Forging Ploughshares: Recent Episodes
Forging Ploughshares
Paul Axton preaches: Jesus claim to Thomas and Philip that they can see and know God in him, that he is the way and the truth and the life, call for a holistic understanding which has been disrupted by modernism but which is approached through Sophiology.
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Anthony Bartlett and Brad and Paul discuss the dropping of the bombs on Japan in light of the Girardian insight into the scapegoating mechanism, and Girard's turn from total condemnation of sacrifice due to the influence of Raymund Schwager, and the entry of Peter Thiel and JD Vance.
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Anthony Bartlett traces the rise of semiotics and the understanding that before being there is the sign, and that reality comes to us through a sign system of violence which will be exposed and displaced by the semiotic shift of the Logos.
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Brad and Paul discuss the convergence of William Desmond's understanding of the potencies of the ethical with Paul's depiction of the fruits of the Spirit, both of which would displace ethical systems with ethical realities.
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Anthony Bartlett traces the impact of the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and Levi Strauss on the rise of structuralism and the deconstruction of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and René Girard, giving rise to a clear split between two notions of Logos.
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Paul Axton preaches: In Corinthians Paul contrasts human and divine wisdom and pictures the cross as the divide between the two, focusing on the absolute transcendence and immanence of Christ, not as a dualism, but as synthesizing these seeming antinomies, which is the continued project of the Christian life in theosis.
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Brad and Paul discuss the convergence of the work of William Desmond with that of Sergius Bulgakov, noting that Desmond's work can be read as on a continuum through Maximus, Hegel, and Bulgakov, which is perhaps the most serious contemporary attempt to think out philosophically and theologically the implications of the Gospel.
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Paul Axton preaches: Is the analogia entis the anti-Christ or is there the possibility of a renewed natural theology and metaphysics?
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Brad and Paul discuss the anti-metaphysical stance of René Girard as compared to William Desmond's renewal of metaphysics, with each bringing a necessary critique to modern metaphysics and surpassing this metaphysic in two needed but perhaps contrasting understandings.
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Paul Axton preaches: Behind this sermon on the fall and summing up of all things in Christ, including everything about the first Adam, is the approach to metaphysics found in William Desmond and Anthony Bartlett. The orientation of a sick metaphysics (Girard and Bartlett) provides the possibility of redemption or the realization of the fulness of metaphysics (Desmond), or the synthesis found in Christ.
From Spiritual Sickness to Divinization
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Anthony Bartlett explains Heidegger's turn to language in place of a philosophical metaphysics, and locates language as the origin integral to being and the essential nature of violence.
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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon traces universal restoration (apokatastasis) and recapitulation, in the way this transforms human thought in the explanation of Origen, Maximus and Eriugena, and illustrated in the case of Peter.
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In this new series of podcasts with Anthony Bartlett, Anthony systematically introduces his extension of the Girardian system into theology and biblical studies. In this first lecture he describes the rise of meaning in the scapegoat and the semiotic shift introduced by Christ.
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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon brings together Paul's picture of creation ex-nihilo and resurrection as the thought behind his notion of epektasis or being stretched out, in the sense of going beyond the self, as further developed by William Desmond in conjunction with John Scotus Eriugena.
(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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William Desmond introduces his metaxological philosophy and its implications for religion, ethics and aesthetics.
(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon develops John Behr's understanding of the Logos along with William Desmond's picture of the betweenness of the intimate universal.
(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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In this final class with David Dawson, David answers key question regarding Christ's recovery of language as the Word, the exposure of the victim, and the overcoming of religion.
(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Paul Axton preaches: Jesus' promise of peace, not as the world gives but his peace, is the beginning of an alternative subjectivity which William Desmond calls the "intimate universal" or an opening of a communicative subjectivity with the transcendent.
(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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In this final conversation with Michael Hardin, Michael's friend David Dawson, author of "Flesh Becomes Word" describes Girard's entry into the discussion of structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction.
(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon for Pentecost Sunday, compares life in the Spirit or in the Trinity to life in the absence of the Trinity, as Paul presents it in Romans 7 & 8.
(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Michael Hardin explains how Christ's exposure of the scapegoating mechanism unleashes the potential for a final violence, which can only be disrupted if Christians can resist through the reality of living out the gospel.
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This discussion and attached sermon with Brad and Paul builds upon the work of Raymond Panikkar and William Desmond in their description of the "between" as this applies to the Trinitarian nature of truth.
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Michael Hardin spells out his key advancement of Girardian theory in his development of a positive view of mimesis as the very mode of salvation.
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Paul Axton preaches: In this sermon on the necessity of love of enemy to arrive at the perfection of God, the focus is on the possible insight the "enemy" such as Islam and Iran might have into the failures of Western Christianity.
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Michael Hardin explains how René Girard scapegoated the term sacrifice and the book of Hebrews and how he corrected course in regard to Hebrews. Karl and Paul discuss attachment of fundamentalism to the historical critical method, and then Nate and Paul point out to Michael the same problem with theological liberalism, and propose an alternative Christocentric hermeneutic in place of historicism.
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Brad and Paul discuss the attached sermon tracing a Jewish understanding of Sabbath as synonymous with God and with being joined to God, as in marriage, and the development of an event oriented understanding degraded into a space surrounding tabernacle and temple taken up and transformed by Christ.
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In this continued discussion with Michael Hardin, Michael lays out a theory of a nonviolent atonement, through Girardian theory. Michael pictures this as key to understanding the cross and the Bible.
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Brad and Paul discuss the attached sermon, of how it is that the church seems to no longer be a resistant community, as Paul and Origen would have it, "putting on the full armor of God," and how it is that Augustinian just war theory, and its exterior/interior division points to a morally compromised church and culture marked by the rise of Jeffrey Epstein and friends.
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Michael Hardin, an expert and friend of René Girard, explains how a Girardian reading of the Bible solves the problem posed by Marcion, of distinguishing between the violent God of the Jews and the Father of Jesus Christ.
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Paul Axton preaches: In this sermon reversing the usual meaning of Christ "becoming sin for us" the working of the cross is examined at a deep psychoanalytic and personal level, through the lens of Julian of Norwich, and her reversal of theology.
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Michael Hardin, the friend of and expert on René Girard, explains the comprehensive nature of mimesis, from the novel, to psychology, anthropology, and religion, explaining the scientific background and universal application of the theory.
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Paul Axton preaches: Bringing together the thought of William Desmond with Maximus the Confessor, this sermon traces how the seventh day is the revelation and reflexive divine presence fulfilled in Christ.
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Michael Hardin leads a discussion on the life and work of René Girard, with whom he was friends, tracing the beginnings of his discovery and then the growth of appreciation and literature dealing with his work.
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Paul Axton preaches: This Easter sermon examines the first Christian proclamation of resurrection in its direct indictment of those who nailed him to the cross, but this scapegoating, nationalistic, religion in its captivity to death and killing exemplifies human religion and the human problem which Christ exposes and resolves in the resurrection.
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(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th on from 7 pm to 9 pm central time. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
In this discussion with Karl, Andy, Jim, and Scott, Paul brings together Christian Anarchy as it coincides with an apocalyptic theology, but fills this out through the work of Ann Jervis, who describes the need to set aside "now and not yet" as a controlling metaphor which does not do justice to victory in Christ.
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(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th on from 7 pm to 9 pm central time. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
This is a combination of Brad and Paul discussing the sermon and the upcoming classes along with the sermon on approaching Easter through the cross, or taking up the cross as enabling resurrection faith.
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(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th from 7 pm to 9 pm central time. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
Paul, Nate, Karl, Jim, and Andy discuss the work of renegade Catholic Priest Ivan Illich in his criticism of institutional Christianity as giving shape to modern nationalism and the profound failures of modern society.
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(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th on from 7 pm to 9 pm central time. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
Paul Axton preaches: Mary and Martha illustrate two approaches to life and thought, with Mary representing a Sabbath form of thought in which thought is received, and Mary representing a doing form of thought in which thought is aimed at a product. While Marth thinking is necessary, all Martha and no Mary takes away the center and purpose from thought.
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(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
Karl, Jim, Nathan, Andy and Paul discuss the difference an apocalyptic theology makes in regard to natural theology, understandings of sin and salvation, and biblical hermeneutics.
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(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
Paul Axton preaches: Building on the picture of salvation in Hebrews as occurring through Sabbath rest, and depicting the unrest or dis-ease of neurosis, war, philosophy, and religion, the resolution to the deadly human predicament through Sabbath is depicted.
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(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
Brad and Paul talk with Ethan Vander Leek about his upcoming course on peace in which he will utilize the insights of William Desmond, Rowan Williams, and Raimon Panikkar among others.
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(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
Paul Axton preaches: In Galatians, Paul delineates fleshly Israel from Spiritual Israel, equating fleshly Israel with the children of Hagar, and Christians with Isaac. Isaac points directly to Christ, just as the faith of Abraham in having Isaac points to Christian faith, but to focus on fleshly Israel is to return to idolatry.
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(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
Paul Axton preaches: Developing Paul's understanding that we fill up the suffering of Christ, the state of being between an originary unity and a developing fulness is explicated against the background of the philosophy of William Desmond, which is building on this Pauline idea.
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(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
Brad and Paul discuss the work of William Desmond and approach it through his engagement with Hegel, his reading of Flannery O'Connor, and his opposition to the dark reading of Slavoj Žižek.
(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
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Paul Axton preaches: Thomas is a resolute unbeliever who after examining Jesus' wound gives the strongest of affirmations of Jesus' divine identity. As in the story of Flannery O'Connor, Revelation, one world falls apart revealing another. The crack opens up to let in the light.
(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. We will examine various forms of false peace and ask what peace is positively, its metaphysical and religious status as a concept and as a lived reality. Is peace possible? How is it characterized? How does Jesus make peace? Can difference be understood, lived, and resolved, not in violence and victory but in cooperation and mutuality? We will be guided into such questions by voices past and present, including Augustine, Thomas Merton, Raimon Panikkar, William Desmond, Rowan Williams, and more. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
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Brad and Paul continue the conversation with John Ashworth, who has spent much of his life in Sudan in practical peacemaking efforts and describes how nonviolence is the real-world solution to conflict.
(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. We will examine various forms of false peace and ask what peace is positively, its metaphysical and religious status as a concept and as a lived reality. Is peace possible? How is it characterized? How does Jesus make peace? Can difference be understood, lived, and resolved, not in violence and victory but in cooperation and mutuality? We will be guided into such questions by voices past and present, including Augustine, Thomas Merton, Raimon Panikkar, William Desmond, Rowan Williams, and more. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
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Paul Axton preaches: John combines his description of love and God with his picture of its reversal in the Antichrist. Friedrich Nietzsche, in recommending the Antichrist and his work (a recommendation taken up by the Nazis) depicts the reversal embraced by a German and American Christianity which would hate in the name of Christ. Agape love is the only counter to this demonic form of the faith.
(Sign up for "Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace": This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. We will examine various forms of false peace and ask what peace is positively, its metaphysical and religious status as a concept and as a lived reality. Is peace possible? How is it characterized? How does Jesus make peace? Can difference be understood, lived, and resolved, not in violence and victory but in cooperation and mutuality? We will be guided into such questions by voices past and present, including Augustine, Thomas Merton, Raimon Panikkar, William Desmond, Rowan Williams, and more. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
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Brad and Paul interview peacemaker John Ashworth, who has spent his life bringing peace to Sudan, long torn by ethnic and political violence. John has been key in negotiating peace settlements and bringing peace to this troubled region and his expertise with the realities of peace as the resolution to violence is grounded in real-world reality and experience.
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Paul Axton preaches: Jesus encounter with the woman at the well transports her and those who follow the conversation to a world in which God is no longer delimited by religion, place and time, and opens up a direct knowing of God, and Truth in the Spirit.
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In part 2 of our discussion of the physics of David Bohm reflected in the work of Hegel, Brad and I lay out the significance of Bohm's theory as it overlaps with Hegel's philosophy and also discuss the role of preaching, connected to these difficult topics.
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Paul Axton preaches: The slaying of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the justification of this slaughter and its denial points us to Christ's exposure of the blind murderers who killed him in the name of law and order. Beyond this evil, there is a third tier of evil which acknowledges Christ's exposure of evil but which is now using this insight to manipulate the blind.
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Brad and Paul, so as to explain recent blogs and podcasts, discuss Hegel's Logic as it applies to the quantum reality and theory of David Bohm and which describes how it is that Christ unifies all things, bringing together mind and matter through the understanding that thought or cognition is ultimate reality. Paul's depiction of two kinds of letter is the point of entry.
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Ethan Vanderleek, a specialist on William Desmond describes to Paul, Desmond's project and its overlap with the Christology of Rowan Williams. William Desmond is one of our most important living philosophers, and Ethan explains how he poses a true metaphysical alternative to both modernism and postmodernism.
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Paul, Nate, Jed, Karl, and Jim discuss how it is that meaning is always embodied, and how misorientation to the body constitutes sin, and salvation through Christ's body entails a new embodied meaning extended to all.
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Paul Axton preaches: The living letters brings together embodiment and meaning in the particulars of incarnation, and this is reflected in quantum mechanics and modern biology as discussed by David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake. The letter that kills is on the order of a materialism which empties out meaning from embodiment.
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Paul, Karl, Andy, and Jim discuss the role of language in Anselm and its development through Descartes into foundationalism, and pose the idea of personalism, found in Christ, as the resolution to this universal tendency to trade the impersonal for the personal.
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Paul Axton preaches: Corinthians says, "you are a letter of Christ" and this living letter resolves the problem of the letter or language that is deadly. The resolution between the difference between God and Creation, subject and object, or all seemingly unbridgeable differences inherent to language, psychology, philosophy, and law (summed up as "the letter that kills") are bridged in the living letter, or what Maximus calls the logoi.
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In this continued discussion of how the Constantinian shift impacted Christianity, Nate, Karl, Jim, Andrew and Paul, discuss the loss of non-violence, the turn from Christian ethics and the Sermon on the Mount, the turn to violent atonement, and the shift in the conception of authority and the church. A different "common sense" arose that pervaded every area of life so as to displace the uniqueness of Christian identity.
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Paul Axton preaches, describing the transformed mind, or knowing God as the suspension of the common Jewish and Enlightenment notion of God and, recognized by Hegel. Paul's suspension of the law and Hegel's negation of the negation as the displacement of a mediated notion of God and direct knowing in Christ, are making the same argument about the necessity to cease believing in the God of the law so as to believe in the Father of Christ.
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In this discussion of how it is that Christianity became a religion, much like other religions, Paul, Nat, Jim, Andrew and Karl, discuss the impact of the Constantinian shift, the rise of Divine Satisfaction, the turn to a closed understanding of the world, and the relinquishing of the revolutionary nature of the faith.
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Paul Axton preaches: The theme of Mathew captured in Immanuel, is completed in the Lord's Supper, in which the efficacious presence of God is made to bear on the lives of believers in what Hegel calls "actualized Christian Freedom." There is freedom from the violence of blood spilled in the taking up of the blood of Christ in the life of believers.
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Paul Axton preaches: In this Christmas Sermon the role of presence ("God with us") and absence is traced in Scripture as the primary theme fulfilled in Christ; a theme also recognized in postmodern philosophy.
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In this continuation of discussions of sin and salvation, Paul Axton takes up and expands upon the early church understanding of recapitulation as an all-embracing understanding of atonement that accounts for the New Testament and the focus on the new divinized humanity found in Christ.
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In a continuation of the discussion of the nature of sin and salvation and hermeneutics, the discussion turns to how the rule of faith, or biblical hermeneutics centered on the person of Christ, brings out Christ's deliverance from the human predicament through his defeat of the rule of death over human lives. This is not an answer defined by law, but a deliverance from this orientation.
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In this new series on sin and salvation, Paul Axton introduces a series on theories of atonement, beginning with Christ as the "rule of faith" interpreting Scripture and exegeting God. The issues of psychological healing in connection to death drive, cosmic bondage and apocalyptic deliverance, and the eternality of the historical Christ are introduced.
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In this talk Paul Axton gave at a local restaurant, the focus is on outlining the Gospel of Matthew as Jesus as Temple recapitulation, the implication of which is Jesus taking up the historical, social, and legal situation of the Temple and Israel, and this is worked out by Gillian Rose and G.W.F. Hegel as addressing the injustice of the law and the Temple or the City of Man.
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Brad and Paul discuss the work of Wittgenstein, Maximus, Hegel and Bulgakov as they converge on embodied synthesis in Christ and then extend the conversation to the synthesis of Scripture overcoming the contention in Job, Daniel, Maccabees, and Jonah over the split and violent or unified and peaceable image of God.
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In a continuation of the discussion of Philosophy of Science, the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake about the dogmatism of science, leads to a discussion of the work of Christopher Kaiser on the creationist tradition and the development of science.
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This discussion of the teleological argument takes us into modern philosophy of science and the debate between Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi. Paul Axton demonstrates the superiority of Polanyi's thought as reaching beyond Kuhn's stunted understanding.
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Paul Axton preaches: Jesus sign in the Temple is not simply pointing to the need to clean up the pricing system but to halt the economy of violent sacrifice and to deliver his sheep into an alternative nonviolent way of being human.
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In this discussion Paul Axton explains the failure of William Lane Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument and how it is that Origen of Alexandria provides the resolution in his view of time and eternity brought together in Christ.
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Paul Axton preaches: Jesus says he will provide no sign other than that of Jonah to the Jews, which is a kind of non-sign in their value system. Jesus, like Jonah, presents a very different picture of God than Nahum and the Jews of Jonah and Jesus generation. This God cares for all and would go to the depths of the earth to retrieve everyone.
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Continuing our discussion in Imaginative Apologetics, we discuss the view of the embodied understanding of Maximus and Hegel reflected in Wittgenstein in which the world is synthesized through embodiment and language.
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Paul Axton preaches: Do we respond to empire with the resurrection faith of the nonviolent martyrs of Daniel and Maccabees or with the violence of the Mattathias and his friends in the Maccabean revolt. Jesus identity with the Son of Man of Daniel and his invoking the nonviolent response to the coming desolation and destruction portrayed in Maccabees provides the resolution to how to respond to evil empires.
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Brad and Paul reflect on the course recently completed with Anthony Bartlett, and discuss how this picture of a semiotic shift surrounding Christ serves as an alternative reading of the Bible and reality.
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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon compares two understandings of Israel and God as presented in Nehemiah, Ezra, and Ruth, with Ruth the Moabite foreigner serving in the messianic line and as a kinsman redeemer through her faithful loving kindness, over and against the retributive picture of God and exclusive picture of Jews in Ezra and Nehemiah.
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Notre Dame Professor Emmanuel Katongole, founder of Bethany Land Institute in Uganda, describes the theology and work of nonviolence in a world divided by violence and hatred.
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Paul Axton preaches: There are competing images of God in the Bible between a God of law and vengeance and the God of mercy and love. This contention is resolved in Christ in which true deity is found in the face of the forgiving human victim, and this highlights a theme traceable throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.
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Frederick Bauerschmidt describes the practical work of teaching about the peace of Christ in the Catholic Church when violent Christian nationalism is the norm.
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Paul Axton preaches: History is of eternal significance in that it pertains to God's identity, and the impact of this significance is in its liberation from an enslaving finite understanding into the liberating eternal reality of God found in Christ.
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Jordan Daniel Wood continues the conversation with Matt and Paul and in part 2 describes Hegel's picture of an inadequate notion of the infinite, and he pictures Hart as falling into this failed understanding, which explains Hart's rejection of Jordan's Maximian-Hegelian understanding.
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Paul Axton preaches: appealing to the work of Sergius Bulgakov, Axton develops the significance of God's presence in the name given to Moses, and then Christ's assumption of this name and the opening to all the possibility of dwelling in the name, which describes the possibility of God pouring himself out in and through human language.
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Jordan Daniel Wood, in conversation with Matt and Paul, explains the logic of Hegel as a natural development of Maximus' understanding of personhood, which also serves to address the failure of David Bentley Hart to grasp the paradigm shift Jordan is picturing in light of Hegel.
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In this talk at a gathering at a local restaurant (thus the country music in the background) Paul Axton presents the manner in which Christ defeats cosmic and personal trauma through the work of predestination.
The Erasure of Cosmic and Personal Trauma in the Lamb Crucified from the Foundation of the World
Roberto J. De Noval and Mark Roosien describe Bulgaokov's entry into speculative theology through Sophiology.If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.
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Paul Axton preaches: John identifies Jesus as the the rejected Logos, which means he is not the Greek logos, the Jewish logos, the philosophical logos, or the religious logos, or the logic, language, reason, or word that grounds this world’s systems of human thought. Martin Heidegger is the prime example of recognizing the violence of the Greek logos, and then of presuming the Logos of Christ is a continuation of the same. René Girard brings out the absolute difference, developed most completely by Anthony Bartlett.
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Roberto J. De La Noval and Mark Roosien describe to Brad and Paul their encounter with Sergius Bulgakov and detail his understanding of universal salvation in its personal implications.
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Paul Axton preaches: Rene Girard pictures the body of the scapegoat as the original sign and signification, which accords with the depiction of religion in the Bible and in the religions of the world, and Christ directly reverses this sign and provides a new order of meaning.
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Matt and Paul talk with David Artman, author and host of the podcast Grace Saves All. In this conversation we discuss how universal redemption is necessarily through Christ and may be completed through and beyond death. David also details his recent reading and podcasts on the rise of fascism through Pentecostalism.
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Paul Axton preaches: Death and judgment are not the end of the story in Scripture but either the continuation of the work begun in Christ or a restorative judgment in which all are drawn into restoration and salvation.
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The author of the book and podcast "Grace Saves All," David Artman, describes his entry into universalism and the development of his book and raises the issue of its playing the role of a theodicy.
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Paul Axton preaches: In this sermon, linking the left/brain right/brain theory of Iain McGilchrist with Paul's distinction between letter and Spirit, a connection is made between how it is the left hemisphere of the brain can take predominance in the same way the law can become its own end, and this is suspended in the opening up of Christ to the thought of God on the order of a full utilization of the right brain.
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In this continuation of our podcasts on Imaginative Apologetics, Paul addresses the moral argument as posed by Kant, and traces his coining the term "radical evil" and provide illustrations showing this is not simply a philosophical but a real world cause and effect - certain conceptions of morality are directly linked to the worst forms of evil.
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Paul Axton preaches: When asked the reason for following Christ, Axton poses a one word answer upon which he builds an alternative understanding to the partial answer of being saved and shows that the choice is between meaning or no meaning.
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In part 2 J. Denny Weaver, the foremost Mennonite thinker, describes the role of the Church as an alternative peaceable kingdom to the violent kingdoms of the world.
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In part 1 of a 2 part conversation Paul and Brad interview J. Denny Weaver, the most prominent theologian among contemporary Mennonites, on his understanding of the atonement he calls "narrative Christus Victor."
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In this second part of our conversation with Girard expert, Anthony Bartlett, we discuss the upcoming class Anthony will teach and also discuss the necessity to go beyond Girard to the fulness of peace and nonviolence of the Gospel.
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Anthony Bartlett describes his departure from the Priesthood and passage through The Little Brothers of Jesus and his discovery of René Girard and entry into a nonviolent reading of Scripture and an alternative community of peace.
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In Part 2 on discussion of the Eucharist the focus on the role of the Holy Spirit, the bringing together sign and signified, in a new humanity of peace realized in deep communion and practice are discussed.
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Paul Axton preaches: The kingdom of Christ, the church, is the all encompassing work of Christ in defeating evil, and the kingdoms of this world, so as to be all in all and to reign over all.
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What happens when a Baptist, an Episcopalian, an Eastern Orthodox, a Roman Catholic, and a non-denominational Christian discuss the Eucharist? Brad, Brian, Matt, Jonathan, and Paul arrive at a point of convergence which relies upon a depth of history, very much associated with the Eastern tradition.
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Paul Axton preaches: The slaughter in Gaza demonstrates the bankruptcy of premillennialism, dispensationalism, and Christian Zionism, all of which deny the basic teaching that the work of the cross has defeated sin, death and the devil. The genocidal teaching displacing the Gospel, and which Christ identifies with blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, is now the predominant religion of the land.
(Sign up for the class Human Language, Signs of God: using Anthony Bartlett’s two books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics and Signs of Change, as one continuous argument. Underlying this sequence is the core perception that language is the privileged medium by which the biblical God, the God of nonviolence, is revealed to us. If God is going to invite us into a new sense and meaning of what it is to be human this has to happen through language, that is through "signs of God." Theology Beyond Metaphysics introduces the thought of semiotics and specifically in relation to the anthropology of Rene' Girard. Signs of Change traces a pathway of semiotic change of meaning through the text of the whole Bible. The course will run from 2025/9/16 to 2025/11/4. Register here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/)
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In part 2 of our conversation with Benard Perret he describes the role of the satan, or the complex nature of mimetic desire and the obstacle cause of desire which gives rise to violence and murder.
(Sign up for the class Human Language, Signs of God: using Anthony Bartlett’s two books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics and Signs of Change, as one continuous argument. Underlying this sequence is the core perception that language is the privileged medium by which the biblical God, the God of nonviolence, is revealed to us. If God is going to invite us into a new sense and meaning of what it is to be human this has to happen through language, that is through "signs of God." Theology Beyond Metaphysics introduces the thought of semiotics and specifically in relation to the anthropology of Rene' Girard. Signs of Change traces a pathway of semiotic change of meaning through the text of the whole Bible. The course will run from 2025/9/16 to 2025/11/4. Register here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/)
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Paul Axton preaches: The point of judgement, "When you have done it to the least of these you have done it to me," puts the full weight of the eternal in the finite, which is the form of the incarnation. Eternity has invaded time, and to continue in a consciousness that separates them is the failed ethics and consciousness Christ defeats in his uniting God and humanity.
(Sign up for the class Human Language, Signs of God: using Anthony Bartlett’s two books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics and Signs of Change, as one continuous argument. Underlying this sequence is the core perception that language is the privileged medium by which the biblical God, the God of nonviolence, is revealed to us. If God is going to invite us into a new sense and meaning of what it is to be human this has to happen through language, that is through "signs of God." Theology Beyond Metaphysics introduces the thought of semiotics and specifically in relation to the anthropology of Rene' Girard. Signs of Change traces a pathway of semiotic change of meaning through the text of the whole Bible. The course will run from 2025/9/16 to 2025/11/4. Register here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/)
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In part 1 of a two part episode, Benard Perret explains the significant depth and development of Girard's theory as an alternative to Anselm and as a further development of Karl Rahner's understanding that God gives himself in revelation. Perret explains how Girard's theory takes account of the violence of Scripture, bringing a unity otherwise lacking.
Sign up for the class Human Language, Signs of God: using Anthony Bartlett’s two books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics and Signs of Change, as one continuous argument. Underlying this sequence is the core perception that language is the privileged medium by which the biblical God, the God of nonviolence, is revealed to us. If God is going to invite us into a new sense and meaning of what it is to be human this has to happen through language, that is through "signs of God." Theology Beyond Metaphysics introduces the thought of semiotics and specifically in relation to the anthropology of Rene' Girard. Signs of Change traces a pathway of semiotic change of meaning through the text of the whole Bible. The course will run from 2025/9/16 to 2025/11/4. Register here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/)
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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon touches upon the possibility of acting upon the lie of radical evil, as in the case of Lamech, and the counter to this in the enactment of divine grace in infinite forgiveness.
(Sign up for the class Human Language, Signs of God: using Anthony Bartlett’s two books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics and Signs of Change, as one continuous argument. Underlying this sequence is the core perception that language is the privileged medium by which the biblical God, the God of nonviolence, is revealed to us. If God is going to invite us into a new sense and meaning of what it is to be human this has to happen through language, that is through "signs of God." Theology Beyond Metaphysics introduces the thought of semiotics and specifically in relation to the anthropology of Rene' Girard. Signs of Change traces a pathway of semiotic change of meaning through the text of the whole Bible. The course will run from 2025/9/16 to 2025/11/4. Register here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/)
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John Dear, the world renowned peace activist, describes his theological focus on practicing the Sermon on the Mount.
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Brad and Paul discuss sin, not as a legal failure giving rise to guilt, but as a loss of the divine model due to the obstacle posed by sin (a very different understanding of missing the mark) and the recovery of this model in Christ. This serves as an explanation of the sermon which follows the discussion.
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John Dear describes to Brad and Paul his life of peacemaking with Jesus along with his friends the Berrigans, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, and others, recommending doing the Sermon on the Mount rather than simply studying about it.
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Paul Axton preaches: The vision of the apocalypse in which the slain Lamb reigns through nonviolent defeat of violence and death is the impetus behind the resistant nonviolence of the Sermon on the Mount. The interlocking logic of the vision and practice points to the necessity of universal salvation as the goal behind the practice.
