Theology Nerd Throwdown
Dr. Tripp Fuller & Rev. Bo Sanders · Dr. Tripp Fuller | Theologian, Philosopher, Minister
Show overview
Theology Nerd Throwdown has been publishing since 2013, and across the 13 years since has built a catalogue of 211 episodes. That works out to roughly 280 hours of audio in total. Releases follow a monthly cadence.
Episodes typically run an hour to ninety minutes — most land between 1h 1m and 1h 39m — though episode length varies meaningfully from one episode to the next. Roughly 62% of episodes carry an explicit flag from the publisher. It is catalogued as a EN-US-language Religion & Spirituality show.
The show is actively publishing — the most recent episode landed 5 days ago, with 26 episodes already out so far this year. The busiest year was 2014, with 35 episodes published. Published by Dr. Tripp Fuller | Theologian, Philosopher, Minister.
From the publisher
Tripp & Bo get nerdy talking about theology, faith, life, and other things.
Latest Episodes
View all 211 episodesThree Books and a Meme: on Brin, Gleick, Baudrillard, Debord, & The Contraction of the Present
We've Engineered a World with Nothing to Say and a Listener with No Ears
Performing for the Digital Slave Master: Bo Sanders's Strava Confession and the Hell of the Same
Puff, Puff, Passages: Bo and Tripp on the Bible, the Ban List, and the Books We Would Take to a Desert Island
The Angel of History, the End of History, and the End of the Liberal Subject
America Was a Mirage: Kevin Carnahan on Why the Moral 1940s–1980s Was an Accident
If an AI Says It Loves God, How Would You Test It?
Over/Unders, Mount Rushmores, and Shooting Fish in Barrel
I'm Unsinkable. I'm Already Dead: A TNT on Doubt, Faith, and the Galilean Vision
The Pope, the Plantation, and the Algorithm: A Theology Nerds Throwdown
They Love Your Questions — Just Not Your Conclusions: Tim Whitaker on Evangelicalism, Apologetics & the Sleight of Hand
If This Is the End Times, I'll Be Your Huckleberry: Peter Thiel's Antichrist Theology
The Hyperlink Permission: How Dispensational Eschatology Reads the Bible & Why It Gets Wild
Big Nephilim Energy: A Field Guide
Just War for People Who Actually Know What It Means w/ Kevin Carnahan
The Consequences, Not the Mechanism: What the Resurrection Narratives Are Actually About
It's Holy Week, which means Bo and I finally stopped talking about chickens, bikes, and CCM songs long enough to do theology — though we did all of those things first. The actual idea Bo had was simple and turned out to be genuinely illuminating: what if we worked our way backwards through the passion week narrative, starting with the post-resurrection appearances on Monday and moving back toward Good Friday? The theory being that if you start at the end and let the consequences of the resurrection interpret everything before it, you read the whole story differently. Turns out, yes, you do. We talked about the fact that no gospel actually describes the resurrection happening — only its effects, only its consequences — and how much Christian energy gets wasted on the mechanism when the texts are entirely uninterested in that question. Tripp's seven implications for Holy Week came fast and hot: the cross as mirror of what civilization does to nonviolent love, PSA as the theological theory with the least observable consequences in people's actual lives, and why loving your enemies isn't a vibe but the specific thing that got Jesus killed. Then Bo discovered Holy Saturday via Balthasar and hasn't recovered — the silent day as a womb of restrained fullness, Jesus as the one who has gone further into death than any of us will ever go, double dead, so that nothing we face is faced alone. Pete Rollins on the experience of absence versus the absence of experience made an appearance. Bonhoeffer made his inevitable appearance. Elgin Frank Tupper closed it out: the resurrection isn't verified by the empty tomb, it's verified by the harvest — when all things are raised into the life of God. We'll be back next week for Nephilim. Happy Easter. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. 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
Spiritual Warfare to Spiritual Welfare: Bo's Four Stories of Reclaiming Charismatic Practice
Happy birthday to Haven, who turns nine today! He’s my third kid, which means the Fuller household has been thoroughly outnumbered for a while now, which also means it is absolutely appropriate that Bo and I spent a Friday morning talking about demons. This one started where all the best TNT episodes start — a text from Bo that said essentially: can we talk about reclaiming the good parts of being charismatic? And listen, I grew up Baptist, so I genuinely missed out on the whole casting-out-demons, anointing-doorframes, spiritual-warfare-as-Dungeons-and-Dragons pipeline. Bo did not miss out. And he's been spending a few years trying to figure out which of those practices were actually onto something, even if the metaphysics were a mess. He brought four stories: prayer walking with your eyes open instead of closed (spiritual warfare → spiritual welfare), spiritual mapping as a way of seeing your city's gateways as sites of partnership instead of enemy strongholds, the "My Heart, Christ Home" pre-baptism house-walk prayer practice, and a full theology of exorcism — power encounter versus truth encounter — including my own undefeated record at exorcisms, which I will not spoil except to say: baptismal font, palm branch, and a very successful businessman who was, by any reasonable definition, acting demonic. I brought my old lecture notes on Tillich and David Ray Griffin's theories of the demonic, which turned out to pair with Bo's stories better than either of us expected. Tillich's line — the demonic is the holy with a minus sign — ended up doing a lot of work. So did Griffin's lecture at Asbury. This one went places. Come for the exorcism, stay for the Nephilim teaser at the end. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. 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. 📅 Starts Tuesday, April 14 | 1pm ET 💰 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
The Two Foundation Stones Holding Up Everything You Hate About American Politics
It's TNT, it's a Friday, and Bo came in hot — with a week's worth of text messages about natural law, JD Vance, and the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary conservatism that started innocently enough and ended somewhere near Bruno Latour and the cloaking of power. Before we get there, I shared a bit about my time at the Futures of Liberation Theology event at Wake Divinity — liberation theology royalty, great hair, genuine questions about what happens to a tradition when it loses its roots in church community and gets handed off to the academy — and whether the baton can be passed when the next generation doesn't know the story they're supposed to be running with. Then Bo lays out what he's been piecing together: that the entire edifice of contemporary American conservatism rests on two foundation stones — natural law and divine revelation — and that when you pair those two things, the same five arguments show up every single time. What follows is an hour of political theology, TNT-style: why natural law is philosophically sloppy in ways that Bruno Latour, Nancy Cartwright, and Denis Noble can all explain, how it functions as a power-cloaking mechanism that launders ideological preferences as biological facts, the historical arc from New Deal liberalism through neoliberalism to the postliberal eruption we're currently living through, MacIntyre and Hauerwas as compelling diagnosticians whose followers scare Bo, the cut flower problem of progressive churches that have all the openness and none of the roots, and why no one at the truck stop cares. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. 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 are included. 📅 Starts Tuesday, April 14 | 1pm ET 💰 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
The Podcast That Wasn't Supposed to Last 18 Years & Vintage Theo-Blog War Stories
Eighteen years. That's how long Homebrew Christianity has been doing this thing — and to celebrate, Bo pulls out trivia, giveaways, and a surprise birthday guest in Brian McLaren, who drops in to talk about hope with longer timeframes, process theology as medicine for hardened neo-Platonism, and what worship might look like if we started from a process worldview instead of trying to fix a broken one. After Brian heads out to work out like the legend he is, we go full memory lane: the theology blog wars, the Hauwersian mafia, Rachel Held Evans and the post that broke the internet (and probably Tripp's evangelical ordination credentials), Rob Bell trying to keep a straight face while Tripp improved a sermon to "No Woman No Cry" at Monkish, getting subtweeted by evangelicals who wouldn't tag them, Chad Crawford — the OG CrawDaddy who saw all of this before anyone else did — and the MP3 recorder between two guys sitting three feet apart in a Westwood office that somehow became TNT. It's a birthday party, it's a wake, it's a theological pub quiz, and it's one of the most genuinely fun hours this podcast has ever produced. Eighteen years. Come on. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City! ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now. The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here. 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
Seduced into Self-Exploitation: Liberation Theology for the Algorithmic Age
Bo and I came in hot this week — Five Iron Frenzy concert tonight, a heated Chick-fil-A debate (Bo is wrong), In-N-Out orders, and the things southern Idaho doesn't have — before diving into the first five of ten thesis statements from the book I'm writing on the digital colonization of the self. I threw the whole document into an AI slide maker without any coaching and we're seeing the results live for the first time, slides out of order and all. We covered the algorithm as history's first successful colonization of human interiority (Jesus said go into your inner room to pray — that assumes there's a door, and the algorithm picked the lock), how this empire rules through seduction rather than coercion so we don't recognize it as empire, the disappearance of the face of the other and with it the possibility of ethics and love, neuroimaging studies showing the gray matter in high social media users' prefrontal cortex is physically shrinking, and Robin Dunbar's research on why screens can't transmit the endorphins that genuine social bonding requires — we're scrolling through pictures of food while our stomachs remain empty. Bo got under conviction live and committed to stop calling in pickup orders so he can stand in line around actual humans, we had a real exchange about spirituality versus religion, went on a significant detour about dating apps and the disappearance of in-person flirting, and we'll do the other five theses next week. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now. The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here. 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