Thomas C. Oden

There's a kind of reformed Catholic renewal today.

I find within Wesleyans, Thomas Oden, Geoffrey Wainwright, some of those guys, William Abraham from Belfast, some wonderful figures.

I think leaning into these elements and yourself and Winfield Bevins and drawing upon the likes of Francis of Assisi also, I think is most welcome.

We were talking about Winfield earlier.

You can see this, of course, in the dialogues of Plato, but you can also see it in the scholastic method.

Have you ever picked up a book of scholastic philosophy, particularly, say, St. Thomas' Summa Theologica? It works like this.

Thomas asks a question.

Does God exist? Right? Do we need grace to be saved? Whatever.

And sometimes things much more abstract and obscure.

And if you read him, he doesn't just say, I'm right, they're wrong.

He will usually concede the good points of his opposition and incorporate them into a more nuanced answer of the truth.

And so Thomas once described dialectic as, demonstrative argument is an argument from first principles, you know, if A then B. Dialectical argument is an argument towards first principles.

We don't read the Scriptures in isolation.

This little series that I got to work on with Tom Oden, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, is just every text of Scripture, and you've got these comments from these ancient writers of the first 800 years.

on the Old Testament text and on the New Testament text, and there's other aids and so forth and so on, you know, that help us to read.

So we're reading the scriptures not in isolation from the community of the church, but together with the church and the interpreters that have been most involved universally accepted as teaching the truth about Jesus.

I was an unusual kid.

And that took me into the company of Thomas Oden, who was a mentor to me for several years.

I went to parochial seminary and was ordained a deacon and then a priest in California.

And while I was working in newspapers while I was working in corporations as a writer, basically, is what I was doing.