Comments on: Didache Blog Tour – Day One, Chapter One

By: Teaching of the Twelve by Tony Jones, Chapter Three | Tony Jones

Teaching of the Twelve by Tony Jones, Chapter Three | Tony Jones — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:00:59 +0000

[...] BloggingJane Smith on Tom Oord Is BloggingThe Teaching of the Twelve: Chapter 1 — Pomomusings on Didache Blog Tour – Day One, Chapter OneBrad Cecil on Tom Oord Is BloggingTed Seeber on Didache Blog Tour – Day One, Chapter One Tag [...]

By: The Teaching of the Twelve: Chapter 1 — Pomomusings

The Teaching of the Twelve: Chapter 1 — Pomomusings — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:34:25 +0000

[...] I’m happy to be a part of the blog tour for Tony Jones’s new book, The Teaching of the Twelve: Believing & Practicing the Primitive Christianity of the Ancient Didache Community. I have just a few comments on the first chapter, and you can also read some more comments on the first chapter by Thomas Turner of Everyday Liturgy (Tony shares some on the 1st chapter too here). [...]

By: Ted Seeber

Ted Seeber — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:36:32 +0000

Oh, great Tyler. Now I’ve got to go look up WHICH epistle Luther called the ‘epistle of straw’…and sure enough, I find it was JAMES that was considered the epistle of straw, not Romans. Luther in fact suffered from scrupulosity- a mental illness that is related to OCD and has as one of it’s symptoms a need for rules and following of those rules, sometimes to ridiculous excess.

Also, some would say James, who put forth works as proof of faith, as being harder to live by than Paul, for whom faith alone justified.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:22:45 +0000

The way Turner describes the time period in which the didache was written could very well describe the milieu in which every New Testament letter was written.

Yes, I can see why some persons find Paul so hard to deal with, what with texts like Gal 5.14 & Rom 12.9-21 and such. James is the easy-going, laid-back dude, with texts such as 2.10 & 4.4 [ http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=126703764 ]. This explains why Luther called Romans an ‘epistle of straw’ because it held Christians to such a high standard, whereas it was James who proclaimed grace for those who can’t live up to Paul’s standards.

By: Dan Hauge

Dan Hauge — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:25:59 +0000

The book looks great–I’ve read a bit of the Didache before but looking forward to seeing the whole thing. I wonder–when you talk about the Didache ‘helping us out of Western cultural captivity’ do you mean ‘Paul captivity’. There seems to be an subtext in your writing about this so far that the Didache can kind of get the church out from under Paul. You say you don’t want to ‘discard’ Paul’s writings, but would you like to see texts like the Didache provide a kind of equal counter-way of being Christian, a kind of ‘alternative canon’ more amenable to post-modern-social-justice oriented Christians than Paul’s writings? Am I reading the subtext right here?

By: Ted Seeber

Ted Seeber — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:31:16 +0000

What I notice most is that proto-Catholicism is there; Deacons and Bishops. And that from the very start, illicit sex (sex not for procreation or union in marriage) was considered a part of the culture of death, not the culture of life.

It makes me wonder how much the rediscovery of the Didache influenced the end of the Counter-Reformation in Vatican II. I need to look into that- I’m too young by a couple of decades to know firsthand.