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    A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
    Unavailable
    A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
    Unavailable
    A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
    Ebook574 pages9 hours

    A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir

    By Thomas C. Oden

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Preaching's Best Books for Preachers

    Best Theological Memoir from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Bookstore

    How did one of the twentieth century's most celebrated liberals have such a dramatic change of heart?

    After growing up in the heart of rural Methodism in Oklahoma, Thomas Oden found Marx, Nietzsche and Freud storming into his imagination. He joined the post-World War II pacifist movement and became enamored with every aspect of the 1950s' ecumenical Student Christian Movement. Ten years before America's entry into the Vietnam war he admired Ho Chi Min as an agrarian patriot. For Oden, every turn was a left turn.

    At Yale he earned his PhD under H. Richard Niebuhr and later met with some of the most formidable minds of the era—enjoying conversations with Gadamer, Bultmann and Pannenberg as well as a lengthy discussion with Karl Barth at a makeshift office in his hospital room. While traveling with his family through Turkey, Syria and Israel, he attended Vatican II as an observer and got his first taste of ancient Christianity. And slowly, he stopped making left turns.

    Oden's enthusiasms for pacifism, ecumenism and the interface between theology and psychotherapy were ambushed by varied shapes of reality. Yet it was a challenge from a Jewish scholar, his friend and mentor Will Herberg, that precipitated his most dramatic turn—back to the great minds of ancient Christianity. Later a meeting with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) planted the seeds for what became Oden's highly influential Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. This fascinating memoir walks us through not only his personal history but some of the most memorable chapters in twentieth-century theology.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIVP Academic
    Release dateNov 6, 2014
    ISBN9780830880195
    Unavailable
    A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
    Author

    Thomas C. Oden

     Thomas C. Oden (PhD, Yale) is Director of the Center for Early African Christianity at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania and Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology and Ethics at Drew University. He is an ordained Methodist minister and the author of many books, including The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity, Doctrinal Standards in the Wesleyan Tradition, and Classic Christianity. Dr. Oden is also the general editor for the widely-used Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series.

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    Reviews for A Change of Heart

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    • 5/5
      As a man converted in English Methodism, and an ordained Methodist minister who served the denomination for a number of years, I find Thomas Oden’s book not only informative but reflective of my own theological battles and concerns. He writes with a warm heart and an exceptionally clear mind. This is one of the few contemporary biographies I have found if difficult to put down. Next, I must tackle his one volume Systematic Theology.