October 7, 2025 Show with Dr. Joe Boot on “Thinking Christianly: Developing an Undivided Mind”

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On the seventh day of October 2025, I'm thrilled to have a returning guest today. Many of you who listen to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio should recognize the name Dr. Joe Boot. He is founder of the Ezra Institute.

He's an author and conference speaker, and judging from the responses I received over the years, one of the best and most wonderfully received speakers at one of my Iron Sharpens Iron Radio free biannual pastors' luncheons.

This was a few luncheons ago in Loisville, Pennsylvania, and today we are going to be addressing the theme of Dr. Boot's latest book, Think Christianly, Developing an Undivided Mind. And later on, we're going to be joined about midway through the conversation with Dr. Michael Thiessen, Dr. Boot's chief of operations in the USA.

But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Joe Boot.

Thank you, Chris. Great to be with you as again, and appreciate the warm introduction. It was great to be at that pastor's luncheon a while back to actually meet in person, because we've done this over the airwaves quite a few times, and it was a real blessing to meet in the flesh.

So thanks for having me back on the show.

Oh, my pleasure. And tell us about the Ezra Institute.

The Ezra Institute and Its Mission

So the Ezra Institute was founded in 2009. We are a Christian world and life view and cultural apologetics, think tank and training organization. We're trying to help believers think and thinkers believe.

And we do that through various print and digital resources and through various conferences and in-person training programs. As we both teach Christians and engage skeptics with the truth of the gospel of the kingdom and the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Amen. And if anybody wants more details on the Ezra Institute, go to Ezra Institute dot com. Ezra Institute dot com. And before we begin our discussion on our main theme, you just told me moments before we went on the air that you'll be in the United States in the near future.

And you are at least one of the places you are flying to from the UK is Phoenix, Arizona. Are you going to be speaking at Apologia Church out there?

Yes, I will be, actually. I'll be. I'm in New York state first for a conference there. People can find out about the conference just outside of Rochester on our on our Web site. And then I will be in Tennessee and Kentucky for a few days and then up into Canada for our mission of God conference for Ezra conference up there.

We're dealing with Islam and immigration and then down to Phoenix where I'll be speaking at Apologia Church. And I think going on the podcast there as well as joining TPUSA for a podcast interview while I'm in in Arizona.

Oh, that's great that TPUSA is familiar with you. They need all the theologically sound men that can get involved with them. And I'm delighted to hear that you are one of them.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to looking forward to meeting with them and discussing some of the key issues of today.

Amen. Well, as we've already announced, we are discussing the main theme of your or the theme, I should say, of your new book, Think Christianly, Developing an Undivided Mind. Usually when a Christian author writes a book, he is either just trying to introduce new information to an audience or reaffirm things and give more detail about something that is a generally believed fact or facts, plural.

But also very often when authors, especially if they are apologists, write books, they are seeking to correct something that they see the church at large, perhaps even globally, has sadly failed at believing or doing.

And I have a strong feeling that this book, Think Christianly, was written with that in mind, the latter. Am I correct on that?

Yes, it is a not just an apologetic work, it is a polemical work. In many respects, Chris, it is a sequel to my major work, The Mission of God, A Manifesto of Hope for Society. I know that's a book you're familiar with.

Yes, it weighs about 400 pounds, this new book. Is it anywhere near as large as that?

No. So, yeah, I know, Mission of God got a little out of hand and was about 800 pages, but this is about 460 or 70 pages or so, so it's just under 500, so it's a smaller book. Still a large book. It is still a significant book, yeah.

And so in that respect, it is a sort of a sequel to The Mission of God. So for those of your listeners who perhaps have read that or know of that book, although I've written a number of shorter works since then, this book is really, as you said in your comments there, partly continuing and developing themes that I introduced in The Mission of God, but some of which I couldn't deal with in detail.

And so there is an apologetic emphasis to this book, Think Christianly, but also a polemical aspect to it. Psalm 86, 11, of course, says, Give me an undivided heart. Teach me your way, Yahweh, and I will live by your truth.

