Forging Ploughshares

Paul Axton preaches - The biblical picture of salvation is the melding or joining of Divine and human Spirit, Life, and Breath. The human image bears this eternal purpose which is only understood through the free joining, willing opening, or purposeful enacting of the grace of God in the person. Augustinian original sin and predestination have obscured this picture of salvation as willing particip...

Tim, Jonathan, Matt, Jim, Brent, Matthew, Austin, and Paul discuss the mystery revealed through the Gospel (in Ephesians) as unfolding of the will of God in creation's completion through redemption. Examples of the mystery compounded are Girardian scapegoating, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Calvinist predestination, each of which reify a mysterious nothing.  Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this pod...

Paul Axton preaches - Divine and created Sophia, as brought together in Christ, describes what is happening in the redemption of the cosmos. The created order is brought to its fulfillment in being joined to the Creator. Human wisdom alone though, leaves out the redemptive step. Creation ex nihilo opens creation to the  possibility of being pictured in humans wisdom as grounded in some reified not...

Jim, David, Matthew, Brian, and Paul discuss the nature of radical evil as the underside of the law (as exemplified by Paul the Pharisee and as duplicated in all radical evil), and how Christ defeats this evil by exposing its deception. This is necessarily cosmic and universal. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

Paul Axton preaches - The demonization and scapegoating of Jesus are exposed by Jesus' death and resurrection and by his explicit teaching, describing the continuation of demonization in the Christian age as the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Where Christians continue to believe the lie of demonization and where they participate in scapegoating there is no forgiveness possible. This is the law...

Tom Evans, formerly on the ministerial staff of one of the largest churches in the country, describes to Paul, the emptiness of the mega church experience. Real world healing and salvation are being set aside for a business model which cannot endure the countercultural truth of a peaceable Gospel.  Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.  

Paul Axton preaches - The cosmic representation of the Temple is made an individual reality as the kingdom of God is establishes through Temple communities centered on life and peace rather than violence and death.  Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.  

Matt, Brian, Jim, David, Jonathan, Matthew, Brent, and Paul continue discussion on the cosmic power of Christ as defeat of the universal psychoanalytic/individual sickness and the corporate powers. Freud, Lacan and Žižek illustrate Paul's point in Eph. 2: the human disease is imagining it has life and power when it only has the power of death and violence. The grace and inheritance of Christ is a...

Paul Axton preaches - No single part of personhood is a sufficient beginning point, but only the fullness of Trinitarian reality can encapsulate the ground for reason, cognition, and experience. This is the center of the Eastern theology of Sergius Bulgakov, which points to a recovery of personhood as the experience of God as making personhood a possibility. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this po...

Matthew, Jonathan, Brian, David, Brent, and Paul discuss the cosmic image of Christ in Ephesians 2, and humankinds incorporation into the divine image, and the simultaneous picture of evil, as the refusal of this reality. Evil arises, in this picture, as the reification or refusal of the cosmic person and the turn to the finite and impersonal (language, law, the symbolic) as the controlling factor...

Paul Axton preaches - Christ exposes the history of murder and the exposure, as in the case of Daniel Ellsberg's exposure of the Pentagon Papers and the Doomsday Machine and Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian exposing nihilistic violence, is the first step in confronting evil. The Gospel, by definition, opposes the violence embedded in the human heart.  Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this pod...

Matthew, Jonathan, Brent, Matt, Brian, Jim, and Paul discuss the psychoanalytic reality of peace and its connection to cosmic peace through the reign of Christ as expressed in Ephesians 1 & 2. Paul introduces Ephesians 2 and the psychoanalytic reality of peace and then the implications of chapter 1 of Ephesians and the subduing of the powers as a practical reality is discussed.

Paul Axton preaches - Recognition of the Abba relationship to God frees from slavery to the law, as the relationship sealed by the Spirit through the Son is a new form of subjectivity. The story of Christ lifts up every human story and every father/child relationship, giving it a depth of meaning and significance. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support ou...

Paul Axton preaches - The explanation of the death of Christ, the divine dying in the human, is explained through the created and uncreated aspects of Wisdom (as in the theology of Sergius Bulgakov). This explanation includes how it is that salvation in dying and resurrection is imparted to all through participation (divinization) - the divinization of Christ in which all participate. Become a Pat...

Brent, David, Matt, Matthew, Jonathan, Jim, and Paul discuss the two-fold economy found in Gnosticism/nominalism and in Paul's summing up as described in Irenaeus' doctrine of recapitulation. Participation in Christ as described in recapitulation constitutes the economy that binds together the various New Testament descriptions of being "adopted," being "in Christ," or being "in his likeness." Bec...

Paul Axton preaches - God is working through all peoples, cultures and religions, as is demonstrated in the recent mass movements of Muslims coming to Christ. But this does not entail relinquishing the critical faculty of thought, as is often the case with Zen Buddhism.  Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

Jonathan, Brent, Matt, and Paul discuss the implications of taking Ephesians as central to the Pauline corpus and discuss both recapitulation and Christus Victor as Paul's understanding of atonment in Ephesians. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

Paul Axton preaches - The test of authentic Christianity is its liberating effect, and the most obvious example of this liberation pertains to chattel slavery in the modern period. The trans-Atlantic slave trade directly involved nearly every Christian group. Gregory of Nyssa provides the earliest critique of slavery and a theology that cannot tolerate this sort of moral and theological failure. H...

Brian, Matt, Brent, Matthew, Jonathan, Austin, David, and Paul discuss the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Wesleyan understanding of salvation and compare it to Paul's depiction in Ephesians. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.  

Paul Axton preaches - The Roman Empire is described in Revelation as the puppet of Satan, and Christ alone defeats this Beast. Empire threatens the church in the United States and the Christocentrism of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his challenge of Nazi Empire, indicates the failure of Lutheran Christocentrism with its notion of two kingdoms, and replaces it with the singular reality of the kingdom of C...

David, Matt, Brian, Brent, Austin, Tim, and Paul discuss the necessary shifts to see Ephesians as central to Paul's Gospel. The work of Douglas Campbell, Richard Hays, E. P. Sanders, Krister Stendahl, and Thomas Torrance, have to be considered in setting aside the reformed understanding of Paul focused on Romans and Galatians, so as to see Ephesians as key to Paul's understanding, captured in the...

Paul Axton preaches - Jesus as ensouled body and embodied soul undoes dualism and antagonism which plays upon body/soul and male/female antagonism. In Christ, as the truly human one, theology is set upon a new foundation in which he defines the human condition and not the other way round. True motherhood and fatherhood, husband and wife, male and female relationship are restored in his flesh. Beco...

Tom Evans describes the difference between ancestral sin and Augustinian original sin and compares it to Paul Axton's Psychotheological approach. Where Augustinian original sin leaves both sin and salvation a mystery (giving rise to legal exchange theories like divine satisfaction and penal substitution), ancestral sin, like psychotheology, provides a diagnosis of the human predicament and a real-...

Paul Axton preaches - Christianity has often given rise to antisemitism, as with Martin Luther's direct inspiration of Adolph Hitler, but rightly understood Christ occupies the Hebraic universe of meaning and Christianity is simply a different orientation in this same symbolic universe. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.  

Paul Axton preaches - In Shusaku Endo's description, Christianity cannot take root in Japan, which he describes as a mud swamp, but every culture has its corrosive effects on the gospel, particularly as in America, where we may be blind to these effects. The resolution is to come to a correct understanding of Jesus relationship to Jewish culture and religion as its proper end. Become a Patron! If...