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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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 heat. Ashish pushes back on the common classroom line that technology is morally neutral, arguing that development and use are different questions and that a technique built for accumulation carries that logic with it. James traces the same tension through David refusing Saul's armor, the warning in Deuteronomy 8 about cisterns you did not dig, and Paul's rebuke of the Corinthian habit of following personalities — a habit our follower counts and platforms have made much easier.

It ends with a hard look at AI image generation, the Minnesota law and the litigation around it, and two Old Testament laws about goring oxen and rooftop parapets that were written to protect people without stopping progress.

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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 Moab in Deuteronomy 2, and the "remember the poor" tagline at the end of Paul's account of the Jerusalem council. James and Ashish ask what those texts do to confident readings of conquest, Christian nationalism and dominionism.

They also walk through how heresy was actually decided — Augustine and Pelagius, Nicaea in 325 and the deliberate loosening of that language in 381 — and why the young-earth reading of Genesis 1 owes more to a social moment than to the text. Plus: Acts 7, Aquinas, and why interpretations should be written in pencil.

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

00:00 What inversion is: when the grid outranks the text

03:22 The hermeneutical spiral — no one reads from nowhere

09:30 Beach muscles: the books we never work

12:11 Deuteronomy 20 and the fruit trees

16:03 Galatians and "remember the poor"

20:11 Deuteronomy 2, dominionism, and the limits question

29:06 Acts 7: Stephen and the opposite error

33:18 How heresy was actually decided

42:23 Nicaea 325 → 381 and loosening the language

47:15 Genesis 1, young earth, and the social moment

59:40 Brokering gaps, creativity, and writing in pencil

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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 scholarship rather than blogs and forums; cited sources down to the page number, as a check against hallucinated books and hallucinated authors; and no attempt to model the user and tell him what he wants to hear. He also explains the one thing Logos coders have hard-coded the tool to refuse, which is writing your sermon, your paper, or your Bible study for you.

The back half of the conversation is a live walkthrough of Study Assistant and Factbook, including a look at Genesis 6, 1 through 8 and the questions most of us do not know to ask a text. Video listeners will get more out of that stretch, so if you are on audio, the version on YouTube or GodTube is worth your time.

This episode includes a special offer for Thinking Christian listeners. Logos is providing a free 60-day trial at logos.com/thinkingchristian. The offer closes September 8, 2026, and the link is in the show notes.

logos.com/thinkingchristian (expires Wed, September 8th, 2026)

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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 is whether Israel gathers around the presence of God or whether God is expected to gather around Israel.

The conversation turns on how easily success gets read as approval. Spencer flags the language of institutions insisting that God needs them to be what they are now more than ever. Varma answers with Habakkuk, where God raises up Babylon in response to injustice and Babylon is still judged for how it behaves, and extends the point to a mission history in which the gospel genuinely spread through colonial expansion that was itself blessed by churches and was still indefensible. Being used is not the same as being approved. Spencer adds Nebuchadnezzar, named as God's servant and punished seventy years later, and the distinction holds: the exile was deserved, the brutality was not.

What follows is uncomfortable for anyone who works in one of these places. Institutions may end because their course is run, or because they failed, or in spite of their faithfulness, and outcomes do not tell you which. Spencer, who consults with seminaries and Christian colleges, describes leaders trapped by buildings, accreditation, and systems, protecting a vehicle rather than the thing the vehicle was for. Nobody pursues a doctorate in order to preserve an institution. The question both men land on is whether the model has quietly been substituted for the mission.

Resources

The diagnosis guide: https://www.thinkingchristian.org/about/framework

Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman- amazon.com

Norman Wirzba on creation and nature- amazon.com

Passages referenced: Genesis 6 and 11 and 15, Deuteronomy 8, 1 Kings 12 and 17, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, John 12

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Chapters

0:00 What transaction means

2:24 Jeroboam and the shortcut

3:10 Not a different god

7:18 Why it looked legitimate

10:42 Institutional inertia

13:44 In defense of the word lucky

15:36 Habakkuk and Babylon

19:52 Spread and consequence

20:19 Kahneman on luck

22:43 Nebuchadnezzar as servant

26:50 Two theological problems

31:34 Babel and human capability

33:50 The patience of God

35:51 Institutions that simply end

39:35 Ideology defines the questions

41:34 What higher ed is protecting

43:16 Substituting the vehicle

45:38 Faithful in the moment

47:56 Repentance and repudiation

50:15 Walking beside someone bigger

53:19 What comes next in the series

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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.

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

Resources

Download the Study Guide at https://www.thinkingchristian.org/about/framework

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

The Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology

Passages referenced: Deuteronomy 4 and 6, Daniel 1, Acts 2 and 7 and 15, Philippians 1

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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.

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

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

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