Podcast
Theology Nerd Throwdown
Hosted by Dr. Tripp Fuller & Rev. Bo Sanders · EN
Tripp & Bo get nerdy talking about theology, faith, life, and other things.
10episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Puff, Puff, Passages: Bo and Tripp on the Bible, the Ban List, and the Books We Would Take to a Desert Island
5d ago01:51:59Tap to summarizeBo had a week. So did I. He is running a plumber-exterminator-HVAC gauntlet and moving eighteen pews for the new community center. I flew across the country for the funeral of one of my best friends from div school. We came back to the table anyway. What we got is one of the wildest, most tangent-heavy TNTs of the year: Bo listening to the audiobook history of the New Apostolic Reformation and realizing he was a real insider until roughly 2016 and then the whole tribe went somewhere he does not recognize; Ryan Burge's new Gen Z data showing that half of an entire generation is refusing church because of Donald Trump specifically; a five-books-for-the-rest-of-your-life draft (we are on the same desert island, which lets us share a Lord of the Rings and free up a slot each); a running argument with the recent Atlantic article about how a third of the country has not finished a book in a year; and, at the end, Bo pitching me five different themes for his Beer Camp session (my favorite: emergency politics in a society of spectacle: a survivor's guide, which is what the chat voted for too), and me pitching a real book to Cynthia Shafer-Elliott based on the archeology of 8th-century Israelite hotboxing. This is a long one. It also contains actual grief. Come sit with us. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The Angel of History, the End of History, and the End of the Liberal Subject
1w ago01:21:52Tap to summarizeBo drives this week. He has spent seven days chewing on Kevin Carnahan's visit — the America 1940s–1980s was a mirage argument — and comes back with a run of philosophical frames he wants to test. Walter Benjamin's Angel of History (the 1940 essay on the Klee painting where the angel is being blown backward into the future by a storm called progress while wreckage piles at his feet). Fukuyama's End of History (the liberal-democratic-capitalist endpoint the fall of the Wall was supposed to confirm). Derrida's différance (the end is always deferred and always different than you expected). Gordon Kaufman's Theology for the Nuclear Age (Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to our concept of God what Auschwitz did to Wiesel's). Steve Bannon's copy of The Fourth Turning. And a Mark C. Taylor line Bo has been carrying since a 2015 Claremont paper: the end is approaching, has always been approaching, approaching from the beginning. My counter-thesis is that all of these frames still assume the liberal subject — the modern individual with an inner room, formed by literacy and attention — and I think the actual crisis is that the liberal subject has been algorithmically dismantled. It is not the death of God or the end of democracy. It is the end of the human being who was built for either one. Also, we rehomed a giant rat, Bo hosted a pop-up LGBTQ youth clubhouse at his church, and $1.2 billion in bike lane funding got canceled for DEI concerns. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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America Was a Mirage: Kevin Carnahan on Why the Moral 1940s–1980s Was an Accident
3w ago02:05:46Tap to summarizeBo is back from fishing (tight lines). Kevin Carnahan is back at the table. And the subject is Kevin's lecture at the Theology Summit, whose central claim is that America was never actually good. The moral America a lot of us grew up thinking existed from the 1940s to the 1980s was a mirage. World War II made us construct ourselves as anti-Nazi. The Great Depression flattened the top of the economy so everyone briefly supported the welfare of the person next to them because they were also broke. The Cold War closed borders. Television consolidated. Dishwashers freed the PTA. Then the iPhone came out and the birth rate fell off a cliff a full year before the 2008 crash because everyone stopped having sex to look at their phones. None of it was moral virtue. It was a perfect storm of accidents. What now, then? Kevin's frame: the responsible self, and Christianity's confidence that our imperfection is taken up by God's perfection. Bo's frame: the Methodists went from getting kicked out of Anglicanism for enthusiasm to being respectable Anglicans-with-different-money in two generations. Mine: we have no economic model left to nationalize, and Augustine was right that we are held together by what we hate. Sit with Kevin's lecture over a Sunday-school hour at theologysummit.com. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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If an AI Says It Loves God, How Would You Test It?
