Thinking Christian

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;

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 r

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

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

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 scholarsh

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