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William Desmond describes the danger of the "all and all" in an Eastern sensibility, of subsuming all things into one rather than preserving difference. He describes the prejudice against belief and his preservation of Christian faith against the philosophical tide of the academy.
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Paul Axton Preaches: The Jewish confusion between God and evil results from the projection of their violence onto God, which Jesus identifies as marking their paternity as children of the Devil. The Jewish captivity to the lie of sin, is the human problem Jesus exposes and defeats, by defeating the power that killed him on the cross.
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William Desmond explains his reading of the Metaxological as the recovery of metaphysics as a being between, and he describes his deep reading of Hegel and points out the failure of the positive reading of Hegel in Rowan William and Gillian Rose, and debunks the Žižekian reading as untrue to Hegel.
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Paul Axton preaches: The saving peace of Christ is universal in its cosmic scope, inclusive of the world, all people, and everything about them, delivering from the violence of the world, infected by human violence.
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In this final discussion of Hegel and Anselm, the contrast between the two in the personal and propositional is brought out, with the idea that God's person is given to us in Christ (poured out in kenotic love) and in this sense can be known.
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Paul Axton preaches: Christ, in the kenotic love of the cross and incarnation, opens God to knowing and by imitating Christ there is a suspension of the oppressive understanding of God, the law, and the self, and the experience of the Spirit. The background to this kenotic interpretation is in Hegel's philosophy which is characterized by this kenotic understanding.
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In this lecture Paul Axton traces the early church's understanding of the Logos as the incarnate Christ, the sensibility preserved best in the East and taken up in Hegel's doctrine of atonement.
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Paul Axton preaches: Following the development of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his expanded Christocentrism and departure from Luther's notion of the two kingdoms, this sermon calls for a clear delineation between Christian Nationalism and authentic Christianity. The failure to delineate gave rise to National Socialism in Germany and is giving rise to fascism in the United States.
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Paul Axton describes Rowan Williams' reinterpretation of Hegel, which accords with Axton's reading of Hegel's work on the philosophy of religion and Anselm's ontological argument. In this understanding, Hegel provides an orthodox Eastern-like sensibility of the necessity of Trinity for thought.
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Paul Axton preaches: Romans 4 describes the experience of the sublime, in which the individual recognizes their unifying center outside of themselves, and are thus enlarged and liberated from the world.
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William Cavanaugh describes to Brad and Paul how the state came to dominate the Church, using Chile as a case study, and drawing links between Pinochet and Trump in the outworking of fascism through Christian nationalism in the US and in models such as Victor Orbán in Hungary.
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Paul Axton preaches: The Lord's Supper is instituted originally against Egypt, Rome, and Israel, but the Eucharistic power has been coopted by the modern state such that nationalism and capitalism have become the modern liturgy, which can only be resisted through the power of bodying forth Christ in the original Eucharistic sense.
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In this continued discussion of imaginative apologetics it is argued that the possibility of knowing is not contained within thought, the possibility and impossibility posed from Anselm, Descartes, and Kant, but as Hegel argues, it is contained in the personhood of God revealed in Christ.
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Tim Turner and Paul discuss the work of the Macedonia Project and the opportunity to come to Japan for a mission internship. Contact the macedoniaprojectjapan@gmail.com or visit https://macedonianprojectjapan.com/
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Brad and Paul discuss the new monthly online fellowship as part of the necessary work of making peace through deep friendships and theology. The antagonism of the institution to the fullness of the gospel may require alternative means of finding fellowship. Send an email to paulv.axton@gmail.com or to bradklingele@gmail.com in order to be put on the fellowship list.
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Paul Axton Preaches: The theology undergirding Donald Trump's expansion of presidential power is that of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, built upon nominalism and voluntarism, the opposite of Jesus Christ as Logos and Lord. In this understanding the rule of law through the political leader displaces Christ's defeat of death and evil, and leaves law and fear as primary and necessitates a sovereign political leader.
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Anthony Bartlett, a leading Girardian theologian who has extended Girard's theory into a more complete description of the the semiotic or meaning shift which takes place in our orientation to signs through Christ, here explains how it is that hominization results in an orientation to death that Christ releases us from in his death and resurrection and in our taking up the cross.
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Paul Axton preaches: In the debates over Christology there were two clear tendencies in which the Alexandrians embraced the paradox of Jesus as God and the Antiochenes attempted to rationalize the suffering and death of Jesus through two natures. This has resulted in an obscuring of the identity of Christ in much of Christianity.
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Anthony Bartlett, a leading scholar of René Girard, describes Girardian theory as precisely not the understanding given to it by Peter Thiel and right-wing Girardians (would be kingmakers in an authoritarian state). In a Girardian reading of the "sign of Jonah" Jesus and Christianity are anti-imperial, anti-oppressive authoritarianism. "A Christianity that would deploy Girardian insights for power and violence are of the anti-Christ."
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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon looks at the radical New Testament depiction of Christ and its implications, and the failure to fully acknowledge this understanding in various heresies or simply the tendency to delimit the discussion such that it falls shore of acknowledging the story of Jesus is the story of God.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty discuss the upcoming class on Colossians and Christology, which will utilize the historical development of Christology detailed by Rowan Williams, in arriving at an applied and practical understanding of the person and work of Christ.
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Paul Axton preaches: Wittgenstein, Hegel, and Moltmann unite in describing the resurrection as opening up the life of Christ as the story of God, and the central interpretive key of faith.
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Paul and Jim look at the ontological argument as an example of the basic human impetus to secure the self, to gain being, in and through language. The work of the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva explains this basic human drive and how the cross breaks open this narcissistic self to become open to others and community.
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Paul Axton preaches: The theological reason for the death of Christ should begin with the historical reality of what killed him and what he defeated in his death and resurrection; namely Israel, Rome, the law, and the principalities and powers behind the reification of death and law.
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The Canadian broadcaster David Cayley describes his groundbreaking interviews with the thinker and theologian Ivan Illich, in which Illich describes how it is the very best, the church, became the very worst, in modernity.
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Paul Axton Preaches: Romans 3:25 is a key verse in determining Christ's relationship to the Temple. Is he a sacrifice of atonement to be fit into the Temple and Law, or is he the (hilasterion) Mercy Seat providing access to revelation of righteousness which is salvation?
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In part 2 of Brad and Paul's conversation with the theologian James Alison, the role of the church in marriage, divorce and the role of Church law are discussed especially as it relates to issues of gender and homosexuality.
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Paul Axton preaches: What Paul calls the ministry of death, is accentuated and exposed in the murder of Jesus, due to Jesus teaching and action in the Temple. The temple deals in the death of animals, which did not touch upon the deadly attitude of the human heart, and Jewish response to his interruption of the killing is the motive for killing Jesus bring this ministry of death to an end.
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Brad and Paul interview the Girardian theologian James Alison concerning the pastoral and practical application of Girard, and how this relates to the sexual crisis in Catholicism.
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Paul Axton preaches on the inadequacy of now and not yet as a characterization of the Christian life. Victory in Christ holds out a fullness of truth, a complete adoption, and the reality of escaping evil.
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Anselm's deployment of the ontological argument leads directly to the closed whole of his atonement theory in divine satisfaction, all of which depends upon the reification of language resisted and corrected in Hegel, and noted by Paul.
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In the story of the Good Samaritan Jesus sets love above custom, law, and religious institutions but the corruption of this very best also poses the possibility of the very worst, in the words of Ivan Illich, in the institutionalization of the Church.
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John Pearson describes his work with the homeless and in sustainable farming leading to his work with wounded ministers through Ministry Support Services International https://www.mssint.org/
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The fundamental lesson of the incarnation is that embodiment in general is the carrier of meaning a meaning for death or life, and that His embodiment is the fullness of meaning, life, extended universally.
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In Part 2 of this 2 part conversation, Jon, Matt, and Paul, discuss the possible meanings and impact of David Bentley Hart's recent confession and discuss various alternative interpretations.
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Personhood is definitive of God and humanity, meaning the relational, the infinite, and the universal, are inherent to truth, rather than the foundational, the propositional, the doctrinal, or the institutional, which reduce to the impersonal. Personal truth and knowledge overcomes the reductionistic, finite, and limited systems of this world.
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In Part 1 of this 2 part conversation, Jon, Matt, and Paul, discuss the positive impact of the work of David Bentley Hart and consider what his recent confession might mean in understanding his work.
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The focus on Christ's faithfulness rather than merely our faith in Christ, creates a more holistic understanding of faith than an interior intensity of belief, focused on Christ as object. Faithfulness is Christocentric rather than anthropocentric, incorporating ethics and embodiment of the living out of faith in Christ.
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Matt, Paul, and Jon continue the discussion of the baptist vision set forth by Stanley Hauerwas and James McClendon, focusing on unity and contrasting it with the forced and violent unity of Christendom.
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Ephesians 3:10 describes the work of Christ as recapitulation, which is inclusive of all that it means to be human, and can be described as a different human experience and psychical difference.
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John, Matt, and Paul, inspired by articles by C. J. Dull, discuss the baptist vision set forth by Stanley Hauerwas and James McClendon, and discuss how this provides for a first order unity in the person and work of Christ.
Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings
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In this sermon, the witness of Scripture to Christ and Christ as interpretive key to Scripture is spelled out, using the Gospel of John and Paul's illustration in Corinthians concerning Moses.
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In this first podcast on Imaginary Apologetics, it is noted that Anselm's ontological and cosmological arguments pose a logic developed in his atonement theory, focused on a foundational logic, and this is contrasted with Hegel's understanding that the ontological argument is dependent on Christianity and the Person of Christ. Hegel is working from a Maximian-like understanding in which Christ brings together thought and being while Anselm does not reference Christ in the core of the argument.
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Philippians 3:13 describes a stretching forth, in which the past (failures and achievements) are forgotten as part of the focus on the goal of attaining to likeness of Christ. Gregory of Nyssa portrays this Pauline understanding as the eternal dynamic of life in Christ which offers true stability and peace.
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The transformative power in conversion and salvation flows backward, redeeming all of our life, so that the end is in the beginning. Our finite lives make sense as they are stretched out in the beginning and end that is Christ. This self-transcendence is realized in being woken up religiously to the love of God, morally to others, intellectually to the cosmic Christ, and psychically or emotionally to the fruits of the spirit.
Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings
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Here is part 2 of the 2 part discussion of the upcoming course Sin and Salvation. John, Matt, and Paul, discuss their theological journey as a journey of friendship. (Sorry, the previous podcast was duplicated but here corrected.)
Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings
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Matt, John and Paul discuss the upcoming course with PBI, Sin and Salvation, which focuses on the peace of Christ, and which pictures the theological journey as only cohering as a continuing journey, in which the beginning is in the end, as with Christ.
Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings
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In part 2 of discussion of Flannery O'Connor, David, Jonathan, and Paul discuss how her depiction is an explicit defeat of liberal and pietistic notions which believe in the natural competency of the soul. Only an acknowledgement of judgment, evil, and purgation, even as part of a universal salvation, is adequate for the reality of the human condition.
(Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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In this discussion Jonathan Heaps, Head of the Lonergan Institute at Seton Hall University, Editor of the Lonergan Review, and author of The Ambiguity of Being: Bernard Lonergan and the Problems of the Supernatural, describes his upcoming class with PBI on Bernard Lonergan. Jonathan describes the resolution that Lonergan brings to the modern theological impasse, a breakthrough broached by nouvelle théologie and ressourcement, but completed by Lonergan.
(Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Colossians 1:15-20 stands at the center of the logic of the New Testament, taken up by Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, Maximus, and in the modern period is recovered by Robert Jenson (among others). Apart from this understanding, that Christ is the realization of the eternality of God, Christianity becomes unintelligible.
(Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Jordan Wood brings his series on Maximus to a conclusion, summing up his views on nature, hierarchy, and the possibility of annihilation.
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David, Jonathan, and Paul in part 1 of this 2 part podcast discuss the novels and short stories of Flannery O'Connor and their challenge to a modern liberal worldview, with their portrayal of inexplicable evil and love.
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Jordan Wood describes key texts in patristics and philosophy and then describes the similarities between Hegel and Maximus.
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Herod lied to the wisemen about his intent, pretending to want to worship Jesus, but slaughtered the innocent children of Bethlehem in an attempt to kill any rival. This provides a working principle for understanding the facade of piety among rulers and the powerful and how to understand the continued slaughter of the innocent in Palestine and elsewhere. It clarifies the mandate for the people of God to be citizens of the Kingdom of God rather than citizens of this world.
(Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Jordan Wood leads a discussion on Maximus' view of the all-embracing and unbelievable love of God as the work being accomplished through the Trinity, in synthesis, personhood, and divine humility.
(Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Mary consented to the formation of Christ within her womb, and Paul calls all people to consent to Christ being formed within. The other choice is bearing the subpersonal image.
(Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method": "Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1904 - 1984) came to see the development of a modern scholarly method for theology as one of the most pressing challenges of 20th-century Christian thought. This course follows how Lonergan's view of theological method as a task and a problem developed on the way to his 1972 book, Method in Theology, and its major breakthrough: functional specialization." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Jordan Wood explains Maximus' understanding of the limited role of nature in universal salvation, which unlike in David Hart's theology in which nature contains the full potential of deification and salvation, there is the necessity of realization in time and history of the actual working out of salvation and the defeat of evil beyond nature in personhood.
Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method": "Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1904 - 1984) came to see the development of a modern scholarly method for theology as one of the most pressing challenges of 20th-century Christian thought. This course follows how Lonergan's view of theological method as a task and a problem developed on the way to his 1972 book, Method in Theology, and its major breakthrough: functional specialization." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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The Lord's Prayer is answered by Christ in the incarnation and parallels and echoes the prayer of Mary and Zacharias as each of us become the bearers of the incarnate Christ through freely carrying out "Thy Will" in enacting the Kingdom of God on Earth.
Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method": "Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1904 - 1984) came to see the development of a modern scholarly method for theology as one of the most pressing challenges of 20th-century Christian thought. This course follows how Lonergan's view of theological method as a task and a problem developed on the way to his 1972 book, Method in Theology, and its major breakthrough: functional specialization." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Jordan follows Maximus argument of deification to conclude that personhood, whether divine or human is not reducible or achievable apart from the reality of the person of Christ (in contradistinction from the work of David Bentley Hart's syllogistic understanding).
(Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method": "Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1904 - 1984) came to see the development of a modern scholarly method for theology as one of the most pressing challenges of 20th-century Christian thought. This course follows how Lonergan's view of theological method as a task and a problem developed on the way to his 1972 book, Method in Theology, and its major breakthrough: functional specialization." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Human conceptuality and understanding is limited by binaries, differences and irresolvable dualisms, but Paul describes the synthesizing work of Christ as a knowledge exceeding human conceptuality.
(Sign up for the upcoming class, "Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method": "Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1904 - 1984) came to see the development of a modern scholarly method for theology as one of the most pressing challenges of 20th-century Christian thought. This course follows how Lonergan's view of theological method as a task and a problem developed on the way to his 1972 book, Method in Theology, and its major breakthrough: functional specialization." The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Jordan Wood lays out Maximus explanation of the Lord's Prayer, which not only explains how prayer can both seek action from God and change the one praying, but accords with the logic of creation as incarnation.
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Jordan Wood addresses the determinate good and love of Christ, in contrast to abstractions, and addresses the Neo-Platonism of Hart and Milbank, and the true orthodoxy of Hegel, as opposed to the received neo-Kantianism of Lonergan.
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Jordan Wood, in part two of a three part series on Maximus' Mystagogia, describes the paradoxical relationship between church and world, soul and body, idealism and realism, the apophatic and cataphatic, and creation and incarnation, demonstrating that these independent realms are integrated and interdependent.
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In Romans 13:1, it was under the darkest of circumstances that Paul outlined the responsibility of Christians to the state. In light of the fact that Jesus has been slain and Paul himself will shortly be murdered, Christians can defeat the powers through the same revolutionary subordination, defeating death (the power of this world's kingdoms) and establishing a resurrection Kingdom through the particular form of Christian civil disobedience.
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Jordan Wood introduces the alternative logic of the incarnation in which the symbol is the symbolized, and usual modes of ordering cause and effect and time and eternity, the apophatic and cataphatic, or the Platonic and Aristotelian are surpassed.
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The two on the Road to Emmaus, illustrate that the embodied, the fleshly, the historical, the scriptural is inadequate in recognizing Christ. To be stuck with the literal, which describes this theological/political moment in the United States, can be likened (according to Maximus and Origen) to being consumed by fleshly desire, while desire directed to God in Christ is infinitely stretched out.
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Jordan Wood answers a series of questions concerning how Christ is to be conceived in regard to hierarchy, lower and higher, cause and effect, and Jordan depicts his embrace and occupation of the inside and outside of hierarchical order. He also discusses contemporary issues of biblical interpretation concerning the body and sexuality and how conscience and progress are to be applied to Bible reading.
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Christ precedes and makes possible the fact of Scripture, both in its writing and formation, but also in the continuing reading and exegesis of Scripture. This fact is the unifying center of the faith, in answer to the multiplicities of Christian faiths now exposed in this politic moment, pointing to a deep theological crisis.
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In this discussion of Maximus' paradoxical view of the space and time bending elements of the Word/Scripture as the continuation of incarnation, Scripture is set in the context of Christ as Word - the Word incorporating and incorporated into all things.
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This sermon on coming to Christ outside the city (Hebrews 13:12-14) traces the inevitable collapse of every civilization, and the attempt of Republican politicians such as JD Vance, Josh Hawley, and Donald Trump, and cultural warriors like Jordan Peterson and Peter Thiel, to weaponize Christianity to aid in civilizational war is equated with the offer of the Devil to Christ. This is a paraphrasing and reapplication of the important talk of Paul Kingsnorth in a talk at First Things.
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Maximus, unlike N. T. Wright or Peter Enns but like Origen and the Apostles, equates Scripture with the body, soul, and spirit of Christ, treating the inspiration of Scripture as continuing to occur through Christ, and not through the letter.
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The logic of Christ defeats the necessary logic surrounding death, in which life is fragmented and sequential in its beginning and end, but Christ's defeat of death introduces an order in which life reigns over death, and in this logic the life of Christ is an eternal reality, bringing together time and eternity, God and incarnation in a reciprocal relation in which beginning and end are united.
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In this conclusion to part 4, Jordan takes on the scholastic notion that creation and incarnation are not a necessity, suggesting that such a notion leaves us with no particular understanding of God or his love.
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The Gospel of John depicts a real world deliverance from fear, real world healing from sin and slavery, and this is captured in John's deployment of Passover and treatment of Isaiah and the Suffering Servant, in which human evil (not God) results in his suffering and God brings mercy and healing from out of his oppression. This stands in contrast to Calvin's depiction of God punishing Jesus because he is identified with the Azazel Goat, identifying him with sin and, in many Calvinist's view, hating Christ.
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The death of Christ encompasses all dying and the life of Christ encompasses all of life, so that every individual true beginning and end is to be found in Christ.
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Yom Kippur, the sacrifice of the Yahweh Goat and the sending of the Azazel Goat into the Abyss is the primary holy day for understanding the work of Christ. Clearly dividing and understanding the work of each goat arrives at a different meaning then those theories (like Calvin's) which fuse the work of the goats. Christ's life and death, like that of the Yahweh Goat, cleanses from sin, and the result of this cleansing is an end of exile and Sheol (the place of exile).
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Jordan Daniel Wood explains how Maximus' notion of the end is the beginning constitutes an understanding of salvation that encompasses and goes beyond legal understandings or ideas of Christus Victor.
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Christ connects to himself a long anti-sacrificial tradition in the prophets, connecting sacrifice with disobedience and violence, and not instituted by God. Christ sees himself as exposing the history of murder and murderous religion, but to reduce Christ to a propitiating sacrifice erases this central part of his message.
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Joy is integral to the Christian life as described by Peter, commanded by Paul, and as defined by love and mutual indwelling by Dionysius and Maximus, who describe this joy and love as ecstatic longing and giving, culminating in the kenotic love of Christ.
(To register for the upcoming class on René Girard with Michael Hardin, Rene Girard and Nonviolent Atonement, go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings. The Course will run from the second week of October to the first week in December.)
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Jordan Daniel Wood delineates two forms of evil, privation and false incarnation in Maximus, and also discusses the object of human desire as the determinate good of incarnation.
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The Lamb sacrificed from the foundation of the world is the singular Logos from which creation proceeds and holds together.
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Jordan Wood explains how it is that the processes of being human are exceeded by the telos of deification, the fulfillment or end but also the beginning of what it means to be human.
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The comprehensible yet infinite depth of the universe grounding modern science and medicine arises both through the understanding that God is legislator and creator and that in Christ this person is working not only as designer and sustainer but healer and controller, such that the person and not the laws are in control. This understanding was extended into science by the philosophy of Michael Polanyi who saw the necessity of the personal in faith for understanding the world.
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Jordan Wood, in this conclusion to the discussion on the person of Christ answers a series of questions on personhood and provides a unique insight into the foreknowledge of God in Christ.
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Jordan Wood, in this lecture discusses the personhood of Christ, the role or meaning of such terms as natural, Logos, and hypostatic union, and he critiques the work of David Bentley Hart in failing to grasp the implications of the neo-Chalcedonian understanding.
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Jordan Daniel Wood focuses in on the key passage in Maximus explaining the whole mystery of Christ as this pertains to all things, but particularly the role of personhood and identity in Christ.
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Jordan Daniel Wood concludes the discussion of Maximus and synthesis, explaining how Christ, even in the midst of sin and false synthesis or through the passions, brings all things together in his life and the life of the Christian.
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The Western tradition from Augustine and Descartes has developed focus on thought, propositions and doctrine separated from practice and ethics. This disembodied form of the faith stands in contrast to Paul's description of being embodied - living sacrifices and it contrasts with the Eastern understanding exemplified in Maximus the Confessor.
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Jordan Wood introduces the controversies surrounding the life of Maximus and also introduces the framework of his theology as cosmic incarnation, providing a synthesis for all things.
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In 2 Corinthians Paul describes the letter or scripture as deadly, as this unenduring reality is not an end in itself. Absolutizing the symbolic order in law or in some form of moral imperative leads directly to evil, not because this is a possible reality but because it obscures the truth that freedom comes from God and there is no autonomous realm of law, nature, reason, or will.
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In this concluding discussion of Orientalism Jon, Tim, Jim, Simon, Brian, Jonathan, and Paul, consider how human understanding is subject to cultural and nationalistic ideology, shaping science, psychology, and impacting Christianity, particularly in Japan and the United States.
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Peter says we are partakers of the divine nature, which the early church called theosis or divinization. This is a concept obscured by western atonement theories and the taking up of Greek philosophical thought, but which in G.W.F. Hegel is reappropriated and expressed as obtaining God's consciousness.
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John, Jim, Brian, and Paul discuss how Japan reversed western notions of orientalism, particularly in psychology, so as to create a unified national identity dealing in death in both inward self-identity and outward colonialism. Japan is a case in point of how cultures reify death and obscure the truth of what it means to be human.
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In Philippians 2 Paul spells out an alternative picture of God and reality which is often thought to be an exception, but God poured out in Kenotic love on the cross is an alternative conception of God, reality, truth, thinking and consciousness.
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Matt explains to Jon, Tim, Simon, Jim and Paul how Sergius Bulgakov's sophia provides and explanation for the wisdom to be found in the Gita and world religions.
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Christian nationalism, the Trump Bible (including the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence in the Bible), and Christian Zionism, confuse the City of God with the city of man and the Word of God with the word of man. It is a blasphemous religion on the order of the faith of Judaizers who would displace the Gospel with law and with the anti-Christ John warned would infiltrate the Church.
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Matt Welch, explains to Simon, Jim, Tim, Matthew, Jonathan, Brian, and Paul the work of Sergius Bulgakov on sophiology and how this provides an opening for understanding world religions.
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Christianity is proven in a lived faith, obedience, and love and does not depend upon arguments or evidences other than those living proofs of the embodied faith.
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Jonathan, Matt, Jim, Brian, Matthew and Paul review the development of Girard's picture of the development of sacrificial religion, the darkness of human desire and rivalry, and tie this into shame and the Janus faced God in Hinduism, Vedantic religion, and Christianity gone bad.
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Apologetic arguments often implicitly misconstrue the nature of Christian truth, which John describes as being witnessed to by the Trinity and this divine Testimony, John says, is present within the believer.
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Paul, Tim, Jim, Matt, and Simon discuss how it is that Rene Girard's theory explains and exposes myth and how this applies to the human condition in general.
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The only route to knowing God as Abba, according to Jürgen Moltmann, is through the crucified God on the cross. This God displaces the oppressive law-giving God of wrath, the God of paganism, but also the oppressive super-ego father of the human psyche. Through Christ we are liberated from the defense mechanism inclusive of the Unmoved Mover - the defense mechanism against death which enslaves.
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Jim, David, Tim, Simon, and Paul discuss the work of Rene Girard and its unfolding in the novel, as illustrated in both Western and Japanese literature.
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Tim, Simon, Matt, and Paul discuss how a practical salvation is a 4th category, distinguished from inclusivism, exclusivism, and pluralism in that it is simultaneously universal and specific to the salvation to be found in Christ. How this then provides an approach to other religions is discussed.
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Jordan Peterson is not simply promoting conservative values but is setting forth his own notion of truth, which has captured many Christians. This sermon sets forth the alternative in which Christ is the Truth, which contrasts with the world's truth as set forth by Peterson.
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Simon, Tim, Matt, Jim, and Paul discuss how narrative theology or what is known as the Yale School or postliberalism defines Christianity as a community of practice, which can serve as entry into understanding religion in general. Following the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, narrative theologians such as George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, James McClendon and John Howard Yoder recognized doctrine and practice must be conjoined.
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In Philippians Paul portrays kenotic love as the very substance of divine reality, power, and truth, and it is in imitating this self-emptying love and not grasping after life that we become imitators of Christ and a community of the Spirit. This marks the central message of Paul rediscovered by Hegel.
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Trent Maxey, Professor at Amhurst College and author of "The Greatest Problem" runs down how Shinto as a native religion is an invention of the modern state in Japan, and how the "secular" state has used Shinto on the order of the American deployment of Christianity. He describes the dishonesty in supposed neutrality toward religion, and the difference with European religious tolerance.
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God is love is definitive of God's personhood and the opening of his personhood in Kenotic Love is the possibility of personhood. This personhood of knowing God is definitive of the personal and of what it means to know and think as persons.
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Trent Maxey, of Amhurst College and author of "The Greatest Problem" on delineating the role of the secular, political and religious in Japan, continues to address the problem of a too simple narrative of secular and religious, and even of the way power functions. Jim, Matt, Jon, Simon, and Paul join the discussion.
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Acknowledgement of God and access to wisdom, reason, and understanding of the self and the world are synonymous. Where Kant and the modern age deny access to God as foundation to reason, and attempt to establish foundations within reason, the Bible and Hegel point to God as the possibility giving rise to reason.
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Trent Maxey, Professor at Amhurst College and author of the book, "The Greatest Problem" describes the amorphous nature of Shinto, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam in connection with culture, economics, violence, and modernity. He questions the usual categories under which religion, east and west, is perceived and points to our continual enmeshment in religious-like issues such as capitalism and nationalism.
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The Prologue of John depicts the point of creation as incarnation and this is fulfilled through the Spirit. God would be known throughout creation as Christ knows him and makes him known, and this is the point of history and the work of the Spirit as depicted in John, developed by Origen and Maximus, and built upon by G.W.F. Hegel.
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Allan, Brian, Jonathan, Jim, Matt, and Paul discuss Charles Taylor's secularization thesis, its factuality and reality as compared with Derrida's theory of difference, Slavoj Žižek's primordial lie and the reality of the knowledge of good and evil, and then how it is that Bulgakov's Sophiology addresses the secondary nature of creaturely sophia.
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David Bentley Hart and Sergius Bulgakov provide the basis for this discussion between Matt, Simon, Tim, Jim, and Paul on how the antagonism in religion has folded into secularism to create a secular experiential reality for fundamentalists of both atheism and religion. Bulgakov's Sophiology once again points toward the synthesizing reality of Christ.
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Matt, Brian, Jason and Paul discuss the work of Sergius Bulgakov's sophiology in addressing transcendence and immanence and the futility connected to the new atheism, as compared to Slavoj Žižek's therapeutic atheism. The hope for goodness and truth as inherent to the personal faith journey is discussed.
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The final words of Jesus in Matthew summarize orthodox Trinitarian belief and the economy of salvation, and the Nicene Creed and Gregory of Nyssa take up this formula as the foundation for orthodoxy and combatting heresy and for describing the dynamics of sin (a dynamic of trinitarian absence) and salvation.