4w ago02:02:58Tap to summarizeBo went fishing. Josh Patterson came over. If you take Bo Daddy and divide by two, you get J Paddy — which is how we know the substitution worked. In two hours we somehow got from Johnny Depp in half his Jack Sparrow makeup at a Los Angeles grocery store, to whether thin places are actually thin or whether the modern world has just made everywhere else too loud to hear the stars, to Josh asking me to defend radical theology and process theology in the same hour without contradicting myself, to the theological Turing test for an AI that claims to love God, to the letter I would write to Tripp in his first year of ministry (short version: you are not the norm, and take Bonhoeffer even more seriously), to Josh's story about the Jewish firefighter that got him accused of teaching that hell was not real. This one runs hot. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Over/Unders, Mount Rushmores, and Shooting Fish in Barrel
Jun 2702:00:25Tap to summarizeBo and I leaned all the way into the wacky-morning-sports-talk-radio format this week — over/unders, a Mount Rushmore or three, and a Name That Name segment where I almost broke Bo with clues about a French Catholic medievalist who turned into one of the most important theorists of the twentieth century. (You will not guess.) Underneath the games, though, we got into the parts of being a pastor and a theology nerd in 2026 that are actually hard. Bo confessed to having reached peak woke in West Los Angeles before any of us knew the phrase, and rubber-banding back. The birth of ABV rules for the podcast. Bo proposed a theory that political violence is missing a word the way the K is silent in knife. And after I went full crotchety-Gen-X-dad on online gambling, marijuana delivery apps, and dating apps, we ended up agreeing that the practice the next generation has most lost is friction. Also: the Theology Beer Camp 2026 factions reveal. Which one are you? You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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I'm Unsinkable. I'm Already Dead: A TNT on Doubt, Faith, and the Galilean Vision
Jun 1901:55:26Tap to summarizeA Substack subscriber named Jennifer recently emailed me a list of thirty questions she had wanted to ask in the live chat but never got to. So we did the only honest thing — pulled in Josh Patterson from Rethinking Faith as a third voice (he just took a job working with Ilia Delio, so he had earned it), let Bo pick the numbers, and turned this TNT into the most confessional one we have recorded in a while. By the end, Bo had told the story of the year he almost broke, Josh had confessed his half-joke that if Calvinism is true he is clearly not elect, I had said out loud that the truly frightening question is whether I would actually pray for the defeat of my own country the way Bonhoeffer did — and we had ended up somewhere I did not see coming, in a soliloquy about why the body of Christ is still the most beautiful story I have access to. Pull up a chair. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The Pope, the Plantation, and the Algorithm: A Theology Nerds Throwdown
May 2902:07:36Tap to summarizeBo and I started with bikes, a Pentecost-red pair of glasses, and my new Crazy Chicks ballcap. We did not stay there. By the end we had hit the evolutionary anthropology of religion before belief, Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical, Gandalf telling Denethor exactly where he can put his stewardship, and the working thesis of the my AI book in process — the platform is the plantation. The connective tissue: we are inside a transition the old institutions cannot speak to, the technology is rewriting the very interiority Whitehead says religion grows out of, and the resources we actually need are older than we think. Three centimeters per second of grooming older, in fact. This is the nerdiest TNT we have recorded in a while. Come for the social-bonding endorphins. Stay for the encyclical. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube. Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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They Love Your Questions — Just Not Your Conclusions: Tim Whitaker on Evangelicalism, Apologetics & the Sleight of Hand
May 2201:47:20Tap to summarizeTim Whitaker finally shows up on TNT, and I want you to know that within the first five minutes he informed us he was homeschooled and never went to college, that his biggest word is "dispensationalism," and that he is a type six on the Enneagram who doesn't know if he can trust people enough to take communion yet, and I was completely at home. Tim is the host of The New Evangelicals podcast, a former drummer in evangelical and charismatic spaces across multiple denominations, a former church planter with the Christian Missionary Alliance, and the guy who got kicked out of his evangelical church in May 2021 for asking — not even fully affirming yet, just asking — whether gay people could be welcomed. He came because Bo and I have been doing this charismatic conspiracy theology series for weeks now and Tim tracks this world the way the rest of us track the weather. He walked us through his own formation — Reformed church with hymns only, charismatic youth group with better music, Assemblies of God, a stint in Finland near the North Pole where headaches were attributed to a heavy shaman presence and a local death metal band with a statue — and somewhere in there the NAR, Peter Wagner, Lance Wallnau, Paula White, and the Cyrus anointing. We talked about where spiritual warfare practices are therapeutic and where they become political machinery, how the prophetic gift Bo had as a charismatic pastor was probably the same neurological scanning system that made him a good point guard, and what it actually costs when the values you were formed in get weaponized against the people you were taught to love. Bo told the story of his brother-in-law's Bethel satellite church in Montana that had to shut down after 2016 because every prophetic word became a Fox News talking point. Tim told the story of getting his first big boy job at a 24-hour Starbucks and discovering that the gay atheist on the overnight shift was just a normal person. Bo told his story of working security at the city library four nights a week and a gay bar three nights a week, which is not the typical preparation for evangelical ministry and was probably the best possible one. Avalon, The Blessing, CCM music production values, Elevation's Hallelujah Here Below trailer, Ecamm, a stream deck, Richard Wolff's undergrad advisor being Paul Tillich, and a benediction involving Valhalla. Raven laid an egg. