Theology Made Podcast

Theology Made
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The Theology Made Podcast takes complicated ideas about God and makes them simple. Each episode unpacks theology, church history, or biblical truth in a way that's clear, thoughtful, and actually enjoyable. substack.theologymade.com

  1. 1d ago

    Frankenstein and Dracula Are Theology Books

    Almost everyone attaches the name to the wrong body. Frankenstein is the man on the stairs. The creature is never named at all. That error is a small version of a bigger one. We remember Mary Shelley’s novel as a warning about science, except she flatly refuses to tell you how Victor did it. She leaves the method blank on purpose and spends her detail on what he does the moment it works, which is walk out of the room, go downstairs, and try to sleep. The three lines she put on her title page in 1818 are Adam, in Paradise Lost, asking his Maker what right he had. Seventy-nine years later, Bram Stoker put a verse from Deuteronomy in the mouth of a madman who eats flies and built four hundred pages on top of it. His Count needs two things to keep going: earth to lie in, and blood to move. Those are the exact two substances Genesis and Leviticus use to explain what a human being is. This episode goes through a volcano in Indonesia, a rainy week on Lake Geneva, a journal entry Mary Shelley wrote about a dream of her dead daughter coming back, a public fight between two London surgeons over whether life is anything more than arrangement, and what happens when a novelist takes the central image of Christian devotion and runs it backward. Neither author was building a sermon. Shelley was raised by a man who had argued his way out of God. Stoker managed a theater and wanted to sell books. They followed an honest question to the end of it, and the end of it was theology. Theology Made is a listener/reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Theology Made at substack.theologymade.com/subscribe

  2. Oct 15

    The Man Who Explained Suffering Until It Happened to Him

    In the autumn of 1960, C.S. Lewis went through a cupboard at The Kilns looking for something to write in. What he found were old school exercise books, a few pages already filled with something else. His wife had died in July. Twenty years earlier he had published The Problem of Pain. It sold, and it kept selling, and it made him the man that grieving strangers wrote letters to. Sitting in that cold house with a schoolboy’s notebook on his knee, he could not find one sentence in it that did him any good. This episode is about what happened in between. Joy Davidman, the Bronx-born ex-Communist poet who caught him out in arguments better than anyone in Oxford. The register office wedding on St Giles’ in April of 1956 that was supposed to be nothing more than paperwork. The bishop who refused, and the priest who married them anyway at a hospital bedside eleven months later. The three years and four months that followed. Then the notebooks, which almost everyone misremembers. The popular version says Lewis lost his faith and found it again by the last page. Read what he actually wrote and you find a man who never once doubted that God was there. He was afraid of something else, and he put it down in plain language before he decided whether it was true. He published it under a name that was not his own. This is why. Theology Made is a listener/reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Theology Made at substack.theologymade.com/subscribe

  3. Oct 8

    The First Christians Fasted Twice a Week

    Usually this show finds the first Christians doing less than you’d assume. This time they did more. The earliest church manual we possess assumes believers will fast twice a week, and its only real instruction is scheduling: skip the Monday-Thursday fast of the synagogue and take Wednesday and Friday instead, the day of the betrayal and the day of the cross. The whole week became a miniature passion play, hunger on the station days, feast on the weekly Easter, and the savings from skipped meals aimed at widows and orphans. This episode traces the fasting calendar from the Didache through Lent, the meatless Fridays that funded fishing fleets, the defiant Lenten sausage dinner that launched the Zurich Reformation, and John Wesley refusing to ordain men who wouldn’t keep the old days, down to the strange present, where the schedule survives on wellness apps, aimed at the mirror instead of the cross. Theology Made is a listener/reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Theology Made at substack.theologymade.com/subscribe

