Forging Ploughshares

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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 Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

In this lecture Paul Axton examines the insights and problems with the three reigning understandings of religion. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

In this lecture on the Holy Spirit, Paul Axton depicts the communion of God within the immanent Trinity as the ground of human communion. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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 Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Jason and Paul discuss the approach of imaginative apologetics in contrast to the traditional approach to natural theology. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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). Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

In part 2 of their conversation of the dropping of the atomic bomb Matt and Paul describe the gospel alternative to mutually assured destruction. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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 Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton Preaches - In this sermon on Ephesians 4 the ancient doctrine of salvation as recapitulation is explained. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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 Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

In this interview with Nathan Hosler, author of Hauerwas the Peacemaker?, the key role and weaknesses of Stanley Hauerwas's theology is considered. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Matt, Jon, and Paul reflect on highlights, key points, and problems in their discussion with Douglas Campbell. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound