Thinking Christian: Clear Theology for a Confusing 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 the episode turns on Cavanaugh's remark that he couldn't answer a question about the midterms without sounding partisan. James and Ashish read that carefully: not as a coded endorsement, but as a recognition that theological convictions will sometimes land incidentally on one side of a two-party ballot without originating there.

From there they recover the older sense of politics — the life of the polis — through a piece of litter on the ground, a squirrel in the road, and Hebrews on efforts that matter without being ultimate.

Chapters:

00:00 Why he sounded softer than he reads

02:23 The nation state as an ideology, not a neutral container

04:33 Why Cavanaugh reaches for idolatry

07:14 Formation, identity, and voices from the periphery

10:16 "I'm not sure I can answer that without sounding partisan"

16:52 Incidental alignment isn't partisanship

20:52 Recovering the polis

26:26 The litter on the ground

29:35 Creation care and the squirrel in the road

36:00 Amazon, Target, and picking your poison

40:13 Politics as art rather than science

44:16 We don't fix the world; we live faithfully in it

48:15 The fall as an optimistic doctrine

51:04 Hebrews: effort that matters without being ultimate

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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 reminder that ostensibly secular nations still deify.

Much of the conversation is about idolatry — why the word is worth recovering despite its colonial baggage, and what Latin American theologians saw when they applied it to economics rather than atheism. Cavanaugh works the argument through Amazon packages, cobalt mines, and Milton Friedman's definition of a free transaction, then answers the obvious objection about whether ordinary people can do anything at all.

He closes on why the pursuit of Christian political power keeps producing the opposite of what it promises, with Hungary as the case in point.

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome

01:24 Politics before it meant elections

03:38 Ecclesia: the church as a third thing

05:30 Migrations of the holy

08:25 The Apotheosis of Washington

09:12 We didn't have to end up here

11:30 Why the fall is an optimistic doctrine

14:58 Chile, Argentina, and the habits of a church

17:17 Kennedy's Pyrrhic victory

20:59 Why Christians think they need power

22:59 Recovering the word idolatry

27:08 Economics as theology

30:31 Amazon, cobalt, and what's invisible by design

34:51 If I don't buy the bananas, who eats?

41:06 Neither the status quo nor a treehouse

44:46 Mondragon and worker ownership

46:12 What you can actually do

48:12 A migrant ministry in Oak Park

51:13 Framing a midterm election

54:34 Hungary, Orbán, and what power costs the church

57:02 The churches everyone assumed were holding

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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 Augustine's ordered loves to the Old Testament grammar of love as loyalty, and argues again that the ordo amoris isn't a ranked list. Ashish brings in Balthasar on faith as resonance — the violin that sounds because it's attuned — and Tolkien's music of creation, which is like unto a chorus without quite being one.

They land on the wedge that can't be closed: a nation is bounded by resources and space, while there is always room in the kingdom for one more. Plus: pilgrims versus tourists, and why Las Vegas may be America's most honest city.

Chapters:

00:00 Reflecting on the Ogle conversation

02:00 When Augustine gets enlisted for a Christian nation

06:48 Love as loyalty: Deuteronomy 6 and 1 John

09:11 Ordered loves is not a dartboard

11:25 The Good Samaritan and the outer ring 1

1:50 Balthasar: faith as resonance and attunement

17:03 Why not a chorus? Tolkien and the limits of language

19:30 Can non-Christians love?

25:11 Sameness that improvises rather than repeats

28:45 Wholesomeness is not holiness

33:07 False theologies and the sacred function of the state

39:27 The wedge: bounded nations, unbounded kingdom

44:48 What the church can do that the state cannot

50:08 O'Donovan: governing authorities as secondary witness

53:43 Pilgrims and tourists

59:39 Provision, anxiety, and the faith muscle

Augustine City of God, two cities, ordo amoris, ordered loves, Christian nationalism, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Tolkien Ainulindalë, Oliver O'Donovan, William Cavanaugh, pilgrim and tourist, political theology, church and state, Veronica Roberts Ogle

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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 Christians already trust these systems, research on what cognitive offloading does to our ability to think, the energy and water costs of the data centers nobody is counting, and why the answer has to start with what it means to be created in the image of God rather than with the technology itself.

If AI is forming us, the question is what it is forming us into, and whether analog practices like radio, print, and actually sitting in a room with other believers are worth defending.

Learn more about NRB at nrb.org. 

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For more thoughts on AI, see James's Christianity.com article: https://www.christianity.com/wiki/current-events/christians-ai-spiritual-formation-discernment.html 

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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 explains the two cities as loves rather than places: one formed by God's love carried as far as contempt of self, the other by self-love carried as far as contempt of God. She unpacks what "contempt of self" does and doesn't mean, and pushes back on reading the ordo amoris as a ranked list — everything is loved in God, not after God.

The conversation turns to what this means for political life: why no political community has an eschatological end, why Augustine is no optimist about politics, and why he thought a judge should see himself as the woman caught in adultery.

Chapters:

00:00 Introductions, and finding Augustine

04:01 The sack of Rome and why City of God got written

09:19 Nations can be healthier or sicker — but not transformed

13:54 Two cities, two loves

17:06 What "contempt of self" actually means 

17:38 Ordered loves: not a ranked list

22:18 Political community and the peace it can reach

28:11 Is the church the same as the city of God?

34:41 What political participation actually is

38:39 Two kinds of father, two kinds of household

43:32 Augustine's letters to Christian judges

45:42 The loaf of bread: need and proximity

48:34 Compassion at a distance, and what we can actually do

53:25 Where to start reading Augustine

 

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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 conversation turns to what makes American identity different — the pledge, the anthem, the flag in the sanctuary — and why "Canadian first" is a phrase that would get you laughed at.

