Radical Obedience

Oden's study of Rudolf Bultmann's ethics, published by Westminster Press in 1964 and in Britain by Epworth in 1965. The publisher's description notes that the debate over Bultmann's proposal to demythologise the New Testament had left his view of Christian ethics almost unexamined, and the book sets out to fill that gap. Oden presents Bultmann's ethic of radical response to God: to listen for and respond to the Word of God speaking through the situation in which one exists, an obedience possible only for one who knows himself already loved, so that the indicative "You are a new creation" carries the imperative "Become who you are." A concluding critique names the problems Oden finds in Bultmann's ethics while judging his conception of the moment as the bearer of God's demand to be his greatest contribution to Protestant ethics. It comes from Oden's early years, when he wrote within the existentialist theology he later left behind.