01
Recognizing God's Reality
The willingness to accept God's claim on our lives so that allegiance to him shapes our thought and action.
Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
Reading the Bible as the final authority for life and faith means 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.
Breaking from the World's Patterns
God Doesn't Live in Our World. We Live in His.
Every culture builds a world that makes sense of how its people live together, and ties that world to what it holds sacred. Its institutions, ideas, symbols, and hopes for the future reinforce patterns aligned with an incomplete sense of how the world works. Habit, ritual, and reward train us to live according to those patterns. Thinking Christian helps God's people recognize those patterns, whether inconspicuous or evident, including those advanced by Christian culture. Our aim is to cultivate a theological sense of the way the world works, and a life patterned on God's self-disclosure in Son, Scripture, and Spirit.
Calm, thoughtful, theological.
More than Misinformation. Mis-formation.
In 2018, while I was serving as an academic dean, accusations of doctrinal drift were leveled against some of our faculty and administrators, me included. As the story went public and high-profile evangelicals weighed in without knowing what was really happening, I watched a simple narrative displace a complicated reality.
What I didn't anticipate was how difficult it would be not to fire back with a terribly simple story of my own. After leaving my position, I wrote articles I intended to publish, and my wife read them and told me I couldn't. They were too angry, too unnuanced, and too untheological. She was right. I was falling into the same patterns I wanted to speak against, responding to the situation instead of responding to God from within it. The problem wasn't simply about misinformation, but mis-formation.
Thinking Christian emerged as a different sort of response: slow, deliberate, theological discussion that refuses to be quick to speak, quick to anger, and slow to listen. Faithful Christian witness depends on that kind of discernment.
The Thinking Christian Framework
How We Think Is as Important as What We Think
Much of what shapes us doesn't present itself as a formal argument, but appears in the form of institutions, symbols, slogans, and stories that encourage us to love on our own terms rather than God's. The Thinking Christian Framework is a way of identifying and analyzing the underlying patterns so that we can respond faithfully to God.
02
Cultivating a Theological Disposition
The pre-reflective, instinctual, theological sense of the way the world works.
03
Practicing Theo-Logic
A structured way of reasoning that holds under pressure when the tribe, the algorithm, and the market are offering competing logics.
04
Committing to Disciplined Inquiry
The patient, non-defensive work of considering four ways of knowing (the Quad).
The Framework in Action
Unsettling Convention, One Topic at a Time
01
(Un)Biblical Masculinity
Men don't need to pursue cultural notions of masculinity. They need to become male disciples of Jesus Christ.
02
Christians & Politics
We aren't meant to be political animals formed by partisan loyalties, but citizens of heaven trained in the politics of the gospel.
03
Technology & Media
Digital distortion doesn't remain digital. Technology tempts us to manipulate a world we don't understand.
04
Literature, Film, & Culture
Literature, art, film, and other aspects of culture offer more than enjoyment and function. They shape the way we imagine goodness, truth, and beauty.
05
Scripture & Theology
It's easy to put God in a box until we begin reading Scripture over against ourselves.
06
Church History
The church was reformed and is always reforming as it encounters the Word of God. Its past shows how that work was done and why it is never finished.
Start Here
Listen, Watch, and Read
01
The Thinking Christian Podcast
Long-form conversations with scholars, pastors, and authors on Scripture, theology, and the church's life in the world.
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Thinking Christian on YouTube
Full episodes and short clips. Coming soon: Asked and Answered, one question at a time in 12 to 15 minutes, building into a catechism for thinking Christians.
03
Articles
Essays and short answers on Scripture, theology, and culture, written to be read slowly and checked against the sources.
Not left. Not right. Not leaving.
Refusing to Settle for Wholesomeness When Only Holiness Will Do
Thinking Christian is for believers committed to the work of building the body of Christ even when doing so requires us to unsettle the conventions we've inherited. Wholesomeness tempts us to set aside our theological convictions and live according to human standards of goodness and respectability. Holiness calls us to be uncompromising as we strive to point to and glorify the Triune God. If you want Scripture to endorse the right or the left without qualification, baptize slogans like "family friendly," or provide a vision of progress that ends in something other than new creation, Thinking Christian will frustrate you. If you want to consider how God's word exposes the patterns keeping us from being conformed to the image of his Son, Thinking Christian is for you.