James raises Robert Bellah on American civil religion. Both men admit to a season of refusing to sing the national anthem, and neither holds that position now. They also discuss why hope is not optimism, why presidents get credited with powers they've never had, and gratitude as the alternative to a posture of constant complaint — the subject of Koyzis's forthcoming book on the Heidelberg Catechism.

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome back

01:55 Divided loyalties, and what none of them can define

03:48 "First allegiance" isn't a pie chart

06:01 Living the whole day before the face of God

09:40 What's different about American identity

14:20 The pledge, the anthem, and inculcating a nation

16:05 Bellah on American civil religion

19:31 Pride, and the hope it starts to cultivate

21:07 Hope is not optimism

21:38 Why we expect presidents to save us

24:53 Flags in the sanctuary

29:08 The Heidelberg Catechism project

33:48 Public life is wider than politics

34:57 Toward a politics of gratitude

36:20 Deuteronomy 8 and forgetting the source

40:03 Inconspicuous patterns, and what we take for granted

43:10 Formation first, politics second

46:10 Advice for an election season

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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 any political agency in the sense we usually mean.

James argues that voting is a voluntary right rather than a sacred duty, and explains why he doesn't always exercise it. Ashish tells the story of asking a pastor why the people who filled the building for ESL classes on Tuesday were absent on Sunday. Both land on 1 Corinthians 7: you don't have to change your situation to serve God where you are.

Guests across the series include Kevin Flatt, Veronica Ogle, William Cavanaugh, Vincent Bacote, and others.

Chapters:

00:00 Why this series, and what it won't do

03:06 What students expect from a political theology class

04:37 Polis: the city, and what "political" actually covers

06:00 Is the gospel political?

08:26 Paul's constraints, and ours 

09:51 Political agency without political power

11:35 "The poor you will always have with you"

13:25 Nested authority: everything under God's

16:13 Philemon, Onesimus, and redrawing the line

17:43 Reimagining: children, packaging, and a can of Coke

21:06 Voting as a right, not a sacred duty

25:24 Pro-life advocacy and the children who age out

28:16 A church on the boundary lines of Chicago

32:02 1 Corinthians 7: serve where you're called

36:22 New eyes, new ears

37:39 Who's coming on the series

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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 military service, and to the medieval contest between papacy and throne — arguing that the entanglement of theology and politics is old news, not a recent American invention.

From there: why neither conservatism nor liberalism has room for Christ at its center, why "care for the poor" collapses so quickly into a debate about welfare, what the three people at a Wednesday night prayer meeting say about arguments over prayer in schools, and a reading of Ahaz in Isaiah 7 — a king who had already decided, and dressed the decision in piety.

Chapters (part-two offsets assume the recordings join cleanly at 28:00 — verify against the export):

00:00 The survey, and what it doesn't tell us

03:25 "Politically motivated" — who gets the label

06:28 Constantine, Nicaea, and the entanglement begins

10:09 Sacred social order and the scope of government

12:33 When political procedure starts discipling us

14:54 Care for the poor, and why it becomes welfare

16:48 Augustine's two cities

18:56 The early church and military service

22:12 Bezalel: creativity constrained by a given pattern

25:32 Selective use of Scripture as a rejection of authority

26:30 Conservatism has no place for Christ

28:00 Two sides of the same coin

31:00 Where do our ideals actually come from?

36:00 Reparations, history, and what we're actually called to learn

36:30 Engel v. Vitale and the Wednesday night prayer meeting

39:40 The government has no interest in informing you

42:00 Housing, highways, and the history nobody teaches

46:40 When the platform changed and nobody blinked

48:50 Isaiah 7: Ahaz had already decided

53:20 McGilchrist, Deuteronomy 30, and knowing what we don't

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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 who counts as a Christian at all.

The conversation leans on George Lindbeck's argument that doctrine is second-order — an attempt to make sense of the biblical narrative rather than the thing itself — and on what gets lost when that ordering flips. Along the way: the ecumenical councils and why some councils didn't make the cut, the filioque and the East-West split, Genesis 22 and whether its tension sits in the text or in front of it, and why James has traded getting it right for getting it plausible.

Chapters (approximate, from speaker turns — verify against the final cut):

00:00 What fragmentation is, and what it isn't

02:29 Church history as the place to start

04:25 "Bleed for the Southern Baptist faith"

08:35 When boundaries are legitimate

11:03 The ecumenical councils and what made them ecumenical

13:53 Insularity, and the cost of never crossing traditions

16:24 Doctrinal distinctives become vested interests

21:05 Lindbeck, Vanhoozer, and doctrine as second-order

23:19 East and West: the filioque and the split

25:16 The Reformation and the explosion of denominations

29:37 Inversion: when doctrine climbs on top of the text

31:15 Genesis 22 — "now I know that you fear God"

36:40 Is the tension in the text or in front of it?

41:13 Written in pencil

42:57 Reading the Bible without the systematic categories

47:38 Nobody reads from nowhere

49:18 The cloud: how secondhand narratives harden

54:11 Petitions, feedback loops, and doctrinal echo chambers

55:35 From "getting it right" to "getting it plausible"

57:37 The Nicene Creed as a broad boundary

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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 power, and why that silence traces back to a thin account of the human heart. They also take up Moody's conviction that charity is life on life rather than a check sent across the tracks, the difference between the early church in Acts and state redistribution, and the harder question Quiggle raises near the end: how much traction would any of this have today if evangelical churches had actually taken up Moody's model of hands-on engagement in their own communities?

Purchase:

Marx and Moody

Bread and Bibles: D.L. Moody's Evangelism and Social Action

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