Thinking Christian: Bible, Theology, and Culture

Why should Christians engage politics? Vincent Bacote of Wheaton College argues that political engagement needs a theological foundation, not an ad hoc approach.

Vincent Bacote, professor of theology and director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College, joins James Spencer and Ashish Varma to ground political life in stewardship and common grace. Politics, he argues, is one part of humanity's larger calling to manage the world God gave us, and Americans hold more political agency than most people in history. That agency changes how we read Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2.

Many evangelicals can...

Michael Rhodes — lecturer in Old Testament at Carey Baptist College in New Zealand, former pastor, and author of Practicing the King's Economy and Just Discipleship — returns to discuss his new book, Reimagining Biblical Politics: What Scripture Says About Public Life and Why It Matters.

Rhodes wrote the book deliberately without addressing contemporary American political issues, hoping to give a partisan-divided church something it could use together. His argument is that Scripture speaks about politics constantly, and in many voices: John says get out of Babylon, Jeremiah says seek its welfare, Paul says submit and also flees a tria...

Continuing the faith and politics series, James Spencer and Ashish Varma turn to artificial intelligence — starting with the data centers going up across the country, which consume enormous land, power, and water while generating far fewer local jobs than the factories and mills they're often compared to.

From there the conversation widens. Both push on the promise of efficiency: whether a technology that lets you work faster has actually given anyone time back, what gets lost when a middle schooler reaches for the calculator instead of the long-form work, and why the steps toward a goal may ma...

American Christians with his answer: the church’s task is to preach the word of God.

Asked whether churches should urge members to enlist, buy war bonds, and preach the issues of the war, Barth answers with a counter-question: does the church know its mission is to preach the word of God according to Scripture? From there he supports the fight against Hitler while refusing to let the church become an instrument of the state, rejecting both identification with any political party and a “timeless” spiritual ministry cut off from the present. James and Ashish connect this to the...

Horror is one of the few genres that refuses to let you look away, and it is one of the few that got people back into theaters after COVID. Dr. Kutter Callaway of Fuller Theological Seminary joins Dr. James Spencer to talk about his new book, Be Afraid: What Horror Reveals About Facing the Darkness, and what happens when a self-described scaredy cat decides to study the genre like an anthropologist instead of writing it off.

The conversation moves from the difference between the best of horror and the tenth sequel, to the common Christian worry that...

Is war the judgment of God? James Spencer and Ashish Varma take up the second question in Karl Barth’s wartime letter to American Christians, and whether some are more guilty than others.

Barth answers yes, and James argues that judgment is part of how humans, as God’s image, reflect God after the fall. The conversation separates recognizing evil as evil from deciding how to carry out judgment, works through Hosea’s picture of wrath giving way to mercy, and asks why Barth saw World War II as a fight that had to be fought. Restraining evil b...

Shane J. Wood, professor of New Testament and its origins at Ozark Christian College and author of Thinning the Veil, returns for the eighth episode in the faith and politics series — this time on Revelation.

Wood argues that the question the series has been circling is the question Revelation opens with. Christians in Asia Minor were living under an emperor in decline, caught in a conflict they hadn't chosen, and the book was written to tell them how to stand.

Much of the conversation is about definitions. When the crucified king is at the center, wh...

In 1942, Karl Barth was asked to write to Christians in the United States. He didn't know the American context well, so he asked his hosts to send him the questions they were actually wrestling with. James Spencer and Ashish Varma work through the first of them: how can a Christian be a loyal citizen of a national state and a loyal member of a church that transcends national interests?

Barth's answer turns on a distinction between the national state and what he calls the righteous state — the God-instituted order the church prays toward when it prays for Go...

Michael McDuffee — formerly professor of historical theology at Moody Bible Institute, now living in Germany — joins James Spencer and Ashish Varma for the seventh episode in the faith and politics series.

The conversation starts with an essay by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas, a lifelong child of the Enlightenment, found himself after 2001 asking whether reason alone could carry the weight of a public ethics, and began describing modern societies as post-secular. McDuffie uses that as a way into the collapse of secularization theory: the assumption that modernization would inevitably shrink religion turned out to describe Europe, not the world...

James Spencer and Ashish Varma debrief their conversation with William Cavanaugh, and work out what he was and wasn't saying.

They start with a tension: Cavanaugh sounded gentler in conversation than his books read, and both men try to account for it. The answer they land on has to do with audience — that Torture and Eucharist and Being Consumed are written to people who need to resist, while the broader project is aimed at those of us sitting near the center of a global economic order who don't notice we're being formed at all.

Much of...

William T. Cavanaugh — professor of Catholic studies at DePaul, director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology, and author of The Uses of Idolatry, Torture and Eucharist, Migrations of the Holy, and Being Consumed — joins James Spencer and Ashish Varma for the fifth episode in the faith and politics series.

Cavanaugh begins where politics itself begins: not with elections, but with how people organize a shared life. He traces how the sacred trappings once belonging to the church migrated to the modern state, and points to the Apotheosis of Washington on the Capitol dome as a re...

James Spencer and Ashish Varma reflect on the previous episode's conversation with Veronica Roberts Ogle — and on what happens when Augustine gets recruited for arguments he was writing against.

The starting point is a claim James has encountered in political speeches: that the two cities can be collapsed, and that a nation might become the city of God. Both men think this misses Augustine's whole point. The cities are distinguished by their loves, and a community formed by self-love doesn't graduate into the other by improving its policies.

From there the conversation widens. James connects Au...

AI is already cutting the audio, designing the graphics, and answering questions people used to bring to their pastors. Troy Miller, president and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters, joins Dr. James Spencer to talk about what happens when a productivity tool starts getting marketed as a teammate.

Miller lays out three buckets: AI as production efficiency for ministries and nonprofits, the industry push to make the tools feel more human, and the legal and ethical tangle of intellectual property, deepfakes, and platform liability. From there the conversation turns to NRB and Barna survey data on how much...

Veronica Roberts Ogle teaches at Villanova and wrote Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God. She joins James Spencer for the third episode in the faith and politics series.

She begins with why the book exists. Rome was sacked in 410, the first breach of the city's walls in centuries, and Romans wanted to know whether Christianity had cost them the protection of the old gods — while Christians, riding the high of a converted emperor, were asking why their God hadn't defended them either. Augustine's answer took thirteen years and twenty-two books.

Ogle ex...

David Koyzis returns to the show for the second episode in the faith and politics series. He's a member of Global Scholars Canada and the author of Political Visions and Illusions, We Answer to Another, and Citizenship Without Illusions — and he spent his first thirty years in the Chicago area before moving to Canada, which gives him an unusual vantage on American national feeling.

Koyzis starts with divided loyalties: we belong to families, congregations, workplaces, and nations, and none of those communities exhausts who we are. The political community isn't higher than the others. From there the co...

The first episode in a series on faith and politics running through the midterms. James Spencer and Ashish Varma set the terms before the guests arrive.

Ashish starts with the word itself: polis, the city — the shared life of a community, of which party politics is only a narrow slice. That opens the question the series will keep returning to. Paul had no power to abolish slavery, but he could tell Philemon that Onesimus was returning as a brother, and in doing so redraw a line the empire had drawn elsewhere. That is political work, done without an...

A Billy Graham Center survey of Gen Z reported that nearly half of respondents agreed that Christian support for Trump has made them less likely to attend church. The survey offers no follow-up on why — whether the objection is to a candidate, to partisanship generally, or to something deeper about how the church understands its own order. James Spencer and Ashish Varma take the finding as a starting point rather than a conclusion.

The conversation reaches back to Constantine and the first council called by an emperor, to Augustine's two cities and the early church's refusal of mi...

James Spencer and Ashish Varma return to the diagnoses that narrow the church's vision, this time with fragmentation — the way faithful Christians end up separated from one another not by heresy but by tradition, idiom, and the slow drift of communities that no longer talk across their boundaries.

James opens with a job interview from 2005 where a pastor announced he wanted no one in the role who wouldn't bleed for the Southern Baptist faith. Both men are clear that boundaries have real value; the question is what happens when a community's distinctives quietly become the test of wh...

Karl Marx and D.L. Moody lived at the same time, watched the same cities industrialize, and asked the same question about the poor. One had a doctorate, wealthy patrons, and a theory of history. The other had about five years of formal schooling and a Bible.

Dr. James Spencer talks with Dr. Gregg Quiggle about Marx and Moody: Two Contemporaries. Two Gospels. Two Tombstones. One Choice., the new book Quiggle co-wrote with Erwin Lutzer for Moody Publishers. They work through where Marx's system runs out of road, particularly its silence on how a state ever relinquishes...

James Spencer and Ashish Varma close out the series on narrowing with amplification — Marshall McLuhan's insight that technology extends human capacity, and what that means when the capacity being extended is our tendency to forget God.

The conversation runs from forks and chopsticks to John Deere, from the fig leaves in Genesis to Albert Borgmann's distinction between things and devices: the wood-burning stove that gathers a household versus the thermostat that anonymizes everything behind the heat. Ashish pushes back on the common classroom line that technology is morally neutral, arguing that development and use are different questions an...

James Spencer and Ashish Varma continue the series on what narrows the church's vision with a look at inversion — what happens when an interpretive grid quietly takes over the authority that belongs to Scripture itself.

The conversation moves from the hermeneutical spiral (nobody comes to the text from nowhere) to the passages most of us never work: the command not to destroy fruit trees in Deuteronomy 20, God giving the land little by little in Deuteronomy 7, the instruction not to dispossess Moab in Deuteronomy 2, and the "remember the poor" tagline at the end of Paul's account of the Je...

More than half of American Christians now say they trust AI with their spiritual life. That is a problem worth taking seriously, and it is also the reason Logos built its AI the way it did.

Dr. James Spencer talks with Scott Lindsey, an executive director at Logos, about what happens when a Bible study tool is cut off from the open internet on purpose. Scott walks through the three design commitments behind Logos AI: no connection to the open web, so answers come from commentaries and scholarship rather than blogs and forums; cited sources down to...

Institutions confuse their own survival with the work of God. Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma close the diagnostic arc of this series with transaction, meaning the trade a person or an organization makes when preserving the platform becomes more important than the faithfulness the platform was built for. The anchor text is Jeroboam, who sets up worship at Dan and Bethel not to introduce a different god but to keep his people from traveling south. Varma's reading sharpens it: the question is whether Israel gathers around the presence of God or whether God is expected to gather...

The fear of losing the faith to another culture is producing the very thing it fears. Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma open a series on three forces pressing on the church, beginning with assimilation, and Varma's argument is that syncretism functions mostly as a fear discourse. The word gets aimed outward, at newer expressions of Christian faith in other places, by people whose own expression is so culturally saturated that they have stopped noticing it. He points out that "essence," the thing we say we are protecting, is a Greek philosophical category rather than a biblical one.<...

The usual complaint about the New Testament's use of the Old is that the apostles play fast and loose. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer thinks the problem runs the other direction. The Old Testament has gone missing from the research, and once you cut it off, ordinary exegetical moves start looking bizarre. Second Temple interpreters and the New Testament authors resemble each other because they were both apprenticed to the same thousand years of Old Testament authors interpreting earlier Old Testament texts.

In this episode, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Schnittjer work through what he calls vertical context...

Most readers hear "Old Testament use of the Old Testament" and picture quotations. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer says quotation is the small end of it. An interpretive allusion needs three things: a donor text that gives the language, a receptor text that takes it up, and an identifiable interpretive outcome. That third item is what separates an allusion from an echo, and it is also why later biblical authors so often change the wording. Saying the same thing again was never the point. Moving it forward was.

In this episode, Dr. James Spencer talks with Dr. Schnittjer...

Ezra-Nehemiah opens on a high note. Yahweh keeps the word he spoke through Jeremiah, Cyrus issues the edict, and the exiles go home. By the last chapter, Nehemiah is walking the city alone, pulling out men's hair and cursing them, and the collective repentances that filled the middle of the book have evaporated. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer argues that most of the literature, popular and technical alike, has quietly declined to read that ending as an ending.

In this episode, Dr. James Spencer talks with Dr. Schnittjer about his forthcoming commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah in the Baker Commentary...

What does repealing Sunday shopping laws have to do with rising rates of suicide, alcohol deaths, and drug overdoses? More than you might expect. In this episode of Thinking Christian, I sit down with Dr. Tamar Oostrom, health economist at The Ohio State University, to walk through her research on blue laws, religious decline, and what the data reveals about the hidden costs of losing community.

The paper's central finding is striking: states that repealed blue laws — the Sunday retail restrictions that once made church the default social gathering of the week — saw measurable increases in deaths of d...

Christians have inherited a strange habit of treating the Old Testament as optional. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer argues that Jesus and the apostles would not have understood the question. There was a gospel, a Messiah, and a church before there was a New Testament, and none of it was possible without the Scriptures Israel already had. Even the word "gospel" comes to Mark by way of Isaiah.

In this episode, Dr. James Spencer talks with Dr. Schnittjer about his new book, Connected: How Scripture Guides the Study of Scripture. The premise is that the Bible already teaches...

Can the church learn to follow the Spirit into places it hasn't been looking? In this episode of Thinking Christian, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma sit down with Dr. Oscar Garcia-Johnson — Professor of Theology and Decolonial Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Spirit Outside the Gate: Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South — for a conversation that will stretch your theological imagination in the best possible way.

Oscar unpacks why the Holy Spirit resists every attempt at domestication, why Pentecost was never about cosmetic diversity, and why genuine Christian maturity looks less like doct...

Is modern life quietly replacing God with something else? In Episode 60 of Thinking Christian, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma welcome back historian and theologian Dr. Kevin Flatt (Associate Dean of Humanities, Redeemer University) to explore one of the most urgent and underexamined ideas in Christian thought today: Sacred Social Order.

Every civilization in human history — from ancient China to Mesoamerican empires to early Christian Europe — understood that human society must align with something higher than itself. That intuition isn't gone. It's been replaced. By nationalism. By progressive identity movements. By civil religion. By the cult of t...

What if secularization isn't the decline of religion — but the replacement of one social order with another? In this episode, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma sit down with Dr. Kevin Flatt, professor of history at Redeemer University and author of Secularization, Social Order, and World History, to unpack one of the most provocative frameworks in contemporary Christian thinking: Sacred Social Order.

Kevin introduces the idea that every human culture — until the modern West — has organized its life around something higher than itself. He argues that what we call "religion" is actually a uniquely Western, uniquely modern...

Is "Cultural Christianity" a bridge to the gospel — or a counterfeit that replaces it? In this episode, Dr. James Spencer (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) and Dr. Ashish Varma respond to James Wood's widely-discussed First Things article, In Defense of Cultural Christianity. Together they unpack why calling a civilisation "Christian" when Christ is not its governing authority is not just imprecise — it's theologically catastrophic.

From the Christendom narrative and American civil religion to the habituation of virtue, abortion statistics, and a profound meditation on Pentecost in Acts 2, this episode models what serious Christian thinking looks like when it r...

What does it mean to be human — really? In an age of AI, transhumanism, and relentless technological "progress," Christians are making confident claims about humanity without a solid theological foundation underneath them. In this episode, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma sit down with Dr. Marc Cortez, Dean of the Litfin School of Divinity at Wheaton College, to explore one of the most urgent and underdeveloped doctrines in Christian thought: theological anthropology.

Dr. Cortez challenges the tendency to let the Image of God do all the heavy lifting — and makes a compelling case that the human body...

What if the church is trapped in the same invisible loop as an addict — and doesn't know it?

What does addiction science have to do with the body of Christ? More than you'd think. In this follow-up conversation, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma build on their interview with Dr. David Van Dyke (Wheaton College Marriage & Family Therapy) to explore how systems thinking unlocks a deeper understanding of church health, Christian formation, and why faithful people keep repeating the same destructive patterns.

Drawing on Kent Dunnington's groundbreaking work Virtue and Addiction, the conversation reveals th...

Most people think of mental health as an individual problem. Dr. David J. Van Dyke — professor, marriage and family therapist, and co-host of the With You podcast — thinks that's exactly the wrong frame. In this episode, Dr. Spencer and Ashish sit down with David to unpack how family systems therapy fundamentally reorients the way we see suffering, relationships, and even the gospel itself.

From a rebellious teenager who kept losing possessions until there was nothing left to take, to Paul's language of perseverance in suffering, David draws a sweeping line between relational science and redemptive theology. He argue...

Is Christian parenting a strict formula to execute, or an art form to practice?

In a culture that bombards Christian parents with exhaustive 10-step checklists and uniform blueprints for family life, it is remarkably easy to accidentally provoke or exasperate our children. This week, Dr. James Spencer, PhD and Dr. Ashish Varma return to the podcast to look at fatherhood through the lens of scriptural wisdom rather than cultural anxieties.

True biblical wisdom doesn't produce recipe-followers; it forms adaptive disciples. Pulling from the book of Proverbs, the Sermon on the Mount, and the letters of...

The Southern Baptist Convention just passed a constitutional amendment restricting women in ministry — and the implications reach far beyond the SBC. In this episode of Thinking Christian, Dr. James Spencer and co-host Ashish Varma sit down with Dr. Beth Allison Barr, historian, Baylor professor, and author of The Making of Biblical Womanhoodand Becoming the Pastor's Wife, to break down what happened, why it matters, and where evangelical Christianity may be heading.

Beth traces the amendment's path from 2022 to its overwhelming passage in 2025, explains why Al Mohler's role was decisive, and unpacks the striking inconsistency at the heart of...

What does it actually mean to be a male disciple of Jesus? And why does so much of what gets called "biblical masculinity" look more like cultural bravado than anything Jesus modeled or taught? In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Kutter Callaway, associate professor of theology and psychology at Fuller Seminary and author of Theology for Psychology and Counseling, to dig into those questions.

We talk through how we got here, because this didn't just appear out of nowhere. There's a history, a response to the feminist movement, the Promise Keepers era, and now a political...

What if Old Testament laws aren’t outdated rules to follow, but a deep, tangible story we are invited to practice?

In this episode of Thinking Christian, host James Spencer is joined once again by Rebekah Josberger and Renee Duffy from the Bible Unbranded podcast to tackle one of the most debated topics in biblical study: how to interpret Old Testament law through a theological framework. 

Using the command of the Sabbath as their core anchor ⚓, the team unpacks how the ancient laws in Deuteronomy and Exodus are designed to reveal the incomparable character of God r...