Author: Paul Axton

The nephew of the deceased interrupted the service at the graveside to object to the entire procedure. “No Turk, Jew, or Muslim, would be forced to submit, against his will, to the rites of a religion which he had rejected,” he cried out. “What is this ‘official Christianity’ then?” asked the young man. “It is the great Whore, Babylon, with whom all the kings of the earth have fornicated, the wine of whose whoredom has made drunk all the peoples of the earth. . ..” The young doctor explained that the deceased had refused to participate in the official worship of God and so, accordingly will have reduced his sins, in his own estimate, by one – “namely the sin of participating in making a fool of God by calling the Christianity of the New Testament what is not the Christianity of the New Testament.” ¹ Continue reading “No More Reformations – Just Singular Individuals Called from the Herd”

How I lost an original, though not fully worked out, notion of peace as a new Christian and then arrived, again, in middle age at an understanding of non-violence is not a process I can narrate in detail. I guess I lost my original notion of Christian peace simply through circumstance. My father explained his understanding of Jesus command to turn the other cheek through a story: “A preacher teaching on this passage is suddenly slapped by someone. The preacher immediately punches the offender but then explains – now I have turned the other cheek.” Being of a literal frame of mind and not attuned to the finer points of hermeneutics – I may have missed the intended facetiousness of the story. A “masculine,” anti-communist, right-wing, nationalistic Christianity was modeled – we lived in Texas. My sense that we should be at peace with the land and God’s created order, though we may need to kill off some of our fellow humans, somehow survived a bit longer. Ultimately, the nationalistic forms of American Christianity proved to be a corrosive sort of mud swamp to my first (naïve) understanding of Christianity. Continue reading “Arriving at Peace in the Land of Silence or How to Drain a Mud Swamp”

A guest to my class on world religions was asked to address the subject of mystery. Being an academic who had spent his life studying the desert fathers I thought a good way to begin the discussion would be to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate notions of mystery. My request that he do this fell flat, as he indicated he had never considered the issue. I had just finished teaching a section on Zen and felt it was important to say what the Christian mystery is not. Having spent 20 years in Japan it would not have occurred to me to presume to teach on the role of mystery without distinguishing its legitimate form and function. My experience with this guest speaker, however, seems to typify a growing phenomenon. Continue reading “The Mystery Revealed”

Are the writers of the New Testament a reliable guide as to how we should read the Old Testament and thus understand the Bible? At a more basic level, is the Bible coherent? What one encounters in much of biblical scholarship is lack of an implicit trust that the Bible is a book which tells a story in which beginning, middle and end form a coherent whole. Continue reading “Whence the crack in the mirror of the Word?”

I believe there are multiple implications to reading Genesis and the Gospel of John together, in the manner I proposed in my last blog. As I demonstrated, it suggests that the purposes of creation, as posed by John Walton, were always that the world would be the meeting place of God and humans (the cosmos as temple). The Gospel of John’s picture of re-creation confirms this in the first two chapters (describing re-creation over seven days) culminating in the foreshadowing of the marriage supper of the Lamb (or the culmination of creation’s purpose) in which the fellowship or joining of God and man is on the order of a marriage (the Church joined to Christ). In this blog, I suggest that the combination of John and Genesis also gives us the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo (and here I am departing from Walton) and in addition serves to explain how Genesis and John combine to provide a counter ontology to every sort of dualism. Continue reading “Genesis through John – The Exposure of Myth and the End of Dualism”

Several years back Beret, my favorite son-in-law, was studying with John Walton at Wheaton and he bought me his book The Lost World of Genesis One. While I liked the book, I was not convinced of its premise until I did something Walton, as typical of Old Testament scholars, did not (and perhaps could not) do – I began to read Genesis through John. I was teaching the Gospel of John and in preparation for the course it occurred to me that the Gospel writer and the O.T. scholar were treating Genesis 1 in a similar fashion. Both consider the creation account in terms of its theological purpose. John is concerned to show that Christ as Creator (he quotes Genesis – “In the beginning”) is inaugurating re-creation with his incarnation. Continue reading “Rereading Genesis and the Bible”

Having spent more than twenty years in Japan it became obvious to me that there is a basic difference as to what is thought to constitute a person in Japan and the United States. The obvious difference, pointed out by Ruth Benedict, between a guilt culture and a shame culture frames an entirely different dynamic of human interaction. The primary obligations of ko (obligation to the father), chu (obligation to the emperor or cultural authority), and kanzan (respect for authority), mediated through amae (dependence) which is primarily focused on the mother begins to get at the way in which the individual is defined through a web of relations. As I began to dig into these differences and how they had been developed and set forth, it took me through the work of Takeo Doi to his teacher and mentor, Heisaku Kosawa to Freudian theory. Kosawa visited Freud in Vienna and proposed an alternative to the Oedipus Complex and was the pioneer in importing Freudian theory to Japan. Doi would become the prime interpreter of all things Japanese and would become the leading thinker in a movement to define what it means to be Japanese known as nihonjinron. Continue reading “The Universal Problem of Death and Its Cultural Manipulation”

The conclusion of Jacques Lacan that “there is no sexual relationship,” is due to the fact that one cannot coordinate the reality of the human body with the ego.  The sexed body provides a mode of relating which cannot be coordinated with the mental or symbolic order.  Sex and gender seem to be a realm apart from the concept I have of myself; so, the way I would relate to the other is not sexual but through the symbolic realm of language – yet this realm falls short of establishing a complete (full-bodied) relationship.  Continue reading “There Is No Sexual Relationship Versus Being Joined to Christ”

A Virtual Round Table Discussion with Ryan Hemmer, Jason Rodenbeck and Frank Dugan III.

“I need not tell you this is the day Americans elect their president and a host of other offices. We will be told this is the day the people rule. That sounds like a good idea, but you need to remember that there was a democratic moment in the Gospels, and the people asked for Barabbas.” Stanley Hauerwas (speaking at Duke Divinity School on election day)

Paul:  I am writing this on Wednesday after the election results came in early this morning. This political season has not only brought out the division in the country but a division among Christians.  The approach of Ryan, Jason, and Frank represent three notions of how to negotiate this breach.  Ryan suggests that we not succumb to the cycle of seeking short-term solutions to long-term problems but asks, as Christians, what practical political action we are to take.  Jason describes his personal response to the situation and concludes that the solution is only in rightly understanding the cross of Christ. Frank agrees with Jason but suggests we may be expecting too much of the principalities and powers to ask them to follow the Sermon on the Mount. Continue reading “How Should We Then Live As Peaceable Christians?”

This is a guest blog by Professor Emeritus Vincent Pauro.

Dr. Klaus Schmidt, an expert on ancient funeral rites, has recently raised serious doubts regarding a key New Testament text. In his book, Rites of Passage, Schmidt questions the historicity of the shortest text of the New Testament describing Jesus response to the death of Lazarus. Continue reading “Scholars Claim Shortest Biblical Text an Impossibility”