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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If This Is the End Times, I'll Be Your Huckleberry: Peter Thiel's Antichrist Theology
May 1602:13:49Tap to summarizeIt's May 15th, 2026 — recording live from what Bo accurately described as Jurassic Park, because Raven the chicken was laying an egg on my thigh while we were discussing the Antichrist, and Marceline was on my back pecking my head before we hit record, and I just want you to know that this is the actual context in which serious theological work is being done. Bo opened with a high, a low, and a learn — Randy Woodley has a new book coming July 14th that you should preorder, a dust storm and semi-truck fire in Twin Falls gave Bo a terrifying glimpse of what environmental collapse looks like up close, and he discovered a group called Acts 17 that he wishes he'd never learned about. We did an either/or — Acts 17 or Acts 29, would you rather get rid of one — which turned into a genuinely useful history of hipster reformed church planting, Silicon Valley spiritual warfare birthday parties with Peter Thiel as guest preacher, and Tripp's long-gestating idea for a class on Christian philosophical theology using Acts 17 as the entry point and process, Tillichian, and radical theologies as the three lenses. Then we finally got to it. Stage four. Bo recapped the first three stages of Antichrist theology — amorphous spirit, personified figure, dispensationalist Voltron super-villain — and Tripp walked through Peter Thiel's actual biography: born in Frankfurt, childhood in a pro-Nazi enclave in what is now Namibia, Stanford student newspaper culture warrior, Girard's prize pupil, PayPal as libertarian financial liberation tool, Facebook as the memetic machine, Palantir as Minority Report for mass surveillance, the 2008 crash that turned a techno-libertarian into an authoritarian, Curtis Yarvin and the CEO monarchy, and then finally the lectures — where Thiel inverts the entire dispensationalist tradition and declares that Greta Thunberg and AI safety advocates are the legionaries of the Antichrist, that the restrainer of the apocalypse and its source are both America, and that unregulated technological acceleration is the only thing standing between us and the one-world totalitarian state. The irony — that the man building a global surveillance empire keeps warning about a global surveillance empire — did not go unremarked. Tripp named it theological shielding for unrestricted greed. Bo named it the upside down. Both are correct. Tim Whitaker of The New Evangelicals joins next week for territorial warfare. Baudrillard summer reading club is apparently in the works. Bo gave the benediction. If this is the end times, he'll be your Huckleberry. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included. 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗 Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The Hyperlink Permission: How Dispensational Eschatology Reads the Bible & Why It Gets Wild
May 802:08:13Tap to summarizeWe were supposed to do this one last week, but things happened and the Antichrist got bumped a week. Worth the wait. Bo spent the extra time going back to the Eerdmans Bible Dictionary he bought in 1992 when he enrolled at Canadian Bible College in Regina, Saskatchewan, because we live in a moment so unmoored from basic coherence that you have to return to first principles just to get oriented. The result was one of the better explainers we've ever done on this show. Bo walked us through the four stages of Antichrist theology: stage one, the generic concept in John's letters — an amorphous spirit of the age. Stage two, you give it the definite article and a face. Stage three, you smash every bad guy in the entire Bible together like Play-Doh remnants — Daniel's beasts, the man of lawlessness in Thessalonians, the beast from the sea in Revelation, Gog and Magog — into one Voltron-level super-villain. And stage four, which is where Peter Thiel lives, and which we are saving for next week because it requires its own episode: you take everything in stage three and invert it. The Roman Empire becomes good. Greta Thunberg becomes suspect. The Pope becomes suspect. The resistance to technological progress is the Antichrist. We covered Jack Van Impe's greatest hits — UFOs as demons, black holes as hell, the Mayan calendar, five missed dates — and John Hagee's gay Jewish Illuminati financier sermon that reads like medieval blood libel and somehow didn't end his career. We talked about how Bo went from a wall chart of the end times to a PhD at Claremont, what Y2K, 9/11, and Left Behind together did to his evangelical certainty, and how an iPod loaded with Rob Bell and Leonard Sweet became an off-ramp. We planned a camp beer. We discussed kettlebells at length. Netanyahu is Wormtongue. Trump is Denethor eating cherry tomatoes while the battle rages. Stage four next week. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included. 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗 Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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