ahhh…free wifi….Thank you, Jesus. 

I'll try some real-time posting during this next session with Emergent posterchild, Tony Jones. But be warned, this will be an on-the-fly, non-linear relay of possibly random thoughts. If it becomes confusing, I'll try to straighten it out after dinner. 
We'll get started in a few minutes…(the wifi signal keeps going in and out, so we'll see…)

Moby: culturally postmodern artist.

*you can be swimming in the water of postmodernity and still reject some major tenets of pm-ism.

 Download his interview at sojo.net

Postmodern tendency to take the old/ancient and synthesize it with the new.

 

*what can we absolutely know for sure? ….how did we get here?

 

Theology does not stand on it’s own. You understand God in relationship to how you understand lots of other things.

 

4-6 BC (The Ancient World)

Aristotle

Plato

Paul

Plotinus

Augustine –hardcore dualism (mind and spirit are good; body and flesh are bad)BIG problems for Augustine: if God is Good, how could Jesus come in a physical form, ob. The body is bad..?) He literally invented the word ‘tri-unitas’, i.e. trinity.

Church Fathers

The Dark Ages (AD 500)

-obviously no great thinkers…

 

Ancient-Modern Transition (AD1000)

Aquinas

Scholastics

 

Modern Period (AD 1500)

Descartes-wanted to prove the existience of human beings, so he spent over a year in solitude, thinking and doubting…at the end, he realized he could doubt everything, except the simple fact that he was doubting. He came up with ‘cogito ergo sum’. Gave birth to reductionism and eventually the reformation.

Luther

Calvin

Copernicus/Galileo

 

Modern-Postmodern Transition (AD2000)

Nietzche

Jacque Derrida

Foucault

Baudrillard

*the real promise of the Elightenment was that we would shed the biggies that divide us, i.e. religion, nation borders, one world money systems and languages and metric system.

 

In the face of Globalization, 3 things are happening:

One, people are becoming more religious instead of more secularized.

Two, Also on the rise is fundamentalism and ethnocentrism.

Three, Postmodernism emerges and provides an understanding of who I am (as an orthodox Christian) but also understand those who are not, and are aware of the Imago Dei (we are made in the image of God). A very christocentric gospel. There exists a dialetctical tension…without resolution of that tension.

 Jacques Derrida—like most PM philosophers, is European, jewish, and (I think) gay.

Most known for the phrase ‘deconstruction’, to break out of something into new meanings.