Forging Ploughshares

Here is a repeat of an earlier episode on René Girard pointing to our upcoming class with Michael Hardin. Paul and Frank have a conversation about the work of Girard, who has given us a tremendously useful and biblical understanding of the scapegoat mechanism which shapes all culture. (To register for the upcoming class on René Girard with Michael Hardin go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings. The Course will run from the second week of October to the first week in December.) Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Jordan Wood answers a series of question on duality and nonduality, contemplation, embodiment, and time, in his explanation of Maximus the Confessor. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

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

The Lamb sacrificed from the foundation of the world is the singular Logos from which creation proceeds and holds together. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. Sign up for the next class, Imaginative Apologetics which will run through the first week of July through the week of August 23rd. https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

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. Sign up for the next class, Imaginative Apologetics which will run through the first week of July through the week of August 23rd. https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

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. Sign up for the next class, Imaginative Apologetics which will run through the first week of July through the week of August 23rd. https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

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. Sign up for the next class, Imaginative Apologetics which will run through the first week of July through the week of August 23rd. https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

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. Sign up for the next class, Imaginative Apologetics which will run through the first week of July through the week of August 23rd. https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

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. Sign up for the next class, Imaginative Apologetics https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. (Sign up for the course, The Theology of Maximus the Confessor with Jordan Wood. https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings. The course will run from 2024/3/25–2024/5/17 and will meet on Saturdays at 9am central time.) Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.