Forging Ploughshares

Paul Axton Preaches - Deploying the three most famous apologies or trial defenses in history (the trial of Socrates, Jesus and Paul), the contrast between a defense grounded in this world order (law,…

Vangie, Jason, and Paul discuss the existential threat posed by surveillance capitalist companies such as Facebook and Google but to which we have long been subject in the age of mass media. The manu…

Paul Axton Preaches - The work of Christ, is one of the most contested aspects of Christianity.  Bad theories of the atonement have obscured the simplicity of the New Testament summed up by Romans 8:…

In this lecture on Jacques Derrida, Paul Axton explains Derrida’s philosophical project of “deconstruction,” aimed at understanding how self-consciousness is divided or already conceived in differenc…

Paul Axton Preaches - In the recapitulation view of the atonement, Christ is seen as the new Adam who succeeds where Adam failed. In psychoanalysis there is a similar diagnosis in which people live a…

In this lecture, Paul Axton, traces how the lie surrounding the law (a lie of radical evil) is defeated by the work of Christ. This deliverance from death to life is the ground which every metaphor o…

Paul Axton Preaches - The ideological form of American evangelicalism follows the pattern of counterfeit religion outlined by John and Paul. It is defined by what it is not and is an antagonistic str…

In this talk Paul Axton explains how the early Church doctrine of recapitulation, or the exposure of a false identity and the reconstitution of identity in Christ, is explained through the psychoanal…

Paul Axton Preaches: American religion, like American politics, is coming undone and the divide between the right and left is exposing the death dealing nature of the heterodoxy of American Evangelic…

In this ongoing talk, Paul Axton demonstrates how radical evil might be equated with reification of the law. The law or the symbolic order may literally be taken as the voice of God, as in bicameral …

Paul describes Christ as breaking down the dividing wall of hostility, but to grasp the significance of this broken wall, it is necessary to understand how hostility constitutes our world in class an…

Part I In this first lecture Paul Axton, in an examination of the Kantian concept of evil as developed in Lacan and his followers, suggests that their concept of radical evil brings a corrective to t…

Paul Axton Preaches - Today, seventy-five years ago, the second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The great irony and sadness of this day was that an all Christian bomber crew, from a …

In part 2 of their conversation of the dropping of the atomic bomb Matt and Paul describe the gospel alternative to mutually assured destruction.

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Paul Axton Preaches - In the world the goal or end is through violence, a redemptive violence. The gospel arms us with an alternative means, the way of peace, which contains the end.

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In part one of this two part conversation, Matt and Paul discuss the great irony that a "Christian Nation" should choose as ground zero the center of the Japanese Christian population in Nagasaki. Th…

Paul Axton Preaches - The Gospel does not teach nonresistance to evil. The New Testament informs us how to resist evil. John Lewis has clearly picked up the point as explained by Paul in Ephesians 6 …

Matt and Paul continue their discussion of shame. In this conversation they discuss how the Gospel and the practice of Christianity, rightly understood, provides a real world resolution to this prima…

Paul Axton Preaches - We cannot see the world through the lens of our law, our constitution, our borders, our police, our armies, because in doing so we are defining ourselves through that which Paul…

Matt and Paul discuss how refocusing the human predicament on shame, as opposed to guilt, shapes and grounds all of theology very differently. Shame is holistic, social, and directly connected to the…