Glossary
The vocabulary, defined.
The Thinking Christian framework uses a set of terms with specific meanings. Some are borrowed from sociology and cognitive science and pressed into theological service. Some are our own. All of them are defined here, with links to where each is worked out at length.
Section One
The Claim
Developed at The Framework →The Inconspicuous Order
The inconspicuous order names where a sacred-social order does most of its work: not in the obvious conflicts a community argues about, but in the assumptions it has already made about what counts as success, wisdom, and a life worth living.
We are not ruled by the obvious. We are ruled by the patterns we live within without sufficient thought. When a community accepts a rival order’s assumptions so deeply that it no longer sees them as assumptions, compromise becomes difficult to recognize as compromise.
Relocation
Relocation is the movement of a practice, a story, or a cultural form from one sacred-social order into another, so that it now sits under the authority of Christ and is reshaped by it.
It is the opposite of assimilation, and the distinction is easy to miss. Assimilation adopts a practice on the terms of the order it came from. Relocation moves the practice wholesale into a different order, where its meaning is transfigured rather than merely tolerated. Christmas on December 25th is the paradigm case: the date belonged to Saturnalia, and Christians moved it rather than rejecting it.
The test is not whether a practice originated elsewhere. It is which order now governs it.
Section Two
The Contrast
Counter-Field
A counter-field is a structured social space whose rewards and instincts run against those of the surrounding culture.
The term adapts Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a field — a structured social arena with its own internal logic and its own ways of distinguishing what belongs. The world’s field rewards reach, legitimacy, and preservation. Its capital is immediate. The kingdom’s field rewards faithfulness, and its capital is often delayed, accumulated through obedience even when obedience requires discomfort and suffering.
Resistance is not passive. It requires participation, over time, in a field that forms a different set of instincts.
Capital
Capital is what counts as currency within a field.
The world’s capital is economic, social, and symbolic: audience reach, institutional influence, platform size, donor relationships, political access, cultural legitimacy. The kingdom’s capital is accumulated through faithfulness and is frequently delayed.
Habitus
Habitus is the set of dispositions, perceptions, and instincts a person develops through long participation in a field. It is not what a person consciously believes. It is how they unconsciously perceive, react, and choose.
Avoiding misformation requires participation, over time, in a field that shapes a theological habitus.
Section Three
The Diagnosis
Developed at The Framework →Narrowing
Narrowing occurs when God’s self-disclosure is not recognized as authoritative, so that a community lives according to incomplete stories that claim to be complete.
It hinders God’s people from seeing the full breadth of the goodness, truth, and beauty given to them. It happens as the church learns and adopts constraints beyond those God has established.
The problem is not that we have too many constraints. The problem is that we have constraints that limit us rather than enabling us. The philosopher Alicia Juarrero notes that constraints “do not function just by closing off possibilities; contextual constraints are also the mechanism whereby the creation of a new level of organization with greater degrees of freedom takes place.” Some constraints open a life. Others close it.
Narrowing is driven by three forces and made harder to see by two conditions.
The Three Forces
Assimilation
Assimilation is the church’s commitment to a culture’s stories or ideologies that claim to represent cosmic reality more completely than they do. These stories dull the senses of God’s people so that recognizing the surplus goodness, truth, and beauty in other cultures and in creation becomes inconvenient or taboo. Assimilation makes cultural stories seem more complete than they actually are.
Deceptive Wealth · Revelation 3:14–22→Fragmentation
Fragmentation is narrowing by exclusion. It cultivates division within the body of Christ as sects develop around specific beliefs, personalities, and institutions, refusing as foreign what are in fact faithful expressions of the gospel in another idiom. Fragmentation makes sectarian loyalty seem like fidelity.
I Follow Apollos · 1 Corinthians 1:10–31→Transaction
Transaction collapses the horizon of an institution or individual by making preservation under cultural and market pressures paramount. It assumes there is no reality larger than the institution, platform, or personality genuinely at stake. Transaction makes institutional preservation seem like stewardship.
