Kerygma and Counseling

Published by Westminster Press in 1966 and reissued by Harper & Row in 1978 in its Ministers Paperback Library, Kerygma and Counseling is Oden's attempt to give secular psychotherapy a theological account. Library subject headings pair Carl Rogers and Karl Barth: the book sets Rogers's client-centred therapy beside Barth's theology and argues, as its subtitle puts it, toward a covenant ontology for secular psychotherapy. It was one of several books from the 1960s and early 1970s in which Oden worked between theology and the therapeutic movements, a period he later recounted in his memoir A Change of Heart before his return to the classical Christian writers.