Thinking Christian with Drs. James Spencer and Ashish Varma

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 Barmen Declaration, Stanley Hauerwas, and the German Christians’ surrender to Nazism.

Barth challenged 93 American Protestant leaders who claimed that Christian principles depended on winning the war, and the same reasoning returns in every “most crucial election.” James and Ashish argue that the church must speak its own language rather than a party’s talking points, loving the world on God’s terms rather than its own. Being in the world but not of it, they suggest, is a matter of allegiance, not only personal morality.

In this episode:

• What is the true function of the church in wartime, according to Karl Barth?
• Should the church identify with any political party?
• Why Barth rejects a “timeless” spirituality and calls the present God’s time
• The Barmen Declaration and the German Christians’ capitulation to Nazism
• Speaking the church’s own language instead of a political party’s talking points

Go deeper: Christians and Politics

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don’t settle for a narrower vision than God’s word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Episodes, articles, and questions: thinkingchristian.org
About James Spencer: thinkingchristian.org/james
The Thinking Christian Framework: thinkingchristian.org/framework
Order Digital Discernment: amazon.com

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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 watching a film exposes you to something spiritually dangerous, to the argument that fear itself is not the problem since the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Callaway makes the case that the real question is where our fears are pointed and which systems are training them. Along the way they discuss Stranger Things and the institutions that manufacture the monsters, the shift from defeating the monster to living with it as a picture of trauma, Albert Borgmann on the inconspicuous patterns that reshape a life, and why the slasher genre only works if we already believe bodies are sacred.

The episode closes where horror and artificial intelligence meet, on embodiment, and why a disembodied future should trouble Christians more than anything on the screen.

Go deeper: Dorothy Sayers, Film, and Christian Art

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Episodes, articles, and questions: thinkingchristian.org
About James Spencer: thinkingchristian.org/james
The Thinking Christian Framework: thinkingchristian.org/framework
Order Digital Discernment: amazon.com

Advertising and partnership inquiries: [email protected]

Find the book at beafraidbook.com.

Find more from Kutter at https://www.kuttercallaway.com. 

 

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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 before it spreads, they suggest, is part of what judgment is for.

Many Christians remember World War II as a clean contest between good and evil. James and Ashish question that framing, and the language of more and less guilt behind it, pointing to Churchill’s policies in India, the Allies’ tolerance of Jim Crow, and the early indifference to Hitler documented at Nuremberg’s Documentation Center. By placing Romans 3:23 beside Romans 13:1–7, Barth leaves no one off the hook while still insisting that evil must be resisted.

In this episode:

• Is war the judgment of God on humankind, and is anyone less guilty?
• Romans 13:1–7 and Romans 3:23 in Karl Barth’s answer
• Judgment and mercy in Hosea, and whether God’s judgment is delayed or suspended
• Why “more guilty” and “less guilty” can excuse the side we favor
• Oliver O’Donovan’s The Ways of Judgment and earthly authorities as “secondary theaters” of God’s judgment

Go deeper: Christians and Politics

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don’t settle for a narrower vision than God’s word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Episodes, articles, and questions: thinkingchristian.org
About James Spencer: thinkingchristian.org/james
The Thinking Christian Framework: thinkingchristian.org/framework
Order Digital Discernment: amazon.com

Subscribe: YouTube · Apple Podcasts · Spotify
Advertising and partnership inquiries: [email protected]

Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

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, what counts as victory changes — which is why Smyrna's reward for faithfulness is that things will get worse. Wood reads Pliny's letter to Trajan as a Roman governor's genuine confusion at a group whose stubbornness took the form of being better citizens than his citizens.

They also discuss why worship was a national security matter in Rome, the iconography of Washington, why obedience and subversion both have textual warrant, and Wood's closing claim: that the early church regarded the emperor as a figure to be pitied rather than feared.

Go deeper: Christians & Politics

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Episodes, articles, and questions: thinkingchristian.org
About James Spencer: thinkingchristian.org/james
The Thinking Christian Framework: thinkingchristian.org/framework
Order Digital Discernment: amazon.com

Advertising and partnership inquiries: [email protected]

Find more from Shane at hsi website https://www.shanejwood.com  

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome back

02:13 The situation Revelation was written into

04:05 Paul, household codes, and relocating structures

06:09 Obedience and subversion: holding the spectrum

07:08 Rome is too small a target

10:56 Smyrna: victory that looks like more suffering

13:34 Pliny, Trajan, and a governor's confusion

16:40 Sacred order and why Christians couldn't comply

17:58 Worship as national security in Rome

20:22 Civil religion, grammar, and iconography

23:36 A Roman historian walks into the Lincoln Memorial

26:19 The slow descent, not the sudden conversion

29:10 The verses we carve and the ones we don't

31:19 Matthew 28: discipleship as political

34:40 Matthew retelling Israel's story

38:05 When governing authority overreaches

40:52 Nero, Domitian, and emperors in decline

45:23 Pharaoh who knew not Joseph

46:44 The church as guide, not political strategist

48:05 The true enemy behind the empire

50:30 Pity, not fear

 