Give me an undivided mind or heart to fear your name. And so at the root of the goal of this book, Chris, is to try and deal with the problem of the, well, let's call it the two issues, really. One is the intellectual disarmament of Christian thinking, of the Christian church, the intellectual disarmament of the Christian church by synthesis, essentially, by our dualism and our inconsistency.

So, you know, a bit like a Toyota Prius where most Christians are part humanist, part secular and part Christian in their thinking. And so this kind of intellectual schizophrenia is a significant problem.

And so the book is rooted in the desire to see Christians develop a completely consistent scriptural world and life view. It was Cornelius Van Tirlu who actually defined Christian apologetics as the defense of the Christian philosophy of life.

And what I'm trying to do in Think Christianly is help thinking Christians, believers, understand and explain and be able to defend a distinctly Christian philosophy of life and not get lost in the confusion, in the synthesis that's been taking place for a couple of generations of Christianity with humanism, with neo-paganism, or what we call secularism.

Why Christians Fail to Think Christianly

Now, the theme in and of itself, Think Christianly, and even the subtitle of the book, Developing an Undivided Mind, on its face seems like a no-brainer. And I'm sure that before having picked up your book, every person that identifies as a Christian, no matter what orbit of theology they find themselves, they would say, Well, I obviously agree with that.

We have to think Christianly, and we should be seeking to have an undivided mind. So specifically, how are Christians grossly failing, in your opinion, in regard to those two things?

Well, let's maybe take up a couple of potential illustrations that might help people to understand what I'm driving at here. First of all, one of the things that's repeated several times in Scripture is that the fear of the Lord or the reverence for the Lord is the beginning or the principal part of wisdom.

Paul reminds us that in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Now, as you said, most Christians would be quite ready, in theory, to acknowledge that Christ is the wisdom of God, and we need to be thinking as Christians.

But the problem is we've got some severe blind spots. And one of the reasons for that is there's been a radical truncating, or let me use a different word, ecclesiasticizing of the Bible and of the gospel of the kingdom.

By which I mean that we've tended to think, Christians have tended to think of the Bible, the Word of God, as a church book. As a book for the institutional life of the church, yes. We would say, you know, theologically, sure, Jesus is Lord, and he's Lord over his church.

And, of course, a kingdom in the future, in some sort of abstract sense, Jesus is Lord now up in heaven. And one day in the future, he'll be manifestly king, but we have to face the reality that that's for the future.

And that the Bible doesn't apply, the Word of God doesn't apply to every area of life. I mean, it doesn't apply to things like education, or law, or politics, or the arts, or the sciences. It's a church book about my spiritual life, and so I need to think Christianly about spiritual things.

And so that dualism, Chris, that ecclesiasticizing of the Bible, of the Word, has actually called forth in large parts, through large parts of the Christian community, the secularization of multiple other areas of life.

So whilst you're right in saying that many Christians listening to this will say, yeah, of course we need to think in terms of the lordship of Jesus. But then on Monday morning, off their children go to Caesar to be educated in the local secular state school.

And when we then get offended, perhaps, when our pastor on Sunday morning challenges us about political life in the nation. So one of the problems we're facing in the West, and the reason for the lack of impact, actually, Chris, of large swathes of the Christian church on the culture, has been that our faith has tended to be privatized and pietized into this upper deck spiritual world.

Where we think of thinking Christianly is thinking about prayer and Bible study and faithful worship on a Sunday. It includes those things, of course. But we haven't tended to think that thinking Christianly, that loving God with our minds, with the foundation of the fear of the law, that that actually applies to how we think about political life and the meaning of politics.

About law and the role of God's law, about education and how the lordship of Christ impacts curriculum, about the identity and sexuality issues. In fact, the research shows in the United States that the vast majority of professing Christians do not have a Christian world and life view.

The Nehemiah Institute has published a good deal of research on this and found that it's just simply not the case that Christians genuinely think Christianly about every area of life. When we do claim to think Christianly, we tend to think about the churchification, the church aspects of our life, but not those things which we tend to deem as secular.

