Thinking Christian with Drs. James Spencer and Ashish Varma

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.

His illustration is an apple. American students arriving in Germany recognize the fruit and still find it strange, because the apple in their heads is large, waxed, and unblemished, and a German student had the same reaction in reverse. The dandelion has a flower and we call it a weed. Every category came from somewhere. Spencer supplies the Old Testament counterweight: what scholars call syncretism there is specific and it is always about Yahweh. Israel does not swap gods so much as limit the one they have, keeping him for agriculture and hiring another for war, and the distortion becomes a denial.

That distinction lets the conversation move without collapsing. Acts 2 puts the gospel into every dialect at once, and Acts 15 declines to make Gentiles into Jews. Varma, whose family is Indian, describes a mission history in which merchant, soldier, and missionary arrived together and in which becoming Christian meant becoming less Indian. He asks what an Indian Christian should do with Diwali, a festival about light overcoming darkness in which a god enters a demon's kingdom to rescue his bride, and offers the reception of Christmas in the Roman world as his analogy. His word for the move is not conform but transfigure. Spencer's is relocation under a different authority. Both insist on a constraint: Jesus the Jewish Messiah, which they argue is what makes the openness possible rather than what limits it.

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
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Varma's essays on Diwali and Indian Christian identity: Substack 

The Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology

Chapters

0:00 Three forces on the church

1:33 Syncretism as a fear discourse

4:26 A German breakfast

6:09 What an apple looks like

7:51 Where the image came from

8:48 Why is that a weed?

9:43 Essence is not a biblical word

10:40 Syncretism in the Old Testament

13:04 Naming it in someone else

16:10 Acts 2 and every dialect

18:11 What was actually at stake

20:00 Mission history in India

21:42 Diwali and light over darkness

22:41 How Christmas landed on the 25th

24:14 Distortion becomes denial

26:11 Relocated under Christ

29:58 Transfigured, not conformed

30:12 Distinction through proximity

34:28 Were Israel's laws more just?

38:13 What actually made Israel different

42:18 Assimilation as the result of fear

45:03 The Jerusalem council

46:31 Glitter and what we miss

51:04 The litmus test

55:22 Constraints that enable

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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. Scholarship attends to the paragraph and chapter around a quoted verse. What gets skipped is the depth beneath it. More than eighty times, the New Testament cites an Old Testament text that is already citing something older. Zechariah's king on a donkey reaches back to the blessing of Judah in Genesis 49, blended with Isaiah 62, and by the time the gospel writers use it, the donkey is carrying a great deal more than a rider. Hebrews turns out to be interested in Torah almost everywhere while quoting Torah almost nowhere, working instead through Psalm 8, Psalm 95, Psalm 110, and Jeremiah.

They also take up fulfillment, which in English carries a prediction-and-payoff sense the Hebrew does not require. Matthew's formula comes off the same plane as 2 Chronicles 36, where fulfilling a word means enacting it into reality rather than clocking a duration. That reframes the hard cases. Hosea 11 contains no prediction at all, but Hosea himself reads Jacob's life forward typologically, so Matthew is reading Hosea the way Hosea reads Scripture. The conversation closes on why this is not a license for interpretive improvisation. Dr. Schnittjer argues for plain sense exegesis throughout, which means reading each author with the grain rather than imposing a modern logic and calling it faithfulness.

Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer is distinguished professor of Old Testament for Cairn Theological Seminary at Cairn University. He writes at Carpenter's Student.

This is the final episode in our four-part conversation and the second of two on the parallel layout project.

Go deeper: Trajectories

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]

Purchase Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout Volume 1: Torah and Prophets at amazon.com

Carpenter's Student (Substack)
https://CarpentersStudent.com

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

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 about his forthcoming Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout from Zondervan Academic, a full-color, side-by-side presentation of the evidence built as an inductive tool rather than an argument. They work through Genesis 5 as an interpretive blend of Genesis 1 and 2, where the image of God turns out to mean son of God. Amos taunting his congregation about bringing sacrifices every three days. The Sabbath command, which stops being a capital matter by the time Nehemiah is arguing with merchants at the gates, and which had already been adjusted once inside the Ten Commandments themselves.