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In this continued introduction to World Religions and Cultures a review of the work of Rene Girard as it folds into Mircea Eliade and Peter Berger helps define the interactive roles of culture and religion as modes of orientation in identity, and as completed in Christ and the Church.
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In two passages from I and II Corinthians, Paul utilizes the mirror or mirroring to illustrate incompleteness and immaturity and fullness. He points to the focus on the spectral, the partial, the created - as in many religions which focus on the sun and its eclipse - as the problem. In Psychoanalysis this mirror stage is universal and without cure, but Paul depicts passage beyond the mirror stage in mirroring Christ.
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Jim, David, Tim, Brian and Paul discuss the possible relationships between Christ and culture, particularly in a secular age, and discuss the opposed positions of Mircea Eliade and Peter Berger and the resolution posed by David Bentley Hart and Sergius Bulgakov.
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The Council of Chalcedon, as read by Maximus the Confessor, provides a solution to the issue of difference and unity, the problem of the one and the many, or the answer to how their can be unifying love in a universe seemingly built on dualism, difference, and multiplicity.
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There are a variety of Christianities in which resurrection is excluded (theological liberalism), not needed (fundamentalism and penal substitution), or deemphasized (evangelicalism or pietism). The answer to the resurrectionless or semi-resurrectionless religions is the gospel, as the defeat of death, a cosmic salvation, a lived righteousness, a resurrection kingdom, lived in the Spirit now.
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In the conclusion to the interview with Girard specialist Michael Hardin, Michael explains how a non-sacrificial hermeneutic, taken up in the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience, given a Christological center is the dynamic for reading the Bible and understanding God, not through morality but in character and ethics. The notion of doubling, rivalry, the rise of passion, and the failure of evangelicalism in accounting for the Jesus Movement are also discussed.
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In John's account of the triumphal entry the resurrection of Lazarus triggers the events leading to Jesus' kingly reception, and then the turning of the crowd and his death as a scapegoat. Jesus exposes the history of violence and murder and explains his coming death as the defeat of Satan and the answer to mythic religious violence.
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In part one of this two part conversation, Michael Hardin, a leading expert on René Girard shows the direct parallels between Girard and Maximus on mimesis, desire, the object cause of desire, and the genealogy of violence, and how it is the very character of God, in kenotic love, delivers creation and the crown of creation from the futility of death.
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In this new series on world cultures and religions, Tim, Jon, Brian, David, Simon, and Paul discuss the impact of the secular on religion, creating a distinct category "religion" separate from culture in which faith and practice become visibly distinct. The obscuring role of religion in Peter Berger and Rene Girard are examples.
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The serpent points to a false desire, sin points to a false understanding of the law, and the idol poses a false god, which in each instance serves as an obstacle to what it promises, giving rise to the obstacle cause of desire. Christ exposes this scandalous lie, but Christ and the cross become a scandal or a stone of stumbling for those who continue to believe the lie, or he is the chief corner stone of a new form of worship for those who believe this truth.
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Matt and Paul discuss key points raised by Jordan Wood and his upcoming class for PBI concerning Hegel, concerning the depth of theosis, and the meaning of being subject to fire in a universal understanding of Christianity.
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Paul and Matt discuss with Jordan the upcoming course on Maximus, discussing Christ as the foundation of a reason bringing together the antinomies (or limits of reason) pointed out by Kant, accounted for in the post-Kantians and incorporated into Bulgakov's sophiology, and Jordan suggests an alternative reading of Hegel in which he is an orthodox Christian working out a form of thought on the order of Maximus.
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Jim, Jeff, Brian, and Paul discuss Paul's use of Isaiah's picture of the covenant with death, and universal deliverance and salvation, as an alternative reading to Romans 10-11, as opposed to justification theory.
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Jeff, Jim, Brian, and Paul discuss the role of the false teacher in Romans 9-11, Douglas Campbell's idea that works of the law was a problem which occurred only with the advent of Christianity, and the role of Christian Zionism and anti-Semitism in justification theory.
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Jeff, Jim, David, Brian, and Paul compare and contrast the Human Subject of chapter 7 and the reconstituted Subject of Romans chapter 8.
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Jim, Jeff, Brian, David, and Paul discuss Romans chapter 7 as providing a diagnosis of the human disease, in which the self is divided against itself. In Calvinism and justification theory this is presumed to be the normal Christian life, but this is Paul's picture of the human disease.
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In the conclusion to our discussion of Romans 6, Matt, Jim, Brian, David and Paul discuss the question as to how to describe the difference in the Christian life. God's universal plan of salvation and the reality of evil create the question whether there is an ontological distinction with those in Christ.
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Jim, David, Brian, Matthew, Jonathan, Matt, and Paul discuss how the law functions as a deep grammar giving rise to the antinomies of a dialectic which functions as an end in itself. Romans 6 describes baptism as the cure to this dialectical antagonism by being joined to the body of Christ in baptism. Here the sign no longer floats free of the signified.
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Jeff, Matt, Brian, Jon, David, and Paul discuss Louis Martyn's depiction of the Galatian heresy as captivity to the elementary principles as this can be equated with Douglas Campbell's picture of the false teacher, and how conversion pertains to mind transformation through deliverance from this cosmos through Christ as fundamental reason.
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Modernity and secularism in capitalism are made of the same stuff as Aaron's Golden Calf, captured in Paul's picture of the law as an idolatrous temptation, after Christ. The principalities and powers continue to reify that which has no substance and the Gospel exposes this idolatrous power.
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Matthew, Brian, Jon, Matt, Jeff, and Paul discuss how the false teacher's understanding has melded with the Augustinian misreading of Romans 5 to make law and sin the primary human problem, while in Paul's Gospel, the orientation to death is the cause of sin and the primary human problem.
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Treating the secular as a unique epoch in history runs the danger of reifying this reality as if it is a true description, when it is on a continuum with the age-old deception of the law of sin and death that has a grip on the human heart.
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Jim, Jeff, Brian, Matt, and Paul conclude their conversation about the false teacher, who embodies the human problem of reifying law and language, which is Paul's definition of sin and the psychoanalytic diagnosis of the human predicament.
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Antinomies, dualisms, alienation, and divide, are reflected in every realm of human thought from the psychological, the philosophical, gender relations, and even religion. Male/female, Plato/Aristotle, Spirit/flesh, sociology of religion/religious studies all represent a partial truth grounded in the lie of division and antagonism. Jesus Christ is the singular synthesis, bringing together that which cannot synthesize itself, thus he is healing, fulfilling and completing the fractured human image.
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Jon, Matt, Brian, Jim, Jeff, David and Paul compare and contrast two meaning systems and two alternative approaches to reality connected to two alternative understandings of justification by faith.
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Jim, Brian, Matt, and Paul contrast the teaching of Romans 1:18-32 with Paul's Gospel in the rest of Romans and in in Ephesians and Colossians, suggesting this may be the gospel (including its anthropology and theology) from hell, which Paul is refuting.
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Jim, Jeff, Matt, Brian, and Paul discuss the opening three chapters of Romans as it contrasts to Romans 5-8, and as treated in Douglas Campbell, so as to delineate Paul's unconditional Gospel from justification theory's fusion of the false Teacher with Paul, resulting in the conditional Gospel.
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Jon, Matt, and Paul discuss the outline and scope of the upcoming course on World Religions and Cultures, dealing with both a theology of religions and the interactions of particular religions with culture, including also the issue of Orientalism and reverse Orientalism, Girard's theory of myth and scapegoating, nationalism, and a close look at the Bhagavad Gita.
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Brian, Jim, Matt, Jeff, and Paul discuss how Campbell's theory of the Teacher accords with the psychoanalytic understanding of sin as a lie concerning the law, with all-pervasive consequences.
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The Wise Men of Matthew traditionally represent the Gentile world and religion, and demonstrate the best of religion and human thought is a guiding star to Christ.
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Brian, Jon, Matt, Jim, and Jeff raise central questions about Douglas Campbell's theory of the false teacher in Romans 1-3 and Paul Axton offers possible explanations.
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The Aramaic term transliterated into Greek, Maranatha, sums up the final word of the Bible which is the creative aim toward which human effort and human history are moving. This prayer encompasses the meaning of time's movement and history's end.
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In this introduction to Douglas Campbell's notion of the false teacher, Paul Axton explains justification theory, how it perverts Paul's Gospel, and the unconditional nature of Paul's Gospel. Jim, Brian, Jonathan and Matt act as interlocutors.
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The virgin birth is a sign of both the deity and humanity of Jesus. It signals the even more miraculous event of the incarnation, God with us, which reverses the typical human understanding portrayed in Plato's parable of the cave, which imagines the absolute requires escape from the created and material world.
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The birth of Immanuel, God with us, means that a Person is at the center of reality. Other forms of conceiving reality will conceive of the categories of the mind as ultimate and fall short of personhood, but Christmas means personalism is final and full reality.
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In this conclusion to Jordan Daniel Wood's depiction of his departure from Hart, he locates the specifics of their difference in Jordan's focus on the personhood of Christ, which embraces sequence, development, and progress historically and in the learning of individuals, where Hart seems to set this aside.
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Ever since the decree of Pope Nicholas in A.D. 1059, focus in the Eucharist has turned to the transformation of elements, rather than the transformation of persons into the person of Christ. Luther aggravates and moves the conversation forward, but the formula of Maximus combined with the developments of Aquinas and Luther, recaptures the early church understanding of the Love Feast.
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Jordan Daniel Wood lays out two possible understandings of David Hart's critique of his work on Maximus. He locates the central issue in Hart's depiction of nature, in which Hart would locate divinity but in which he would turn to the Person of Christ as uniting the natural and divine. Jonathan suggests that Bernard Lonergan's approach, dropping focus on nature but looking to human desire, may be a mediating understanding.
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In Corinthians, Paul says some are sick and dying due to their practice of the Lord's Supper. Is this crude magical thinking or does it accord with the picture in modern science of mind/body holism in which sick meaning systems give rise to literal sickness? Paul's answer is to be incorporated into the body of Christ, inclusive of a new ethic, a new love, a new economy, and a new humanity.
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Jonathan leads the discussion of Pope Francis's Laudato si', with Tim, Brian, Jim, Jon, Jeff, Allan and Paul. What is the proper use of technology, such that it does not become a violent and shaping force and remains a means (not an end)? Global warming and overpopulation, must be addressed not simply at a technological but at a theological level.
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The Lord's Supper is first known as the "love feast" which is both commanded by the New Testament and forbidden at the Council of Carthage, resulting eventually in the distorted meaning of the Mass. Correctly understood the love feast or eucharist is the enactment of the body of Christ - or the person of Christ - seen in sacrificial love. Literal reduction to blood and flesh reifies the sign and misses the person of Christ and the purpose of the meal, which is not to kill Christ but destroy what killed him in the lives of believers.
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Jonathan Totty leads the discussion with Brian, David, Jonathan, Allan, Jeff, and Paul on the once active social teaching of various churches, and the loss of this focus, and the return of Catholic Social Teaching as represented by Pope Francis.
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Matthew chapter 5 depicts Jesus' accomplishment or fulfillment of the law as a direct reference to his person, his teaching, and his kingdom which the Mosaic law only pointed toward. Jesus ushers in a righteousness that abrogates and contradicts the law, such that one cannot "keep" the law and be a follower of Jesus. One cannot hate the enemy, a requirement of the law, and follow Jesus.
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Jonathan, Matt, Matthew, Tim, Brian, Jim, David, and Paul continue their discussion of the book of Philemon, comparing it to Giorgio Agamben's notion of homo sacer, and Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and contrasting it to the letter from Pliny the Younger. Philemon as a worked example of revolutionary subordination is the Gospel in synopsis, and we discuss the practical way to apply the letter.
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Some Jewish authorities are advocating the obliteration of Gaza, as this is Israel's by divine fiat, but Jesus saw himself as true temple and ushering in the true kingdom.
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Tim, Jonathan, Brian, Jim, David, Matt, and Paul discuss how it is that the tiny book of Philemon fills out the revolutionary nature of the gospel in its undermining of slavery and the institution of a new social order. Slavery is the motif defining sin, yet in the history of reception of Philemon, the revolutionary challenge of the gospel to slavery was ignored, downplayed, and denied. Implicit in this overlooking of Philemon is the failure to recognize the world changing revolution of the gospel in its defeat of the enslavement of sin and the inauguration of a new social order.
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Mike Johnson has put on display the reigning religion of Christian Nationalism, in imagining God ordained his rise as Speaker so as to support Israel. The appeal to Romans 13 is a key part of this Christian Nationalism, but this misses the true message of Paul that the Christian defeat of evil government is not through fusion of church and state, but by Christian adherence to the Kingdom built on resurrection power not through directing the state power of death.
In part 2 of our conversation, John DePue explains the history of interpretation of Romans up to the Reformation, the manner in which Phoebe would have acted out the text, and how it is an apocalyptic reading avoids supersessionism or antisemitism.
See Beyond Justification (https://wipfandstock.com/9781532678981/beyond-justification/) , by Douglas Campbell and John DePue.
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The rise of Christian nationalism, first in England and then in the United States, has always been linked to Christian Zionism, which is now killing Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians. Ironically this is linked to Romans 11, where Paul sets forth the purposes of Israel to Christ, and refutes any eternalizing importance of the law or of ethnic Israel.
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John DePue explains to Jeff, Brian, Matt, David and Paul the historical and grammatical argument for reading Romans 1:18-32 and other places in Romans as Paul giving voice to the False Teacher.
See Beyond Justification (https://wipfandstock.com/9781532678981/beyond-justification/) , by Douglas Campbell and John DePue.
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Many, such as John Calvin, presume the law is definitive of the economy of salvation, and thus read Romans 7 as the normal Christian life. The tragic error of this misunderstanding is to confuse the lie of sin with the solution of Christ. The lie of this false teaching is brought out by contrasting chapters 7 (life under the law) & 8 (new life in Christ) of Romans.
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The law always has its transgressive support – doing a particular form of evil so as to produce a particular form of the good. The law generates this embodied deception. In Paul’s imagery, the body can be attached to either law (Paul uses the phrase, “body of sin”) or to the body of Christ, the issue is, which is the constituting environment?
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In part 2 of our conversation concerning the book Beyond Justification (https://wipfandstock.com/9781532678981/beyond-justification/) , by Douglas Campbell and John DePue, John describes the shortcoming of the new perspective, but particularly the programmatic failure of N. T. Wright, along with the unnecessary divisions which occur between justification, sanctification, revelation and salvation, in justification theory.
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In Part I of this two part conversation, Jonathan DePue, coauthor with Douglas Campbell, discusses their upcoming book (https://wipfandstock.com/9781532678981/beyond-justification/) with Paul, with particular focus on the problem of anti-Semitism in traditional Protestant justification theory.
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The typical understanding of salvation, or the typical Protestant understanding, is that all people recognize God and his righteousness, and experience the incapacity to keep the law. This inability to keep the law is definitive of both the human problem and the solution of the cross of Christ, and this explains the curse of the law. This sermon proposes an alternative understanding of the human problem and a different soteriology, based on an alternative reading of the curse of the law in Romans and Galatians.
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Brian, Matt, Jonathan, David, Austin, Jim, and Paul discuss John Howard Yoder's and David Bentley Hart's depiction of Constantinianism and the fusion of Church and State and the disappearance of the church. The only visible Christian is one armored by the gospel, resistant to and not armored by the state.
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The impetus behind Paul’s writing and the work of the Christian life and theology is the conversion of the mind, the transformation of the Subject, the rise of a new form of consciousness including self-consciousness. God, the essence of reality, is not passively intuited or grasped by sight or images – which by definition remain objects – but God in Christ presents himself for the understanding, to be actively apprehended as part of human decision and judgment.
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Brian, David, Matt, Brent, Jonathan, Jim and Paul discuss the armor of peace and nonviolence as the heart of resisting the powers, rather than, in the manner of Hart and Milbank, as a passive nonresistance. This resistance is salvific and the meaning of "putting on Christ."
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Faith brings coherence, intelligibility, and understanding, in the midst of the homelessness of being human. The foundations of culture, of law, of institutions, crumbled at Babel just as they have in postmodernism but faith secures meaning in the midst of this homeless condition.
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Brian, Jim, Jonathan, Matt, Brent, David, and Paul discuss the picture of imitation in Ephesians and the New Testament as the basic motif of salvation in the New Testament. Christian imitation is a lived salvation delivering from the rivalry of mimetic desire.
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Romans 1:18-32 are not Paul's gospel but the premises of a false Teacher opposing Paul, and in Romans 1-3 he deconstructs these premises, preparing for his conclusion that the law is part of the problem defeated by Christ.
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Jonathan, Matt, Brian, Brent, and Paul discuss Ephesians 4-5 and the singular lie exposed by Christ creating entry into love. The function of a hostile lie in the reification of culture and religion, as in the work of Peter Berger and Rene Girard, and the necessity of this lies exposure so as to be "rooted and grounded in love" is discussed.
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The Romans may have had a law-based understanding of atonement connected to the notion that sin is simply breaking the law. Paul takes them from this understanding to the notion that sin is bondage to a lie in regard to the law from which Christ delivers through resurrection.
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This is the key conclusion to The Mystery Revealed: The Gospel as Exposure of the Lie of Evil as focus turns to individual participation in creation. As David Bentley Hart points out in All Shall Be Saved, humanity is in bondage, but then as he recognizes in You Are Gods, this bondage does not preclude human participation in self-creation. In this discussion Tim, Jonathan, Matt, Jim, Brent, Matthew, Austin, and Paul discuss the implication of these poles of reality in the encounter with and defeat of evil.
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In Romans 1-3 Paul is giving voice to and refuting a false teacher, yet justification theory takes all of Romans 1-3 as the teaching of Paul, ending up with a contradictory gospel which Paul might call the accursed gospel. By not sorting out the voice of the false teacher from Paul's refutation of this teacher, justification theory imagines the law, human capacity, and human recognition of its need is the precursor to coming to Christ. By way of contrast, Paul believes humanity is in bondage to sin and death and Christ alone delivers and only Christ is the foundation for right understanding.
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Ambrose, Matt, and Paul, discuss how the United States, due to the culture of secrecy surrounding the various intelligence agencies and classified history has come to resemble church's that cloak sex scandals or closed societies that keep their citizens in the dark. Ambrose traces this secret history surrounding UFO crash retrievals, such as that which retired Major David Grusch exposed in his testimony to Congress.
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Luther's justification by faith, though it may have been aimed at an unconditional understanding over and against works-righteousness, melded conditionalism and unconditionalism and injected much of Christian thought and biblical interpretation with this confusion. Romans is the place these two systems collide, and particularly how we read Romans 7 brings out the contrast in epistemology, anthropology, the doctrine of revelation, the understanding of God, and of Christ and atonement.
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Megan, Shaila, Jess, and Paul continue the discussion surrounding Megan's Women's Chapel, as it has addressed the destructive nature of how women and human sexuality are viewed in teachings surrounding both purity culture and complementarianism as they have become part of church and Christian teaching.
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Justification by faith can either be understood as the "accursed gospel" of the false teachers or entry into the unconditional good news. The manner in which justification by faith must include every category is worked out in this message.
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Megan, Shaila, and Jess describe to Paul the Women's Chapel started by Megan as a project through Washington University to provide a space for women to share their church journey through, what is sometimes a stifling and traumatic experience.
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Justification and faith have been skewed by a gospel that defines these terms as if the law is the baseline and as if retributive justice defines the work of Christ. In this understanding all comprehend who God is and his requirements, yet they simultaneously are depraved. In this false gospel suffering bring righteousness, forgiveness is granted only after wrath is propitiated, and God's anger is pitted against his love. This is not the Gospel.
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Matt, Tom, and Paul continue their discussion of the film, Oppenheimer, and discuss the portrayal of sin and evil acknowledged and unacknowledged by the man and the film.
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On August 6th, 1945 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, bringing to a conclusion three hundred years of scientific discovery in the holocaust unleashed on Japan and still threatening the world. The individual credited as the father of the atomic bomb, demonstrated the Adam-like struggle tying great good to profound evil, which haunts the human race.
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Matt, Tom and Paul discuss the Christopher Nolan film, Oppenheimer, and the book which serves as the basis of the film, American Prometheus, setting it in the context of the dropping of the Bomb on Hiroshima (August 6th) and Nagasaki (August 9th), and the theological and moral implications.
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Paul Axton preaches - The biblical picture of salvation is the melding or joining of Divine and human Spirit, Life, and Breath. The human image bears this eternal purpose which is only understood through the free joining, willing opening, or purposeful enacting of the grace of God in the person. Augustinian original sin and predestination have obscured this picture of salvation as willing participation of the human person in receiving Divine personhood.
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Tim, Jonathan, Matt, Jim, Brent, Matthew, Austin, and Paul discuss the mystery revealed through the Gospel (in Ephesians) as unfolding of the will of God in creation's completion through redemption. Examples of the mystery compounded are Girardian scapegoating, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Calvinist predestination, each of which reify a mysterious nothing.
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Paul Axton preaches - Divine and created Sophia, as brought together in Christ, describes what is happening in the redemption of the cosmos. The created order is brought to its fulfillment in being joined to the Creator. Human wisdom alone though, leaves out the redemptive step. Creation ex nihilo opens creation to the dual possibility, of being pictured in humans wisdom, as grounded in some reified nothing, This produces the antinomies and antagonism from which the Divine-Human One saves.
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Jim, David, Matthew, Brian, and Paul discuss the nature of radical evil as the underside of the law (as exemplified by Paul the Pharisee and as duplicated in all radical evil), and how Christ defeats this evil by exposing its deception. This is necessarily cosmic and universal.
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Paul Axton preaches - The demonization and scapegoating of Jesus are exposed by Jesus death and resurrection and by his explicit teaching, describing the continuation of demonization in the Christian age as the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Where Christians continue to believe the lie of demonization and where they participate in scapegoating there is no forgiveness possible. This is the law of forgiveness, which demands forgiveness of enemies that forgiveness from God would be granted.
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Tom Evans, formerly on the ministerial staff of one of the largest churches in the country, describes to Paul, the emptiness of the mega church experience. Real world healing and salvation are being set aside for a business model which cannot endure the countercultural truth of a peaceable Gospel.
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Paul Axton preaches - The cosmic representation of the Temple is made an individual reality as the kingdom of God is establishes through Temple communities centered on life and peace rather than violence and death.
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Matt, Brian, Jim, David, Jonathan, Matthew, Brent, and Paul continue discussion on the cosmic power of Christ as defeat of the universal psychoanalytic/individual sickness and the corporate powers. Freud, Lacan and Žižek illustrate Paul's point in Eph. 2: the human disease is imagining it has life and power when it only has the power of death and violence. The grace and inheritance of Christ is a unifying defeat of this divisiveness.
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Paul Axton preaches - No single part of personhood is a sufficient beginning point, but only the fulness of Trinitarian reality can encapsulate the ground for reason, cognition, and experience. This is the center of the Eastern theology of Sergius Bulgakov, which points to a recovery of personhood as the experience of God as making personhood a possibility.
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Matthew, Jonathan, Brian, David, Brent, and Paul discuss the cosmic image of Christ in Ephesians 2, and humankinds incorporation into the divine image, and the simultaneous picture of evil, as the refusal of this reality. Evil arises, in this picture, as the reification or refusal of the cosmic person and the turn to the finite and impersonal (language, law, the symbolic) as the controlling factor of the self.
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Paul Axton preaches - Christ exposes the history of murder and the exposure, as in the case of Daniel Ellsberg's exposure of the Pentagon Papers and the Doomsday Machine and Corman McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian exposing nihilistic violence, is the first step in confronting evil. The Gospel, by definition, opposes the violence embedded in the human heart.
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Matthew, Jonathan, Brent, Matt, Brian, Jim, and Paul discuss the psychoanalytic reality of peace and its connection to cosmic peace through the reign of Christ as expressed in Ephesians 1 & 2. Paul introduces Ephesians 2 and the psychoanalytic reality of peace and then the implications of chapter 1 of Ephesians and the subduing of the powers as a practical reality is discussed.
Paul Axton preaches - Recognition of the Abba relationship to God frees from slavery to the law, as the relationship sealed by the Spirit through the Son is a new form of subjectivity. The story of Christ lifts up every human story and every father/child relationship, giving it a depth of meaning and significance.
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Paul Axton preaches - The explanation of the death of Christ, the divine dying in the human, is explained through the created and uncreated aspects of Wisdom (as in the theology of Sergius Bulgakov). This explanation includes how it is that salvation in dying and resurrection is imparted to all through participation (divinization) - the divinization of Christ in which all participate.
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Brent, David, Matt, Matthew, Jonathan, Jim, and Paul discuss the two-fold economy found in Gnosticism/nominalism and in Paul's summing up as described in Irenaeus' doctrine of recapitulation. Participation in Christ as described in recapitulation constitutes the economy that binds together the various New Testament descriptions of being "adopted," being "in Christ," or being "in his likeness."
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Paul Axton preaches - God is working through all peoples, cultures and religions, as is demonstrated in the recent mass movements of Muslims coming to Christ. But this does not entail relinquishing the critical faculty of thought, as is often the case with Zen Buddhism.
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Jonathan, Brent, Matt, and Paul discuss the implications of taking Ephesians as central to the Pauline corpus and discuss both recapitulation and Christus Victor as Paul's understanding of atonment in Ephesians.
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Paul Axton preaches - The test of authentic Christianity is its liberating effect, and the most obvious example of this liberation pertains chattel slavery in the modern period. The trans-Atlantic slave trade directly involved nearly every Christian group. Gregory of Nyssa provides the earliest critique of slavery and a theology that cannot tolerate this sort of moral and theological failure. His theology is the remedy to the modern theological failure.
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Brian, Matt, Brent, Matthew, Jonathan, Austin, David, and Paul discuss the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Wesleyan understanding of salvation and compare it to Paul's depiction in Ephesians.
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Paul Axton preaches - The Roman Empire is described in Revelation as the puppet of Satan, and Christ alone defeats this Beast. Empire threatens the church in the United States and the Christocentrism of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his challenge of Nazi Empire, indicates the failure of Lutheran Christocentrism with its notion of two kingdoms, and replaces it with the singular reality of the kingdom of Christ.
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David, Matt, Brian, Brent, Austin, Tim, and Paul discuss the necessary shifts to see Ephesians as central to Paul's Gospel. The work of Douglas Campbell, Richard Hays, E. P. Sanders, Krister Stendahl, and Thomas Torrance, have to be considered in setting aside the reformed understanding of Paul focused on Romans and Galatians, so as to see Ephesians as key to Paul's understanding, captured in the notion of a participatory ontology.
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Paul Axton preaches - Jesus as ensouled body and embodied soul undoes dualism and antagonism which plays upon body/soul and male/female antagonism. In Christ, as the truly human one, theology is set upon a new foundation in which he defines the human condition and not the other way round. True motherhood and fatherhood, husband and wife, male and female relationship are restored in his flesh.
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Tom Evans describes the difference between ancestral sin and Augustinian original sin and compares it to Paul Axton's Psychotheological approach. Where Augustinian original sin leaves both sin and salvation a mystery (giving rise to legal exchange theories like divine satisfaction and penal substitution), ancestral sin, like psychotheology, provides a diagnosis of the human predicament and a real-world cure.
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Paul Axton preaches - Christianity has often given rise to antisemitism, as with Martin Luther's direct inspiration of Adolph Hitler, but rightly understood Christ occupies the Hebraic universe of meaning and Christianity is simply a different orientation in this same symbolic universe.
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Paul Axton preaches - In Shusaku Endo's description, Christianity cannot take root in Japan, which he describes as a mud swamp, but every culture has its corrosive effects on the gospel, particularly as in America, where we may be blind to these effects. The resolution is to come to a correct understanding of Jesus relationship to Jewish culture and religion as its proper end.
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Jon and Paul discuss gender reassignment surgery and issues of gender and possible theological approaches to the subject. Jon explains the fully affirming Episcopal perspective and the parameters and limitations of that perspective.
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Jon, Matt, and Paul discuss issues of gender and the church in the context of the course on marginalization. Jon, from an Episcopalian and (LGBTQ) affirming perspective, and Matt from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, discuss how best to negotiate and understand the current issues concerning sexual identity and gender reassignment.
Paul Axton preaches - In this secular age the experience of God may be lost, as Paul describes, due to a pursuit of human wisdom and signs. But in Christ the fulness of divine experience opens all of life to the fulness of a different reality and experience.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul reflect on our conversation with Jordan, including his departure from David Bentley Hart, and Jon takes up Hart's understanding and suggests a rapprochement through Bulgakov.
