Forging Ploughshares

Christ came to defeat sin death and the devil. This is inclusive of an overcoming of blinded minds so that we can now apprehend the working of sin in and through the principalities and powers.

In other words this perverse kind of Christianity is just one more ideology that is used to justify the self. At the heart of the problem is the very doctrine of the cross of Christ. Anselm’s doctrine of divine satisfaction that is an exchange between the Father and Son tends to leave out the human reality—that is an exchange within the Trinity does not picture what is happening in the New Testament. Calvin’s picture of penal substitution takes it a step further so that the God of the Bible is often portrayed like a kind of pagan deity demanding violent sacrifice. So we lose an understanding in this of the real-world difference that Christ makes in the reality of our own lives—that there are two kingdoms/logics/ways of thinking. So there is a kind of moral failure and intellectual failure in what often passes for Christianity today. What I’d like to talk about today is the meaning of the death of Christ as it is portrayed in the Bible. What we will see is that the way it is often talked about tends to mystify something that is not actually mystical.

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Music: Bensound

Carlyle King, a man with autism, and Mario Puentes, the parent of a child with autism, share a friendship that they call “a nearly unbreakable relationship.”  In this podcast, they discuss how their friendship has overcome the loneliness of autism and brought hope to both of their families. At Forging Ploughshares, we think the practice of healthy presence and acceptance they describe is a wonderful model of the way the peaceable kingdom works to bring different people together and an example of the practice of friendship with the other.

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Music: Bensound

Paul continues to tell the story of theology.

Because we have to ask ourselves “What is the role of Christ, the role of salvation, what does it mean to read the New Testament?” That’s really what I’m aiming at, “Why read the Bible?”  I’m afraid that the reason that we read the Bible and the way that we do salvation is very much that we’re just going to have Jesus fill the gap, that he’s going to be one more product, or that he’s going to hold out fullness in some way. Is that the role of Christ, or is it to reveal the deception of this entire construct, and undo it?

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Music: Bensound

Many people quote Jeremiah 29:11 (“For I know the plans I have for you…plans to prosper you and not to harm you…”), but few read vss. 1-10, in which we find God’s people stuck in a difficult place, a pagan nation. The Gospel is not merely a promise of future escape, nor is it merely a system of “making the world better.” It is, instead, a kingdom which we live in the now as we look forward to God’s “not yet.”

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Music: Bensound

This lecture seeks to show how ethics is either integrated or separated from the saving work of Christ.

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Music: Bensound

Paul and Jonathan Totty discuss the meaning of the death of Christ in light of the psychoanalytic reading of Paul (the Apostle), as described in Paul’s book.

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Music: Bensound

By not recognizing Paul’s description of the perverse there is a “Christianity” that remains perverse to its core. Salvation is freedom from both perversion and agonism and this alternative subjectivity is salvation. The move from one form of subject to the other as a description of salvation offers an alternative to atonement theories focused on the law.

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Music: Bensound

In this segment of Practicing Peace, Hayden chats with Dr. Stephen Chapman of Duke University about theological interpretation of Scripture and Old Testament violence.

In order for us to be clear about the gospel and clear about our confession of Jesus Christ we also need to be clear-eyed about violence. ~Stephen Chapman

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Paul explains how the cross addresses evil.

We understand the nature of evil in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ, which is not normally the way this is done. Usually when we talk about Christ we don’t bring in the issue of evil. What we would bring in is other issues like the problem of sin. So, evil is usually reserved in a college classroom for something like apologetics—and in an apologetics course you never bring in the cross of Christ. You may think “that’s a travesty.” That’s the travesty of modern evangelicalism…

There is a Christianity, unfortunately, that makes itself irrelevant by colluding with the evil of the world. I’m not sure that we should continue to call it Christianity, but I’m not going to be the one to say, “Let’s stop using that word.” But where do we see it? We see it in nationalism, a Christianity coopted by the state…capitalism: a Christianity that gives itself over to notions of consumption and desire…or maybe just a commitment to do evil on a personal level so that good may abound. In someway, a Christianity that does not recognize the problem of evil and how the cross addresses it is one which makes itself irrelevant.

Music: Bensound

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