Forging Ploughshares

Paul and Jesse Schrader discuss the anthropology of Ratzinger and Hauerwas, covering important differences and misunderstandings.

In talking about the topic of relativism: in the church being a separate community you will most certainly confront relativism. Because your only line of defense against relativism is not appealing to reason or philosophical argument. Instead, you are insisting that truth is something that is embodied—there is a merger there.

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Music: Bensound

A picture of Christian salvation in terms of therapy or deliverance from systemic deception and the destruction this entails.

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Music: Bensound

Jonathan Totty describes the importance of Irenaeus as an example of a theological understanding for the Church rather than the academy.

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Music: Bensound

Paul explains how we can learn from the atheists to reject a certain understanding of God and thus come to know God as He truly is.

Is there a God we need to refuse as we come to the God revealed in Christ? Is, in fact, our conception of God, inasmuch as it is not shaped by the person and work of Christ, likely to stand in the way of a relationship to who God really is? Let me state it, overstate it perhaps, this way: do we need to pass through a kind of atheism? To refuse the belief in a certain understanding of God that we might recognize the God of the Bible?

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Music: Bensound

Paul traces the stark difference posed in Scripture between the world of darkness and of light, of flesh and Spirit.

The point is not, “Oh where are the authentic Christians to be found?” or “Where has the church failed?” … The idea is, let’s get before us the picture of what we are called to in Christ. So, we will all continually be striving, as Paul says, to “work out your salvation in fear and trembling.” … But we should be able to identify, historically, certain teachings or understandings that get it right and those that get it wrong.

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Music: Bensound

Forging Ploughshares Garden Adviser and Community Liaison explains why Peace with the land must be incorporated into concepts of salvation and describes her work in this regard.

…we had all kinds of differences, but that all sort of melts away when you’re planting vegetables together or delivering a box of vegetables to a community member that’s shut in to their house. So I guess I found God in the garden because we were able to have conversation and fellowship in a way I hadn’t found before. I found that working together can be a good first step in reconciling differences.

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Music: Bensound

An exposition of Romans 8 as God’s hope (the hope that God has) that exposes the escapism inherent in our dualistic understanding of humanity. Suffering has meaning not because we hope to escape the physical world, but because God is seeking to restore that world. The groaning of this world is a suffering that will “bear much fruit.”

God himself is in the place of having planted a garden and is hoping, awaiting, for the fruit of the garden to come. And so, too, history for God is unfolding. It is a real world that is coming to bear fruit in the Kingdom of God. This is a strange notion for us because in a kind of scholastic or philosophical understanding that often gets fused with the New Testament, the idea that history is real and that things are unfolding even for God himself is out of court—it just doesn’t fit with an Aristotelian notion of an“Unmoved Mover.”

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Music: Bensound

Paul explains the nature of sin’s deception.

If we mystify the problem [of sin], we’ll go on to mystify the answer.

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Music: Bensound

Paul explores the question, “What is theology?”

The way that Karl Barth has said the same thing is, as he was reading Romans the “strange new world of the Bible opened up to him.”  What he means by that is he began to enter into a different world because of his realization and understanding of who God is in Christ.  That thrilling discovery of an alternative cosmos, an alternative world, I’m afraid is precisely what is lost in scholastic, classical, evangelical, even protestant approaches.  The very way in which they engage the world has left most of the world untouched by what I would consider the foundational understanding.

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Music: Bensound

Paul explains how hope deconstructs desire. The future anterior perspective (hope) breaks through the imminent perspective (desire).

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Music: Bensound