Forging Ploughshares

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Music: Bensound