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Paul Axton preaches - Is the incarnation finished with the resurrection and ascension of Christ or is this now an eternal fact about God and reality? There is a form of Christianity that posits a complete divide between faith and practice, body and soul, and heaven and earth (implicitly or explicitly assuming the incarnation is provisional) which misses the beauty of God revealed in the world and real world defeat of evil.
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Matt and Paul discuss the UFO phenomenon with Ambrose Andreano, who has written the book Angels, Archons and Aliens. Some of the the explanations for the phenomena and possible implications are considered.
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Paul Axton preaches - The portrayal in each of the resurrection appearances is grief, initial misrecognition of Jesus, and then a shift in perspective. It is within this shifted perspective that the gospel is proclaimed, the New Testament is written, the church is formed, and two thousand years of witnesses come forth.
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Paul Axton preaches - Colossians poses the incarnation of Christ and redemption as the true creation and the true beginning, in which Genesis 2 is made a reality and the false creation and incarnation of Genesis 3 is suspended.
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Matt and Paul discuss with Jon the upcoming class, Marginalization and Restorative Justice: A biblical and theological study of the Kingdom of God - an approach to issues of power and inequality among oppressed groups including gender, race, disability, and socio-economic status.
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In Part 3 of Matt and Paul's interview with Jordan Wood, Jordan differentiates his and Maximus' focus on the person of Christ from David Hart's clinging to formal categories and tendency toward abstraction. Jordan also addresses the issue of panentheism, his departure from Thomas Aquinas, and his understanding of the role of nature and grace in Maximus.
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Paul Axton preaches - The book of Philemon is a worked example of the implication of the gospel in that the slave/master relationship is displaced in the church by the koinonia of brothers and sisters. Yet this obvious implication of the gospel, worked out in Philemon, is rejected as is indicated in the reception of the book and the continuation of slavery among Christians. This may be because the implication of the gospel is a complete overturning of the city, the law, and the economy of the the city of man.
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In part 2 of our interview with Jordan Wood, Jordan soars to amazing heights. Jordan explains to Matt and Paul, Maximus' formula "creation is incarnation" and the time and space bending implications of Jesus Christ as being at the beginning of all things. We also discuss how it is the fall occurs with the beginning with creation ex-nihilo.
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Paul Axton preaches - Paul’s depiction of the armor of God in Ephesians is a summary of his gospel with the focus on taking it up and doing it. This is not simply an allegory or illustration, but the very center of Paul's gospel as presented in Ephesians. It is the power of the Constantinian shift which will tend to spiritualize and trivialize this depiction, and it is precisely against a Constantinian Christianity and this sort of insidious power that this armor protects.
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In this first in a series with Jordan Daniel Wood, Matt and Paul interview Jordan and discuss his journey from the Restoration Movement and a Bible College in Missouri to his groundbreaking work on Maximus the Confessor. Jordan, Matt, and Paul, share the overlap and development of their journey and discuss the present state of the academy and church, and Jordan introduces why Maximus is the theologian for this age of expanding knowledge.
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Paul Axton preaches - Imitation of Christ is the very substance of salvation. Apart from imitating his life there is no gospel, no tradition and no faith, yet this crucial motif supporting the language of discipleship, being in Christ, walking as Christ walked, is obscured by "faith alone" and theories of atonement focused on payment.
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Paul Axton preaches - The power of coercion, the power of command and control, or power over other people is the power of death and violence that is universally recognized. Resurrection power redefines the meaning of power, linking it with the love and unity of being joined to Christ.
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Jim, David, Austin, Drew, Brian, and Paul discuss Luther's approach to faith and reason as building upon a nominalist understanding which leads to his focus on forensics and his notion of a necessary and continuing dialectic between law and grace.
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Paul Axton preaches - The blindness of sacrificial religion, of idolatry, of cultural hostility, creates a fabricated reality described as a process of externalization, objectivation, and internalization in which the origins of human culture create a necessary blindness or mystery which Christ exposes and displaces.
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Paul Axton preaches - Creation ex-nihilo poses the possibility of evil as a return or defeat of the fulness of creation in redemption and participation in the divine. Thus we are co-participants in our own creation, willing the fulness of our completion in Christ through our echoing the "Yes" of Christ the the Father and the Spirit.
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Brad, Brian, Matthew, Drew, Jim, Austin, Matt, and Paul conclude their discussion of Maximus the Confessor and his notion of theosis and take up possible problems and implications.
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Matt, Jim, Brian, Brad, Drew, Matthew, and Paul examine together the Christo-logic of Maximus the Confessor found in his formula “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.” The radical implications and potential issues with this understanding are discussed.
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Paul Axton preaches - The holistic cosmic vision of Ephesians also details how this integrated vision defeats the partial vision of sin, in which the finite is invested with ultimate meaning. The genealogy of the desire of the flesh, involves investing the flesh with a semantic load it cannot bear or satisfy. The antagonism this creates is resolved in the Body of Christ.
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Matthew, Rob, Matt, Brian, Drew, Brad, and Paul conclude their discussion on Augustine's departure and contrast to Origen and develop the practical difference this will make in reading the Bible.
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Paul Axton preaches - Paul's notion of Christ's "summing up" of all things (Eph. 2:10) is taken by Irenaeus and the early church as descriptive of the economy of salvation and the means of defeating evil. Where this economy of participation is lost there is a simultaneous loss of a real world defeat of evil and a loss of a coherent frame explaining being "in Christ."
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Jim, Brian, David, Matthew, Drew, Rob, Matt, and Paul, discuss the shift that occurs with Augustine's rejection of Origen's apocatastasis and his turn to a dualism and notions of language and interiority that will come to define the modern in its nihilism and secularism.
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If Paul's gospel is summed up by Ephesians, this means the Lutheran or Protestant focus on Law versus grace or faith over and against works does not figure. This recentering of Paul's gospel entails a different perspective on Judaism (based on covenant and not contract) and also the understanding that Christ fulfills the covenant and does not meet the obligations of a contract, and this is God predestined plan for the cosmos.
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Brian, Austin, and Paul discuss how Origen's Christology constitutes a metaphysics. In describing the relation between the Son and the Father Origen establishes his first principle, the foundation of the Christian worldview.
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Paul Axton preaches - The mystery revealed in the Gospel pertains to creations end and beginning, to salvation from sin and the defeat of the Prince of the Power of the Air, to cosmic peace and reconciliation, and according to Origen, to the logoi or arche laid in the foundation of Christ.
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Brian, Matt, David, Austin, Drew, Matthew, Brad, and Paul discuss the key and foundational role, in spite of his condemnation, played by Origen of Alexandria.
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Paul Axton preaches - At the baptism and transfiguration of Christ are revealed the transforming power of God found in God's presence in Christ, in Scripture, and in the communion of the Saints.
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Brian, Brad, David, Matthew, Drew, Jim, Allan, Matt, Rob, and Paul discuss how Irenaeus' recapitulation as salvation/hermeneutic is taken up by Origen in his book, On First Principles, as the first theology spelling out how Christian logic departs from Greek philosophy.
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Paul Axton preaches - John describes the antichrist as denying the humanity of Christ and Karl Barth concludes the antichrist of the German church has also displaced Jesus as mediator with the world (in the form of the führer, the analogy of being, the state). There is a direct identity between Christ and the believer which brings together Creator and creation, flesh and Spirit, God and man, which is illustrated by Melchizedek and extended to Christ and all believers which directly counters the antichrist.
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Austin, Brad, Brian, Matt, Drew, Matthew, Allan, Jim and Paul, discuss the work of the early church father, Irenaeus, and his approach to both his reading of the Hebrew Scriptures and the economy of salvation, including cosmic salvation, through the summing up (recapitulation) of all things in the Gospel.
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Paul Axton preaches - Isaiah depicts a world of darkness broken open by the light of the Messiah. The depth of the violence, oppression, and meaninglessness of this darkness must be appreciated so as to apprehend the world-changing nature of God conjoined to the world in the light of Christ.
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Matt, Jim, Allan, Rob, David, Brian, Brad, Drew, and Paul discuss the Gospel as answering the question, "Who do you say that I am?" Identifying Christ comes with the presence of Christ in the one answering the question. This Gospel encounter, not history, nor Scripture, nor church, is the central and primary authority from which all of these authorities are derived.
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Paul Axton preaches - The kingdoms of the world would determine reality through manipulation of life through death while Christ's kingdom defeats death and establishes a kingdom of life and peace. Though the Jewish notion that the Messiah would defeat Rome through violent insurrection was mistaken, it was not a mistake to understand that the Messiah would usher in a different kingdom and a different order of truth and reality.
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In this first in a series on reading the Bible Allan, Jim, Trenton, Matt, Brian, Drew, Matthew and Paul discuss the early church hermeneutic connected to the Gospel of peace and its connection to an embodied ethic, soon set aside in the Constantinian shift.
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Paul Axton preaches - In the United States and many places throughout the world Christianity is being tied to fascism and authoritarianism. There is a failed form of Christianity that becomes a platform for the worst forms of abusive authoritarianism, yet where Christianity is correctly understood Fascist Christian, Nazi Christian, or perhaps German Christian or American Christian should be oxymoronic.
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In this interview with Australian Pastor and Peace Activist Michael Wood, Michael describes how the struggle of being a peaceful Rector (head - the one in charge) led him to realize the depth of violence by which we are surrounded and the need to implement and practice peace structurally and strategically in church and throughout life. (You can find Practicing Peace at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1666792241?ie=UTF8&n=133140011
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Paul Axton preaches - the anthropic principle may accord or point to a Christian understanding, but Paul goes far beyond this in describing Christ as the motive force - the means and reason - for creation and creation's completion in redemption.
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Paul Axton preaches - the anthropic principle may accord or point to a Christian understanding, but Paul goes far beyond this in describing Christ as the motive force - the means and reason - for creation and creation's completion in redemption.
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Catherine Totty interviews Paul in regard to his story in missions and his journey and experience in Japan. They discuss the role of mission organizations, the notion of contextualization, mission strategy, and training leadership.
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Paul Axton preaches - Christ as the truth resolves the trouble of dialectic through identity and difference. Maximus the Confessor describes Christ, based on the Chalcedonian formula, as a new form of rationality, bringing together absolute transcendence and immanence in the person of Christ - redefining all of these categories in the process.
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In this final podcast on the book of John, Jim, Matt, Brian, Tim, David and Paul, discuss the atonement theory of John - and whether atonement is the right word - and the meaning of dying with Christ or being inflicted with the sickness unto death (or the incapacity to die with Christ).
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Paul Axton preaches - "God became man that man might become God." Maximus takes Athanasius' formula as summing up God's purposes for creation. The Christian becomes Christ, who is God. Rather than Luther's imputed righteousness Maximus holds to an unfolding deification in which "creation is incarnation."
Jim, Matt, David, Janice and Paul discuss the trial motif in the Gospel of John and the trial of Jesus as it directly confronts the problem of evil. The focus of discussion becomes the question of the nature of evil and its defeat in Christ.
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Paul Axton preaches - Origen, following Paul, held that the relation between the Father and the Son found in the incarnation is the eternal truth about God and creation. There is no other biography of God than that found in Jesus Christ, yet this simple Gospel understanding has been obscured in part due to the condemnation of Origen's development of it.
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Matthew, Jim, Brian, Matt, Tim, Janice, and Paul, consider the book of John in terms of a cosmic trial in which Judas and all who hand Jesus over are witnesses for the prosecution and Jesus and all those who witness on his behalf throughout the book are witnesses for the defense. The verdict has cosmic implications.
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Paul Axton preaches - Paul, in Ephesians, says all things are summed up in Christ. This doctrine of summing up or recapitulation, according to the church father Irenaeus, is at once the salvation and hermeneutic that constitutes the Gospel.
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Jim, Matt, and Paul discuss the apocalyptic shift of Christ as truth and life. The tomb of Christ becomes the true ark of the covenant collapsing hades and sheol. The lamb who takes away the sin of the world, John's theological summary, is focused on the power of life as inherently defeating death, and this is the meaning of the two goats of the day of atonement.
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Paul Axton preaches - The identity of Christ (the Gospel), is inclusive of the presence of Christ in the one answering the question of identity. The identity of Christ is the primary authority, not the authority of history, Scripture, or Church, which derive their authority in his identity. Like early heresies, missing the identity of Christ, is to miss his presence in the inner person answering the question.
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Matt, Brian, Jim, Janice and Paul discuss our after death experiences and the experience of abiding in the peace and presence of Christ, and how this ties in to the doctrine of salvation in John, and the picture of Christ as true Temple and true abiding place.
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Tim, Matthew, Janice, Brian, Matt, and Paul discuss John the Baptists phrase "Behold, the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world" as an interpretive frame for understanding the nature of salvation, the meaning of the cross, and the problem of darkness as presented in John's Gospel.
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Paul Axton preaches - The rule of faith refers to apostolic authority, the canon or rule determining scripture, the rule which the apostles applied to one another and the Hebrew Scriptures, and the ethic and mindset the Christian. The Christian is to put on as the mind of Christ and the mode and goal of this rule or mindset is peace - the unity of the faith.
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Mathew, Jim, David, Matt, Brian, and Paul examine how the Jewish and Greek worldview and sensibility is undone in the crucifixion of Christ. The return to a premodern understanding allows for Christ as foundation. Specifically, crucifixion was the destiny of Haman, the curse of the wicked, the annihilation of personhood and Christ's crucifixion and harrowing of hell empties out Jewish and Greek absolutes and establishes an alternative frame of understanding (escaping the modern dilemma).
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Paul Axton preaches - A key part of the rule of faith is the peace that can resist the violence of torture, a type of the violent regime of "truth," which the peace of Christ deposes. Christ's peace is an interpretive rule for reading scripture and the world which is included in the mind of Christ the believer puts on.
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Paul Axton preaches - A key part of the rule of faith is the peace that can resist the violence of torture, a type of the violent regime of "truth," which the peace of Christ deposes. Christ's peace is an interpretive rule for reading scripture and the world which is included in the mind of Christ the believer puts on.
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Paul Axton preaches - The Apostle Paul uses the picture of the "analogy of faith" or the "rule of faith" and pictures it as part of having the mind of Christ. This rule is the measure of the canon of scripture, so that we go from Gospel to scripture both historically (in the formation of the canon) and in our interpretation of scripture.
(To register for our next class “Reading the Bible in Community” starting the week of September 26th and running through November 18th register at https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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In this interview with Old Testament scholar Eric Seibert, Paul and Eric discuss his most recent book Enjoying the Old Testament (https://www.amazon.com/Enjoying-Old-Testament-Encountering-Scripture). Eric explains the value of the Old Testament as a pointer to Christ, and as training in righteousness and maybe even a counterexample to the teaching of Christ.
(To register for our next class “Reading the Bible in Community” starting the week of September 26th and running through November 18th register at https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Jim, Brian, Matthew, Janice, David, Matt, and Paul discuss how it is the force of human law that explains the source of evil which Christ encountered and defeated. The work of Walter Benjamin, critical race theory, and natural and positive law are discussed in their connection to forms of violence exposed by Christ.
(To register for our next class “Reading the Bible in Community” starting the week of September 26th and running through November 18th register at https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Paul Axton preaches - The satanic version of theosis is not displacement of God with self but a loss of self under the weight of sin sickness, violence and fear. True freedom does not pertain to religion or irreligion per se, but to suspending the weight of the sickness unto death through Christ.
(To register for our next class “Reading the Bible in Community” starting the week of September 26th and running through November 18th register at https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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In this discussion of Hans Jonas' picture of Gnosticism, Jim, Tim, Janice, Brian, David, and Paul consider how the Gnostic problem characterizes the human tendency toward dualism expressed in modern nihilism, deism, and existentialism and how John's Gospel addresses the problem.
(To register for our next class “Reading the Bible in Community” starting the week of September 26th and running through November 18th register at https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Paul Axton preaches - The early church term, found in Ignatius, Irenaeus, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Maximus the Confessor, for being partakers of God, or being made God, is theosis, which is another way of describing salvation or being incorporated into Christ.
(To register for our next class “Reading the Bible in Community” starting the week of September 26th and running through November 18th register at https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
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Tim, Brian, Matt, Mathew, David, Dan, Janice, Jim, and Paul discuss the key difference between a gnostic and Christian conception of the Logos and tie in the gnostic antagonism to the darkness described in John and defeated by Christ. The discussion concludes with an examination of how faith defeats gnostic nihilism.
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Paul Axton preaches - Jesus quotes Psalm 82, "You are Gods," to explain his own claim to deity and his extension of eternal life to his disciples, which restores humankind to the reign assigned to Adam and which Peter pictures as a "participation in the divine nature."
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In this opening series on the Gospel of John Jim, Janice, Brian, Tim, Matt, Dan, and Paul, discuss the prologue of John and the meaning of the Logos, not as the pre-incarnate Christ but as the historical Jesus, and the difference this makes to conceptions of God, salvation, and the meaning of creation.
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Paul Axton preaches - God's Word is world constituting, self-authenticating, and a repetition of God while the human word may attempt to constitute a world in its own self-authenticating repetition - inducing human failure. God's Word is the cure for this failure.
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Jim, Janice, Matt, David, and Paul discuss how gender, race, ethnicity, or simply language can become and oppressive tool of the culture or of the symbolic order and how the Christian community is defined by its suspension of this cultural oppression.
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Paul Axton preaches - Donald Trump has promoted the big lie that he did not lose the election, but this lie is a type of the big lie challenged and exposed by Christ which pictures the human, the political, this world as God's truth. Christ as truth exposes the big lie.
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Janice, Jim, Brian, David, and Paul discuss how the theory of Rene Girard fits with the Bible, but how it points to the benefits of sacrificial religion over uncontrolled violence, and how the end of scapegoating leaves open the possibility of total violence.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The truth of the Trinity, or Truth, unfolds historically with the realization of God as Father, the incarnation and recognition of the Son, and with the giving of the Holy Spirit and full human participation in God. This marks three possible errors: God as Father apart from the Son and Spirit can be confused with law or power, God as Son, apart from the Spirit and Father can be equated with the historical, and God as Spirit, apart from the Son and Father can be equated with the individual interiority and experience.
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Jim, Janice, David, Brian, Matt, Dan and Paul discuss the various ways that the matrix of bondage grips us (e.g., through capitalism, sexism, religion, ontotheology, dualism, psychology, and time) and how Christ, specifically in the resurrection breaks open this matrix and frees us.
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Paul Axton preaches - The now and not yet of the process of salvation can be split and made static and exclusive, missing the unfolding of entering this rest on a daily basis. This failure gives rise to all "not yet" (on the right, Christian fascism) or all "now" (on the left, Christian Marxism and liberalism), two forms of nihilism which can only be remedied by maintaining the tension of Christian hope.
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Paul Axton preaches - In this second sermon developing an allegorical reading, the specific displacement of a violent God through the God of peace revealed in Christ, including freedom from the law of sin and death or emancipation from the reign of violence is developed in conjunction with a spiritual hermeneutic.
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Paul Axton preaches - There is a spiritual or allegorical reading of Scripture which interprets through Christ and there is the fleshly reading concentrating on the letter or on history, which according to Paul, misses Christ and leaves one enslaved.
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Matt, Jim, Janice, David, Brian, Dan and Paul discuss the origin of evil in the human unconscious and the presumption of life through the law apart from the body - the lie displaced through participation in the Trinity.
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Paul Axton preaches - In John atonement or salvation is new creation, a new humanity, a new birth, a redirected desire, a reorientation to death, recapitulation, Christus Victor, or simply creation completion.
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Jim, Janice and Paul review the psychoanalytic, philosophical, and biblical picture of death denial as constituting sin and discuss how the Cross of Christ defeats death denial through death acceptance.
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Paul Axton preaches - The trial of Jesus is the centerpiece of John, and the entire Gospel is framed as a trial, with witnesses and evidence presented against God/Christ and against the world, echoing the trial in Isaiah, in which salvific judgment is the verdict.
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Matt, from an Eastern Orthodox tradition, and Jon, from an Episcopalian tradition, and Paul, discuss the spiritual life, prayer, and the experiential difference available in active spiritual practices and living life from a spiritual perspective.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In the so-called cleansing of the Temple is the depiction of the theme of John: Christ is true Temple and true Passover Lamb, and there is a fulfillment of a Jewish order now destroyed (subsequent to 70 A.D.) as the cross marks the true defeat of death and the tomb now marks the spot of revelation and life previously assigned to the Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant.
Jim, Matt, David, Brian, and Paul discuss how the idolatrous scene illustrates the shame/pride condition and the fear of death and how Christ's dissolution of death is illustrated in the transformation of the tomb into a similitude of the Ark of the Covenant.
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Paul Axton preaches - The lamb that takes away the sin of the world, is the Passover lamb which does not bear sin, but this result is finalized by Christ in his work of filling up all things, including Sheol, with his life - thus taking away sin through his life.
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Dan, Rob, Ray, Matt, David, Jim, and Paul discuss the focus on the defeat of death in Ignatius as a defeat of sin and heresy and the shift with Augustine and Constantine which results in alternative atonement theories.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The gap between heaven and earth is marked by Sheol or the place of the dead, a distance illustrated in the rites of the tabernacle and the distance between the Goat for the Lord and the Goat of Azazel, a gap closed by Christ and by his preaching to the dead and freeing those captive to Sheol.
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Jim, Matt, David, Janice, Rob, Ray, and Paul discuss how Anselm's shift to rationalism changed the register of theological discussion to abstractions surrounding identity (Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche) which develop in modernity, giving rise to the delusion of a self-grounding reason and identity; the false notion Christ defeats.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The cross, as foolishness to Greeks and a scandal to the Jews, requires a world-view shift for both Jews and Greeks, in which God in Christ directly confronts the inhumanity, injustice, and demonic evil which constitutes the city of man and which put Christ on the cross.
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Matt, Janice, Jim, Rob, and Paul discuss the inherent violence leading to and stemming from the doctrine of penal substitution. Penal Substitution is a manifestation of the problem of sin and violence which Christ defeats.
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In this lecture Paul Axton traces the intrinsic necessity of violence to the law, which accounts for the peculiar violence of the United States. The law founding and law keeping violence described in the work of Walter Benjamin supports the biblical depiction of "necessary violence" exposed as the lie which killed Christ.
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Rob, David, Matt, Janice and Paul, discuss the early church understanding of Christus Victor and Recapitulation as developed through Irenaeus and this is compared to notions of the cross as God's punishment, culminating in Luther's notion that Jesus is viewed by God as the worst of sinners and Calvin's doctrine of Penal Substitution.
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Paul Axton preaches - The lame man at the pool, the Jews in their belief in sabbath law, and moderns in their belief in absolute law and that God has absconded, share a nihilistic belief in impersonal blind forces which Christ challenges and defeats.
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In this first in a series on sin and salvation Matt, Jim, Janice, Brian, Allan, Ray, and Paul discuss how sin can be equated with violence. A nonviolent hermeneutic, understanding the peace of Christ as the lens through which to abrogate the violence of God in the Old Testament, is introduced.
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In this lecture Paul Axton explains John's and Paul's spiritual reading of the Hebrew Scriptures which has been lost in modern scholarship (as witnessed to by Charles Hill) and at a popular level. Henri de Lubac points us to Origen of Alexandria as the cure for historicism and what might be a type of Gnosticism, which a correct reading of John cures.
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In this PBI discussion David Rawls explains Alexander Campbell's justification for nonviolence and Allan advocates for complete non-participation in nations and governments. Matt, Tim, and Paul join this final discussion on the peaceable kingdom.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In Revelation and the Gospel of John the church is depicted as bringing forth the enfleshment of the Son in an ongoing incarnation or travail of birth.
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In this PBI discussion David, Matt, and Paul discuss the typical "what if" scenarios in regard to nonviolence and point to the early church discipline in which being peaceable was part of catechesis of every disciple and the common thread found in the early church and among Anabaptist groups of divinization.
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(Register for the upcoming Class on the Gospel of John starting May 9th here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
Paul Axton Preaches - There is a Gnostic notion that evil arises before creation and that this is reflected in the chaos of Genesis or the nothing of creation ex nihilo. John locates and delimits evil and pictures its defeat and this is understood through correctly identifying the Logos with the "word of the cross."
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In this PBI discussion Trenton, Tim, Allan, and Paul discuss how a shift in atonement theory (away from penal substitution) accompanied rediscovery and preservation of a peaceable understanding among Anabaptists, while a failure to shift atonement theory accompanied the relinquishing of peace among groups who originally held to nonviolence. The case of Reinhold Niebuhr, and his Christian realism, is key.
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(Register for the upcoming Class on the Gospel of John starting May 9th here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
Paul Axton preaches - John depicts the life of Christ from an apocalyptic perspective, unveiling the dwelling place of God with man established in his "lifting up" a new Temple established in a new humanity.
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Tim, Trenton, Allan, and Paul discuss the tenets of the just war tradition and how most all of the churches indigenous to the United States began as peace churches but relinquished this original understanding to adapt some form of just war.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The Gospel of John equates truth with the life of Christ shown forth at Easter. This truth relativizes all other notions of truth as other trues are always extrinsic trues (location, date, composition, etc.) while the life of Christ is a first order truth which only refers to itself.
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David, Allan, Matt, and Paul discuss the implications of the accommodation of violence and the development of the just war tradition beginning with the Constantinian shift.
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Paul Axton Preaches - There are two orders of language and meaning. The Word of the Cross is the eternal wisdom of God, the "I am" reversing time and space and undoing death dealing (sequential, cause and effect, time and space bound) ordering of human wisdom.
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In this interview with Dr. Timothy Boyle, an expert on Japan, the Japanese language, and the Japanese writing system, Paul and Tim discuss the discovery of the stories of Genesis in Japanese writing (Kanji) and the profound similarities between the group oriented shame concepts found in the Bible and Japan. Tim also tells the story of Wounded Tiger, which he is translating, and which soon will be made into a feature film.
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Paul Axton preaches - The Eucharistic meal is the institution of a new community, simultaneously enacting the self-sacrificial love of an economic sharing and the suspension of ethnic, sexual, socio-economic, or class distinctions.
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Jon, Matt, and Paul, discuss the notion that there might be a natural human cut off from the grace of God. Matt and Jon question Paul's reading of Romans 7, with the consensus pointing to redemption as the completion of creation in theosis.
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Paul Axton Preaches - There is no nature and grace dualism, as conceived by Augustine (and as absorbed by Western Christianity), as humans are created, molded, and sustained by the Spirit of grace given at creation and completed by Christ.
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Trenton, Tim, Dan, and Paul discuss how the Constantinian shift resulted in theological failure: a turn to law, to a closed universe in an attempt to preserve God's freedom (rather than focus on God's love). The result is the notion that God, in his absolute freedom and control, does evil so as to bring about the Good.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The Gospel, proclaimed by the apostles, reads the Hebrew Scriptures through the precedent and lens of Christ. To reverse this amounts to a worship of angels and a deifying of what is not God; the error of the false teachers and contractual theology.
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Tim, Trenton, Allan, Dan, and Paul, discuss three alternative ways of understanding church history, and how to account for failure and progress in the tradition and the fall into violence and the definition of peace.
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David, Isaiah, and Paul discuss the challenge Christ poses to Old Testament violence, and specifically to the portrayal of God as participating in and encouraging war and genocide. Understanding who God is through Christ, means that those who kill Christ represent the violence (and the God of violence) which Christ challenges and defeats.
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Tim, Trenton, Allan, Dan, Jason and Paul, discus identity formation around war and violence in nationalism as experienced in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and New Zealand. The discussion centers on the alternative value of Christ, peace, as the abolishment of idolatrous human sacrifice.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Building on the understanding that death is the predicament in which sin arises; this is illustrated through Thomas Hobbes, the Book of Wisdom, and James, explaining why defeat of fear of death enables love.
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Jino (in India), Isaiah (in Korea), Matt, David, and Paul discuss the failure of the Constantinian form of Christianity and the necessity to recognize that with James Cone, the untouchables of India and Japan, and the poor in Korea, authentic Christian experience will tend to be erased by those in power.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Due, in part, to Augustine's misreading of Romans 5:12, Western theology has confused cause and effect between sin and death, and in the process lose how it is that sin is an orientation to death, and the defeat of death is a defeat of sin. The New Testament and the earliest gospel preached by the apostolic fathers, such as Ignatius of Antioch, see death as the cause of sin.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul conclude their discussion on Hart's book, Tradition and Apocalypse, by examining the gap between the New Testament and the reality of the church in its Episcopal, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant forms.
