Forging Ploughshares

Paul explains how the image of God defines us. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

Paul and Jonathan Totty discuss the life of Søren Kierkegaard. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Jonathan and Catie Totty visit and discuss mysticism within Eastern Orthodoxy, specifically Vladimir Lossky, and their baby joins the dialog. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul and Frank begin a conversation about house church. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul concludes the study of Galatians. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul demonstrates how the Holy Spirit overcomes the various socio-cultural and personal barriers so as to bring about unity. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

Paul compares the two economies presented in Galatians. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul interviews Michael Householder, who practices a very different “church growth” system than what we normally see in consumer-oriented mega-churches. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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: Didache Getting Political Rediscovering Communion – Part I If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

In this lecture, Paul discusses the root negative emotion, shame, and how Christ addresses it. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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

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

Paul and Frank start a conversation about a Biblical understanding of communion and what it may mean to restore Biblical practice today. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound Resources from the conversation: Didache Alexander Campbell, The Christian Baptist, “On the Breaking of Bread” For further reading: 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. Gese, Hartmut. “The Origin of the Lord’s Supper,” In Essays on Biblical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1981. Hicks, John Mark. “Churches of Christ and the Lord’s Supper: Twentieth-Century Perspectives.” Stone-Campbell Journal 13 (2010): 163-176. Hicks, John Mark. Come to the Table: Revisioning the Lord’s Supper. Orange, CA: Leafwood Publishers, 2002. 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. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This lecture seeks to show how ethics is either integrated or separated from the saving work of Christ. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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

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

Paul compares and contrasts the certainty we would attain to and the certainty given in Christ. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

A picture of Christian salvation in terms of therapy or deliverance from systemic deception and the destruction this entails. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Jonathan Totty describes the importance of Irenaeus as an example of a theological understanding for the Church rather than the academy. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

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

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

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

Paul explains the nature of sin’s deception. If we mystify the problem [of sin], we’ll go on to mystify the answer. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

Paul explains how hope deconstructs desire. The future anterior perspective (hope) breaks through the imminent perspective (desire). If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

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

Paul tells the luring story of theology, and provides insight on interpreting that history. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: http://www.bensound.com

Paul Axton and Jonathan Totty talk about Bernard Lonergan. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.