Thomas C. Oden said this quote

“ There are many who occasionally attend church and who are trying experimentally to be Christians, yet are unable to identify well or define accurately the central truths of Christian teaching. The knowledge they have of the Christian tradition may have come chiefly through hymns. Their strong and sincere feelings are not matched with serious biblical or historical reflection on those feelings. Religious feelings are, indeed, crucial to the deeper learning of Christian truth, but they easily become superficial and narcissistic if the mind of Christ is not a mentor to natural religious impulse. The loss of center in Christian education is arguably due to a serious default of pastoral leadership; when the teaching elder does not teach, the effect is felt throughout the entire Christian congregation. ”

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God's holiness is not an unloving holiness, and God's love is not an unholy love. It is only by keeping these two primary moral qualities of the divine being closely related that we may rightly behold the character of God. (p. 98)

~ Thomas C. Oden

Grace works ahead of us to draw us toward faith, to begin its work in us. Even the first fragile intuition of conviction of sin, the first intimation of our need of God, is the work of preparing, prevening grace, which draws us gradually toward wishing to please God. Grace is working quietly at the point of our desiring, bringing us in time to despair over our own unrighteousness, challenging our perverse dispositions, so that our distorted wills cease gradually to resist the gift of God.

~ Thomas C. Oden

The faithful have no dread of using the traditional language of the church. Terms like incarnation and resurrection need to be explained, not avoided.

~ Thomas C. Oden

Some contemporary theology has been enamored with the heady idea of an imagined freedom that functions without any law or norm or rule of obligation. The technical name for this idea is antinomianism. This yen for freedoms other than Christ's freedom has compounded the problems in pastoral theology. Pastoral practice has at times been exceedingly ready to be guided by this antinomian tendency in theology that implies: if God loves you no matter what, then your own moral responses to God's absolute acceptance make little or no difference; God is going to love you anyway, so assert your individual interest, express yourself, do as you please, and above all do not repress any impulses. It is on the basis of this normless, egocentric relativism that much well-intended liberal pastoral practice has accommodated to naturalism, narcissism, and individualism. It has therefore steered consistently away from any notion of admonition, hoping to avoid 'guilt trips.' But ironically, guilt is more likely to be INCREASED by the lack of timely, caring admonition. For if there is no compassionate admonition, we tend to hide our guilt in ways that make it worse.

~ Thomas C. Oden