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Matt, Jon and Paul return to key questions raised by Hart's book, Tradition and Apocalypse, and suggest that what is needed is an alternative hermeneutic in reading Scripture and history which suspends the violence and reads from beneath the oppression of the powers.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul continue to discuss Hart's recent book and turn the critique on their own traditions and discuss what it means to make progress in theology.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul discuss Hart's recent book detailing an understanding of salvation which in its unfolding fully admits the contradictions of history and doctrine while looking to a future coherence in the eschaton.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The New Testament describes a form of realism a connecting with ultimate reality, in which words and actions connect in the definitive giving (δίδωμι) of Christ which overcomes and defeats the “handing over” (παραδίδωμι) which delivered him to the cross.
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In this final discussion of the Holy Spirit Rob, Allan, and Paul, discuss the sense in which Freud's notion that belief in God is about sex, Marx's notion that religion is about economics, and Schmitt's view that the state in the equivalent of the Church, need to be flipped.
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Rather than a contrast between Agape and Eros, Allan, Justin, Matt, David and Paul, discuss their interconnection and the key role of love as the end point of the work of the Holy Spirit.
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Rob and Paul discuss the harm that the masculine image of God and accompanying patriarchy continues to exercise among the young. Rob, describes the situation in Sydney, the center of the controversy of the heresy of subordinationism (in the Trinity) in order to support subordination of women.
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Paul Axton preaches - Christ breaks down the dividing wall of hostility, providing a peaceful hermeneutic in which God, the Bible, and Church are understood as nonviolent. The law is the wall of hostility put in place, not by God but by human violence and hostility which Christ has defeated.
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In this PBI discussion Allan, Matt, Justin, David, and Paul review how masculine and feminine conceptions impact Trinitarian analogies and how Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine converge in their depiction of the Trinity in connection to Romans 5 and 8.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In the Western conception, as handed down through Augustine, Anselm, Luther, and Calvin, sin and salvation function as an extension of the law, making redemption a legal fiction. In the Bible, sin is a disease, a lie, enslavement, or corruption, all involved in an orientation to death, and all solved in a real world fashion through Christ's defeat of this orientation.
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Allan, Matt, David, Justin, and Paul discuss the history of iconography and Christian art and the implications of its depiction of the Trinity and the tendency to diminish the role of the Spirit, culminating in the Spirit's displacement by depictions of Mary.
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In this PBI Discussion Rob, Dan and Paul take up the issue of suffering and extend the discussion to a conclusion as to practical ways as to how to view and handle suffering - repudiating the notion that God needs suffering.
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In this PBI discussion Allan, David, Justin, Dan, Matt, and Paul discuss types of suffering as perceived in East and West and as distinguished in Romans 7 & 8. In a critique of Sarah Coakley and Rowan Williams, the question is raised if there is a failure to distinguish a total futility of suffering and suffering love.
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In this PBI discussion Rob, Trenton, Allan, Justin, David, Matt, and Paul, discuss misdirected desire and its redirection through a real world connectedness of love in the Spirit.
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In this PBI discussion Matt, Allan, Dan, Justin, David, Rob, and Paul discuss how Mary is perceived in Catholicism and in Eastern Orthodoxy, and how the feminine role of the Spirit is preserved in an embodied experiential understanding of God.
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In this first PBI discussion on the Holy Spirit Dan, Matt, Robb, Justin, David, and Paul discuss Sarah Coakley's and Jürgen Moltmann's work on the Holy Spirit as it pertains to the sexual crisis and the subordination of the Spirit in the scholastic approach to the Trinity.
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Paul Axton preaches - Herod slaughters the innocent children of Bethlehem in an attempt to foreshorten the state mandated murder accomplished under Pilate. His lying pretense to find and worship the Messiah gives us a working principle on how to consider the desire of government to worship Christ as King.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In Greek thought, represented in Plato's allegory of the cave, the material world is but a realm of shadows blocking out the sun (representative of transcendent truth), so that which is of the womb/cave is unreal and truth is thought to abide in the transcendent forms. The Virgin Birth finds the absolute, the sun, the equivalent of the the forms, in the womb.
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In this PBI discussion of the final chapter of Paul Axton's book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation, Allan, Tim, Matt, Nathan, Rob, David, and Paul compare and contrast desire versus hope, the frustration of life in the imaginary with life in Christ, and the body of death with life in the Spirit.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The shattering of the idols of a settled notion of God in Christ opens us to the world as a reflection of his activity and presence in human relationships and interdependence with the world.
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In this PBI discussion of chapter 9 of Paul Axton's book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation, Allan, Tim, Matt, Nathan, Thomas, Trenton, Rob, and Paul discuss the three part structure of the human subject as revolving around a deception. Calvin's is taken as an example of one who misses the deception and in doing so believes the lie of sin, demonstrated in the failed treatment of baptism, the confrontation and resolution to the lie.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The name Abba names and sums up the work of Christ in establishing God's Lordship over every aspect of the world, including all that it means to be human and it simultaneously displaces the "father problem" enslaving human-kind.
In this PBI discussion Paul and Allan review Paul Axton's book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation (chapters 3-7), explaining key points through philosophical thinkers and their impact on theology.
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Paul Axton Preaches - A prayerful attitude allowing the for the work of the Holy Spirit engenders a new emotional life and alternative character summed up in a continual thanksgiving.
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Matt, Allan, and Paul continue discussion of Paul Axton's book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation, expanding upon the link between Romans 7 and the secular, discerning the dual sense in which every age may manifest its own unique characteristics with its own leading personalities but every age shares in the same corporate deception.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The feminine characteristics of God found in the Spirit tend to be muted or subordinated to a masculine image. Romans 8 portrays this masculine image being defeated by the Spirit's engendering into the Trinity - which amounts to the displacement of an idolatrous understanding of God.
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In this PBI course discussion of Paul Axton's book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation, Trenton, Tim, Jon, Matt, Nathan, Thomas, Dan, and Paul discuss how nominalism and secularism fit into Paul's description of a law based ordering of reality. Jon depicts the nominalist predicament and Nathan, an expert on Emmanuel Levinas, poses a response to Slavoj Žižek's bleak depiction.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The failure to delineate the sinful suffering of Romans 7 from the redemptive suffering of chapter 8 results in the recommendation of sinful suffering as if it is redemptive.
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In this PBI discussion of chapter 6 of Paul Axton's book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation, David and Paul discuss the drive to gain life through fantasy and various symbolic orders and how this is addressed in Christ.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The origin of desire in God also points to a surprising resolution to the primal human need. Paul indicates, with the Psalmist, it is not our knowing but being known by God that aligns with primal desire.
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In this PBI course discussion Trenton, Allan, Thomas, Nathan, Matt, and Paul discuss Slavoj Žižek's atheistic understanding of the saving work of Christ and compare it to Søren Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death and notions of healing from the disease of shame and the orientation to death.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Conformity to Christ displaces the cultural conformity to fear we are witnessing in U.S. churches and culture - a direct parallel to Bonhoeffer's description to the conformity of the German church to the fear aroused by Hitler. Love of friends and marital love is an extension of the conforming power of Christ in the church which can overcome the conformity to fear and hatred.
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In this PBI discussion of Paul Axton's book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation, Tim, Rob, Thomas, Nathan, Matt, David, and Paul discuss the perversion of imagining an absolute law and how the feminine or hysteric orientation questions the law and opens up an alternative.
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Paul Axton Preaches - A key departure in the early church was the entry of a Greek philosophical view of God which gave rise to the doctrine of the economic and immanent Trinity. The rediscovery of key German theologians is that Christ and the passion of Christ is definitive of our understanding of God - most especially the passionate love of God - which means the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity.
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In this discussion with Tyler Sims, a long time practitioner of contemplative healing prayer, Paul and Tyler discuss the real world access to the love and presence of God which brings about healing communal and individual connectedness.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In comparing the story of Nicodemus and the Samaritan Woman it is seen that the role of the erotic and physical is not an obstacle to quenching desire but a medium and means of recognizing the love and desire of God.
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In this interview, part 2, with Brian McVeigh, a leading expert and student of Julian Jaynes and his theory of the bicameral mind, we discuss possible biblical and therapeutic applications of Jaynes' theory.
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Paul Axton preaches - There is an inadvertent tendency to subordinate the role of the Holy Spirit but Romans 8 opens the depth of the Trinity on the basis of a prayerful experience in which the reality of God's self-hood completes human self-hood in a triadic unity of experience.
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In this discussion with Brian J. McVeigh, who is the premiere student of Julian Jaynes and also a scholar of Asia who specializes in Japanese pop art, education, politics, and history, Paul and Brian discuss the formation and manipulation of Japaneseness through psychology.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The church is in a sexual crisis which might be partly explained by a misunderstanding of desire. Desire is greater than gender or human eroticism, though it accounts for both, as desire originates in God's desiring love.
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Scott McNay interviews Paul Axton, discussing their history in Japan and introducing the role of the death drive or death instinct into theology.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The biblical definition and early concept of martyrdom as compared to modern martyrs, particularly Dietrich Bonhoeffer, calls for a reconceptualization of the term.
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Jon and Paul conclude their series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer by discussing his contested status as a martyr and the implications for Christian witness, who God is, and the nature of faith if he is or is not considered a martyr.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In this time in which the church and Christianity may seem to be failing, the example of both Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard in their response to a failed Christianity is key. Both turn to an understanding that Christ mediates the love of God within the life of the individual.
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Jon and Paul continue their discussion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by linking his thought to a development of the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, meaning that religionless Christianity is linked to a critique of Christendom, and cheap and costly grace, worldliness, and obedience are all also Kierkegaardian concepts developed by Bonhoeffer.
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Paul Axton Preaches - 20 years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, evangelicalism has given into a cult of personality and religious nationalism, not unlike that of Nazi Germany. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's call for a religionless Christianity may be the answer.
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Jon and Paul continue their discussion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, discussing the extent to which he was working within Lutheran parameters and the degree to which this impinged upon his understanding of a religionless Christianity.
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Jon and Paul take up a three part series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and in this initial podcast introduce several approaches to his biography as this relates to his theology. In regard to his "religionless Christianity" Jon defends a reading that sees this as provisional and immediate while Paul suggests Bonhoeffer means this theologically and universally.
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David and Paul review the failure of theology and philosophy as it has been caught up in an unquestioning orientation to the law and as is summed up in the introduction to Paul Axton's book The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation.
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In this PBI discussion of Paul Axton's book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation, Tim, Matt, Allan, Rob, Nathan, and Paul discuss how German idealism intersects with theology, psychoanalysis and the biblical depiction of the human problem and its cure.
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Paul Axton Preaches - There is a brand of Christianity that imagines Paul, in Romans 7:14-25, is describing the normal Christian life. But to Miss how chapter 7 contrasts with Romans chapter 8 is to miss out the fulness of life in Christ.
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In this PBI course discussion Matt, Rob, Allan, Trenton and Paul review a Pauline/Lacanian approach to philosophy and Ludwig Wittgenstein's intervention into philosophy.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The deadly belief in conspiracy theories is a type of a belief in the satanic conspiracy that there is life in the law - which kills. The evangelical religion and its key theologian promote this lie as the cure which causes many to miss the true cure.
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In this PBI course discussion referencing Paul Axton's book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation, Tim, Nathan, Matt, Allan, Dan and Paul, discuss the dynamics of human subjectivity in Paul's depiction of the ego, law and body of death (in Romans 7), as they overlap with the Freudian/Lacanian registers.
Paul Axton Preaches - The continual theme of Scripture is God's sustaining, nurturing presence, which was once a presumed part of Christian experience. With the rise of modernity and modern theology there is a peculiar loneliness (a felt absence) which can be diagnosed as an aggravated form of Paul's picture of sin overcome in Christ.
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Paul Axton lectures on Romans 16, focusing on the significant role of women, such as the female apostle Junia, Phoebe - Paul's spokesperson and carrier of the letter, Priscilla and Aquilla, and the profound warmth and personal connection displayed in the conclusion of Romans.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In relationship to ourselves we hit upon an absence or discord that points us to the one who constitutes and participates in our own deepest understanding and experience of ourselves.
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Paul Axton lectures on Romans 15 the summation and conclusion of Romans, found in Paul's cosmic vision of a new fellowship and humanity which in its world wide vision comes to pertain to the particulars of loving relationship.
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Paul Axton preaches - Human sinfulness is defined in Galatians as an incapacity to question a perverse orientation to the Law. This is exemplified by Mike Pompeo's rejection of critical race theory as potentially a questioning of the law that could bring down the country, yet Paul's picture is that the Jewish law is hostile and exclusive and Christianity resolves this hostility.
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Paul Axton lectures on the life and work of Friedrich Nietzsche, tracing parallels to Freud, Hegel, and Paul, while also mining his insight into the possible directions of human culture and the human psyche.
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In this lecture, Paul Axton, introduces the theory of Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind and its development as the background to human consciousness. Comparison is made with the theory of Jacques Lacan and the overlap with a biblical understanding is discussed.
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Paul Axton lectures on Romans 14, the culminating point in Paul's argument which foresees a new form of humanity emerging in the new temple communities of Christians.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The God of the philosophers, the God of the law, the God of Christendom, and scientism is dead and to desire to return through fascism, right-wing fundamentalism, or nationalism is on the order of Israel desiring to return to Egypt, or a fall back into idolatry and law. In Christ we can face the desert of a world of lost meaning.
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In this PBI discussion Jino (from India), Alan (from Mexico), Jason, Matt, Jon, and Paul (in the U. S.) consider the systematic theology of the post-liberal approach of James McClendon as compared to a typical evangelical systematic theology. The applied nature and cross cultural nature of this practical theology is discussed.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The parameters of philosophy can be laid out along the lines of Paul's depiction of the subject. In the subject focused on the "law of the mind," the legal, philosophical order holds out life. With the focus on the ego there is a questioning of philosophy and law and the pointer to fullness in Christ alone.
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In this lecture on Romans 12-13 Paul Axton sets chapter 13's picture of being subordinate to the government in the context of chapter 12, of not being conformed to the world but being transformed. Subordinance is not compliance or conformity but a means of disempowering the weapon of death deployed by the state.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Friedrich Nietzsche misreads Paul in the standard Lutheran contractual theological manner as suffering from guilt and resentment against God and the law. His pronouncement of the death of God is a prophetic pointer to the demise of western philosophical foundations which a correct, apocalyptic, reading of Paul and Christianity already address.
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Paul Axton lectures on Romans 11 detailing the conclusion of how "God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all."
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Paul Axton Preaches - Hebrews is a case in point of how a figurative reading of Scripture and history is existentially now and not yet. It is not Nietzsche's Platonic - not yet Christianity nor is it Hegel's immanent - now Christianity, thus it counters both fascism and Marxism.
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Paul Axton lectures on Romans 10 which depicts the universal predicament of turning to the sign of the law rather than the transformative relationship of covenant which resolves this problem.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Romans 8 counters the suffering and agonistic desire described in chapter 7 with a participation in the Trinity grounded in hope.
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Matt, Tim, Alan, Trenton and Paul compare and contrast various approaches to Romans 9-11, represented in part by David Bentley Hart and N. T. Wright, discussing the various facets of the possibility of universal salvation.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Sin is the alienating power linked to the orientation to death in Romans 5 and 7 and this is what Christ defeats and which, as Romans 6 describes, Christians realize by being joined to Him.
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Paul Axton argues that in chapter 9 of Romans Paul is not talking about a double predestination of the Calvinist type. He is speaking of the way in which Israel’s vocation to be the people of the creator God, including specifically its calling to be the “vessels of wrath,” was the focal point of the plan to save the world.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The defining doctrine of evangelicalism, Calvin's penal substitution, subverts the biblical meaning of the work of Christ, trading a God of love for a wrathful pagan-like deity.
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Matt, Alan, Tim and Paul, in this initial discussion on Ro 9-11 discuss the mystery of Christ and the approach of David Bentley Hart and N.T, Wright to these chapters.
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Paul Axton Preaches - John Calvin, by tying the place of the dead to eternal punishment and then linking this with the punishment inflicted on Christ on the Cross so as to achieve forgiveness, invented the doctrine of penal substitution. The correct translation of Isaiah 53 and the right understanding of the Apostles' Creed are set forth to counter Calvin's innovation with the biblical understanding of atonement.
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Paul Axton lectures on Romans 8, depicting the contrast with Romans 7, as now love, life, Abba Father, the Holy Spirit, hope, prayer, and a new depth of communion and communication appear which were absent in chapter 7.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The significance of recognizing the cosmic work of Christ as the predestined purpose and fulfillment of creation is that this is the only understanding adequate to overcoming the meaning generated by evil. To picture the work of Christ as a response to sin is to fit this work to an evil frame.
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Paul Axton lectures on Romans 7 and discusses the identity of the "I" and the problem this "I" has with deception in regard to the law, which is definitive of sin.
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Paul Axton Preaches - On this Mother's Day, the theological significance of John's privileging of women is portrayed. John seems to be narrating for us the theological point that to be joined to Christ will mean that we pass beyond stereotypical male/female roles in order to put on Christ – in order to be the bride of Christ.
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Paul Axton lectures on Romans 6, explaining the "likeness" we share, through baptism, with Christ and how this eliminates the false orientation of the "body of death" and gives us access to being, and not simply having, a body.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Churches indigenous to the U. S. follow the pattern of the early church - acknowledging nonviolent peace and then forsaking this original commitment. The key to maintaining this original peace stance is to correctly understand and implement a nonviolent atonement.
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In this PBI course discussion Matt, Tim, David, Trenton, and Paul discuss the way in which the false foundation of conservative faith, reflected in the treatment of women, has missed the foundation of Christ.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Churches of the Restoration Movement once held to the doctrines of the historic peace churches as part of what was to be restored in the authentic church. By this measure, churches of this Movement do not meet the qualification of authentic Christianity, and as outlined by David Lipscomb, Alexander Campbell, and Barton W. Stone, Restoration Movement Churches are of the whore of Babylon described in Revelation.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The turn from Christ as ethical model also entails a turn from Christ as the full revelation of God. Abstractions about God's nature, apart from Christ, devolve to pure power and evil. The resolution is Christ's depiction of himself as revealing the will of God.
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Paul Axton untangles the problem of the mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate taken up and incorporated into Augustinian theology. A straightforward explanation of the reign of death, at the root of sin, and the defeat of this reign is set forth.
Jason and Paul look back over the past 5 years and 500 podcasts to the beginning of Forging Ploughshares and the founding of Ploughshares Bible Institute and discuss where we have been and plans for the future. In celebration we introduce our new intro and outro.
Paul Axton Preaches - The world challenging nature of the Gospel was itself challenged by the Constantinian shift, which seemed to have made the former enemy the support of the church. But the question is, if this Roman violentization of church and theology can be uncritically accepted?
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Music: Bensound
In this PBI course discussion Tim, David, Allan, Matt, and Paul discuss the impact of Constantinianism on what was presumed to be the unbiased consensus, the shared natural understanding, reached in the church councils.
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Music: Bensound
Paul Axton preaches - Mary demonstrates the human temptation to linger at the tomb. Human culture and religion, along with contractual theology, would reify death but the Easter story empties the grave and the law of sin and death. Only in turning from the tomb can we see the risen Jesus.
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In this PBI course discussion Tim, Allan, Austin, Trenton, Matt, and Paul discuss how contractual or justification theory has captured the Western understanding of Romans interpreters and a practical alternative is discussed.
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Music: Bensound
Paul Axton Preaches - In the Triumphal Entry Jesus not only reverses the crowds nationalistic expectations but reverses the myth of death denial by which the Prince of this world enslaves.
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Music: Bensound
In this lecture on Romans 4, Paul Axton depicts Abraham's faith as an organic reversal of universal death denial (sin) through the death acceptance of resurrection faith.
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Music: Bensound
Paul Axton Preaches - What sacrifice do you believe in, the sacrificial systems of this world inclusive of war and sin or the sacrifice of Christ which has ended the sacrifice of war and sin?
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Paul Axton, in this lecture on Romans 3, applies the "faith of" Christ to being made right (righteousness) in regard to the incapacity for faithfulness created by the lie of sin.
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Music: Bensound
Paul Axton Preaches - To find where God is at work requires looking beyond the symbolic/law which determines significance in human values, to the value of the cross which suspends ("as if not") the principles and powers of this world.
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In this third lecture on Romans Paul Axton deals with the difference between the "faith in" and "faith of" Christ and the difference between an objective cognitive faith as found in contractual theology and a holistic faithfulness, truer to the Greek and fitting the faithfulness of Abraham. The issue of available light and the mysterious Gentiles who have been true to the law are also dealt with.
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Music: Bensound
Paul Axton Preaches - Can you love someone and kill them? Most all Protestants answer, yes, in regard to killing in a just war, but this is a reversal of the teaching of Jesus. The problem is a separation of the life of Christ from his teaching and the resolution is to restore Jesus as model.
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Music: Bensound
In this opening discussion of the theme of Romans Matt, Tim, Allan, Austin, and Paul discuss the real world difference of being made right in regard to sin, death, and desire.
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Paul Axton Preaches - After Constantine the cross is completely changed in meaning. Instead of a reviled instrument of torture and representative of a nonviolent sacrifice, it is made into an emblem of war and the official sign of Empire. Constantinianism changes Christianity and we must be able to discern this change to understand the New Testament faith.
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In this second lecture on Romans Paul Axton sets aside the pervasive notions of a contractual understanding which have obscured access to Paul's depiction of the human predicament and its resolution in Christ.
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Paul Axton Preaches - As Christians who believe the peace of Christ is a central teaching of Christianity, how do we read the Old Testament depiction of God as if he is a warrior deity, promoting genocide and killing? The New Testament teaches us how to read these sections of scripture as applying spiritually.
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In this continuing PBI course discussion on Romans Matt, Tim, Austin and Paul discuss how it is that death is obscured or denied in the salvation systems of this world which deal in death.
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In this PBI course discussion Tim, Austin, Matt, and Paul discuss Romans 5 and I Corinthians 15:56 and the universal tendency to transpose sin and death. The universal mistake is definitive of sin and recognizing it is an opening to rightly understanding salvation.
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In this first in a series of talks on Romans, Paul Axton introduces the theme of Romans - the human predicament and its resolution - as it revolves around the problem of shame and death and as it is resolved in righteousness. This is contrasted to the typical Augustinian approach that misappropriates this language.
In the PBI course discussion Tyler, Matt, Trenton, Jason, Tim, & Paul, discuss how the image of God in humans is simultaneously an ontological reality for all people but one completed or corrupted by being joined to either the the work of Christ (resurrection life) or a destructive story like redemptive violence.
Jon, Megan, and Paul discuss the post-apocalyptic science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The topic turns to this present moment and the nature of hope in the midst of dystopia.
Paul Axton Preaches - Christ directly contradicts elements of the Law, along with the Old Testament portrayals of God as violent. The defenders of this mistaken understanding were those who killed him, so that he died in exposing and correcting this difference.
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In this PBI course discussion Tim, Austin, David, and Paul discuss the practical ways to engage both church and culture with the non-violent peaceable Gospel.
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Paul Axton Preaches - James 3 describes the characteristics constituting wisdom and presumes a capacity to achieve righteousness characterized by peace and love are among the key ingredients of this wisdom.
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In this PBI discussion Alan, Matt, and Paul discuss the real world revelation of the immanent Trinity in Jesus, who is the Cosmic Christ. The definitive sign of having encountered Christ is the passage from violence to Peace. To miss this is to potentially mistake the devil for God.
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In this PBI course discussion on science and language, Tim, Tyler, Trenton, and Paul discuss how Girard's theory might or might not fit evolutionary theory, or a deterministic or a free will universe, and how modern science accords with a particular theological understanding of language.
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In Part 2 of their discussion, Megan, Jon, Jason, and Paul spell out ways of breaking down the barriers which have arisen with belief in conspiracy theories and identity politics, and focus on the attitudes and theological answers that might heal this present moment.
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In Part I of this two part discussion, Megan, Jon, Jason, and Paul come to grips with why people are taken in by conspiracy theories, identity politics, and the theological failure and theological answers that might explain this present moment.
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Paul Axton Preaches: The recent attack on the Capitol and the religion that supports this nationalism has parallels to German Christian thought and the rise of Hitler. Paul is describing the defeat of this death dealing orientation.
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In this PBI discussion, Jon joins Matt, Tim, and Paul in a continued conversation of how to get beyond modernist, Hegelian, dialectic thought and hermeneutics by returning to the early church's approach to Scripture.
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In a PBI Course discussion, Tim, Matt, and Paul discuss a reading of Scripture that harmonizes Old Testament violence with the peace of Christ by focusing on a theological reading or a return to the early church hermeneutic.
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In a PBI discussion, Tyler, Matt, and Paul, discuss a Christian form of knowing which is neither supersessionist nor modern foundationalism. Using the psychoanalytic poles of perversion and hysteria, they lay out a third way of knowing.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Mary's Song and story opens human interiority and depth to world-changing consequences for human choice. Out of this realization evolves the modern sense of human interiority.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Darkness is interwoven into the light of the Christmas story which heightens the meaning of its sublime beauty and purpose.
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Jon and Paul continue their discussion of the critical realism of Ben Meyer and Bernard Lonergan and discuss how subject/object duality is the specific form of subjectivity overcome in Christ and how this might conflict with or fit into an apocalyptic theological understanding.
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Jon and Paul discuss the critical realism of Ben Meyer and Bernard Lonergan and how this might conflict with or fit into an apocalyptic theological understanding.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The advent of the light breaking into the world is not dependent on human decision. It is a matter of what God is doing. To focus on the mediation of law, on the mediation of history, or to picture faith as a mediation, is to miss the act of God in Christ.
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In this lecture, Paul Axton fully engages contemporary critiques of Sigmund Freud but suggests that in the second phase of his work and in the broad parameters of his project there is a potential theological understanding that needs to be utilized.
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Paul Axton pits the salvation historical approach of N. T. Wright or the Quest for the Historical Jesus against the apocalyptic revelation of being found "in Christ" as in Galatians. Transference out of slavery to freedom does not depend primarily on history or time but a shift in relationship.
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Paul Axton describes a horseback journey to Adobe Walls on the old XIT Ranch which completes the story of his recent blog on the role of our own creation of memory as it plays out in our reading of the Gospels.
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American Christian nationalism conjoined with Christian Zionism strangely reduplicates the false teaching Paul identifies with the false gospel in Galatians. The only antidote to the pervasive spread of this false teaching is still the prescription Paul gives - the true gospel message.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The gospel inaugurates a new world order with its own understanding and reason. The argument of Galatians is that the gospel is its own foundation and does not depend on law, rhetoric, reason, religion, or anything else, as it is the speech act of God in which the Christ event continues to unfold.
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In this lecture Paul Axton distinguishes the manner in which true experience of God includes the created order, while the counterfeit experience (inclusive of forms of reason) excludes the world and thought itself.
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Several passages in the Bible depict humans as reflecting the image of God, and by extension the entire creation bears the mark or image of the creator. The implication is that creations purpose is fulfilled in this image bearing which embraces the role of all of creation and our own story in the created order.
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Jon and Paul discuss the history of biblical interpretation, critical approaches to Scripture, and the recent role of "cultural interpretation" as a means of arriving at a peaceable hermeneutic.
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Paul Axton Preaches - There is a definitive description of the experiential reality of God in which one world system with its morality and apriori presumptions melts away.
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Jason discusses the unique perspective and insight of the art of Corby Blem with the artist. View the accompanying video to go along with the discussion of this unique artist. https://youtu.be/D7DFTBoo_B0
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Paul Axton Preaches - The Christian experience of the sublime is the simultaneous recognition of the overwhelming power unleashed into the world and the existential recognition that this power is unleashed in our own life in resurrection faith.
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In this lecture Paul Axton examines the insights and problems with the three reigning understandings of religion.
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In this lecture on the Holy Spirit, Paul Axton depicts the communion of God within the immanent Trinity as the ground of human communion.
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Paul Axton, in a course at the Carpenter's House, explains the failure of modern thought as it is connected to natural philosophy and proposes a morally and aesthetically engaged understanding in a narrative or imaginative understanding.
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In this fascinating interview with Michael Hardin, author of some ten books dealing with René Girard he tells of his relationship with both Girard and Walter Wink and he describes the essential element which Girard brings out in the Gospel and the Christian journey.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In philosophy of religion and apologetics the moral and religious arguments for God proceed from the universality of religious beliefs or morality to the conclusion that God must exist. But is what we call God or the “moral law” in these arguments perhaps, nothing more than our own projection or the law of sin and death.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The revelation of the two-part name of God to Moses is fulfilled in the divinity and humanity of the incarnate Christ. The implication is that creation is a fit dwelling for God and Jesus is the story of God.