Jeroboam’s Calves · 1 Kings 12→The Two Conditions
Inversion
Inversion occurs when leaders and communities close interpretive questions prematurely and allow those conclusions to govern their reading of Scripture, so that the community’s positions displace Scripture’s authority. What presents itself as fidelity to the text is often fidelity to an interpretive grid elevated above the text, so that the text is never permitted to correct it.
Traditions of the Elders · Mark 7:1–23→Amplification
Amplification is the acceleration of the three forces through technology. Technological engagement shapes habits and dispositions at a pace that bypasses the communal practices by which theological instincts are tested and corrected. Technology does not add new substance to these pressures. It accelerates them.
Forgotten God · Deuteronomy 8→Misformation
Misformation is the shaping of habits, instincts, and ways of seeing that happens below the level of deliberate reflection, at a pace that bypasses the communal practices by which theological judgment is normally tested and corrected.
The digital world’s most serious effect on the church is not that it delivers false information. It is that it forms us even when what it tells us is true. Convictions can remain entirely intact while instincts, priorities, and the experience of the world shift.
The church’s problem is not misinformation. It is misformation.
Developed in Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press)
Section Four
The Framework
Developed at The Framework →The Thinking Christian Framework
A four-part theological method for cultivating 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’s reality), 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.
Recognizing God’s Reality
Recognizing God’s reality means submitting to the claim God has on us, rather than adopting aspects of his order while continuing to live on our own terms.
It takes shape through three ongoing practices: reordering loves so that all our affections are immersed in unreserved loyalty to God; reorienting attention toward God’s presence and action in a culture that competes aggressively for what we attend to; and learning to respond to the Triune God rather than reacting to situations as if he were absent or irrelevant.
Christian thought begins with allegiance to the Triune God, not with ideas about him.
Theological Disposition
A theological disposition is a pre-reflective, instinctual sense of how the world actually works, formed in the body of Christ, in which the Triune God is understood to be infinitely more relevant than any other actor or factor.
A disposition is not a set of beliefs one could list if asked. It is durable, largely intuitive, and settles what matters, what can be trusted, what should be feared, and what should be loved. It resembles the trained know-how of a dancer, who does not think through each movement in sequence.
Everyone has a disposition. Dispositions are not formed by conscious decision but by what we attend to, the communities we belong to, the practices we repeat, and the stories we inhabit. The question is not whether you are being formed but what is forming you.
Theo-Logic
Theo-logic is a shared, cruciform way of reasoning grounded in the conviction that obeying God is always the best option.
The word logic is doing real work. Theo-logic is not a posture or a feeling but a structured, shared way of reasoning that holds under pressure when the tribe, the algorithm, and the market are offering competing logics.
It forms three habits of judgment. It is patient, resisting the pressure to conclude too quickly. It is cruciform, refusing to ask what will win or trend and asking instead what faithfulness to a crucified and risen Lord requires. It is faithful, producing a community that can argue without contempt and disagree without demonizing.
Disciplined Inquiry
Disciplined inquiry is the structured practice of Christian discernment, guided by considerations of truth, skill, perspective, and participation.
It is not a method for getting from text to application, and it cannot be applied apart from the formation of the person practicing it. Recognizing God’s reality, developing a theological disposition, and committing to theo-logic are the formation within which disciplined inquiry operates.
Its structure is the Quad.
The Quad
The Quad is a set of four questions, drawn from four ways of knowing and reframed theologically, that trains Christian discernment by attending to what is being claimed, how skill shapes what is being said, what is being treated as relevant, and what the whole account assumes about who we are and what kind of world we are in.
The four ways of knowing come from the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke:
- Propositional knowing — knowing that something is the case; the recognition of a truth claim.
- Procedural knowing — knowing how to do something; embodied skill that operates whether or not it can be stated.
- Perspectival knowing — knowing from a particular vantage point; the sifting by which we recognize what is relevant to the situation we are in.
- Participatory knowing — knowing by being; the knowing that emerges through embodied participation in the world.
These are not four independent activities. They are four dimensions of a single integrated engagement with reality.
Christian discernment in a digital age requires more than fact-checking. The pressures Christians face are not primarily about isolated truth claims. They are about partial accounts of reality presented as complete. The Quad refuses that premature closure.