This is the old problem that Francis Schaeffer dealt with, with the illustration of the double-decker bus, that London bus with an upper deck and a lower deck. He said, well, the tendency is for us to put spiritual, really important things on the upper deck, prayer, Bible reading, evangelism, going to church.

We consider that thinking about those things, that's the Christian mind. But the lower deck, education, law, politics, the arts, sciences, media, economics and so forth, that's all the lower deck stuff.

That's the stuff of nature or the secular world. We don't have to think in distinctly Christian ways about those things. We don't need to be concerned with the transformation of those areas of life. The problem is that the driver of the bus is on the lower deck.

Then we wonder why our culture is driven off a cliff and the churches stood there watching. Largely, it's because, as Harry Blamire argued in his book, The Christian Mind, back in the 1960s, the English scholar, he said, there really is no Christian mind anymore as such.

That's my experience in Britain. It was certainly my experience in Canada. I think the U .S. is doing better, but not a great deal better than Europe and Canada on this issue. I think the urgent need of the time, the urgent need of the hour is the recovery, the true recovery of a Christian mind where we've been transformed, as Paul says in Romans 12, by the renewal of our minds.

The thing that puzzles me is why a certain element, a very prominent and perhaps dominant element of evangelicalism would be angry at your approach and what you are trying to present. But at the same time, like, for instance, when you spoke at my pastor's luncheon, that was a very mixed group.

And in spite of the fact that there were a couple of people during a Q &A that were taking exception to a couple of things you said, the vast majority of people that I spoke with afterwards who were from different backgrounds, they were from amillennial, premillennial, and postmillennial, from Calvinist, Arminian, Dispensationalist.

There was a very mixed group. And time and time again, pastors were approaching me, either face to face or through the email, just thrilled with what you had to say. And it puzzles me why anybody would take exception to your approach, because even a person who is not postmillennial, not theonomic or reconstructionist, when they are in their homes, they're not going to allow anything to be viewed on the television set, typically, if they are strong believers.

Or even regenerate at all. They're not going to just let any movie or television program be on the TV. They're not going to let their kids listen to any kind of music they want, go to any kind of movies they want.

They're not going to tell their children when they were voting age, just vote for anybody that you want. It doesn't matter what the platform of the party is or anything like that. So why would this be such, in your opinion, from what you've seen and from objections you've received, what is the main argument from your average run-of-the-mill Christian?

It's still something that puzzles me.

Well, you make a good point, Chris. I think part of the issue, I think there's a few things going on, but maybe the first and most obvious thing to say is that actually, in our experience as a ministry at Ezra, it's often not that Christians and pastors have a considered hostility to our perspective.

It's the fact that they haven't actually considered it. This was not dealt with usually at seminary. Scriptural world and life view and a cultural apologetic, it was very often not part of the program.

During the whole COVID era, one of the things that we heard a lot of TGC pastors saying was that this whole question, for example, of the relationship of church and state, they just said, well, this wasn't on the test at Bible school.

This wasn't on the test at seminary. And so a lot of the problem actually is, can I say kindly, ignorance, actually. They've not heard the arguments laid out. And because there's sort of been an almost an assumed or background by osmosis, we've taken in, many of us as Christian leaders, we've just taken in a pietistic retreatist and dualistic form of Christianity.

We've just taken the status quo as the norm. We haven't actually, many haven't actually been presented with a robust biblical world and life view presentation that deals with the foundational paradigm of Scripture as the unfolding of the kingdom of God, of creation, fall, redemption, consummation through the power of Christ and in the consummating power of the Holy Spirit.

That this is, that the creation and fall and redemption exist in historical continuum, that they are, that the creation still holds God's laws, the norms of creation still hold, that the fall was radical in its character and nature and affected all of our thinking, feeling, doing and being.

And that redemption in and through Christ is equally comprehensive and touches every area that the fall has touched. And so when you think about it like that, I mean, that is the teaching of Scripture.

I mean, that's the meaning of, of course, total depravity in the reformational evangelical worldview is that creation is in and through Christ, that the fall went to the root of our being, to the heart of man, in his fall away from God.

