Forging Ploughshares

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 Redi...

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...

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 proble...

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 r...

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.  ...

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...

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...

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 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 po...

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 o...

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 div...

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 wonderf...

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 b...

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’...

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 consid...

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...