Grace, Faith & Life

Thomas C. Oden, a leading theologian describes the unexpected resurgence of a New Christian Orthodox — post denominational, flexible, and rooted in ancient beliefs.
Here is an interesting excerpt from pages 84-85 of the book.

Comparative Trajectories of Two Methodist Radicals
Not until I recently explained to younger friends how closely my path had followed the same trajectory as that of Hillary Rodham Clinton did they grasp what I was saying about my history. It seems odd now, but Hillary was working out of precisely the same sources and moving in the same circles as I in our formative years. In fact, our two trajectories almost mirrored one another until the early seventies. I fell much harder for Marxist ideology than she ever did, but we made many of the same ideological stops along the way.
Why do I mention this? Because Hillary’s pattern clarifies where I once squarely located myself ideologically, only later to reverse myself and disavow previous opinions. My education paralleled hers (Yale, Methodist activism, moving ever leftward), both in the ideas we held and the people by whom we were mentored. We were both avid followers of Saul Alinsky, a pragmatic urban organizer and unprincipled amoralist. Hillary became intrigued by situation ethics, the subject on which I wrote my dissertation. She learned her tough amoral activism from Alinsky and her view of history from quasi-Marxists, just as I did. She once revealed that she had saved every copy of motive magazine, the progenitor of much of her religious and political radicalism, and so have I. That magazine fueled me intellectually during my heady years as a pacifist, existentialist, Tillichian, and aspiring Marxist, and its editors (Roger Ortmayer and B. J. Styles) were old friends of mine. In those days I trusted completely the Methodist radicalism of motive. It set the leftist momentum of all my thinking, as it did Hillary’s.
Hillary’s chief mentors in Chicago included dear friends of mine, Joseph and Lynn Mathews, and their associates in the Ecumenical Institute of Austin, Texas (later to become the Ecumenical Institute of Chicago), where some of my writings were embedded in their standard curriculum. I went to Yale more than a decade before Hillary did, but we had many threads of mutual friends and almost a total congruence of values in those early days. Her former pastor and mentor, Professor Don Jones, remains my close colleague in ethics at Drew University. During her years in the White House, she belonged to one of the most politically radical local congregations among United Methodists.
When I look now at Hillary’s persistent situational ethics, political messianism, statist social idealism, and pragmatic toughness, I see mirrored the self I was a few decades ago. Methodist social liberalism taught me how to advocate liberalized abortion and early feminism almost a decade before the works of Germaine Greer and Rosemary Radford Ruether further raised my consciousness.

Once Completely at Home with Modernity
I left seminary having learned to treat scripture selectively, according to how it well it might serve my political idealism. I adapted the Bible to my ideology an ideology of social and political change largely shaped by soft Marxist premises about history and a romanticized vision of the emerging power and virtue of the underclass. Though during this time it was largely knowledge elites (professors, writers, movement leaders) rather than the underclass that shaped my views, I nursed an inordinate confidence in my own ability to define the interests of the poor.
Like all broad-minded clergy I knew, I tried hard to reason out of modern naturalistic premises, employing biblical narratives narrowly and selectively. I could plead for social change and teach hearers to take pride in their good intentions and works; but I was not prepared to communicate the saving grace of God on the cross, which I experienced oniy at some vague and diffuse level and would never have thought of personally attesting publicly.

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