Forging Ploughshares

Paul Axton preaches: We live in a time in which ethics has been separated out from the Christian story so that people do not hesitate to embrace the ethic of the culture rather than the ethic of love. – keeping the foreigners at bay, putting children in cages, making America Great Again at the expense of Christian ethics. The question arises as to the ground of ethics and especially Christian ethics. Is our ethics grounded in love? And what does this mean? If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

In this podcast, Paul Axton compares the work of Mircea Eliade, the father of religious studies, and Peter Berger, the father of the notion of the social construction of reality, so as to arrive at a biblical understanding of religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches: The dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile is broken down in Christ, and the removal of this barrier is, for Paul, the archetype of salvation. Money shared by Gentiles and accepted by Jews is the token of its accomplishment. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

In this discussion Aaron Woods describes his work in Jerusalem teaching peace to Muslim children in a Christian school. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches: The resurrection connects us to creation, it exposes the lie of death as an escape, it connects us to embodiment, it frees us from the valuation and ethical system of culture, it connects us to the deep love of others and the comfort of that love, it connects us to history and salvation history – we are part of this history. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton concludes the series on various ways of engineering death in orientalism, occidentalism, and particular modes of enculturation the extreme form of sickness - the serial killer or the homicidal and genocidal tendency - by linking to a universal construct addressed in the death of Christ. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches: Is it the sting of sin is death or is it the sting of death is sin? Our tendency to misread this passage points to our tendency to miss what Christ saves us from. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton illustrates the way in which death is engineered into the purpose of life and culture in this analysis of Takeo Doi. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches: The "sickness unto death” is despair at not having the self. Resurrection is the ultimate cure of this sickness – but rightly conceiving of the resurrection we can begin to conquer this despair now. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton traces the manner in which Freud was taken up in Japan and the deep resonance between his theory and a Japanese sensibility. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches: The Corinthians, the evangelicals, the Roman Catholics, presume there is a naturally given recognition of good and evil in human wisdom. This "wisdom" is not the basis for Christianity but what Christ destroys. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton explains that orientalism is not simply academic or nationalistic but is intimately tied to psychology and human interiority. Japanese used the work of Sigmund Freud, very much an orientalist, so as to manufacture an identity to ward off and reverse the denigrating assessments of the West. Japanese psychologists and texts literally reverse Freud and his valuation system and this reversal has become a key part of the Japanese search for identity. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches that the apostle Paul offers no room for dualism – for the notion that material reality is unreal and that it is only the soul that goes to heaven. This is the lie that deludes. It is this way of dividing up the world defeated in resurrection. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

To make the point that putting resurrection in the center constitutes an alternative Christianity, Paul Axton in this sermon sums up a few key ways in which a different emphasis on resurrection completely alters key doctrines. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton discusses identity through difference illustrated in Orientalism Part II. If Japan is a mud swamp which has successfully warded off Christianity (which it is and has for the most part), it is by virtue of the same power which has shaped Christianity so as to fit modern Western identity. This is an understanding defeated by a right understanding of sin as an orientation to death defeated in resurrection. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches on 1 Corinthians 14:34ff: This passage raises key questions about how we interpret Scripture and how we understand who God is. Our relationships and attitudes toward maleness and femaleness are not secondary but primary to our understanding of Christianity. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Orientalism serves as an example of identity through difference as a failed form of thought that necessarily involves us in the lie of attempting to reify a human construct. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches: Truth comes to us in a person, through his words, but the truth is not in the form, the letter, the propositions of the words but in a deep spiritual communion which displaces the discommunion of the covenant with death. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Sharon Klingemann and Paul Axton discuss the effect of eternal torturous existence on Christianity and possible alternative understandings. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

Paul is saying to those who speak in tongues, which apparently he wants everyone to do, to make themselves intelligible. There is an isolated and private part to all of us which can only be shared with God. This most intimate aspect of who we are should not create a sense of isolation – as if we cannot get outside of ourselves so as to share with others the deepest part of who we are. We should see this private interiority as the place God meets us with a word about which we tell others. Preached by Paul Axon. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound