Thinking Christian: Clear Theology for a Confusing World

s mercy in judgment a sign of weakness? In part 2 of their capital punishment conversation, James Spencer and Ashish Varma ask whether the death penalty fits God's long-suffering. Ashish Varma argues that Old Testament laws calling for death were less a mandate than an image of how serious sin is, an image fulfilled at the cross, which in his view takes capital punishment off the table for church...

Jonathan Leeman — president of 9Marks and author of Political Church: The Local Assembly as Embassy of Christ's Rule — joins James Spencer for the eleventh episode in the faith and politics series. Leeman uses "political" functionally rather than partisanly: all of life falls under the rule of Christ, and the local congregation is meant to exemplify what that rule looks like. His centr...

Should Christians support livestreaming an execution? James Spencer and Ashish Varma weigh capital punishment, the Bible, and spectacle. James Spencer and Ashish Varma respond to the proposal to livestream the execution of a man who committed a mass murder, a plan later called off. They ask what the Bible says about capital punishment, from Genesis 9:6 and the image of God to why Israel's law pres...

Norman Wirzba — Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Theology at Duke and author of This Sacred Life and Love's Braided Dance — joins James Spencer and Ashish Varma for the tenth episode in the faith and politics series. Wirzba grew up farming and wanted to be a farmer, then went through graduate school without encountering a single farmer on a syllabus. Reading Wendell Berry cha...

Suicide prevention in the church: David Gilleland, author of Holding Hope, explains how pastors can recognize warning signs, ask directly, and walk with people toward hope. David Gilleland spent nearly a decade managing suicide prevention programs for the National Guard and Army Reserves before becoming a pastor. As a pastor, he found that most church leaders had received no suicide prevention tra...

Can pastors endorse political candidates? Troy Miller, president and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters, explains NRB’s Johnson Amendment lawsuit against the IRS. The Johnson Amendment was added to the tax code in 1954 by then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. It bars 501(c)(3) organizations, including churches, from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Miller explains why NRB went to co...

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 p...

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 t...

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, hopi...

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 anthropologis...

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...

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...

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...

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 ans...

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 w...

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, whil...

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...

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...

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 indu...

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 &mda...

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...

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 co...

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...

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 rol...

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 b...