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Jason and Paul, in discussing the course (Imaginative Apologetics) starting October 19th, discuss how philosophical arguments, such, as the moral argument, have given rise to radical evil as a concept and a reality. Register now at Ploughshares Bible Institute: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/about
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Paul Axton Preaches - Paul, in Ephesians, describes the Christian life as seeing everything differently, a seeing from the heart or waking up to the light. C. S. Lewis described his baptism as a baptism of the imagination and his Narnia tales illustrate what this waking up or conversion of the imagination entails.
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Jason and Paul indicate how the philosophical arguments play into a failed psychology and point to the need for a fuller and more robust recognition of the Gospel as part of an apologetic. Our course Imaginative Apologetics will begin on October 19th.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The events of history bear the truth of Christianity so that this truth invites a redefinition, not only of truth, but of legitimate human sovereignty, justice, and reason.
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Jason and Paul discuss the approach of imaginative apologetics in contrast to the traditional approach to natural theology.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Deploying the three most famous apologies or trial defenses in history (the trial of Socrates, Jesus and Paul), the contrast between a defense grounded in this world order (law, reason, power) and one grounded in the Kingdom of God, is used to illustrate the apocalyptic (world disrupting) nature of a proper Christian apologetic.
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Vangie, Jason, and Paul discuss the existential threat posed by surveillance capitalist companies such as Facebook and Google but to which we have long been subject in the age of mass media. The manufacturing of consent and consumption is the lie of the principalities and powers in its modern guise.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The work of Christ, is one of the most contested aspects of Christianity. Bad theories of the atonement have obscured the simplicity of the New Testament summed up by Romans 8:2, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death” (Romans 8.2).
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In this lecture on Jacques Derrida, Paul Axton explains Derrida’s philosophical project of “deconstruction,” aimed at understanding how self-consciousness is divided or already conceived in difference, which is the root problem of violence. Derrida's development follows and aids Paul's conception of the law.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In the recapitulation view of the atonement, Christ is seen as the new Adam who succeeds where Adam failed. In psychoanalysis there is a similar diagnosis in which people live according to a fantasy or lie about themselves and the world and part of the goal of psychoanalysis, as with Christianity, is to traverse or expose and correct this fantasy.
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In this lecture, Paul Axton, traces how the lie surrounding the law (a lie of radical evil) is defeated by the work of Christ. This deliverance from death to life is the ground which every metaphor of atonement supports or, mistakenly, obscures.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The ideological form of American evangelicalism follows the pattern of counterfeit religion outlined by John and Paul. It is defined by what it is not and is an antagonistic structure that erupts in the perversion it would suppress.
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In this talk Paul Axton explains how the early Church doctrine of recapitulation, or the exposure of a false identity and the reconstitution of identity in Christ, is explained through the psychoanalytic notion of traversing the fantasy.
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Paul Axton Preaches: American religion, like American politics, is coming undone and the divide between the right and left is exposing the death dealing nature of the heterodoxy of American Evangelicalism while pointing to an orthodox faith with the opposite orientation.
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In this ongoing talk, Paul Axton demonstrates how radical evil might be equated with reification of the law. The law or the symbolic order may literally be taken as the voice of God, as in bicameral theory, and this explains the sort of perversion put on display by Jerry Falwell Jr. Sin establishes the self (in the law) so that punishment and pleasure are fused for the pervert, who would service the subject behind the law.
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Paul describes Christ as breaking down the dividing wall of hostility, but to grasp the significance of this broken wall, it is necessary to understand how hostility constitutes our world in class and caste.
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Part I In this first lecture Paul Axton, in an examination of the Kantian concept of evil as developed in Lacan and his followers, suggests that their concept of radical evil brings a corrective to theories of evil which can provide the background to understand how the cross addresses evil.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Today, seventy-five years ago, the second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The great irony and sadness of this day was that an all Christian bomber crew, from a Christian administration, all from a so called “Christian Nation” dropped the bomb on the center of Christianity in Japan.
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In part 2 of their conversation of the dropping of the atomic bomb Matt and Paul describe the gospel alternative to mutually assured destruction.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In the world the goal or end is through violence, a redemptive violence. The gospel arms us with an alternative means, the way of peace, which contains the end.
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In part one of this two part conversation, Matt and Paul discuss the great irony that a "Christian Nation" should choose as ground zero the center of the Japanese Christian population in Nagasaki. The myth it was a necessity, along with the myth of redemptive violence is challenged.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The Gospel does not teach nonresistance to evil. The New Testament informs us how to resist evil. John Lewis has clearly picked up the point as explained by Paul in Ephesians 6 and Jesus in Matthew 5, in his nonviolent civil disobedience.
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Matt and Paul continue their discussion of shame. In this conversation they discuss how the Gospel and the practice of Christianity, rightly understood, provides a real world resolution to this primary human problem.
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Paul Axton Preaches - We cannot see the world through the lens of our law, our constitution, our borders, our police, our armies, because in doing so we are defining ourselves through that which Paul calls a hostility. This hostility divides us from others, it is the hostility which killed Christ, but it is also the hostility which he defeated.
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Matt and Paul discuss how refocusing the human predicament on shame, as opposed to guilt, shapes and grounds all of theology very differently. Shame is holistic, social, and directly connected to the experience of death and this understanding opens an alternative notion to the meaning of the work of Christ.
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Paul Axton preaches - In Ephesians Paul is describing the principalities and powers as the spirit or personality of a country or group of people which is larger than the sum total of its parts. We can be controlled by this power or we can present an alternative or witness to the powers by exposing their false narrative.
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Jason and Vangies interview the innovative artist, Lily Jurskis, on her well thought out approach to artistic creation. You can view her art by following this link: https://youtu.be/n71d0mVxEbY
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Paul Axton Preaches - The implication of the ancient view combined with a New Testament understanding is that the social and political is integrated with the spiritual. Perhaps every business, corporation, school, church denomination, bureaucracy, sports team— indeed, social reality in all its forms— is a combination of both visible and invisible, outer and inner, physical and spiritual.
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Paul Axton preaches - Christ is enacting a revolution continued in the church, not through domination or taking control, but through a bottom up shift enacted through a disempowering subordination.
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Paul Axton preaches - Skipping the particular, "black lives matter," for the universal, "all lives matter," deploys the logic that killed Christ. Christ and God are found in the place of the excluded, the lynched, the crucified.
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Jon and Paul continue their discussion of Luke Timothy Johnson and in this conversation trace the interaction of Paul's Hebraic, Pharisaical, and Christian approach to reality. Using the example of slavery and racism they discuss the implications of the Pauline model for this present moment.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In this sermon on Ephesians 4 the ancient doctrine of salvation as recapitulation is explained.
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Jason and Paul discuss the upcoming class being offered through Ploughshares Bible Institute. The course is dealing with forgiveness and reconciliation in Paul. It will be a practical development of radical forgiveness and reconciliation from Philemon and Ephesians worked out in healthy community. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/lm/offerings
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In this lecture, Paul Axton, makes the point that Ephesians describes the deconstruction of those categories that divide so as to reconstitute a unified humanity. Not all dualistic categories are the same - some will need to be obliterated and some reconstituted - but inasmuch as they partake of dualistic identities they are undone in Christ.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul discuss various approaches to understanding Paul. In this second part of their conversation they discuss the complications of any biography, systems of dating, or modes of narrowing the works within the Canon, appealing to the recent work of Luke Timothy Johnson.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul discuss various approaches to the biography of Paul as these fit into understandings of the Canon, appealing to the recent work of Luke Timothy Johnson.
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In this interview with Nathan Hosler, author of Hauerwas the Peacemaker?, the key role and weaknesses of Stanley Hauerwas's theology is considered.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul reflect on highlights, key points, and problems in their discussion with Douglas Campbell.
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In Part II of this discussion, Douglas Campbell answers our questions on his recent work, Pauline Dogmatics, spelling out his understanding of "flesh" and "spirit," and his understanding of how to navigate contemporary issues surrounding culture and sexuality.
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In Part I of this two part discussion, Douglas Campbell answers some of our key questions on his recent work, Pauline Dogmatics, spelling out his theology. We discuss the shape of his work around resurrection and predestination, his understanding of foundationalism, universalism, and sachkritic.
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Matt, Jon and Paul discuss the biblical notion of election as aimed at theosis. In the next talk we will discuss Douglas Campbell's work with the man himself.
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Matt, Jon and Paul discuss the biblical notion of election as opposed to false understandings.
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In part 2 of this discussion on dualism Matt, Jon, and Paul describe how resurrection defeats apparent dualisms.
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In part 1 of this discussion on dualism Matt, Jon, and Paul attempt to define just how the New Testament interacts with apparent dualisms, or in the words of David Bentley Hart "provisional dualisms."
You may need to download this one again if you downloaded before 9am on May 18th as it contained an error. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul discuss how evil is different than sin and how resurrection defeats both categories.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul discuss the key passage in Romans 5, often mistranslated in the Western tradition, and how sin needs to be redefined as an orientation to death answered by resurrection.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul discuss the existential experience of death and its defeat.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul discuss the existential experience of death and discuss how sin and death are interwoven in Paul, Barth, and psychoanalysis.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul continue their discussion of the work of Douglas Campbell, focusing this week on narrative and the way in which this story bound the three of us together.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul continue their discussion of the work of Douglas Campbell, focusing this week on narrative and the way in which Christ's story can bind our lives and the world together.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul continue their discussion of Douglas Campbell, focusing on the transcendentals and living out the Gospel.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul, discuss the apocalyptic notion of truth shared by Søren Kierkegaard and Douglas Campbell and contrast this with other notions of truth.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul continue their discussion of how love is definitive in an apocalyptic approach to theology. Love describes God as a communion of persons, which means that community and relationships are definitive of humans, and the only way to point to this truth is through witness and invitation and is not through reduction to propositions, doctrine, or belief.
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In this 8 part series Matt, Jon, and Paul, follow the work of Douglas Campbell, focusing and expanding on his recent work, Pauline Dogmatics. In this second discussion, the love of God in an apocalyptic understanding, is contrasted with the focus on sovereignty. The work of Robert Doran is brought together with Rene Girard to contrast apocalyptic with focuses on justification. Douglas Campbell will join us for the 8th podcast as we discuss his key insights.
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In this 8 part series Matt, Jon, and Paul, follow the work of Douglas Campbell, focusing and expanding on his recent work, Pauline Dogmatics. In this opening discussion the foundation of Christ, over and against human foundationalism, and the radical shift in understanding of God, reading Scripture, and salvation, are set forth. Dr. Campbell will join us for the 8th podcast as we discuss his key insights.
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Paul & Hayden continue their discussion of "The Tree of Life" and focus in on the films portrayal of the problem of evil and its depiction of a resolution.
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In Part I of a two part discussion, Hayden and Paul discuss the prayer like film, "The Tree of Life" and draw out the theological implications of the role of nature and grace in the life of the O'Briens.
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Jason and Paul continue their discussion of the role of narrative and poetry. In this discussion they focus on the power of narrative to capture the complete portrait of life, inclusive of death.
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Jason and Paul discuss the primary role of poems and stories in capturing reality - the reality of injustices and the prime reality of simple beauty. Deploying the work of Wendell Berry and selections from their own writings they discuss how these poems and stories capture key lessons which tune us in to the primary reality of life.
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In this lecture Paul Axton introduces the first comprehensive post-liberal theology - the work of James McClendon. McClendon moves beyond the controversies of modernity to a theology which builds upon the interpretive insights of the early Church.
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Paul Axton Preaches - "God's anger, is at one with his love; so, too, God's mercy and his justice are one and the same. Mercy and punishment are not opposed; for punishment - the consuming fire - is a means to an end, that we might be the creatures he intended us to be. God's punishment, his justice, can be his most merciful act."
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Matt, John, and Paul, discuss the early Orthodox understanding that Jesus is the revelation of the immanent Trinity and the wide ramifications this has for the doctrine of God and theological anthropology.
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Paul Axton preaches - This verse speaks of three different groups or three different types of people. We can trace three psychological types which correspond to these three orientations.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul discuss the interaction of Christ with culture by using Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, displaced by Christ, as an example of how the violence of Christ filters out evil and lifts up the good. In part 2 we focus in on what it might mean to be a Christian in America.
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Paul Axton Preaches - In Chapter 1 of Ephesians Paul has described a world built upon Jesus Christ. In chapter 2 he begins to contrast this with a world controlled by the Prince of this world. The truth and morality of the one is pitted against the other.
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Matt, Jon, and Paul discuss the interaction of Christ with culture by using Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, displaced by Christ, as an example of how Christ filters out evil and lifts up the good.
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Paul Axton Preaches - For Paul, Christ is Jesus – the reality of the one is inseparable from the other. It is not that Jesus is one phase of the making of the Christ. The truth of God, the truth of the world is found in the incarnation.
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Dylan and Kylie, two of our Forging Ploughshares community, are starting a special home here in Moberly. Dylan describes their journey and the nature of their vision.
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Paul Axton preaches - Certainly, salvation is the overcoming of sin but the fullness of redemption is the completion of creation’s purpose. Paul has moved our understanding of God’s plan beyond the earth and the human race to its cosmic impact as part of the outworking of the love (the very essence) of God. The whole point of who God is and what God is doing in creation is summed up in the incarnate Christ (1:10).
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In the conclusion to a discussion on modern experiential reality Jon, Matt, and Paul, describe the peculiar role of Eastern Orthodoxy in contrast to Protestantism and Roman Catholic thought impacted by nominalism and the rise of the peculiarities of the secular in the West.
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Ephesians describes a different experiential reality. To get at this understanding we need to redo the deep grammar from which our experience flows. This will include a reworking of the category of eternity and our relationship to that category.
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In this introduction to describing this place we have come to in modernity Jon, Matt, and Paul discuss the role of nominalism in Protestantism and Roman Catholic thought and the rise of the secular in modernity.
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The heart of the New Testament is a theology of new creation through resurrection: God affirms the goodness of the created order, and affirms he is makeing itanew, starting with the physical body of Jesus Himself.
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In this lecture Paul Axton describes the formation of desire from a biblical and Lacanian perspective and links this to idolatrous religion and human angst, both of which are defeated in putting on the image of Christ. This piece is part of the larger picture of religion being put together in the upcoming class for which you can register here at the bottom of the page - https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/lm/offerings
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In this conversation Jason and Paul touch upon the issues of religious sacrifice, nationalism, orientalism, and the primary role that violence and peace play in the confrontation between the kingdom of Christ and the principalities and powers. The upcoming course World Culture and Religion will take up these issues in depth.
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Jason, Vangie, and Paul discuss how Christian's are to perceive this present political moment in which a vast number of Christians have aligned themselves with a particular political party.
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Part I - Jason and Vangie Rodenbeck and Paul Axton discuss the significance of the Netflix portrayal of the election of Pope Francis and the resignation of Pope Benedict.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The way of peace can be equated with the Gospel while the way of violence is that taken by the enemies of the cross of Christ. It should be oxymoronic to speak of “violent Christianity” or “Christian warfare.” Peace is the Christian way established by the Cross and instituted in God's Kingdom, the Church.
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In Part 2 of this interview with Dr. Deborah Saxon the roll of self care is explored more completely and this gives rise to a discussion of how this understanding relates to other cultures such as Japan.
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Paul Axton Preaches - The story of Herod's lying guise of wanting to worship Jesus and his subsequent slaughter of the innocents calls upon us to consider the moral cost of the perpetual battle for power in which political leaders will put on the façade of religion and where the powerless and the poor are slaughtered for the powerful.
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In Part 1 of this 2 part conversation with Dr. Deborah Saxon we discuss some of the missing texts written by and focused on women in the early Church. Dr. Saxon has focused on gender and the care of the self in early Christianity and she explains what this meant and its implications for Christians today.
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Deep and full joy and laughter are a rebellion against the darkness of the world. Laughter and Christ are synonymous. To miss the laughter, to miss the joy, is to miss Christ.
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In part 2 of this discussion between Brad Jersak, Matt Welch, and Paul Axton the approach to the Old Testament understanding, in light of Christ, is worked out.
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Paul Axton Preaches: Humans are deadly. We are deadly for other creatures and for ourselves. The revelation of Christ witnessed to in Scripture is not about God’s anger being appeased or satisfied. It is about the human predicament, the exposure of the destructive nature of human logic, and the positing of life on a different principle.
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In this episode Paul Axton and Matt Welch talk with Brad Jersak about his journey of discovery of peace and the Christ centered nature of that peace.
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Paul Axton Preaches - There is a waiting – that is simply fear driven inaction. Advent is not this sort of waiting. It is the expectation of the birth of Christ, reimagined and infused with hope of the Parousia, so that “God with us” identifies the nature of the absence.
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Paul Axton Preaches: A Girardian interpretation of the Eucharist exposes the murder covered over by the myths of the nation as in Thanksgiving.
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Martin Heidegger was at once the the greatest metaphysician of the 20th century and a despicable idiot in his involvement with National Socialism in Germany. In this talk Paul Axton suggests the evil of the man is present in his thought while the thought still contains great insight.
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Paul Axton Preaches - Is conscience and guilt the voice of God or part of the human disease deluding the self. The history of human suffering and its peculiar shape according to time and place indicate the human creation of suffering and this points to the the therapy or healing of Christ.
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In this lecture on Japanese religion and culture Paul Axton delves into the problem of defining religion, especially as it is often defined in connection with Christianity. This is a sample of the approach that will be employed in the upcoming class on Religion and Culture offered through Ploughshares Bible Institute.
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Paul Axton Preaches: The New Testament is focused on achieving peace. This peace is certainly inclusive of a physical non-violence, but it also includes corporate peace – an enacted peace in the body of Christ, and a psychological peace which we are to discern and cultivate.
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Jonathan Totty and Paul Axton describe how approaches to Thomas (in Neo-Thomism, Nouvelle Theology, Radical Orthodoxy, Post-liberalism, Reformed Theology) may account for Trad-Catholics, Evangelical apologetics, analytical philosophy, and the rise of nominalism and secularism. The peculiar understandings of Thomas help explain the divisions of modern thought and theology.
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The ultimate sacrilege occurring in churches today is the sacrifice of women and children, the outworking of the Fall characteristic of Moloch worship, in the name of Christ. This is the potential tragedy connected with reifying traditional roles captured in complementarianism. It misses the fact that the Gospel is overturning fallen norms of what it means to be male and female.
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Paul Axton Preaches: Love in the body of Christ is our assurance it is our certainty. This is not the certainty of a principle or formula (which is without life or presence) but the certainty of a promise of real presence of my brother on the right and my sister on the left.
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In this interview with Michael Hardin, the author of the "Jesus Driven Life," we discuss the work of Rene Girard as it is integrated with a non-violent hermeneutic. Hardin is an acclaimed author who has written extensively on Girard and in addition to his other books also edited the important compilation, "Stricken by God."
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Paul Axton Preaches: One of the curses of the Fall, a part of what it means to have forfeited the image of God, is that man will oppressively rule over women and women will masochistically succumb to this rule. Authentic Christian salvation is aimed at curing this oppressive curse.
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Jason Rodenbeck and Paul Axton discuss the misfocus of forms of universalism and Jason suggests a key part of following Christ is necessarily left out of any form of universalism.
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Paul Axton Preaches: The completion of all creation is the completion of man by the creation of woman. The whole inner basis of creation, God’s whole covenant with man, which will later be fulfilled through Christ and the Church is prefigured in the completing of man’s emergence by the coming Woman to man.
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Jason Rodenbeck and Paul Axton discuss the misfocus of forms of universalism and Jason suggests a key part of following Christ is necessarily left out of any form of universalism.
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Paul Axton preaches - By referencing one of the most famous sermons in America and referring to one of the most unremarkable passages in the New Testament, the proposition is posed that the universal is to be found in the specific, the ordinary reality of all of our lives.
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Matt, John and Paul continue their discussion of David Bentley Hart's recent book That All Shall Be Saved.
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Sermon - God’s will is being enacted in creation, in history, in all of our lives culminating in universal worship: “Every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:10-11).
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Matt, John, and Paul discuss Hart's dogmatic universalism as set forth in his most recent work.
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Paul Axton preaches: Freedom does not mean that we are constrained by nothing so that true freedom arises in a vacuum. We are to be slaves of truth, slaves of righteousness, slaves of happiness. This is true freedom. Christ frees us from the slavery to death to slavery to righteousness and this accords with absolute freedom.
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Paul Axton interviews Douglas Campbell, a professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School who is known for studies of Paul's writings that command the respect of scholars worldwide, discussing the details of his work on Romans and his larger understanding of theology.
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Paul Axton preaches: The basic negative emotions – shame, jealousy, envy – can be understood as arising with mimetic rivalry – desiring what the other desires; desiring life and wholeness and feeling its absence. With the faith of Abraham made complete and available in Christ, imitating his faith saves from blind sacrificial violence.
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Paul Axton preaches: In Christ what sacrifice hides is now revealed. No longer can we claim that sacrifice and murder are perpetuated by God – as His murder and all murder “shall be charged against this generation” (Luke 11:51). All that would claim the necessity of His sacrifice perpetuate the lie that killed Him.
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Jason and Vangie Rodenbeck discuss the upcoming PBI course THE 310 Christian Community in the World: A study of the Kingdom of God as it restores community and creation.
Registration is currently open and can be found at the bottom of the current offerings page.
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Paul Axton preaches: The Word of Christ can save as it displaces a word that kills around which we would center ourselves.
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Paul Axton proposes that the key idea of Hegel is explained through his interaction with Kant, Descartes, and the thought he gave rise to in psychoanalysis.
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Paul Axton preaches: Evangelicalism reproduces forms of idolatrous religion because it is of the same mold. We are no longer deceived and we can name this idol.
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Richard Rohr's depiction of the Universal Christ is providing an answer to a generational disaffection from Evangelicalism. Paul Axton and Sharon Klingemann discuss his work.
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Paul Axton preaches: Religion and thought is world preserving in comparison to Christianity which is world deconstructing. The revolution we are called to be part of is world deconstruction.
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Paul Axton explains that the common approach to religion - Pluralist, Inclusivist, Exclusivist - fails to understand the specificity of salvation in each religion and Christianity in particular.
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Paul Axton preaches: The election of Donald Trump and evangelical support for Trump is a living proof that white supremacy is alive and well, not in spite of, but because of evangelical Christians. Is a faith that requires oppression and exclusion, which explicitly tolerates and promotes white supremacy, “Christianity"? Isn’t this, as Douglas would have it, “the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels?”
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Paul Axton preaches: We live in a time in which ethics has been separated out from the Christian story so that people do not hesitate to embrace the ethic of the culture rather than the ethic of love. – keeping the foreigners at bay, putting children in cages, making America Great Again at the expense of Christian ethics. The question arises as to the ground of ethics and especially Christian ethics. Is our ethics grounded in love? And what does this mean?
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In this podcast, Paul Axton compares the work of Mircea Eliade, the father of religious studies, and Peter Berger, the father of the notion of the social construction of reality, so as to arrive at a biblical understanding of religion.
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Paul Axton preaches: The dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile is broken down in Christ, and the removal of this barrier is, for Paul, the archetype of salvation. Money shared by Gentiles and accepted by Jews is the token of its accomplishment.
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In this discussion Aaron Woods describes his work in Jerusalem teaching peace to Muslim children in a Christian school.
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Paul Axton preaches: The resurrection connects us to creation, it exposes the lie of death as an escape, it connects us to embodiment, it frees us from the valuation and ethical system of culture, it connects us to the deep love of others and the comfort of that love, it connects us to history and salvation history – we are part of this history.
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Paul Axton concludes the series on various ways of engineering death in orientalism, occidentalism, and particular modes of enculturation the extreme form of sickness - the serial killer or the homicidal and genocidal tendency - by linking to a universal construct addressed in the death of Christ.
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Paul Axton preaches: Is it the sting of sin is death or is it the sting of death is sin? Our tendency to misread this passage points to our tendency to miss what Christ saves us from.
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Paul Axton illustrates the way in which death is engineered into the purpose of life and culture in this analysis of Takeo Doi.
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Paul Axton preaches: The "sickness unto death” is despair at not having the self. Resurrection is the ultimate cure of this sickness – but rightly conceiving of the resurrection we can begin to conquer this despair now.
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Paul Axton traces the manner in which Freud was taken up in Japan and the deep resonance between his theory and a Japanese sensibility.
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Paul Axton preaches: The Corinthians, the evangelicals, the Roman Catholics, presume there is a naturally given recognition of good and evil in human wisdom. This "wisdom" is not the basis for Christianity but what Christ destroys.
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Paul Axton explains that orientalism is not simply academic or nationalistic but is intimately tied to psychology and human interiority. Japanese used the work of Sigmund Freud, very much an orientalist, so as to manufacture an identity to ward off and reverse the denigrating assessments of the West. Japanese psychologists and texts literally reverse Freud and his valuation system and this reversal has become a key part of the Japanese search for identity.
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Paul Axton preaches that the apostle Paul offers no room for dualism – for the notion that material reality is unreal and that it is only the soul that goes to heaven. This is the lie that deludes. It is this way of dividing up the world defeated in resurrection.
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To make the point that putting resurrection in the center constitutes an alternative Christianity, Paul Axton in this sermon sums up a few key ways in which a different emphasis on resurrection completely alters key doctrines.
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Paul Axton discusses identity through difference illustrated in Orientalism Part II. If Japan is a mud swamp which has successfully warded off Christianity (which it is and has for the most part), it is by virtue of the same power which has shaped Christianity so as to fit modern Western identity. This is an understanding defeated by a right understanding of sin as an orientation to death defeated in resurrection.
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Paul Axton preaches on 1 Corinthians 14:34ff: This passage raises key questions about how we interpret Scripture and how we understand who God is. Our relationships and attitudes toward maleness and femaleness are not secondary but primary to our understanding of Christianity.
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Orientalism serves as an example of identity through difference as a failed form of thought that necessarily involves us in the lie of attempting to reify a human construct.
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Paul Axton preaches: Truth comes to us in a person, through his words, but the truth is not in the form, the letter, the propositions of the words but in a deep spiritual communion which displaces the discommunion of the covenant with death.
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Sharon Klingemann and Paul Axton discuss the effect of eternal torturous existence on Christianity and possible alternative understandings.
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Paul is saying to those who speak in tongues, which apparently he wants everyone to do, to make themselves intelligible. There is an isolated and private part to all of us which can only be shared with God. This most intimate aspect of who we are should not create a sense of isolation – as if we cannot get outside of ourselves so as to share with others the deepest part of who we are. We should see this private interiority as the place God meets us with a word about which we tell others.
Preached by Paul Axon.
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Paul Axton and Jason Rodenbeck discuss the newly-available Ploughshares Bible Institute (PBI) course on Romans: Salvation through the Body of Christ.
You can register for the course here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/lm/offerings. Hurry, it begins on May 27th!
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Continuing his conversation with Paul Axton, David Rawls explains how he led his congregation through the "clobber" passages on women in leadership.
Part 2 of 2.
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Paul Axton preaches: What psychoanalysis misses and what Paul provides is passage beyond the mirror stage into mirroring the glory of the Father in the image of the Son by the Spirit.
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David Rawls discusses his church's biblical journey to allowing women in leadership with Paul Axton.
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Paul Axton preaches: The point of salvation, creation, life, and all things is love. Paul’s Gospel has as its central theme, not grace, or righteousness – which are certainly key but are not the center. Love, as Paul presents it, is the point of Christian faith.
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Paul Axton explains how the two premier thinkers of East and West (Heidegger and Nishida) converge on a singular idea which gets at the root of philosophical evil in the 20th century.
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Paul Axton preaches: Jesus appears and he is unrecognizable to them. At first, Jesus is still accursed in their sight – death has won out, the grave has consumed him, and their understanding is bound by this reality. In each instance they have to in some way change up their perspective in order to comprehend that it is the risen Jesus who stands before them.
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Paul Axton preaches: If salvation is a body united, sin is the resistant core, the alienating power, which as Paul depicts is the turning of self against itself. In the same way we can understand salvation as a harmonious body, we can understand the suffering of sin and even a damnable existence as people turned against one another.
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The premiere historian of the Restoration Movement, Richard Hughes, discusses his research with Paul Axton, tracing the core myth of white supremacy which stands behind the myth of America as a Christian Nation.
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Paul Axton preaches: The spiritual gifts may be misunderstood as miraculous magic apart from a grounding in true spirituality. An examination of I Corinthians 12.
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Paul Axton and Jason Rodenbeck continue their conversation on living in the tension of postliberalism which requires people to entrust themselves to God.
Part 2 of 2.
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Paul Axton and Jason Rodenbeck differentiate postliberalism and liberalism.
Part 1 of 2.
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Paul Axton begins a new series answering basic theological questions, beginning with original sin.
