Tuesday, October 4, 2011

The Cymbrogi, the Didache, and Postmodern Followers of the Way

I wanted to share the following excerpt from "The Teaching of the Twelve: Believing & Practicing the Primitive Christianity of the Ancient Didache Community" by Tony Jones. It loosely describes what we have been doing here in Santa Fe. I am not sure how many of us have read this book if any, but this selection stood out to me as a modern example or model for communities like ours.

I have not yet finished the book, but I highly recommend it based on what I have read so far. I recommend reading and/or watching all of Tony Jones' materials. He is very relevant to a postmodern Christianity (whatever that means).


Here are a couple reviews of Jones' book

Monday, October 3, 2011

We Awaken in Christ's Body

We awaken in Christ's body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in His Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous? -- Then
open your heart to Him

and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ's body

where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real,

and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
he awakens as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.




What in the World is Postmodernism?

Postmodernism thus is not relativism or scepticism, as its uncomprehending critics almost daily charge, but minutely close attention to detail, a sense for the complexity and multiplicity of things, for close readings, for detailed histories, for sensitivity to differences. The postmodernists think the devil is in the details, but they also have reason to hope that none of this will antagonize God. For are not the modernists rather like the Shemites, furiously at work on the tower of Babel, on the “system,” as Kierkegaard would say with biting irony, and are not the postmodernists following the lead of God, who in deconstructing the tower clearly favors a multiplicity of languages, frameworks, paradigms, perspectives, angles? From a religious point of view, does not postmodernism argue that God’s point of view is reserved for God, while the human standpoint is immersed in the multiplicity of angles? (pp. 49-50)
– John D. Caputo, Philosophy and Theology