  4. Oct 1

    Weddings Weren't in Churches for a Thousand Years

    Picture a wedding: the aisle, the officiant, the white dress, the vows at the altar. Now hear the history. For roughly a thousand years, Christians married at home with no clergy required, and a pope in 866 wrote that skipping the ceremony was no sin, especially for the poor. When weddings finally approached the church, they stopped at the door, literally, where Chaucer’s Wife of Bath had her five husbands, because the porch was fraud prevention for an age of secret vows. The rule that a priest must witness your marriage dates to 1563. The white dress dates to Queen Victoria. This episode walks from the catering crisis at Cana through the clandestine-marriage chaos of the Middle Ages to the birth certificate of the modern church wedding, and delivers some very old good news to everyone who ever married at a courthouse: historically, you’re the original recipe. Theology Made is a listener/reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Theology Made at substack.theologymade.com/subscribe

  5. Sep 24

    The First Christians Didn't Sing with Instruments

    Organ or band, piano or drums: every church has picked a side in the worship wars. For the first eight hundred years of Christianity, there were no sides, because there were no instruments. The church that sang in prison cells and before dawn under threat of death did it with voices alone, on purpose, even though its own Psalter commanded harps and cymbals. This episode traces the strangest sound decision in church history: why the harps stayed on the wall, how a Byzantine emperor’s diplomatic gift smuggled the organ into the West, why Aquinas still described instrument-free worship as the church’s position in the 1200s, and how the finest musician of the Reformation came to rip the organs out of Zurich. Every organ was once a drum kit. And the real question was never the instrumentation. Theology Made is a listener/reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Theology Made at substack.theologymade.com/subscribe

  6. Sep 17

    The King James Bible Had 80 Books

    The King James Bible is the fixed point: sixty-six books, unchanged since 1611. Except the 1611 edition had eighty. Between Malachi and Matthew, the original KJV carried fourteen books, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, the Maccabees, cross-referenced by the translators and appointed for reading in church, and in 1615 the Archbishop of Canterbury threatened printers with a year in prison for leaving them out. Two centuries later, a Bible society funding dispute known as the Apocrypha Controversy ended with a committee vote, and the most famous Bible in history quietly lost an inch. This episode tells the whole story: Jerome’s ancient middle way, Luther’s brilliant compromise heading, the verse from Sirach that rescued John Bunyan, the Scottish revolt that shrank the world’s Bibles, and the winter festival in John 10 whose backstory your Bible no longer contains. Theology Made is a listener/reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Theology Made at substack.theologymade.com/subscribe

  7. Sep 10

    The First Christians Didn’t Own Bibles

    Did early Christians have Bibles? For the first several centuries of Christianity, almost no believer owned a Bible, most couldn’t read one, and the complete single-volume Bible barely existed before Constantine. This episode does the math nobody does: a hand-copied Gospel cost about a month’s wages, a full Bible ran the price of a small farm, and it took an imperial budget to put fifty Bibles in one city. So how did a movement of cobblers and laundry women become the most Scripture-saturated community in the ancient world? Through trained memory, public reading, and teenage lectors whose ordained job was to be the voice of the Gospel. Featuring the emperor who tried to kill Christianity by confiscating manuscripts, and the clergy who died guarding them, the story behind the word “traitor.” Theology Made is a listener/reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Theology Made at substack.theologymade.com/subscribe

  8. Sep 3

    The First Christians Didn't Have a Pastor

    Somewhere this Sunday, a man will walk onto a stage, and everyone will call him the pastor. A Christian from the year 60 would have no idea who he is. The New Testament uses “pastor” for church leaders exactly once, never addresses a letter to one, and describes churches run by teams of elders meeting in living rooms. So where did the job come from? The trail runs through a church manual obsessed with freeloading prophets, a congregation that fired its leaders in 96 AD, and an old man in chains whose letters invented the office on his way to die in the arena. This is the story of how one word in Ephesians became the biggest line in the church budget. Theology Made is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Theology Made at substack.theologymade.com/subscribe

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About

The Theology Made Podcast takes complicated ideas about God and makes them simple. Each episode unpacks theology, church history, or biblical truth in a way that's clear, thoughtful, and actually enjoyable. substack.theologymade.com

Information

  • Creator
    Theology Made
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    67
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Theology Made
  • Show Website
    Theology Made Podcast