An Alternative to the Antioch Declaration with Joseph Spurgeon

Why the Antioch Declaration Was Hard to Sign

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, and I was just talking to Brother and Pastor Joseph Spurgeon behind the scenes for a little bit. I know some of you are wondering, when are you gonna start?

We are having a good talk. So we are starting now though, and we're gonna talk a little bit about this Antioch Declaration and the response that Brother Joseph Spurgeon has made to this. He has an alternative, and we're gonna go over that alternative.

And I think it's a better statement. No statement is perfect. No statement is scripture. No statement is inspired by God in that way that humans have come up with. But I think that this is something to build off of, and it's, I think, framed very well.

And I'll just say this before introducing Joseph, but he came to me with this, I wanna say it was hours after the Antioch Declaration was up there.

It wasn't long.

And I was really impressed that he had come up with something this good in such a short span of time. And so this will help, I think, those out there who are wondering, John, why didn't you sign it? Maybe even Pastor Spurgeon, why didn't you sign it?

This will help you a little bit more, I think, understanding why we decided not to and what we think would be a better statement if we were gonna address some of the related subjects. So with that, Pastor Joseph Spurgeon, welcome once again.

Long time, no see. You were on the podcast last week, and here you are again. How you doing?

Yeah, doing well, man. I don't know if I ever had that many conversations that matter. And so now we have.

Yeah, yeah, they do matter. I think the video I made on the Antioch Declaration has like, I don't even know now, with the audio and the video, over 15 ,000 views and wasn't expecting that, but here we are.

And I wanted to broaden that discussion because I talked about my personal opinion on all of those things, how I think about it. And it was very in the moment. It was very fresh. And I had a lot of people asking me questions.

We've had time to digest. And I wanna get a second perspective as well, which is yours. And you've thought deeply about this. So maybe we'll start there. Why didn't you sign the Antioch Declaration?

Let me just start by saying it was kind of difficult in one sense not to. And what I mean is I really respect the brothers and the ministries that are behind the statement. One of them, I think it was Jeff Durbin, came to me personally asking me to sign it.

And I have a lot of respect for Pastor Durbin. I would say that when I was in seminary, I discovered Apologia and I had become post-millennial and discovered them. And there was like other people like this.

And now they're involved in abortion ministry, which I was involved in. And it was just like, it was really refreshing, encouraging, and probably would go as far as to say, I may not even be a pastor of a church if I had not discovered their ministry and been that encouraged.

So when he comes to me and he's like, we got this and we want you to sign it. You feel immediately like, okay, yeah, I wanna be a part of this. I love these brothers. But as I read it, for one, I just thought I just was like, there's something I hate to say, but there's something off about it.

And that it's some of it's just confusing as a statement. It reads like a blog for those who have a lot of inside baseball knowledge. Like I've had so many people come to me, even from my church, in other words, like, what is this thing about?

I read this statement and it doesn't make head or tails. And I think if you're gonna have a theological statement that's meant to, and theological statements with affirmations denials, they have a purpose.

The purpose is to unite Christians and separate them from false teaching. There's always unity and division, but if you're gonna have that, it has to be clear what people are signing on to. And it has to fulfill that purpose.

It has to be able to be signed by true believers, I think. And unless it's some niche little thing, like, hey, we all agree on head coverings and we're gonna make a head covering statement. Okay, you acknowledge that you're not trying to unite all Christendom around that.

But when you're trying to broad statement, it needs to be able to bring in Christians who can agree. And it also needs to keep out those who need to be kept out. I think the problem, and I wrote a whole thing about why I wouldn't sign it.

And this is really the major kind of problem to me is that it's convoluted and simplistic on the issue of ethnicity and race. And as sometimes it goes off in the straw man territory and other times it includes things that are just, like, why is a whole section, why does it even start with talking about the French Revolution?

And so, again, I love Doug Wilson and have benefited from his ministry, but sometimes, and forgive me if people don't like this, sometimes his writing is too cute. And he likes a lot of turn of phrases and Chesterton type stuff.

And it leads to sometimes being, okay, I just read a paragraph and don't quite understand what you're even trying to say. Or the thing that you spent 25 words explaining something that could have took two words and left a lot of confusion.

And I feel like that is in this statement that they put out, that it is about as clear as mud in a few places. And go ahead, you're welcome to disagree with me.

Inside Baseball, Tone, and the Problem of a Confusing Statement

No, I agree. I just, I was gonna, you said it was, his writing's cute and stuff. And so it held me back from making my own quips and jokes for a moment there. Cause I was just gonna say like, well, you don't have a position on like the French National Assembly and the seating arrangements there.