It became an endemic, basic hostility that touched every aspect of his being. That's what the total means. It doesn't mean that we're as evil as we possibly could be, but that it's touched every aspect of our being.

And therefore the redemption that's at work in Christ is equally as comprehensive as the fall. And that Christ is reconciling all things to himself. You think of that great summary of the gospel in Colossians 1 that I go back to again and again.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, for by him everything was created in heaven and in earth, things visible, invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities, et cetera, et cetera.

And Paul tells us at the end of this incredible statement on Christ, that he's a creator of all things, that he's Lord over everything, all things, that this gospel has been preached in all creation under heaven.

And that comprehensiveness of the gospel is obvious biblically, but it's interesting that for a lot of Christians and for a lot of pastors, the dots have just not been joined. We've done our biblical theology, we've done some of our language studies, we've done a bit of systematics, do our pastoral theology, get out of seminary, into the church, and we're caring for pastoral needs of people.

But we haven't grappled with or wrestled with actually the scriptural world and life view through which we need to understand our theology. In that sense, scriptural world and life view is pre-theoretical.

So we get into theological theory and doctrine, and pastors are often good at talking about Christian doctrines, but then they're flailing and confused and don't know quite where they are when the state tries to seize control of the church.

During the COVID era, or the state reaches in to control education and tell parents how they're going to educate their children, or the state reaches in to control welfare and all of these sorts of things.

And then we're looking at the arts industry, all these different areas, and we may be, as you say, sensitive to the issue of, well, there's excessive violence or immorality in this TV program, not that my kids watch it, fine.

But where is our worldview critique? Where are we helping our teenagers, our young adults, to look at what the culture is presenting academically in the universities or in media and bring a worldview critique to all of that to show how the Christian faith brings an answer to it that responds with the true, the good, and the beautiful.

So I think the first thing, actually, Chris, is not that there's often a considered hostility, but they've never actually heard it presented. They've never had the dots drawn, connected for them in this way.

And we find that for a lot of people, it's just almost like an aha moment. It's sort of Yahtzee. It's getting into the bathtub and seeing the water displacement and running down the street, like Archimedes, I think it was, saying, I've just seen it.

The number of times we say that we hear from people, I had an email this week, actually, from a Christian leader who said, I just felt like having read this book, I was given a new Bible. I felt like my mind was born again.

And we hear that kind of thing all of the time when we unpack the meaning of the kingdom of God and of the lordship of Jesus. It's not that there's a considered hostility very often, it's just that it's not been heard.

Now, periodically, occasionally, there is a considered hostility and people have adopted a two kingdoms paradigm for a variety of reasons, and maybe we can talk about that in a minute. So that's another issue where sometimes the issues have been considered, and there's been a sort of religious decision made to move against the idea of Christ's material authority and lordship in every area of culture and the application of God's word.

And then sometimes, Chris, the third thing is it's as simple as compromise through fear and intimidation, or actually through unfaithfulness, where we just don't want to pay the price, we don't want to deal with the cost of faithfulness in a culture that has moved increasingly in the West against the gospel, against the lordship of Christ.

We are offended at the claims of the Lord Jesus Christ, we are embarrassed by the law of God, and we want to find a way around, we want a Talmudic approach, we want a Pharisaic approach, we want to replace God's word with our traditions, our customs, so that we need not pay the price.

And sadly, that's a reality too, that sometimes it's as simple as compromise, or we feel we're embarrassed by the decisions that we've made. And I think for some leaders, especially the older ones, who maybe have opposed Christian and home education and sent their kids off to the state school, maybe their children have lost the faith, abandoned the Christian church, or they've made decisions where they know there's been compromise, and they hear a message like this, they feel challenged, maybe they feel a little embarrassed, a little ashamed, and they push back.

So, all three of those reactions do happen. But, you know, in my experience, I would say for the majority of people who are Christians who love the Lord, it's that they have never been taught this. They've never really been exposed to this message.

