Agenda for Theology Author:Thomas C. Oden Thomas C. Oden was Professor of Theology and Ethics at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey when his Agenda for Theology: Recovering Christian Roots was published in 1979. Oden argues that modernist Christian theology has failed its students and must be replaced by a return to classical orthodox theology. He uses the term "orthodox" ... more »to mean "correct," not as the name of a tradition as in "Eastern Orthodox."
Oden claims his students wanted to know the foundations of Christian practice not how Christianity could be re-molded to fit the liberal agendas of the third quarter of the twentieth century. They knew science and they knew it could not save their souls. What they wanted was what was taught by the "profits, apostles, saints, and martyrs." Oden calls such students "postmodern people." He means literally "after modern" he is not referring to the deconstruction of texts that has become the basis of postmodernism in today's language. He claims postmodern people seek "something beyond modernity, some source of meaning and value that transcends the assumption of modernity." However, "suffering through modernity" is a prerequisite to becoming "postmodern." The neo-classicists like Niebuhr and Barth do not qualify because they never had succumbed to the fads of modernity.
Oden names modernist theology's sin: Christianity's language had been "tamed by civil religionists, neatly pruned by logical positivists, dehistoricalized by existentialists, deabsolutized by the process theologians, naturalized by the behaviorists, sentimentalized by the situation ethicists, freak-out by the drug-oriented spiritualists, secularized by the `death of God' partisans, politicized by the social activists, and set free from all bounds by the sexual liberationists." The solution to all this faddish modernity is a return to teaching "classical" Christianity; the Christianity revealed by the apostles, spread by the saints and codified by the Ecumenical Councils of the first Christian millennium.« less