Forging Ploughshares

Hayden Hagerman and Paul Axton discuss Wittgenstein's and Augustine's understanding of language and how this can result in two different theological understandings.

Part 1 of 2.

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Music: Bensound

Paul Axton concludes his series on Anselm: Anselm works out the necessity of the death of Christ as part of the logic, already developed in his other arguments, of a pure reason. The necessity of the death of Christ is a violent logical necessity in his closed system of the human mind.

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Music: Bensound

Paul Axton Preaches: Paul is teaching the Corinthians of an alternative knowing - a self-awareness that must include a sensitivity to persons. It is not simply a matter of knowing a set of facts – idols are nothing and God is something. It is a matter of knowing persons – some are weak some are strong – and the principle found in Christ is that of a loving personal knowledge.

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Music: Bensound

Paul Axton connects Anselm to Hegel and Heidegger and to Lacanian psychoanalysis in tracing the turn to a reified language as a form of salvation.

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Music: Bensound

Paul Axton explains how Anselm reasons from ordinary differences to an absolute difference so as to attain to the thought of God and cross the ontological divide which separates the divine and human. To cross this divide using reason is an ultimate act of the will which will require the Cross. All of this depends upon an essentializing or absolutizing of human interiority.

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Music: Bensound

Paul Axton explains how Anselm gives us an alternative theory of atonement based on an alternative anthropology which depends upon pure reason. Mysticism and rationalism are seen to be fused and necessary in this key thinker who stands behind Western Christianity and Western thought.

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Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches: Salvation as Paul applies it in I Corinthians pertains to how we do marriage, how we regard sex, how we negotiate our social station, or how we negotiate identity. Clearly Paul’s message is not that you have now accepted Jesus into your heart and so you are going to heaven when you die – and everything else is secondary. Rather he says you have been bought with a price and what you have been bought out of is a world where sexual gratification, social station, or ethnicity or family may be thought to be the primary point of human existence.

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Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches: Anxiety is created by putting too much importance on the world of marriage, social status and ethnicity. Paul may be using end of the world language metaphorically so as to relativize worldly things but certainly he means these concerns to not have a definitive grip. The way we suspend this anxiety producing grip is to be found in Paul's phrase "as if not." 

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Music: Bensound

Paul Axton Preaches: The arc of Scripture contains a confrontation with the tragic that is an occasion for what Kierkegaard called the comedic. The Christian is in on the humor if it is not obstructed by bad theology.

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Music: Bensound

Paul Axton preaches: To get the freedom of sex in marriage correct one must sort out the principle of the flesh from the reality of the body.

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Music: Bensound