Two Books to Frighten and Inspire Young Researchers

You have to read G.E. Ladd and Thomas C. Oden before doing a PHD in Bible or Theology

Ridley College has a thriving postgraduate studies community with 25 research students and 10 DMin students. We have had graduates in recent years students from Australia, America, Asia, and Africa. Most students research while remaining resident in their home city/country, but we have regular meetings, an annual conference, and mentor students into becoming Christian academics.

Seriously, if you’ve done an MDiv with a 12K research project, have a decent GPA, and think a PhD will help you in your career, calling, or ministry, and if you want a flexible and high-quality program, then look me up. We are always willing to talk to applicants to see if Ridley is right for them.

In our mentoring of postgraduate students, I get them to read two particular books, one to scare them and the other to inspire them.

First, on the scary side, there is John A. D’Elia’s biography of G.E. Ladd: A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America.

Ladd was one of the theological giants of post-War II evangelical scholarship in the twentieth century. He wrote books on biblical eschatology, the kingdom of God, Revelation, and a massive Theology of the New Testament that did for evangelicals what Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament did for the mainline church. He taught for many years at Fuller Seminary and had a very influential teaching career and publishing career. But he never gained the respect of non-evangelical scholars and it ate him up from the inside out.

Sadly, Ladd’s biography is a morality tale what what happens when you seek the praise of others. While the accuracy of D’Elia’s portrait of Ladd will be for others to decide, the story D’Elia tells is tragic. D’Elia describes Ladd’s struggle with his own inadequacies as a “wound that had existed in Ladd’s psyche from his earliest days, one that had grown virtually unabated during his adult life” (p. 180). This wound became nearly mortal after receiving a negative review of his 1963 book Jesus and the Kingdom by Norman Perrin. As D’Elia describes it, this event was a turning point in Ladd’s academic life and a self-preceived failure from which he never recovered and his personality deteriorated.

Ladd wanted to divorce his wife for being “frigid,” he became estranged from his daughter, became alienated from former students, and ended-up as a washed-up alcoholic.

If you are seeking the praise of others, you will either get addicted to it, be consumed by it, or be destroyed by it. Make your PhD an object of service, devotion, worship, and love, for both God and the church. Your job is to preach Jesus and be forgotten. Scholarship will give you neither fame nor immortality.

Remember, preach Jesus, mentor others, then be forgotten.

Second, on the inspiring side is the autobiography of Methodist Theologian Thomas C. Oden, A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir.

Oden recounts his beginnings as a radical lefty, a theologian into Bultmann, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, but then experienced a turn towards conservative theology through an encounter with the church fathers.

Oden abandoned his idealistic pacifism and socialism and moved theologically after discovering the joy of learning about Christmas (incarnation) and Easter (resurrection). He calls the first forty years of his life prodigal, the second forty he considers as homecoming. Several things propelled him towards orthodoxy including Barth, Pannenberg, Anglicans like J.I. Packer, and especially a Jewish colleague at Drew University named Will Herberg. It was Herberg who told him that “You will remain theologically uneducated until you study carefully Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas” (p. 137). And so began Oden’s journey into patristic literature which forever changed him.

I first came across Thomas Oden through his book Requiem which recounts demise of the mainline churches through their abandonment of orthodox theology. I love his book written with J.I. Packer called One Faith which proves that Arminians and Calvinists can get along together. Oden is probably best known for his work editing the Ancient Christian Commentary Series and his later works about early African theology.

There’s a lot of good biographical info here about growing up between the Great Depression and World War II in Oklahoma. But it is Oden’s move from 1960’s revolutionary to paleo-orthodox theologian that is by far the main focus of this book. Oh man, there are so many good anecdotes, quotes, and stories I could cite from the book. He says that, “Regrettably the Scripture texts I had loved as a child had become buried in my secularizing consciousness, but now they found a new life with me” (p. 70). Oden was well-traveled and met theologians from Barth to Ratzinger. About Barth he says, “He gently warned me against veering too far from the central task of theology as the study of the Word of God revealed” (p. 95). The story of his family driving from Germany to Jerusalem through war-torn Syria is hard to put down. In finding historic orthodoxy he says, “I had been in love with heresy. Now I was waking up from this enthrallment to meet a two thousand year stable memory” (p. 140).

Oden says that he considered converting to Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but remained Methodist since his “vocation was in the church that had baptized and ordained me” (p. 277).

This is a book about learning what matters, discarding fads for the rock of orthodoxy, and finishing life well!

If you are thinking about going into research into biblical studies, or theology, I heartily recommend these books to you!

Mention in despatches also for:

Tim Grass, F.F. Bruce: A Life (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2011)

Alister McGrath, Thomas F. Torrance (London: T&T Clark, 2006).

Elizabeth Achtemeier, Not Til I Have Done (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1999).

John Goldingay, Walk On: Lost, Truth, and Other Realities (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2002).