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In this sermon, Paul Axton sorts out the biblical picture from the various traditions and reactions that arose around the Lord's Supper.
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Hayden Hagerman and Paul Axton discuss how Postliberalism intercedes into modern thought- as a disruption on the order of idolatry undone and absorbed by the strange new world of the Bible.
Part 2 of 2.
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Paul Axton preaches: The reversal of sin is through the death of Christ because sin is an orientation to death which his death addresses.
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Paul Axton and Hayden Hagerman discuss how postliberalism goes beyond the liberal/fundamentalist controversy as well as beyond postmodernism and such thinkers as Quine and Davidson.
Part 1 of 2.
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Paul Axton preaches: Male/female relations are a correlate of the Trinitarian relationship between the Father and the Son. Our success in gendered relationship is interwoven with our understanding of who God is.
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In this lecture, Paul Axton poses the possibility that nothingness, absence, negation, - is itself demonic. The recognition that the idol is nothing is not to disarm the demonic but to recognize the strength the idol exercises.
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Paul Axton preaches: I Corinthians 10 contrasts demons and glory - and equates simply suspending the law, naming the idol as nothing, as inadequate and destructive. It is the sort of destructiveness unleashed by Marxism and deconstruction which as a half-truth is more destructive than outright paganism.
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Hayden Hagerman and Paul Axton discuss the key figures in postliberalism and the development of this alternative to modernist liberal and conservative theology.
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Jason Rodenbeck and Paul Axton conclude their discussion of the 2018 film Vice and share their reflections on a the peaceable Kingdom's response to the pursuit of political power and our contemporary political situation.
Part 2 of 2.
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Paul Axton preaches: The organizing principle of this world is idolatrous in that it would sacrifice people for principle, the few (the poor and weak) for the many (the strong). Paul pictures this as collusion with demons and call for anarchism - love against the organizing power of this world.
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Jason Rodenbeck and Paul Axton discuss the 2018 film Vice and share their reflections on a the peaceable Kingdom's response to the pursuit of political power and our contemporary political situation.
Part 1 of 2.
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Hayden Hagerman and Paul Axton continue to lay out the significance of Wittgenstein and show how this correlates with part of an Augustinian understanding which correlates with Karl Barth and serves as the basis for Post-Liberalism.
Part 2 of 2.
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Paul Axton preaches on I Corinthians 9, where the apostle Paul's ideal of authority and leadership is contrasted with that of the Corinthians and contemporary notions of leadership.
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Hayden Hagerman and Paul Axton discuss Wittgenstein's and Augustine's understanding of language and how this can result in two different theological understandings.
Part 1 of 2.
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Paul Axton concludes his series on Anselm: Anselm works out the necessity of the death of Christ as part of the logic, already developed in his other arguments, of a pure reason. The necessity of the death of Christ is a violent logical necessity in his closed system of the human mind.
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Paul Axton Preaches: Paul is teaching the Corinthians of an alternative knowing - a self-awareness that must include a sensitivity to persons. It is not simply a matter of knowing a set of facts – idols are nothing and God is something. It is a matter of knowing persons – some are weak some are strong – and the principle found in Christ is that of a loving personal knowledge.
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Paul Axton connects Anselm to Hegel and Heidegger and to Lacanian psychoanalysis in tracing the turn to a reified language as a form of salvation.
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Paul Axton explains how Anselm reasons from ordinary differences to an absolute difference so as to attain to the thought of God and cross the ontological divide which separates the divine and human. To cross this divide using reason is an ultimate act of the will which will require the Cross. All of this depends upon an essentializing or absolutizing of human interiority.
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Paul Axton explains how Anselm gives us an alternative theory of atonement based on an alternative anthropology which depends upon pure reason. Mysticism and rationalism are seen to be fused and necessary in this key thinker who stands behind Western Christianity and Western thought.
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Paul Axton preaches: Salvation as Paul applies it in I Corinthians pertains to how we do marriage, how we regard sex, how we negotiate our social station, or how we negotiate identity. Clearly Paul’s message is not that you have now accepted Jesus into your heart and so you are going to heaven when you die – and everything else is secondary. Rather he says you have been bought with a price and what you have been bought out of is a world where sexual gratification, social station, or ethnicity or family may be thought to be the primary point of human existence.
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Paul Axton preaches: Anxiety is created by putting too much importance on the world of marriage, social status and ethnicity. Paul may be using end of the world language metaphorically so as to relativize worldly things but certainly he means these concerns to not have a definitive grip. The way we suspend this anxiety producing grip is to be found in Paul's phrase "as if not."
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Paul Axton Preaches: The arc of Scripture contains a confrontation with the tragic that is an occasion for what Kierkegaard called the comedic. The Christian is in on the humor if it is not obstructed by bad theology.
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Paul Axton preaches: To get the freedom of sex in marriage correct one must sort out the principle of the flesh from the reality of the body.
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A brief conversation with Vangie Rodenbeck, developer of Ploughshares Bible Institute’s newest course: THE 250 Marginalization and Restorative Justice. The course is a practical and thought-provoking application the peaceful Gospel message at the heart of Forging Ploughshares’ mission to issues of power and inequality among traditionally marginalized groups. Vangie shares how her experiences raising a child with a documented disability have influenced her theology and her ideas about the justice offered by the powerlessness of Jesus’ cross.
The course will be open for registration by the 14th of January.
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In this introduction to Kierkegaard, Paul Axton compares Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death with Lacanian psychoanalysis.
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Paul Axton continues his examination of the life and theology of John Howard Yoder.
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Paul Axton exams an absolute and Christian notion of Freedom and suggests our age is characterized by a pursuit of a false freedom giving rise to the sickness of the age.
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Paul Axton talks about John Howard Yoder, one of the premier theological thinkers of the 20th century who suffered from a sexual perversion. Since he consciously developed his theology to include the fullness of personality the test here is to work out how this failure is reflected in the theology of John Howard Yoder.
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Paul Axton poses the question, "Do Christians have recourse to the law when so-called Christians are abusing them sexually or financially?"
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Paul Axton weaves the thought of Wittgenstein with his personal journey in order to set the stage for understanding his philosophy.
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Paul Axton preaches: The apostle Paul deals with the origin and depth of evil and explains to the Church in Corinth how to insure the power of the Passover Lamb applies to them. Part of what needs to be gotten rid of is the notion that law and love are opposed.
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Paul Axton explains that Ludwig Wittgenstein shifted philosophy and with it theology to a new appreciation of the embodied nature of language and thus the embedded contextual nature of being human.
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Paul Axton preaches on I Corinthians 4, where the apostle Paul says he does not judge anyone nor even presume to judge himself. He is describing a relinquishment of judgmentalism achieved by presuming responsibility as a servant and not a legislator of over the church.
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Paul Axton preaches: The Church is an ethic, a form of spiritual worship constituting the presence of Christ. It does not simply have these things or do these things as if there is a gap of separation between them an the Church. This is definitive of the Church.
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Scott McNay and Paul Axton discuss the influence of Eugene Peterson and the point of being a pastor through reflection on the book of Corinthians.
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In this sermon, Paul Axton suggests that Christ is the foundation of the cosmos in that he is creator and sustainer and this understanding accords with recent science but also goes beyond it and beyond the fundamental principles of reason available in a closed cosmos.
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Paul Axton lectures on the importance of the singular foundation through Niemöller and Bonhoeffer. Paul pictures Christ as the One foundation in I Cor. 3 and indicates even though we may build on this foundation our life may be a futility. The work of the Church at certain periods in history may come to nothing - this is illustrated in the life of Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
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Paul Axton preaches: Rhetoric, philosophy and law or debaters, philosophers, and scribes is Paul's way of describing the talk and talkers which are of this age. A fullness of speech marks a different age, a different identity, and a different orientation to language.
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Paul Axton introduces I Corinthians. He argues Paul is employing something like Austin's notion of a speech act - his "word of the cross" is deployed to create a unified community where the logos of wisdom is creating dis-community.
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Paul Axton preaches on I Cor. 2:6-8 - Human wisdom is responsible, according to Paul, for the death of Christ and those who killed him were blind to what they were doing. The Bible traces human religion and understanding to a death dealing lie and this is what the wisdom of Christ exposes and displaces.
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In this episode, Paul Axton sets Girard within atonement theory - over against propitiation and penal substitution but also not in accord with Hegelian notions of death as absolute.
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Paul Axton preaches: With sexual abuse by both Catholic Priests and Protestant clergy reaching epidemic proportions there is the necessity to pose the possibility the church is incubating evil. Corinthians addresses and provides an alternative to illicit desire and sexuality.
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Michael Hines has written and studied the history of Islam and we discuss the various possibilities as to the identity of Muhammad, the difference in the view of God between Islam and Christianity, the historical development of Islam and the influences which may have shaped this faith. Join the discussion hosted by Paul Axton.
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Paul Axton preaches on the opening section of I Corinthians. in which Paul calls them "saints," "sanctified," the "called out" holy ones, is the point of unity to which he is calling this divided community. God's holiness, his innermost unity, is the mode in which the Corinthians and all of us are to find unity.
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In this conversation Paul Axton and Ryan Hemmer discuss philosophy of science as it impacts theology and as worked out by Bernard Lonergan.
Ryan also recently started his own podcast, Systematically.
Part 3 of 3
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Paul Axton preaches: In the 1960’s and into the 70’s – with the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, the rise of the drug culture – what we call the cultural revolution – a phenomena called the Jesus People came about. Youth Culture meets the Church. We are not at the end of this cultural clash but can assess it through Corinthians.
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Ryan Hemmer has explored key thinkers on the question of Christ and culture. In this episode Ryan explains the significance of Paul Ricouer, Rene Girard, and Sigmund Freud, in regard to the role of culture. What role for evil and desire or goodness and deity in language and culture?
Ryan also recently started his own podcast, Systematically.
Part 2 of 3
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In this introductory sermon to I Corinthians, Paul Axton compares the measure of the cross to the health and wealth gospel and the philosophy of church growth as a measure of success.
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Paul Axton interviews Ryan Hemmer who is completing a major work on Bernard Lonergan. Here are his insights into this key theologian of the 20th century. Lonergan provides the basis for theology to forge ahead into previously uncharted territory and Ryan explains why.
Ryan also recently started his own podcast, Systematically.
Part 1 of 3
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Jason Rodenbeck and Paul Axton discuss the newest course available on PBI.
Matthew: Gospel of Kingdoms is an in-depth, theologically reflective reading of the book of Matthew which allows Jesus' life and teaching to challenge all of our ideas about the way life is supposed to work in this world. We see Jesus' Kingdom vision as truly as we can and learn to imagine what it was he saw as he taught it. Learning how it defied the expectations of the first-century people awaiting the Messiah helps us see how our own contemporary expectations aren't much different and how Jesus is as shocking today as he was 2000 years ago.
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In part three of this discussion, Paul Axton and Megan Kenyon talk about the failures and inadequacies of Utopian societies and attempt to describe the ideal understanding of the Christian community - especially as it relates to the embodied human condition and the need to meet the entirety of human needs. As a female artist, Megan describes the particular struggle of women in the Church.
Part 3 of 3.
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Paul Axton preaches: Persons were a minority among people of first century Rome. Onesimus and Jesus did not qualify as Persons according to Roman law. Christ, by becoming a slave, overturns the valuation system of the world and in the process redefines what it means to be a person.
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In part two of this interview, Megan Kenyon describes the blossoming of art in its relation to the renaissance and reformation, and then the fragmenting of thought and theology as reflected in modern art.
Part 2 of 3
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Paul Axton quotes two poets, Woodie Guthrie and Jason Rodenbeck, to make the point that bad theology fused with capitalism enslaves. We are to be about the work of redemptive creation care in all of our labors.
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In part one of this interview, Megan Kenyon and Paul Axton discuss the role of art in the life of the Christian and the theology of art.
Part 1 of 3
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Paul Axton preaches: Is slavery a metaphor for sin and not itself sin or is slavery a type of sin? How we answer this question not only determines our reading of Philemon but determines if we recognize that economics and socio-political forces are part of what enslaves us and constitute a part of what Christ frees us from.
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Paul Axton explains Zizek and the core of Lacanian theory as it overlaps with the apostle Paul.
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In this sermon, Paul Axton suggests that the manner in which slavery is subverted by Paul is the mode in which the Kingdom is made a reality. Radical subordination enacts the subversion of the City of Man and marks the City of God.
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Paul Axton preches: Christendom held out the promise of an enduring social structure impacted by Christ. Christendom failed and every form of this faith is bound to fail. So what are we left with?
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Paul Axton preaches by depicting engagement with the truth of Christ and contrasting it with the detachment of the alternative understanding characterized by idolatry but also by any focus on religious experience.
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Paul Axton preaches: An examination of biblical idolatry as an example of the problematic nature of the pursuit of religion on the basis of an uncritical desire and experience. Christ exposes the misdirected religious pursuit of human religion.
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Paul Axton interviews Eric Miller, who stands in the unique position of forming an Anabaptist like communion from within the Restoration movement.
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Paul Axton preaches: Our tendency is to fly free from the mortal condition but in doing so we isolate ourselves from human relationships. The question we are asked each Sunday, "Are you one of Us?" grounds us in the fellowship of the crucified.
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Paul Axton preaches: Christian belief intervenes in a passive, disconnected orientation to the law and to the world so as to overcome the gap between mind and will.
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Paul Axton interviews Nathan Hosler of Office Peace Building and Policy: A key Anabaptist engagement with the powers in an attempt to foster peace.
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"The Price of Everything": With unprecedented access to pivotal artists and the white-hot market surrounding them, this film dives deep into the contemporary art world, holding a fun-house mirror up to our values and our times -- where everything can be bought and sold.
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Paul Axton invties Bryan Gallant to discuss recovering from the worst sort of grief and finding love and a new understanding of God and what is important.
Author's book: Undeniable
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Paul Axton and David Rosado review the Netflix Documentary "Take Your Pills," which examines the drug of choice, Adderall, launching the conversation into the connection between mind and spirituality.
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Those disaffected from evangelical Christianity have formed a community which is in many ways quite helpful but it has also strayed into Gnostic notions regarding gender and God. Bret Powell and Paul Axton continue to discuss the Liturgist podcast and its significance.
Part 2 of 2
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Those disaffected from evangelical Christianity have formed a community which is in many ways quite helpful but it has also strayed into Gnostic notions regarding gender and God. Bret Powell and Paul Axton discuss the Liturgist podcast and its significance.
Part 1 of 2
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This Father's day sermon by Paul Axtno suggests ultimate despair is answered through love of God as Father.
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Paul Axton interviews congressman Mark Siljander, attacked by Bush and Cheney for attempting to work out a diplomatic solution to the Middle East, spent 4 months doing hard time in a federal prison as a result. His notion that we should give peace a chance has had real-world results and radical personal consequences.
THE ALGORITHM Things To Avoid:
Are you pushing a personal agenda?
Are you asserting that"I" am right & "you" are wrong?
Are you using the tactics of shame or disgrace;"pointing out mistakes"?
Are you keeping a record of the offences committed by the "other" person?
Are you holding anger toward the "other" person? Are you acting proud of yourself, your culture/country or religion?
Are you happy when bad things happen to your enemy?
Things To Embrace:
Are you patient with each other?
Are you acting in kindness or acting upon your own self-interests?
Are you seeking justice and truth?
Are you hopeful (to God) for a positive outcome?
Are you giving up easily or are you working together persistently?
Do you think that the "other" party is trustworthy?
Are you only protecting your self interest?
How To Apply: Eat a meal together. Pray with & for each other.
Highlight common ground & resolve any misunderstandings. Get to know them personally (family, passions, concerns, etc.)
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In John women play key roles as models of service and belief which seems to narrate the theological point that the law is suspended through relinquishing prototypical masculine notions of identity and taking on new (feminine) familial orientation. Paul Axton preaches.
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Eric Seibert is Professor of Old Testament at Messiah College and his book Disarming the Church is a complete guide to the peaceable kingdom. If Christians follow the Prince of Peace, why do they often behave so violently? What can be done to transform the church so that it looks more like Jesus? In this podcast. Seibert and Paul Axton explore these questions and discuss biblical and practical reasons for living nonviolently in all areas of life.
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Paul Axton preaches on a Christianity which needs to hurt others - children at the border - Christ on the Cross - in which law is privileged over doing right. Through an examination of John 5 the question is raised whether this "law and order" Christianity deserves the name "Christian."
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“Theology is the constant attempt of Christians to speak well whether we be laity or clergy.” — Stanley Hauerwas
Jonathan Totty interviews Stanley Hauerwas about why being informed about theology is important for all Christians. And, how as Christians we are obligated to engage in theology so as to make sense of our own humanity in relation to God. This is the first of a series of podcasts titled “Why Theology Matters.” In this series Jonathan explores how theology is the “Queen of the Sciences” and the broadest horizon in which we understand and make sense of reality by interviewing theologians, pastors, and lay people who are engaged in the work of theology.
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Paul Axton preaches on how the Logos overcomes the logos of man in that identity through oppositional difference is undone.
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Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty have a conversation about Balthasar's explanation of the analogia entis, Barth's misunderstanding, and why this esoteric matter would make a difference to a theologian like James Cone.
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Paul Axton preaches on the ultimate sin identified with Judas: handing over Jesus. This sermon demonstrates how this ultimate sin is one that is shared by the Apostles and which is specifically confronted by Jesus.
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Paul Axton compares two functions of language as typefied at Babel and Pentecost.
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Richard Hughes, the premier historian and key thinker in the Restoration Movement addresses the problem of white supremacy and racism as it is attached to particular theological perspectives and offers a theological and historical resolution. Presented as part of the Peace and Justice Study Group at The Stone Campbell Conference.
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Paul Axton preaches on two notions of truth, compared and contrasted as they come into conflict during the trial of Jesus.
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Paul Axton and David Rosado review the film The Rider. After suffering a near fatal head injury, a young cowboy undertakes a search for new identity and what it means to be a man in the heartland of America.
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Paul Axton examines alternative theories of predestination and arrives at a resolution that is neither Calvinist nor Pelagian.
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The contrasting dreams of two generations clash within the microcosm of an ancient Buddhist monastery in Bhutan, when Gyembo an ordinary teenager is chosen as the next guardian of their family monastery by his father.
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Fire, torture, punishment, and discipline are depicted as purifying. In 1 Cor 3:11-17 - fire purifies and saves while some are depicted as being annihilated. There is no eternal conscious torment depicted in Scripture. In this sermon, Paul Axton examines terms translated as eternal and punishment to suggest that "the chastening of that Age" is neither eternal nor retributive.
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David Rosado and Paul Axton discuss the role of spirituality in mental health. What does the Bible say about mental health and how does mental disease, spirituality, and physiology potentially work together?
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This sermon follows Paul Axton's recent blog suggesting that the trial of Jesus forever suspends absolute notions of sovereignty and justice.
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Paul Axton preaches on passages describing the narrow way and those depicting an all inclusive salvation which give us theological fundamentalism and various forms of universalism. The first step toward overcoming this problem is to recognize salvation is not from eternal torturous existence but from the universal problem of sin and death.
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Here is the interview with the premiere historian of the Restoration Movement - Richard Hughes. We discuss nonvioloence in the RM, white supremacy, why continue on identifying with this tradition, and the essence of true religion.
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Paul Axton uses James and Frederick Douglas to describe how religion becomes evil through becoming deaf to the oppressed.
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Paul Axton shows that the dialectic between madness/wisdom is simply part of the dialectic always taking place between life/death which the cross addresses and undoes.
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Paul Axton and David Rosado review the film Of Fathers and Sons: For more than two years Talal Derki lives with the family of Abu Osama, an Al-Nusra fighter in a small village in northern Syria, focusing his camera mainly on the children. From a young age, the boys are trained to follow in their father’s footsteps and become soldiers of God. The horrors of war and the intimacy of family life are never far from one another. At the nearby battlefront Abu Osama fights against the enemy, while at home he cuddles with the boys and dreams of the caliphate.
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Paul Axton and David Rosado review two films, Won't You Be My Neighbor and Primas.
Won't You Be My Neighbor: Fred Rogers was about to enter the seminary when he turned on his first TV and saw a man get hit with a pie. He was aghast. How could he preach love and kindness when preschoolers were absorbing junk violence? So he changed career, trading a clerical collar for a cardigan, and attempted to change the world. Morgan Neville’s “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” follows how Rogers spent three decades hosting PBS’s “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” answering kids’ questions that other entertainers wouldn’t, including week-long episodes on death and divorce. Introducing the film at Sundance, Neville described his cheery documentary as therapy, only now for adults. At the first glimpse of the retro red trolley, a grown man in the audience moaned in joy.
Primas: How do you go on after an appallingly traumatic experience? Rocío, an 18-year-old Argentine girl, has managed to get her life back on track. When she was 10, she was dragged from her bike by a passing stranger, raped, set on fire and left for dead in a field. Incredibly, she survived. Now she tells her story to her cousin, who was sexually abused for years by her own father. Director Laura Bari transforms the girls' shocking personal stories into a beautifully natural portrait of two ordinary adolescents with familiar questions about life.
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Paul concludes his Easter series of sermons with the resurrection: He is risen, sin is forgiven and new creation has commenced. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound
Paul Axton continues his sermon series leading up to Easter. Several of the liturgical readings surrounding Palm Sunday are referenced leading up to the crucifixion and resurrection.
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Following the liturgical calendar leading to Easter, this sermon describes the character change of the new covenant described in Jeremiah through the life, death, and resurrection - and the high priestly ministry of Christ.
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Paul Axton follows liturgical readings leading up to Easter. Here he explains what it means to be fallen and saved and how the cross takes us from one world to another.
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Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty have a conversation about Divine simplicity, which done wrongly gives us ontotheology but correctly understood it forecloses any notion which would reduce God - including penal substitution.
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Paul Axton concludes his sermon series on Hebrews.
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Paul Axton preaches on Hebrews 12:2 - Despising the Shame. It demonstrates the transvaluation taking place in Hebrews. It is still a system which accounts for honor but under a different mode of valuation.
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In this podcast, Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty discuss the need for humility in reading scripture: Coming to the scripture with the attitude of desiring to be shaped by it as a part of the community of Christ.
Ploughshares Bible Institute is offerning a course on Hermenuetics starting March 17th. Enroll today!
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Paul completes his five-part series on Yukio Mishima. Mishima longs for a return to a childhood omniscience. He will achieve this through a tragic cause which justifies his suicide.
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Paul Axton continues his sermon series on Hebrews. Hebrews 12 pictures a present tense encounter with Mount Zion and the Heavenly Jerusalem. Bad apocalypse pictures ultimate destruction but biblical apocalypse pictures recreation from out of the midst of the the undoing of this world's principalities and powers.
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Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty have a conversation about Karl Barth's doctrine of election. Barth recovers a profound NT insight which puts a very different emphasis on predestination and election.
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Paul Axton continues preaching on Hebrews. Chapter 11 characterizes faith as the capacity to face the reality of death and to trust God. This resurrection faith does not fall into the lie of denying or fearing death. But as with Martin Luther King Jr., and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, there is an acceptance of suffering and futility and a capacity for endurance to be found in living by the vision of an alternative through faith.
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Paul continues his series depicting the working of the law of sin and death through the life of Yukio Mishima.
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Paul Axton talks about Mishima's turn from writing to a turn to duty: Where his writing stood over and against his father his will now shape his life according to the word of his father by silencing his ego and taking up a path toward his own self-destruction.
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Paul Axton continues his exploration of Yukio Mishima, primarily working with his autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask. Paul describes the turn away from love to self-destruction as a moral masochism in service to the law.
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Paul Axton preaches on whether faith is subjective or objective.
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Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty talk about how evil is not a problem for Aquinas and becomes a problem only with the shift taking place in in his lifetime.
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Paul Axton continues his use of Japan to illustrate his theological understanding. Yukio Mishima explains his justification for his traditional suicide in language that gets at the human struggle at its most basic level and which the New Testament describes as the law of sin and death.
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Paul Axton begins to trace the origins of his discovery of dialectic in orientalism, Tadanobu Tsunoda, and Takeo Doi.
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Paul concludes his study in Hebrews.
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Jonathan Totty interviews Paul Axton on his experience in Japan. Paul describes why and how he ended up doing an analysis of psychoanalytic readings of Paul as a result of his experience.
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As we come to the conclusion of Hebrews in chapter 13 we examine the economy the book is describing in terms of Honor and Shame. Not to say this is some historical artifact but is a universal truth about the way shame and honor are addressed in salvation.
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The temple as microcosmos an mirror of heaven emphasizes the immanence and transcendence of God respectively. Christ resolves this tension as true temple. At the same time the work of Christ and the the nature of God are apprehended against this background.
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Persecution, hostility toward God, and suffering are a futility and evil, but even these endured rightly can be transformed into a discipline.
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This sermon pictures the various rituals surrounding the temple as focused on cleansing from death. The ultimate cleansing is from the rebellion of sin and death - this is the meaning of the atoning death of Christ. This stands in direct contradiction to penal substitution.
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Thomas Evans, Jonathan Totty, Matt Welch, & Paul Axton discuss the essence of Christianity. Did Gandhi have it better than Calvin? In this wide-ranging discussion, we touch upon the work of Tolstoy, King, Girard, and others.
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An explanation of Hebrews 9, often used to support penal substitution. Paul Axton argues that it is at the ascension of Jesus, not His death, that atonement is completely worked out.
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Paul Axton continues his study in Hebrews.
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The Jewish shadow and form resolved through the temple.
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Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty discuss gender.
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Paul Axton continues his study in Hebrews.
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Resurrection is at the center of salvation.
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Jason Rodenbeck and Paul Axton discuss an alternative to traditional seminary and Bible college. What is the difference of an education derived from the principle of peace?
We are happy to announce Ploughshares Bible Institute is now accepting applications!
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Faith breaks open a closed cosmos and a closed economy to receive God's gifts.
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A sure Promise - Jesus has gone behind the veil. The Transcendent and immanent nature of truth as we have it in Christ.
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Is faith an interior state or a participation in a transcendent essence. How we understand the "essence" of faith is determinative of the shape of our Christianity.
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Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty discuss the potential resolution to the modernist divide between faith and reason to be found in Radical Orthodoxy, Postliberalism, Barthianism, and the the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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Chapter 6 of Hebrews can be compared to II Peter in its description of "partaking" in deity.
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Salvation is an embodied, practical salvation which is inclusive of practicing virtue. The way to virtue is by practice.
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The counter to liberalism and fundamentalism is a proper appreciation of bodily resurrection and ascension.
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The resurrection and ascension is the point of perfection which is then what is mediated to us. This accords more with theosis than Western notions of atonement.
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Frank Dugan makes a distinction between various metaphors and the telos of God's creative and restorative work, in particular forgiveness as an accounting metaphor. Paul Axton then leads the study on Hebrews 10:19ff.
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The two goats - YHWH and Azazel - of Yom Kippur are both referenced in 9:28. Paul explains how this shapes Heb 9-10. Keeping the goats straight will bring clarity to the meaning of how Christ saves.
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The temple as microcosmos and mirror of heaven stand in tension, but the resolution of this tension is to be found in a properly worked-out Christology.
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Jonathan Totty and Paul Axton discuss the problem of evil as it relates to modernity and the secular.
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Paul preaches on the Sabbath rest.
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An explanation of the pollution of death surrounding the temple and its rites. With this in mind it would be impossible to think of God needing or requiring the death of Christ.
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Jonathan Totty and Paul Axton discuss the secular nature of belief in modern forms of faith.
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Paul preaches on the concept of Sabbath, Today, Now, or of Messianic time in Hebrews.
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Christ's bodily ascension overcomes dualism. Dualism is defined as the universal structure of sinful alienation - it is a false dualism.
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Penal substitution is often derived - Paul offers an alternative reading.
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Paul preaches on entering in to a different concept of time - Messianic time.
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Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty discuss the The Genealogy of Modern Theology. Under this title we cover several topics:
- The Medieval Renaissance: Aquinas and the Classical Synthesis
- The Late Middle Ages: Nominalism and Voluntarism, The Renaissance and the Reformation, The Enlightenment and Pietism, German Idealism, The notion of the secular.
The goal in this first podcast is to get a clear image of the shift which occurs between the premodern and the modern.
There is an introductory blog post for this series.
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The body of Christ is the cosmic temple toward which the earthly tent pointed.
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Paul lays out an alternative understanding of sin and salvation while exploring Hebrews 2.
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Paul continues his study in Hebrews.
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Using John Howard Yoder this sermon demonstrates five instances of how Jesus interacts with existing world-views and cosmologies.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty have a conversation about Eastern Orthodox Theology.