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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 God's will on earth. James and Ashish trace what that means in practice: that a state serving only its own interests forfeits any claim to righteousness, that the church is not identical with the kingdom it hopes for, and that protest and resistance are forms of loyalty rather than betrayals of it.

The conversation sets Barth against the German Christian church of his day, the Augustinian figure of the pilgrim, Jeremiah's shock that God would use Babylon, and the question of what any of it means at a ballot box. First of a series on the letter.

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

00:00 The backstory: why Barth wrote this letter

02:19 Question one: loyal citizen, loyal to the church universal

03:25 Is the nation state a recent invention?

04:55 The righteous state and the kingdom of God

08:13 The church hopes for the kingdom but isn't identical with it

13:31 Volk, blood, and the purity of the land

19:32 Reading Barth: resist everything incompatible

24:37 Why resistance is loyalty, not betrayal

26:26 The state that serves only itself ceases to be righteous

28:16 Empire, India, and the limits of the good-guy story 34:07 No white hats and black hats

39:26 "Righteous" in scare quotes

41:45 "We shall have our hands full" 

43:57 Jeremiah, Babylon, and God using pagan nations

47:18 Augustine's pilgrim: belonging to a place without being owned by it

51:37 Narrowing, and what the church broadens 54:49 Single-issue voting and playing by the world's rules

Tags/keywords: Karl Barth, Letter to American Christians, Barth 1942, Christian nationalism, church and state, kingdom of God, German Christian church, Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer, Augustine pilgrim, political theology, Christian citizenship, single-issue voting, Christians and politics

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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.

His sharper claim is that the secular was never a neutral condition but a strategy — a way of categorizing peoples and ideas that maintained a particular hegemony, and one whose vulnerability has opened room for voices it had kept out.

They apply this to America, which McDuffee argues was post-secular before the term existed. The last stretch takes on 1776 and 1619 together, arguing both frameworks share a blind spot, and ends on coveting, idolatry, and Francis of Assisi as a model for finding a voice.

Go deeper: Christians & Politics

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Episodes, articles, and questions: thinkingchristian.org
About James Spencer: thinkingchristian.org/james
The Thinking Christian Framework: thinkingchristian.org/framework
Order Digital Discernment: amazon.com

Advertising and partnership inquiries: [email protected]

Chapters:

00:00 Introductions

01:19 Habermas and an awareness of what is missing

06:21 Durkheim, France, and the durability of religion

08:38 Why secularization theory described Europe, not the world

11:43 Liberalism, neoliberalism, and the sovereign individual

17:47 Post-secular doesn't mean the secular is over

21:28 The secular as a deliberate strategy

25:00 From Hellenized being to deism to history to ideology

31:44 What post-secular opens up

37:31 Postmodernism gave voices the chops

45:50 A nation with the soul of a church

51:20 1776 and 1619 share a blind spot

57:17 Creation, not nature

1:00:27 Coveting, idolatry, and the inclusio of the Decalogue

 

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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.

Go deeper: Christians & Politics

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Episodes, articles, and questions: thinkingchristian.org
About James Spencer: thinkingchristian.org/james
The Thinking Christian Framework: thinkingchristian.org/framework
Order Digital Discernment: amazon.com

Advertising and partnership inquiries: [email protected]

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

Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

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.

Go deeper: Christians & Politics

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Episodes, articles, and questions: thinkingchristian.org
About James Spencer: thinkingchristian.org/james
The Thinking Christian Framework: thinkingchristian.org/framework
Order Digital Discernment: amazon.com

Advertising and partnership inquiries: [email protected]

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.

Go deeper: Christians & Politics

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Episodes, articles, and questions: thinkingchristian.org
About James Spencer: thinkingchristian.org/james
The Thinking Christian Framework: thinkingchristian.org/framework
Order Digital Discernment: amazon.com

Advertising and partnership inquiries: [email protected]

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

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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. 

Go deeper: Technology & Media

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Episodes, articles, and questions: thinkingchristian.org
About James Spencer: thinkingchristian.org/james
The Thinking Christian Framework: thinkingchristian.org/framework
Order Digital Discernment: amazon.com

Advertising and partnership inquiries: [email protected]

Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.