The long middle of the conversation is Ruth. Levirate marriage, land redemption, the rights of gleaning, and the Deuteronomic exclusion of Moabites all pressing on one another at the city gate, with the Davidic covenant hanging on how the exclusion gets read. Dr. Schnittjer will not let his students say kinsman redeemer. He makes them say financially responsible near relative, because the plain term forces you to stay in the moment instead of leaping past it. The gospel is already here, he argues. We do not have to smuggle it in.

Content note: the conversation includes a brief discussion of the rape of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13 and the rape laws of Deuteronomy 22.

Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer is distinguished professor of Old Testament for Cairn Theological Seminary at Cairn University. He writes at Carpenter's Student.

This is part three of our conversation, and the first of two on the parallel layout project. In the next episode we turn to the New Testament use of the Old Testament.

Go deeper: Trajectories

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]

Purchase Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout Volume 1: Torah and Prophets at amazon.com

Carpenter's Student (Substack)
https://CarpentersStudent.com

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

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 on the Old Testament series. They start with the hyphen. Ezra-Nehemiah is one book split across two scrolls for the same practical reason Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles were split, and reading half of an already difficult book makes it nearly unreadable. From there they work through what happens when you let the ending stand: if the exile was supposed to reform the people, it did not, and God will have to keep his word some other way.

Along the way, Nehemiah 8 through 10, where the people ask Ezra for the Torah scroll at the Water Gate on an ordinary day, study Scripture together for eleven days, and then sign an oath committing themselves to a standard higher than the one Torah sets. The canonical question of why the Hebrew Bible ends in Chronicles on a note of hope while Ezra-Nehemiah ends in failure. And the mass divorces, which Dr. Schnittjer reads against the grain of the usual explanations. The book never calls these others Gentiles or foreigners. It calls them non-covenantal. The pressure was economic before it was ethnic, and Ezra-Nehemiah keeps the camera on the whole community rather than the individual households.

Go deeper: Trajectories

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]

Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer is distinguished professor of Old Testament for Cairn Theological Seminary at Cairn University. He writes at Carpenter's Student. 

Get Ezra-Nehemiah (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament) at amazon.com.

This is part two of our conversation. In the previous episode we discussed Connected: How Scripture Guides the Study of Scripture, and in the next two episodes we turn to inter-biblical exegesis and Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout.

 

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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 despair in the years that followed. States that kept those laws did not. The mechanism isn't as simple as more alcohol access. It's something harder to quantify: the erosion of identity, purpose, and the kind of social accountability that comes with belonging to a local religious community.

We talk through what economists actually study, why unintended consequences are so hard to see in real time, and why re-instituting blue laws isn't the answer even if the data is compelling. The more useful question is what individuals, employers, and communities can do now to rebuild the connective tissue that those laws once quietly enforced.

The conversation also touches on remote work, social media, and the broader collapse of in-person socialization — and what all of it might mean for where deaths of despair go from here.

Go deeper: Faith and Mental Health

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]

Find more from Tamar Oostrom at https://www.tamaroostrom.com 

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

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 us how to read it. Story teaches us to read story in Deuteronomy 6. Prophecy teaches us to read prophecy in Zechariah 1. Poetry and wisdom teach us to read poetry and wisdom in Psalm 1. Jesus models the whole thing in the synagogue at Nazareth in Luke 4.

Along the way they work through continuity and discontinuity between the testaments, the burden of holiness carried by the priests and what Hebrews does with it, Daniel's need for help understanding Jeremiah, and the strange counterpoint in Jeremiah 44 where survivors of Jerusalem's fall blame Josiah's reforms for the disaster. They close on Deuteronomy as a book that builds an entire culture of Scripture study, from the king who writes his own copy of the law to the whole covenant community gathered every seven years to hear it read.

Go deeper: Trajectories

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]

Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer is distinguished professor of Old Testament for Cairn Theological Seminary at Cairn University. He writes at Carpenter's Student.

This is part one of a two-part conversation. In the next episode, Dr. Spencer and Dr. Schnittjer turn to Ezra-Nehemiah.

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

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 doctrinal confidence and more like humble, attentive discernment. Drawing from scripture, church history, and his own journey as a pastor-scholar moving between the church, the academy, and the city, Oscar challenges the "canonical imagination of the West" — not to reject Christian theology, but to reroute it toward a more faithful, Spirit-led witness in a global, pluralistic world.

