Forging Ploughshares

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Axton concludes his sermon series on Hebrews. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul continues his series depicting the working of the law of sin and death through the life of Yukio Mishima. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

Paul Axton preaches on whether faith is subjective or objective. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

Paul Axton begins to trace the origins of his discovery of dialectic in orientalism, Tadanobu Tsunoda, and Takeo Doi. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul concludes his study in Hebrews. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

Persecution, hostility toward God, and suffering are a futility and evil, but even these endured rightly can be transformed into a discipline. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

Paul Axton continues his study in Hebrews. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

The Jewish shadow and form resolved through the temple. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty discuss gender. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton continues his study in Hebrews. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Resurrection is at the center of salvation. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

Faith breaks open a closed cosmos and a closed economy to receive God's gifts. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

A sure Promise - Jesus has gone behind the veil. The Transcendent and immanent nature of truth as we have it in Christ. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

Chapter 6 of Hebrews can be compared to II Peter in its description of "partaking" in deity. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Salvation is an embodied, practical salvation which is inclusive of practicing virtue. The way to virtue is by practice. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

The counter to liberalism and fundamentalism is a proper appreciation of bodily resurrection and ascension. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Totty and Paul Axton discuss the problem of evil as it relates to modernity and the secular. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul preaches on the Sabbath rest. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

Jonathan Totty and Paul Axton discuss the secular nature of belief in modern forms of faith. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound