Forging Ploughshares

Brad and Paul continue the conversation with John Ashworth, who has spent much of his life in Sudan in practical peacemaking efforts and describes how nonviolence is the real-world solution to conflict.  (Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. We will examine various forms of false peace and ask what peace is positively, its metaphysical and religious status as a concept and as a lived reality. Is peace possible? How is it characterized? How does Jesus make peace? Can difference be understood, lived, and resolved, not in violence and victory but in cooperation and mutuality? We will be guided into such questions by voices past and present, including Augustine, Thomas Merton, Raimon Panikkar, William Desmond, Rowan Williams, and more. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.) If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating

Paul Axton preaches: John combines his description of love and God with his picture of its reversal in the Antichrist. Friedrich Nietzsche, in recommending the Antichrist and his work (a recommendation taken up by the Nazis) depicts the reversal embraced by a German and American Christianity which would hate in the name of Christ. Agape love is the only counter to this demonic form of the faith. (Sign up for "Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace": This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. We will examine various forms of false peace and ask what peace is positively, its metaphysical and religious status as a concept and as a lived reality. Is peace possible? How is it characterized? How does Jesus make peace? Can difference be understood, lived, and resolved, not in violence and victory but in cooperation and mutuality? We will be guided into such questions by voices past and present, includin

Brad and Paul interview peacemaker John Ashworth, who has spent his life bringing peace to Sudan, long torn by ethnic and political violence. John has been key in negotiating peace settlements and bringing peace to this troubled region and his expertise with the realities of peace as the resolution to violence is grounded in real-world reality and experience.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches: Jesus encounter with the woman at the well transports her and those who follow the conversation to a world in which God is no longer delimited by religion, place and time, and opens up a direct knowing of God, and Truth in the Spirit. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

In part 2 of our discussion of the physics of David Bohm reflected in the work of Hegel, Brad and I lay out the significance of Bohm's theory as it overlaps with Hegel's philosophy and also discuss the role of preaching, connected to these difficult topics.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches: The slaying of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the justification of this slaughter and its denial points us to Christ's exposure of the blind murderers who killed him in the name of law and order. Beyond this evil, there is a third tier of evil which acknowledges Christ's exposure of evil but which is now using this insight to manipulate the blind.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Brad and Paul, so as to explain recent blogs and podcasts, discuss Hegel's Logic as it applies to the quantum reality and theory of David Bohm and which describes how it is that Christ unifies all things, bringing together mind and matter through the understanding that thought or cognition is ultimate reality. Paul's depiction of two kinds of letter is the point of entry. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Ethan Vanderleek, a specialist on William Desmond describes to Paul, Desmond's project and its overlap with the Christology of Rowan Williams, William Desmond is one of our most important living philosophers, and Ethan explains how he poses a true metaphysical alternative to both modernism and postmodernism. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul, Nate, Jed, Karl, and Jim discuss how it is that meaning is always embodied, and how misorientation to the body constitutes sin, and salvation through Christ's body entails a new embodied meaning extended to all.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches: The living letters brings together embodiment and meaning in the particulars of incarnation, and this is reflected in quantum mechanics and modern biology as discussed by David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake. The letter that kills is on the order of a materialism which empties out meaning from embodiment. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!    

Paul, Karl, Andy, and Jim discuss the role of language in Anselm and its development through Descartes into foundationalism, and pose the idea of personalism, found in Christ, as the resolution to this universal tendency to trade the impersonal for the personal.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches: Corinthians says, "you are a letter of Christ" and this living letter resolves the problem of the letter or language that is deadly. The resolution between the difference between God and Creation, subject and object, or all seemingly unbridgeable differences inherent to language, psychology, philosophy, and law (summed up as "the letter that kills") are bridged in the living letter, or what Maximus calls the logoi. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

In this continued discussion of how the Constantinian shift impacted Christianity, Nate, Karl, Jim, Andrew and Paul, discuss the loss of non-violence, the turn from Christian ethics and the Sermon on the Mount, the turn to violent atonement, and the shift in the conception of authority and the church. A different "common sense" arose that pervaded every area of life so as to displace the uniqueness of Christian identity. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches, describing the transformed mind, or knowing God as the suspension of the common Jewish and Enlightenment notion of God and, recognized by Hegel. Paul's suspension of the law and Hegel's negation of the negation as the displacement of a mediated notion of God and direct knowing in Christ, are making the same argument about the necessity to cease believing in the God of the law so as to believe in the Father of Christ. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

In this discussion of how it is that Christianity became a religion, much like other religions, Paul, Nat, Jim, Andrew and Karl, discuss the impact of the Constantinian shift, the rise of Divine Satisfaction, the turn to a closed understanding of the world, and the relinquishing of the revolutionary nature of the faith.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches: The theme of Mathew captured in Immanuel, is completed in the Lord's Supper, in which the efficacious presence of God is made to bear on the lives of believers in what Hegel calls "actualized Christian Freedom." There is freedom from the violence of blood spilled in the taking up of the blood of Christ in the life of believers.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches: In this Christmas Sermon the role of presence ("God with us") and absence is traced in Scripture as the primary theme fulfilled in Christ; a theme also recognized in postmodern philosophy. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

In this continuation of discussions of sin and salvation, Paul Axton takes up and expands upon the early church understanding of recapitulation as an all-embracing understanding of atonement that accounts for the New Testament and the focus on the new divinized humanity found in Christ. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

In a continuation of the discussion of the nature of sin and salvation and hermeneutics, the discussion turns to how the rule of faith, or biblical hermeneutics centered on the person of Christ, brings out Christ's deliverance from the human predicament through his defeat of the rule of death over human lives. This is not an answer defined by law, but a deliverance from this orientation. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!  

In this new series on sin and salvation, Paul Axton introduces a series on theories of atonement, beginning with Christ as the "rule of faith" interpreting Scripture and exegeting God. The issues of psychological healing in connection to death drive, cosmic bondage and apocalyptic deliverance, and the eternality of the historical Christ are introduced. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!