Both the strengths and weaknesses of Oden's vision for a rebirth of orthodoxy are on display in One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus, a compilation of extracts from evangelical statements of faith gathered by he and J. I. Packer. The strength is a desire to seek true ecumenical unity that is grounded on truth on something of a creedal model. Thus materials are gathered under fifteen chapters, beginning with "The Good News" and running through a list that includes the classical theological topics of "The Bible," "The One True God," "Human Life Under God," "Jesus Christ," and "Justification by Grace Through Faith." Also included are important contemporary issues not typically represented in the creeds, including chapters on religious pluralism and Christian social responsibility. Each one of these chapters is comprised of selections from faith statements representing a startling array of parachurch or "transdenominational" organizations – over fifty by my count.
The compilation is meant to show the convergence of two streams of Evangelicalism, the Calvinist/Lutheran/Baptist and the Arminian/ Wesleyan/Holiness/Charismatic/Pentecostal, and it is precisely here that the weakness of Oden and Packer's vision comes to the fore. Like transdenominational Evangelicalism itself, the goal of consensus is reached only via a necessary soft-pedaling of traditional distinctives and a significant expansion of – surprise – matters concerning evangelism, the Christian life, and social action. Thus, under the heading of "Observing God's Ordinances" Evangelicals are called to "awaken to the sacramental implication of creation and incarnation," but a mere ten lines of text are given to a strongly memorialistic definition of these "sacraments" – a definition strangely drawn from the International Pentecostal Church of Christ. Apart from this clearly one-sided definition, the minor role afforded these ordinances clearly represents a wholesale swallowing of the magisterial Reformation by holiness elements. A convergence this is not.
So while a great deal of sound material is on display here, in and of itself often edifying, the reader is left with the same sinking impression given by Oden's Justification Reader. While a consensus is constructed from a sea of snippets, would the agreement remain if each source text were read as a coherent whole? Does the Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America (previously Pentecostal Fellowship of North America) Statement of Faith really agree with the Facult Libre de Thologie Evanglique Profession de Foi on the matter of justification by grace alone through faith alone? Don't we really have to read each in its entirety to know? The answer to this question is not asked, because Oden and Packer see Evangelicalism as a "movement," not a church, and a movement is apparently happy to take agreement where it finds it in order to keep moving along.