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The implication of Christ’s Priesthood in Hebrews 7 will be worked out such that we are also priests.
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Paul continues his study in Hebrews 6:9.
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Paul continues his study in Hebrews.
Be forewarned: Toddlers are toddling and vocalizing their opinion throughout the discussion!
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Paul begins a sermon series on Hebrews.
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Jonathan Totty preaches on the righteousness of God.
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Paul concludes his sermon series on I John.
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The answer to the question of what would constitute the answer to Jesus prayer in 5:7 is resurrection, and resurrection faith is taken to be the kind of faith we have to combat sin. Sin is equated with the faithlessness of not trusting God for life – resurrection life.
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Gregory Palamas was a monk of Mount Athos in Greece and later the archbishop of Thessaloniki, known as a preeminent theologian of Hesychasm. Paul and Jonathan discuss the significance of Palamas as a point of departure from the Latin tradition.
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Paul continues his sermon series on I John.
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Paul continues his study in Hebrews.
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Jonathan Totty preaches a sermon on breaking bread together.
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Blood-humanity and water-deity are forever fused in and through the person and work of Christ. A simple idea that requires a revised understanding of blood as it is used in the OT and as it is understood in the NT.
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Jonathan Totty preaches on The Mirror of the Word.
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Paul continues his sermon series on I John.
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Paul continues his sermon series on I John.
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Christ is high priest after the death and resurrection which impacts how we understand his significance and the nature of our faith.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty discuss C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength.
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Paul continues his sermons series of I John.
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Paul continues his study of Hebrews.
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Paul continues a conversation with Tom Evans and Matt Welch about their personal journey into nonviolence.
Part 2 of 2.
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Paul begins a conversation with Tom Evans and Matt Welch about their personal journey into nonviolence.
Part 1 of 2.
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Paul continues his Bible study of Hebrews.
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Obedience, love, and belief, are not simply tests of faith but proofs of the truth of Christianity. Postmodern definitions of incommensurateness set the stage for the argument that these are proofs inasmuch as they constitute the coherence of Christianity.
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Paul continues his Bible study of Hebrews.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty have a conversation about C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. The nature of evil, the atonement, God’s creative purposes, are all part of this discussion about the second book in Lewis’ Space Trilogy.
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Paul begins a series of sermons on I John.
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Paul concludes his sermon series on Galatians.
The cross demonstrates not the wrath of God to be undone, but the virtue of Christ to be imitated.
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Paul shows that Christ delivers from slavery to fear of death as the work of the atonement.
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Paul pictures the law as having a perverse underside which can become oppressive. It is the antagonism between the spirit and the flesh and not this categories per se that is definitive of sin.
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Paul preaches on the role of narrative in conveying the truth of Scripture and explains the verse recommending the Judaizers castrate themselves.
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Paul continues his Bible study of Hebrews.
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Paul preaches on Galatians 4. The basic principles of the law are not our problem. It is imagining that these basic principles deliver life and God to us.
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The series of quotes brings together the significance of the meaning of the Son of God – Christ as the Davidic Messiah and YHWH returned.
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Paul has a conversation with Jonathan Totty concerning Augustine’s theory of knowledge as worked out by Eric Przywara.
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Paul continues his exploration of the theology of Hebrews.
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Paul and Jason have a conversation about Wendell Berry.
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Paul equates returning to the law with idolatry. An equation that expands upon the problem of idolatry so as to make it inclusive of sin.
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The revelation of Christ is constituted as revelation in its conjunction with creation. Or to state it differently, Christian truth demonstrates itself in the particular context into which it enters.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty have a conversation about Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality and the Self.
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Paul continues his sermon on Galatians, expounding the “faith of” Christ as inclusive of ethics.
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Paul concludes his study in I John. The final phrase in John concerning idolatry is a summation of the problem he has dealt with and a contrast to the solution he has offered.
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Paul introduces the book of Hebrews.
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David Mosley has written and published on the intersection between art and theology. In this conversation he compares and contrasts Tolkien and Lewis and describes their particular strengths. He also locates their work in a particular theological understanding.
Part 2 of 2
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David Mosley has written and published on the intersection between art and theology. In this conversation he compares and contrasts Tolkien and Lewis and describes their particular strengths. He also locates their work in a particular theological understanding.
Part 1 of 2
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Paul continues his study in I John.
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Paul explains the role of resurrection in Christian understanding on Easter Sunday.
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Paul and Alec Bussen have a conversation about communion practices.
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Paul runs down the meaning of blood and blood sacrifice as it relates back to Abraham and Isaac and is taken up into the Goat of the Lord. From its inception, sacrifice pointed to kenotic love.
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Paul and Jason discuss the issue of suffering and evil from the perspective of Jesus’ “Identification” with our suffering and his experience of evil on the cross, as described by theologian Brad Jersak’s Identification theology.
Part 2 of 2.
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Paul and Jason discuss the issue of suffering and evil from the perspective of Jesus’ “Identification” with our suffering and his experience of evil on the cross, as described by theologian Brad Jersak’s Identification theology.
Part 1 of 2.
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Paul explains the psychotheology of violence.
Part 2 of 2
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Paul explains the psychotheology of violence.
Part 1 of 2
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Jonathan Totty makes the case that nonviolence is at the heart of the central ideal of unity in the Restoration Idea.
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Paul traces how authority works in relation to the Gospel and what this has to do with Justification.
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Galatians and the New Testament are written that, “We might know how to conduct ourselves in the household of God.” The Bible is to be read in the Church so as to preserve an already existing unity.
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Can we state the concrete personal and psychological difference which Christianity makes? Through a comparison of contemporary psychoanalysis and Ro. 7-8 this difference is layed out.
(Talk given at Lane Christian Church for the area men’s meeting.)
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In this sermon, Paul summarizes the book of Romans.
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Paul continues his study of I John.
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Using Scientology and Albert Speer as examples, Paul demonstrates how narrative misdirection or a truncated narrative can result in evil. This points to the need of the alternative narrative community of the church in which to ground our ethics.
The picture, then, of a Christianity that does not take into account [being enculturated] is the failure of Christianity in Nazi Germany—I think it’s the failure of a Christianity in the United States—because what Christians often imagine is that being a Christian in no way means that they have to sacrifice participation in the culture at any level. But that it means you can add those symbols of faith without any sacrifice or suffering while remaining comfortable.
Here the failure of humanity is the way that we would join ourselves together. If we would join ourselves for purposes that are inadequate—well that corporate community is subject to becoming evil. If we join ourselves to a Wall Street firm whose only goal is to make profit, do you think that could become evil? What happens with corporate cultures or cultures per se, is that their story is truncated—it’s too small. If we find our stories in these places, being rich on wall street, a movie star, an athlete, if that becomes a kind of end goal, then we’ve joined into precisely the problem. What Wink has realized is that even church—churches set upon numerical growth… you think they can become evil? Yes, because they’ve truncated the story.
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Paul continues his study in I John, emphasizing that a Christianity which is focused on punishment is inadequate and falls short of love.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty discus Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard’s key work, and bring to a conclusion his goals in authorship. The significance is the attempt to bring the psychological realm back into theology.
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Paul continues his study in I John.
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Paul explains the logic of Anselm’s ontological argument, what it does, and connects it to the death of Christ.
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Paul and Frank have a conversation about the work of René Girard, who has given us a tremendously useful and biblical understanding of the scapegoat mechanism which shapes all culture.
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Paul continues his study in I John.
And so John gives us the test, “You know the spirit of God—every spirit who confesses Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.” You do not distinguish between the man and the divinity, the incarnation, then, is God in the flesh. If you do a little church history it’s amazing how this same thing comes up again and again. I kind of like Luther’s phrase that “God died on the cross. “What he’s combatting is the tendency that he was running into of people splitting up God… Jack Cottrell does this most beautifully. He says, “Well, the spirit of God can’t die, it was the body of Jesus that died.” Oh, we’re right back into dualism and Gnosticism. Other than that it’s a wonderful doctrine, but John says it’s of the antichrist and by this test he would be a false kind of prophet… but I’m not going to say that… Okay, maybe I will.
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Paul presents a reconstituted, holistic form of apologetics that may provide effective witness.
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Paul invites Matt Welch to share his story and talk about his current work with the 91four ministry.
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Paul lays out his understanding of why Christ died and how His death can be described in terms of a change of subjectivity.
I think what we see God getting satisfaction out of, we do, too. In a very perverse way.
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Paul and Frank continue their discussion on communion. This episode covers “real presence” and the meaning of “eating” and “drinking” the flesh and blood of Jesus. Rather than dwelling on the theoretical, they dive right into a big-picture view of the Gospel of John by going through the whole story to understand what Jesus meant when He gave that strange commandment.
Sources Cited: * Scott Hahn’s talk * Alexander Campbell’s article
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Paul continues his study of I John.
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The universal notion of sacrifice and the biblical departure from this system in the Old Testament and in the sacrifice of Christ.
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Ethics and belief must be brought together in the ethic of love. To not bring them together results in ideology – a religion without content.
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The equation of hope/love, self-sacrifice/love, righteousness/love, recognizing Jesus/love. All of these are needed to arrive at a notion of agape love.
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The Christian ethic begins by putting our security in the hands of God. Evil arises because we would secure ourselves and this is the ground of personal and corporate evil.
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Modern apologetics would presume to be able to prove God through the traditional arguments for God. Paul proposes holistic witness as an alternative.
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How we define evil will be determinative of how we understand God. We know God not on the basis of a law or tradition as with the Friends of Job but through Christ. As we confront and challenge evil, that is precisely (in the thinking of Bonhoeffer) where God meets us.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty talk about Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus, and how he travels a road very similar to Zizek and Lacan. The difference of course is that Kierkegaard moves beyond Climacus to a full blown Christianity. The question is if his criticism of Hegelian Christians as falling short applies to the contemporary scence.
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Paul continues his explanation of Romans 13.
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Paul’s study in I John continues, this time about practicing righteousness and what it means to be born again.
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Paul explains the disastrous consequences in the 20th Century brought about in part by the role modern philosophy of religion played.
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Paul addresses how the Christian should respond to evil government in Romans 13.
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Paul describes the keys to recognizing the false Christians among us.
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What kind of dialogue does the Gospel of peace have with the state, especially in as dark a political time as the one we find ourselves in? That of obedient supporters of its agendas or of withdrawn resignation to its violence? Jason and Paul discuss the New Testament’s witness (from the Gospels and the epistles) of the Church as a radical alternative Kingdom to Caesar’s, a Kingdom whose prophetic words and life are an engaged critique of the powers of this dark world.
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Subordination is significantly different from unconditional obedience. Was Christ “obedient” to Rome? He was killed by Rome. Romans 13 is not about “blind obedience to the state.” If that was the case, the Christians would all have been worshiping Caesar. Paul is rejecting any notion of violent revolution. Paul has no illusions about Rome being a servant of God, though he does use corrupt nations for his purposes as they remain under his judgment.
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John poses three tests to determine orthodoxy: The moral test (How do you walk in light or darkness?), the social test (Do you continue to fellowship with the saints or are you divisive?) and the doctrinal test (Do you believe that Jesus is Lord and that he was fully human?).
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Paul discusses how our own self-image and the idolatrous image reflect a failed image. The restoration of the image in Christ is actually more of a fulfillment of an original potential.
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In this study John’s opposed pairs are shown to counter dualistic notions in that one pair is always pictured as overcoming the other. Salvation is pictured as entailing a set of practices (walking in the light) that John clearly delineates. Practicing Christianity is already an idea aimed at defeating the dualistic separation of faith and practice.
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Sharon Klingemann, Mazie Sinlee and Paul discuss the lost apostle – Junia. Why has she gone missing and what are the implications of a woman apostle? The discussion is based on Sharon’s research of the subject.
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This conversation between Paul and Jason is inspired by Paul’s essay The Mystery Revealed. The conversation explores legitimate and illegitimate understandings of the mystery of Christ and focuses largely on pagan understandings of the “idol” and the contrast of the “Image of God” as described by Genesis 1. As the conversation unfolds, what emerges is an understanding of loving God and loving neighbor as self as a restoration of the image of God and a correction of perverse notions of God which are more pagan than Christian.
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Paul begins a Bible study on I John. This introduction covers key ideas leading to universal false teaching as represented by Gnosticism.
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Paul explains how the image of God defines us.
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Paul and Frank continue their conversation on house church. Topics covered in this episode include what to call “house church,” confession, disciplinary action, and integrated learning.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty discuss the life of Søren Kierkegaard.
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Jonathan and Catie Totty visit and discuss mysticism within Eastern Orthodoxy, specifically Vladimir Lossky, and their baby joins the dialog.
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Paul and Frank begin a conversation about house church.
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Paul concludes the study of Galatians.
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Paul demonstrates how the Holy Spirit overcomes the various socio-cultural and personal barriers so as to bring about unity.
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Ryan, in an unusual move, combines Pauline theology and the Book of Revelation with the peaceable living of agrarianism.
He talks about Wendell Berry’s agrarian pacifism, it’s a sort of rooted peaceableness. In my mind, I can’t imagine anything more peaceable than rooting oneself on a piece of land, committing oneself and one’s family to live in tune with that place and embodying the gospel by your peaceable existence on that land and in that community. I can’t imagine anything less violent than saying, “I’m going to reject what the world says I should be doing in terms of pursuing all of these economic goals,” rejecting that whole system and instead saying, “I’m going to root myself here and I’m going to take my life from this land.” That’s how I connect the way I think about creation care and agrarianism and how, at its core, is concerned with a kind of patient peaceableness that I think the gospel calls us to. So, we can talk about peace all day, but at the end of the day if we’re still getting our food from an industrial system that destroys God’s creation and depends upon oil, then we’re still benefiting from other people committing acts of violence.
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Paul compares the two economies presented in Galatians.
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Paul interviews Michael Householder, who practices a very different “church growth” system than what we normally see in consumer-oriented mega-churches.
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That we have entered into this millennial kingdom in and through Christ—what should mean for us in our immediate experience is that we’re no longer desperate to save ourselves. If we understand the human enterprise—the kingdoms of this world—what are they all about? Well, they’re in the business of securing themselves. They’rein the business of saving themselves. And that is the desperate need that consumes peoples’ lives. It’s the driving force. And, so, when we talk about the millennial kingdom, it is a resolution that is enacted in baptism through the church now,so that we begin to live resurrection lives in the present.
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Paul and Frank continue their discussion on the meaning, origin and practice of communion. This episode covers the purpose of the Levitical sacrifices and the significance blood, more readings from the Didache, whether communion and the assembly should be open or closed, and a little more detail on the way thanksgiving offerings were practiced.
For Further Learning: 1. Didache 2. Getting Political 3. Rediscovering Communion – Part I
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Romans chapter 10: The end of the law, or the purpose of the law is shown to be the way it points to covenental relationship which resolves the problem of shame and death which is the problem of sin.
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In this lecture, Paul discusses the root negative emotion, shame, and how Christ addresses it.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty have a conversation about the state of the restoration movement.
Paul: To my mind, this is the pernicious influence that we’re combatting: Donald McGavran church-growth philosophy which flows with American utilitarianism, pragmatism, and consumerism to produce the model of the mega-church as the goal which is pervasive—and I don’t mean just the big churches, but even in the little churches, the mega-church is just the goal. Is that your perception?
John: Yes, even in smaller congregations in smaller communities, Instead of thinking in terms of how do we best serve the community, how do we grow spiritually,and how do we grow deeper in our knowledge of the Word, the emphasis is still on how we grow numerically.
Paul: Right, and how you grow numerically is not through a scholarly engagement with the Old Testament, but a kind of concealed light treatment—a kind of “gospel-light.” But the whole trend in preaching is toward a kind of spectacle and production—as is the music—all bent upon delivering a product.
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What is the mystery resolved in Christ? Paul connects the resolution of this mystery to the meaning of world history and to the meaning of predestination and the role of Israel and the Church. (Romans 9-11)
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There is no personal relationship to God apart from the historical ground of the covenant with Abraham fulfilled in Christ. The perverse underside of the law draws us in through imagining we can gain righteousness through agonistic struggle or through intensified personal effort or emotion – through an intensified “personal” disembodied relationship. This leads to the fruits of the law.
The problem Paul struggles with is how to avoid the trap of perversion, that is, of a Law that generates its transgression. Paul presents a sinful perspective on the law which generates transgression (and transgressive desire), but he presents no way out of this bind other than through re-founding subjectivity in Christ.
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NT Wright says, “The story of the new exodus in Christ and the homeward journey of God’s people led by the Spirit provides the setting for incorporative and participationist language.” This is over and against the old Lutheran reading, right? In other words the way you are saved in a Lutheran/Calvinist understanding is not so much through participation in Christ but it’s through an imputed legal righteousness. That leaves out the narrative reality that is being described.
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A first-Sunday-of-Advent message about the meaning of the cross of Christ and how it resolves the violence of people and not the violence of God. Inherent in the discussion is the topic of the meaning of OT sacrifice. Jason gives an alternative to the classic “appeasing an angry God” reading of the atonement sacrifice.
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Paul and Frank start a conversation about a Biblical understanding of communion and what it may mean to restore Biblical practice today.
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Resources from the conversation: 1. Didache 2. Alexander Campbell, The Christian Baptist, “On the Breaking of Bread”
For further reading: 1. Lindsay, Dennis R. “Todah and Eucharist: The Celebration of the Lord’s Supper as a ‘Thank Offering’ in the Early Church.” Restoration Quarterly 39 (1997): 83–100. 2. Gese, Hartmut. “The Origin of the Lord’s Supper,” In Essays on Biblical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1981. 3. Hicks, John Mark. “Churches of Christ and the Lord’s Supper: Twentieth-Century Perspectives.” Stone-Campbell Journal 13 (2010): 163-176. 4. Hicks, John Mark. Come to the Table: Revisioning the Lord’s Supper. Orange, CA: Leafwood Publishers, 2002. 5. Thurian, Max. The Mystery of the Eucharist. American ed. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981.
Paul describes the problem with divine satisfaction and presents an alternative biblical understanding.
As long as we are willing to sell our brother down the river, have the other suffer instead of us, I believe we have no part in true Christianity. When we are willing,though, to take up the cross and stand with those who are suffering, stand with those who are oppressed, then I believe we have joined the way for Christ.
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What is the Church and how does it save? The point is not that we have to negotiate between two realities – there is only one cultural reality and this is that established in the body of Christ.
As NT Wright has put this, “No first century Jew could imagine that the worship of their God and the organization of human society were matters related only at a tangent.” That is that who God is—think of the Old Testament means coming out of the nations, forming an alternative economy—what is the economy of the Jews? It’s the strangest economy of the world, it’s built on Jubilee and Sabbath. Every 50 years everything reverts back [debt is erased]. Now, whether the Jews practiced that is in question, but Jesus came preaching, “The year of Jubilee has arrived.” Here is a kingdom, a culture that is going to put into practice the ideas built into Israel. It’s a social rebellion—a departure from the most powerful Empire in the world. This should resonate here. We live in the most powerful Empire in the world. And the tendency is to continue to make bricks.
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The New Testament describes the defeat of sin and death and the devil. Historic explanations have missed this focus by picturing atonement as removing an obstacle located in a singular person (God, humans, the devil) when all three are involved in the construct which the cross addresses.
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The scapegoating of Christ pronounced by Caiaphas is the height of political genius and definitive of majority rule. It is this evil that Christ came to defeat. Paul uses Rene Girard to explain scapegoating, the way it consumes all in its wake and how it is exposed by Christ.
The New Testament puts on display the logic and workings of human politics and shows us the logic at the center of human political strategy.
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How are we made right? In that we are found faithful inasmuch as we are found to be in Christ. He is the one who is faithful to the covenant. So we do ethics not as a separate part of our Christianity, as if “We got saved now and maybe we can be good on top of that.” The point is that Jesus’ goodness, his faithfulness, his walking in the way he did constitutes a faithfulness to the covenant. And our participation in his faithfulness is a participation in walking the way he walked. Our ethic is not an additive to salvation. Our ethic is our salvation. Too strong? Salvation is something you practice.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty have a conversation about Karl Barth and his engagement with Eric Przywara on perhaps the most important theological conversation of the 20th century, analogia entis, the analogy of being.
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Christ came to defeat sin death and the devil. This is inclusive of an overcoming of blinded minds so that we can now apprehend the working of sin in and through the principalities and powers.
In other words this perverse kind of Christianity is just one more ideology that is used to justify the self. At the heart of the problem is the very doctrine of the cross of Christ. Anselm’s doctrine of divine satisfaction that is an exchange between the Father and Son tends to leave out the human reality—that is an exchange within the Trinity does not picture what is happening in the New Testament. Calvin’s picture of penal substitution takes it a step further so that the God of the Bible is often portrayed like a kind of pagan deity demanding violent sacrifice. So we lose an understanding in this of the real-world difference that Christ makes in the reality of our own lives—that there are two kingdoms/logics/ways of thinking. So there is a kind of moral failure and intellectual failure in what often passes for Christianity today. What I’d like to talk about today is the meaning of the death of Christ as it is portrayed in the Bible. What we will see is that the way it is often talked about tends to mystify something that is not actually mystical.
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Carlyle King, a man with autism, and Mario Puentes, the parent of a child with autism, share a friendship that they call “a nearly unbreakable relationship.” In this podcast, they discuss how their friendship has overcome the loneliness of autism and brought hope to both of their families. At Forging Ploughshares, we think the practice of healthy presence and acceptance they describe is a wonderful model of the way the peaceable kingdom works to bring different people together and an example of the practice of friendship with the other.
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Paul continues to tell the story of theology.
Because we have to ask ourselves “What is the role of Christ, the role of salvation, what does it mean to read the New Testament?” That’s really what I’m aiming at, “Why read the Bible?” I’m afraid that the reason that we read the Bible and the way that we do salvation is very much that we’re just going to have Jesus fill the gap, that he’s going to be one more product, or that he’s going to hold out fullness in some way. Is that the role of Christ, or is it to reveal the deception of this entire construct, and undo it?
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Many people quote Jeremiah 29:11 (“For I know the plans I have for you…plans to prosper you and not to harm you…”), but few read vss. 1-10, in which we find God’s people stuck in a difficult place, a pagan nation. The Gospel is not merely a promise of future escape, nor is it merely a system of “making the world better.” It is, instead, a kingdom which we live in the now as we look forward to God’s “not yet.”
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This lecture seeks to show how ethics is either integrated or separated from the saving work of Christ.
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Paul and Jonathan Totty discuss the meaning of the death of Christ in light of the psychoanalytic reading of Paul (the Apostle), as described in Paul’s book.
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By not recognizing Paul’s description of the perverse there is a “Christianity” that remains perverse to its core. Salvation is freedom from both perversion and agonism and this alternative subjectivity is salvation. The move from one form of subject to the other as a description of salvation offers an alternative to atonement theories focused on the law.
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In this segment of Practicing Peace, Hayden chats with Dr. Stephen Chapman of Duke University about theological interpretation of Scripture and Old Testament violence.
In order for us to be clear about the gospel and clear about our confession of Jesus Christ we also need to be clear-eyed about violence. ~Stephen Chapman
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Paul explains how the cross addresses evil.
We understand the nature of evil in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ, which is not normally the way this is done. Usually when we talk about Christ we don’t bring in the issue of evil. What we would bring in is other issues like the problem of sin. So, evil is usually reserved in a college classroom for something like apologetics—and in an apologetics course you never bring in the cross of Christ. You may think “that’s a travesty.” That’s the travesty of modern evangelicalism…
There is a Christianity, unfortunately, that makes itself irrelevant by colluding with the evil of the world. I’m not sure that we should continue to call it Christianity, but I’m not going to be the one to say, “Let’s stop using that word.” But where do we see it? We see it in nationalism, a Christianity coopted by the state…capitalism: a Christianity that gives itself over to notions of consumption and desire…or maybe just a commitment to do evil on a personal level so that good may abound. In someway, a Christianity that does not recognize the problem of evil and how the cross addresses it is one which makes itself irrelevant.
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A comparison of Ro. 7:7ff – which amounts to an empty word from nowhere with Ro. 8:26-27 which describes an infinite depth of communication.
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Paul compares and contrasts the certainty we would attain to and the certainty given in Christ.
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Paul and Jesse Schrader discuss the anthropology of Ratzinger and Hauerwas, covering important differences and misunderstandings.
In talking about the topic of relativism: in the church being a separate community you will most certainly confront relativism. Because your only line of defense against relativism is not appealing to reason or philosophical argument. Instead, you are insisting that truth is something that is embodied—there is a merger there.
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A picture of Christian salvation in terms of therapy or deliverance from systemic deception and the destruction this entails.
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Jonathan Totty describes the importance of Irenaeus as an example of a theological understanding for the Church rather than the academy.
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Paul explains how we can learn from the atheists to reject a certain understanding of God and thus come to know God as He truly is.
Is there a God we need to refuse as we come to the God revealed in Christ? Is, in fact, our conception of God, inasmuch as it is not shaped by the person and work of Christ, likely to stand in the way of a relationship to who God really is? Let me state it, overstate it perhaps, this way: do we need to pass through a kind of atheism? To refuse the belief in a certain understanding of God that we might recognize the God of the Bible?
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Paul traces the stark difference posed in Scripture between the world of darkness and of light, of flesh and Spirit.
The point is not, “Oh where are the authentic Christians to be found?” or “Where has the church failed?” … The idea is, let’s get before us the picture of what we are called to in Christ. So, we will all continually be striving, as Paul says, to “work out your salvation in fear and trembling.” … But we should be able to identify, historically, certain teachings or understandings that get it right and those that get it wrong.
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Forging Ploughshares Garden Adviser and Community Liaison explains why Peace with the land must be incorporated into concepts of salvation and describes her work in this regard.
…we had all kinds of differences, but that all sort of melts away when you’re planting vegetables together or delivering a box of vegetables to a community member that’s shut in to their house. So I guess I found God in the garden because we were able to have conversation and fellowship in a way I hadn’t found before. I found that working together can be a good first step in reconciling differences.
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An exposition of Romans 8 as God’s hope (the hope that God has) that exposes the escapism inherent in our dualistic understanding of humanity. Suffering has meaning not because we hope to escape the physical world, but because God is seeking to restore that world. The groaning of this world is a suffering that will “bear much fruit.”
God himself is in the place of having planted a garden and is hoping, awaiting, for the fruit of the garden to come. And so, too, history for God is unfolding. It is a real world that is coming to bear fruit in the Kingdom of God. This is a strange notion for us because in a kind of scholastic or philosophical understanding that often gets fused with the New Testament, the idea that history is real and that things are unfolding even for God himself is out of court—it just doesn’t fit with an Aristotelian notion of an“Unmoved Mover.”
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Paul explains the nature of sin’s deception.
If we mystify the problem [of sin], we’ll go on to mystify the answer.
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Paul explores the question, “What is theology?”
The way that Karl Barth has said the same thing is, as he was reading Romans the “strange new world of the Bible opened up to him.” What he means by that is he began to enter into a different world because of his realization and understanding of who God is in Christ. That thrilling discovery of an alternative cosmos, an alternative world, I’m afraid is precisely what is lost in scholastic, classical, evangelical, even protestant approaches. The very way in which they engage the world has left most of the world untouched by what I would consider the foundational understanding.
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Paul explains how hope deconstructs desire. The future anterior perspective (hope) breaks through the imminent perspective (desire).
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Paul talks about life in the trinity from Romans 8.
You know, we often hear people say this that ‘Christ’s death defeats death,’ but can we say that we know exactly how—‘how does it do that?’ Well, once we understand that ‘death’ is the form of ‘life’ outside of Christ, that people’s lives are controlled by this absolute that is posited, and then Christ exposes that it’s not an absolute—that the enemy controlled it as some sort of door or mystery, that it is the fear of death as pictured in Hebrews—the punishing effects of sin and death are finished…the announcement in Romans 8 is that ‘living death’ is undone in Christ.
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Paul tells the luring story of theology, and provides insight on interpreting that history.
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Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty talk about Bernard Lonergan.
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Paul discusses how sex and death relate to the universal subject in Romans 7:1-6, which follows Paul’s book The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation.
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Paul explains how the “wretched man” is rescued by Christ is Romans 7:7ff.
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Conclusion. Wrapping up the conversation and looking forward.
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Forging Plowshares elements. What are some specific things that Forging Ploughshares will be doing. Also, a lengthy discussion on issues facing church growth philosophy.
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Introduction to Forging Ploughshares. How is Forging Ploughshares an attempt to live out a learned Gospel of peace in community?
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Initial discussion on violence and the Gospel of peace. Dr. Paul Axton and Jason Rodenbeck share thoughts about issues of violence in the world and the solution found in the Gospels.
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