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That's royaldiadem .com, mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with Dr. Joe Boot, the founder of the Ezra Institute, and we have a question from a listener in Hoshton, Georgia, and this is Anthony. Dr. Boot, would it be a wise thing to do to comb over the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, looking at the judicial laws in particular, to help develop a framework of thinking Christianly?

As all Scripture is profitable, would this be of any benefit, or should a Christian just look to the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, and the New Testament epistles?

Well, actually, in my book Think Christianly, I have the only subject that gets two chapters. There's 12 chapters. The only subject that gets two chapters is a consideration of the law of God, and in particular, I'm interested to challenge the reliance of some on the idea of natural law, sort of abstract principles, abstract juridical principles.

I critique that in the first chapter that I deal with on law, and in the second chapter on law, I look specifically at the importance of the details of God's revealed law, that in God's Word, we have concrete revelation.

God has spoken and revealed himself. He's never left human beings, ever, just with creation to look at, just looking at nature, trying to discern the will and purpose of God. Even in the garden, God spoke with our first parents in terms of verbal revelation.

And so, no, I think the listeners are onto something very, very important there, the details of God's law matter. And in fact, one of the things I do in the book is look at Jesus' treatment of the law, the way in which Jesus utilized the details of the law in his own ministry, starting, of course, with the way in which he defeated the temptation of Satan with quotations from Deuteronomy, as well as his debates with the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, and, of course, his great statement as the greater Moses when he went up onto the mountain, what we call the Sermon on the Mount, when he affirmed the totality of the law in its detail, and that those who teach it, live it and teach it, will be great in the kingdom of heaven.

So not some past era, but in the kingdom of God. So it's very important that we study in detail the law of God. And I've spent a good deal of my time over the years studying and reading the details of God's law.

And I think this is really important. We can, of course, agree with the reformers that we can discern moral laws, laws that are applicable to the civil sphere, juridical laws, and, of course, ceremonial or restorative laws in the biblical legal collections.

They don't come as separate lists. The law comes as an integrated garment. And so there's important work to do because biblical law really is a journey into wisdom. And when you look at the various ways in which God's law comes to us, some of it is didactic.

So we have the standing law, the Ten Commandments written by the very finger of God, the ten words, which echo the ten utterances of creation. It's interesting, isn't it, that at creation, God calls all things into being by his word.

And the one place in scripture where God actually writes the scripture himself without the human vehicle is the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, where there is no human hand involved. So we have the standing law, and then we have case laws, which are moral applications.

These are moral laws, but they're applications of the standing law to particular, specific, limited cases, which need to be mined in their details for us today for their core principles. The Puritans would have said the general equity of those laws.

And then the restorative laws, which concern the priesthood, laws of separation and sacrifice and so forth. Well, these are all, they're not abolished, they are fulfilled and they're transposed in the Lord Jesus Christ.

They continue, but in a different form, which is in the intercession of Christ in the heavenly temple where Christ makes, we're told in Hebrews, he sprinkles his blood on the mercy seat and makes intercession for us.

So the tabernacle, the instructions of which are given to Moses in the law is a copy of the heavenly one. So even the ceremonial or restorative elements of the law are not abolished. They're transposed.

They continue in a different form. So the listener is astute. I think this is very important. A detailed study of God's law is necessary and important, and we should be engaged in that as Christians. David the Psalmist was so enthralled and in love with the law of God that the longest song, the longest chapter actually in scripture is a celebration of God's law in Psalm 119.

And the law of the Lord is perfect, Psalm 19 tells us as well, converting or restoring the soul. We should love God's law and we should want to mine its wisdom. So we see the didactic forms of the law.

We see the law expressed in wisdom literature as the teaching of a father to a son in the book of Proverbs. And then we have the prophets exegeting the law and calling the people back to obedience to the law.

So in one sense, all of scripture is God's law, where specifically the Torah, the first five books of scripture are the law, and it is then taught and explicated and applied by the wisdom literature and by the prophets.

And Jesus says, I haven't come to abolish this. I've come to fill it up so that it reaches full measure, to give it its full weight and application. And that is what a Riddibos called the theonomy of the gospel.