee in pureness of living and truth; through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” My eyes filled with tears as I asked myself what I had been missing in all of my frenzied subculture of experimental living.

I began to question my role as an activist reformer and began to move inwardly toward classic Christian teaching on natural law and public order involving such issues as abortion, parental responsibility, and sexual accountability to God’s way of ordering creation as male and female.

A Change of Heart

One reason for writing A Change of Heart (InterVarsity Press, 2014) was in part to alert young people to question the realism of the permissive, statist, collectivist, and unexamined illusions that has once guided me. The wrongs that I failed to recognize in my youth have had ripple effects, some of which I will never completely know, but I understand that on the last day I will be accountable for them.

I did not become an orthodox believer until after I tried out most of the errors long rejected by Christianity. If my first forty years were spent hungering for meaning in life, the last forty have been spent in being fed. If the first forty were prodigal, the last forty have been a homecoming.

I now understand that I would never have been able to be a plausible critic of the absurdities of modern consciousness until I myself had experienced them. Looking back, I now know God has accompanied me on this long path to help me at last to put my feet on the road to classic Christianity. My major learning has been the rediscovery of Christmas and Easter as events in history: incarnation and resurrection. Both have to do with life: God’s life coming to us in human form and the renewal of life from his grave.

Prior to the time of my decisive change of heart in 1970, I had been teaching social ethics to young pastors. In those ethics classes I had been providing a rationale for their blessing of convenience abortions. I had not yet considered the vast implications of those consequences for women, families, and society, but most of all for the lost generation of irretrievable aborted babies. When I tried to explain to God why I had ignored those costs, the answer kept coming back to me: No excuse. I had been wrong. The situation ethics on which those abortion arguments were made were unprincipled and careless of human life.

When Rudolf Bultmann was my guide to the demythologizing of the New Testament, I was left without an adequate grasp of the law and of moral constraint. I had been taking seriously the premise that the moment reveals what to do. Accordingly, we do not learn what to do from universal history, but only from the fleeting slice of it we call “now.” I was left with no way to function in the discipline of ethics. I had already thrown away the instruction of the law which guides conscience and leads to repentance. This had devastating consequences for family and sexual ethics.

January 22, 1973: Roe v. Wade

At the time of Roe v. Wade, situation ethics was entering its heyday. Its core conviction was that the command of God is revealed in the now, and only in the now, and hence not disclosed in any durable rule ethic. Established rules and long-standing precedents were widely considered irrelevant and yet what was relevant was making Christianity acceptable to modern understandings of the truth. The history of moral wisdom was being junked, and I was functioning as a junk dealer.

Two years later abortion became an unavoidable issue for me when women seminary students who were struggling to understand their own abortions came to my office for counsel. They were grieving over loss. They had thoughtlessly become trapped in sexual activity as “flower children” committed to making love not war. They were among the best students I ever had. They did make love, but a subtler war ensued. It was a war against children. It was a war within themselves about what they had done. I belatedly recognized that millions of innocent lives were being destroyed on behalf of political expediency that was knowingly careless of its consequences. Taking life was being argued simply on the basis of arbitrary individual choice and convenience. I experienced an overwhelming wave of moral revulsion against the very abortion-on-demand politics I had once advocated. It was a visceral nausea, like an aversion in the stomach to what I had previously digested.

The protection of the prenatal child had been swallowed up in a wave of advocacy for free choice, overriding the incomparable value of life and overlooking the irreversibility of death. The deliberate killing of babies in the womb had become the new normal, and I was a part of it. That was a shock and still is. That realization produced a numbing loss of confidence in a whole series of permissive policies I had previously struggled to achieve. The abortion issue was my wake-up call.

As I awakened from my stupor, I realized that some mainline Protestant theologians needed to stand up for the unborn. Not many Protestant theologians at that time were openly pro-life because that would have caused loss of face with some audiences whose feathers they dare not ruffle. But there were two courageous United Methodist theologians who did speak out. Both were my highly valued friends and mentors: Albert Outler and Robert Nelson. Both were mentioned by Lifewatch in its earliest years. This was a time when few reservations were being voiced against convenience abortions. They made the case for life, and showed the weaknesses and tragedies of the culture of death.

In time, I came to a simple conclusion: Before conception, we have a moral choice as to what we will do with our bodies. After conception, we do not have a choice to take away the life our bodies have created. After conception, men do not have a choice to be non-fathers, and women do not have a choice to be non-mothers. After conception, more than two human beings are involved. Then it is not a matter of convenience but of life.

After Roe v. Wade, I could consent only to being responsibly pro-choice before conception and pro-life after conception. That was in January of 1973, the month of the decision of the United States Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade. As it turned out, that was the first step in a series of acts of political repentance for me.

To the Corinthians who lived in a cesspool of sexual confusion, Paul wrote: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.” (I Corinthians 3:16-17, RSV)

But suppose we say, as I said for years to myself, “I know nothing about this.” Then I heard Proverbs 24 speak to me: “If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?” (v. 12, NIV) He who weighed my heart knew that I was avoiding what I knew more deeply in the voice of conscience.

In Austin, Texas on leave in 1976, I was invited to a private luncheon to speak with Sarah Weddington, the attorney who had argued and won the Roe v. Wade decision before the U.S. Supreme Court. She was a smart, youthful, feminist attorney. Her client, Norma L. McCorvey, was the “Jane Roe” in Roe v. Wade. Her client was at that time a leader in the fight for convenience abortions.

Fast forward. Years later, in 1995, Ms. McCorvey revealed she had falsely testified that she had been raped. Surprisingly, she turned against the very court that had made a judicial precedent for abortion on the basis of her plea. In 1995, McCorvey was baptized and became actively pro-life in a life-affirming ministry to women who have had abortions, but have lived with unresolved grief and depression. Chiefly, she taught forgiveness in a unique way by helping those women understand that their children are waiting in eternity to welcome them with open arms.

Life is of incomparable value since it is the precondition of all other human values. It is on a wholly different plane morally than the relief of suffering, which itself is in the service of life. Protecting life is the premise of every conceivable value that depends upon life. That protection has been denied by law to millions and millions of babies in our time.

John Cassian, in the early fifth century, advised those seeking to live a holy life in this way: “Learn to be compassionate toward those who struggle, and never frighten with bleak despair those who are in trouble or unsettle them with harsh words. Instead, encourage them mildly and gently and, according to the precept of that most wise Solomon: ‘Spare nothing to save those who are being led to death and to redeem those who are being slain.'” (Conference 2.13.10)

The parents of unborn children are made able by grace to hold fast to a specific promise: God “will not let you be tempted beyond your strength” (I Corinthians 10:13, RSV). Both parents of unplanned pregnancies are called to come to trust this Word and live by its promise.

The One who keeps watch over our souls has known our hearts even when we go astray and wonderfully when we return.