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(Un)Biblical Masculinity
Men don't need to pursue cultural notions of masculinity. They need to become male disciples of Jesus Christ.
The Thinking Christian Framework
Relationship Precedes
Rationality
Christian thought does not begin with ideas, but with allegiance. It requires us to submit to God's claim on our lives rather than adopting aspects of his order while continuing to live on our own terms. Before Christians work out what to think about politics, technology, suffering, or anything else, we have committed to the reordering of the self toward the God who made, redeemed, and is renewing the world.
The Thinking Christian Framework is a theology of discipleship. It describes how God's people recognize his claim on their lives, how they are formed within his order, and how that life is handed on to others.
The Thinking Christian Framework is a four-part theological method for cultivating a deep allegiance to God and the theological instincts, reasoning, and discernment commensurate with it. It moves from the foundational reality of Christian life (recognizing God), through the formation of Christian habitus (a theological disposition), into the way Christians reason together (theo-logic), and out into the practice of Christian discernment (disciplined inquiry, structured by the Quad).
It is not a self-help tool with theological decoration. It is a description of what discipleship does to us.
Four movements
On Earth as it is in Heaven
The guide’s four movements describe what it looks like for the church to live according to a Christian sacred-social order so that it points to and glorifies the Triune God.
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The Claim
A Sacred-Social Order
A Christian sacred-social order is rooted in God’s self-disclosure and shapes the various dimensions of our common life.
Read this movement →02
The Contrast
Kingdom as Counter-Field
The world’s rewards are reach, legitimacy, and preservation. Its capital is immediate. It conditions us for earthly success. The kingdom’s field rewards faithfulness. Its rewards are often delayed, and it calls us to conform our lives to Christ.
Read this movement →03
The Diagnosis
The Problem of Narrowing
Narrowing occurs when God’s self-disclosure is not recognized as authoritative so that we live according to incomplete stories that claim to be complete. This narrowing is exacerbated by three forces (assimilation, fragmentation, and transaction) and two conditions (inversion and amplification).
Read this movement →04
The Response
The Thinking Christian Framework
Resistance is not a program but a posture. The framework describes the architecture of theological maturity with four interlocking components that address an unwavering allegiance to God, instincts fitted to God’s reality, reasoning that emerges from our relationship with God, and a structured, deliberate practice of discernment.
Read this movement →The Claim
Eight Domains of Sacred-Social Order
A sacred-social order takes shape across the common domains of life. Follow each one into The Claim.
01PatternsShaping life after the patterns God reveals rather than reducing faithfulness to principles we abstract and apply on our own terms.Explore this domain →02PlaceReceiving the places God made as settings full of meaning, centered on his presence, rather than as empty space awaiting our design.Explore this domain →03TimeOrdering individual and communal life by sacred rhythms and calendars that mark God's people as distinct from the nations.Explore this domain →04Interacting with GodApproaching God in worship, prayer, and obedience on his terms rather than ours.Explore this domain →05Powers and PrincipalitiesRecognizing the spiritual powers at work in politics, institutions, and systems, and refusing them the allegiance that belongs to God alone.Explore this domain →06Nations and RaceExposing the national and racial allegiances that organize the modern world and living as one body drawn from every nation, tribe, people, and language.Explore this domain →07Male and FemaleLiving as male and female image bearers in marriage, sexuality, and the body of Christ according to God's design rather than cultural stereotypes.Explore this domain →08DiscipleshipReproducing the life of Christ in others “according to its kind,” so that faith is handed on as a way of life and not merely as information.Explore this domain →
Three forces · Two conditions
The Diagnosis
Narrowing occurs when the church learns and adopts constraints beyond those God has established. These forces and conditions make incomplete stories seem complete and faithful witness harder to sustain.
01AssimilationAssuming that incomplete stories are more complete than they actually are.02FragmentationActively or passively cultivating disunity in the church through the development of sectarian loyalty.03TransactionDefining faithfulness in terms of institutional preservation and continuance.04InversionMaking a given interpretive system more authoritative than Scripture.05AmplificationIntensifying cultural forces so that they become more difficult to resist.
Four components
The Response
Resistance is not a program but a posture. The framework describes the architecture of theological maturity through four interlocking components.
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Recognizing God's Reality
The willingness to accept God's claim on our lives so that allegiance to him shapes our thought and action.
Cultivating a Theological Disposition
The pre-reflective, instinctual, theological sense of the way the world works.
Practicing Theo-Logic
A structured way of reasoning that holds under pressure when the tribe, the algorithm, and the market are offering competing logics.
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
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Christians and Politics
We aren't meant to be political animals formed by partisan loyalties, but citizens of heaven trained in the politics of the gospel.
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Technology & Media
Digital distortion doesn't remain digital. Technology tempts us to manipulate a world we don't understand.
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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.
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Scripture and Theology
It's easy to put God in a box until we begin reading Scripture over against ourselves.
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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.
In Progress
A Theology of Discipleship
James Spencer and Ashish Varma are writing a book-length treatment of the Framework. It traces discipleship from God's order in creation through the eight domains of sacred-social order, and into the structures, Scriptures, and disciplines through which God's people are formed. Along the way, we'll be working through each domain on the podcast.
Foundations
Spiritual maturity, and discipleship as God's way of ordering and reproducing life.
Eight Domains
Patterns, place, time, interacting with God, powers and principalities, nations and race, male and female, and discipleship.
In Practice
Structure and formation, Scripture in discipleship, and the disciplines.
Final Thoughts
Formation takes time
The church doesn’t have an information problem, but a formation problem. The forces and conditions the church faces today are not so different from those it has faced in times past. What is new is the velocity at which these pressures now operate, and the unique ways the modern world disrupts the rhythms of the church. A church that cannot see what is forming it cannot resist being formed by it.
The framework offered here, recognizing God's Reality, cultivating a Theological Disposition, practicing Theo-Logic, committing to Disciplined Inquiry, is not a program to adopt. It is a posture to develop. That kind of formation happens slowly, in community, through rhythms and rituals and relationships that most of us no longer make time for. The difference between God’s story and the world’s story should be as obvious as the difference between a bath and a baptism.
Begin reading
Start with The Claim
Read the four movements in order, then continue through the studies that follow.