If you've ever felt the tension between theological certainty and genuine openness to what God is doing in surprising places, this episode is for you.

Go deeper: Trajectories

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]

Key Takeaways:

• Why pneumatology (the study of the Holy Spirit) naturally resists the same gating mechanisms that Christology can fall prey to
• The difference between relativism and Spirit-led discernment — and why Oscar is firmly not a relativist
• How the Tower of Babel and Pentecost represent two competing logics still at work in the church today
• What "terminal knowledge" is and how the Spirit is actively healing it in marginalized communities
• Why true Christian maturity is relational and active — not self-referential
• How to ask "Where is God?" instead of only "Where is the devil?" when encountering other cultures and traditions
• The connection between Acts 7, the Jerusalem Council, and Spirit-led openness to the Gentiles
• Oscar's new book Decolonial Love in Times of Hatred: 40 Ways to Follow Jesus Today

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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 the individual.

In this wide-ranging conversation, James, Ashish, and Kevin map how the West lost its sacred social order, what quietly took its place, and what the Church must 

recover — including a radical rethinking of time, space, the Sabbath, and Christian catechesis.

If you've ever felt like the world is moving too fast, or that something foundational has been hollowed out — this episode names what it is.

Go deeper: The Reformation

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]

Key Takeaways:

• What "Sacred Social Order" means — and why virtually every pre-modern civilization shared it
• How secularization doesn't create a vacuum; it creates replacement religions (nationalism, identity politics, civil religion)
• Why the American founding contains an unresolved ambiguity between Christian and Deist foundations — and what happened when that ambiguity tilted secular
• How technology is catechizing us into seeing time and space as things to master, not gifts to steward
• The striking biblical parallel between Sabbath laws and land laws — and what exile means for a church that ignores both
• Why literal gardening might be one of the most counter-cultural spiritual practices a Christian can adopt today
• What a Christian catechism for our moment needs to address — and what sacred values compete against it

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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 compartment, while Sacred Social Order is the operating system beneath all of culture. From there, the conversation moves through Christian nationalism, the liberal firmware of Western democracy, Philip Reif's cultural warfare thesis, and why your children's public school is not religiously neutral.

If you've ever sensed that something deeper than a culture war is unfolding — that the ground itself has shifted — this episode gives you the language to name it.

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]

Key Takeaways:

• What "Sacred Social Order" means, and why it's a more accurate lens than "religion" for understanding culture
• Why secular order isn't neutral — it has its own values, telos, and demands on individuals
• How the Christian nationalism debate connects to identical movements in India, Iran, China, and the Muslim world
• Why Philip Reif's "third culture" thesis is partly right — and where Kevin respectfully pushes back
• Why public education is never neutral, and what Christians should really be asking about schools
• Why the gym or the yoga studio may be shaping your theology more than Hinduism is
• The Labubu doll illustration: how misidentifying spiritual threats reveals our blind spots

 

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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 refuses to foreclose on the full authority of Jesus Christ too soon.

If you've wrestled with Christian nationalism, the "good, true, and beautiful" in culture, or what it means to vote as a follower of Jesus, this conversation is essential listening.

Key Takeaways:

• Why "a culture influenced by Christianity" is an insufficient — and potentially dangerous — definition of "Christian culture"
• The concept of "inappropriate foreclosure": closing off our understanding of the good too soon and using that partial view as if it were complete
• How Robert Bellah's concept of American civil religion explains why Christian language gets co-opted by government without actually conforming people to Christ
• Why the Book of Acts — specifically Pentecost and the Gentile inclusion — fundamentally disrupts any vision of Christianity as a singular cultural program
• The Light Bright metaphor: God is the light source; culture is the peg pattern. Christians must point people behind the pegs to the light itself
• Why policy-driven virtue formation (habituation) has measurable real-world limits — and what the abortion statistics during different administrations actually reveal
• How Dr. Varma's personal experiences — from campus life on 9/11 to being randomly selected in airports — illustrate why Wood's "civilisational benefit" narrative forecloses on the experiences of many believers

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To read James's article on this topic, check out his author page on Christianity.com.

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