Forging Ploughshares

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

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

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

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

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?” If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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? If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

In this discussion Aaron Woods describes his work in Jerusalem teaching peace to Muslim children in a Christian school. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

Paul Axton illustrates the way in which death is engineered into the purpose of life and culture in this analysis of Takeo Doi. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

Paul Axton traces the manner in which Freud was taken up in Japan and the deep resonance between his theory and a Japanese sensibility. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharon Klingemann and Paul Axton discuss the effect of eternal torturous existence on Christianity and possible alternative understandings. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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

David Rawls discusses his church's biblical journey to allowing women in leadership with Paul Axton. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Axton and Jason Rodenbeck differentiate postliberalism and liberalism. Part 1 of 2. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton begins a new series answering basic theological questions, beginning with original sin. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

In this sermon, Paul Axton sorts out the biblical picture from the various traditions and reactions that arose around the Lord's Supper. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

Paul Axton preaches: The reversal of sin is through the death of Christ because sin is an orientation to death which his death addresses. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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

Hayden Hagerman and Paul Axton discuss the key figures in postliberalism and the development of this alternative to modernist liberal and conservative theology. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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