Come on, man. Like, so sorry. I was holding myself back for a, I guess that's a little bit of mockery and maybe some people will take that wrong, I think it gets to the heart of what you're saying though.

It is so able to be mocked because of what, like those little quips, that like an aside about Aristotle, right? Like, where did this come from? What is this about? So for those who are, I know defensive of the statement, cause I have some of them reaching out to me and wanting to know more about why I wouldn't sign it and stuff.

Like we're tracking the same way. Like I don't like a statement that's not firm, clear and you can mock anything I suppose, but this makes it so easy. It makes it into a joke a bit. And I don't want to attach myself to that.

So that's part of it. That's not the whole thing, but that is, I think what you're saying and what I'm saying, so.

Yeah.

And I think some of those quips and stuff are like things that you might joke about with a friend or, you know, they also include a lot of, again, I call it inside baseball, but what I mean is like, and this is another point I made is there is a context around this statement that is all throughout it, though I know they, Toby and others have tried to, that's Toby Sumter, one of the pastors there, have tried to separate it from the circumstance, but I just don't see how it can be.

And the circumstance is the situation with Joel Webben and Tobias, German last name, can't remember how you say his last name, I won't even try.

I think it's Riemenschneider.

Okay, Riemenschneider. So I'm not trying to be a jerk about it, just didn't know how to say it. But there's that context. There's a context with Steven Wolf as well. And Aristotle Thain is kind of a barb at them.

And I think what it does is, again, the whole point of statements like this is to set boundaries, to set fences. And the question is, are they trying to keep out Webben and Steven Wolf? And little things like that make me say yes.

So it's like, why are you gonna publish his book on one hand and then put a little barb that is, can at least, maybe they would say, no, it wasn't aimed at him, but it can at least give the appearance of that.

And I think we have to be wise about how we do stuff like that.

Did you, out of curiosity, did you read Doug Wilson, I think it was yesterday, he had a blog that he put out there and he addressed some of this?

I skimmed some of it, maybe you refresh me. What.

No, I don't like.

Okay, so I did too. And so the substance of the entire blog is not why I'm bringing it up, but there was a section though, someone sent me a section on what you just talked about, Steven Wolf being a published author at Canon.

And it almost, I read it a few times, that section. It was like one paragraph where Doug Wilson gives his assessment of Steven and says essentially that 80 of the time he's brilliant and fine and good, but there's this 20 where he's signaling to Nazi revoice, whatever that is.

And I just thought, he just signed a contract, Steven, that he published it out there publicly, that he just signed a contract to do another book with Canon, which is I think a shorter version of the book that he put out.

So it's the shorter case for Christian nationalism. But I can't, if I was an author and I couldn't trust my publisher or I felt like I was being threatened by my publisher or I couldn't depend on my publisher not to countersignal me, I probably wouldn't be publishing with them because that's part, I published a few books with different publishers and part of the point of publishing a book, it doesn't mean you necessarily have to agree, like the publishing company isn't endorsing every little thing you say, right?

But it's basic and understood that they're not going to be pulling the rug out from under you. They're not gonna be putting things over your head. When they agree to publish something, they've agreed to publish that.

And that is, and you should be able to depend on them to not throw cold water on what you're trying to do. They're a partner with you essentially, like you're in this together, at least to an extent. And it's an odd, odd thing.

It's odd.

It's odd and that's no word for it. It's very odd.

It's odd and so, well, I'll defend a little bit that thing. So we all have friendships, connections with different Christians and we're united in the church, but we ought to be loyal to each other and yet loyalty doesn't keep us from offering criticism.

So I'm okay with Doug criticizing Stephen Wolfe on things or Wolfe criticizing Doug Wilson.

Yeah, and I left out something that I shouldn't. So before you finish what you're saying, I don't know if this will affect it, but it was in also the context of Stephen being a published author with them and whether or not that will continue.

And I'll be honest, when I read it, it left it open-ended.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm talking about. It's not the disagreement. It is more the, threat seems too strong a word, but that's what I kept thinking that, that's the word that kept coming to my mind, like the threat of, hey, if you don't reign it in somehow and it's vague as far as what he's doing, like they don't really define exactly, or Doug doesn't, what exactly he's doing wrong.

It's a little bit vague in my mind, but then your future with us, publishing with us, well, that's kind of up in the air. And so anyway, you finish what you're saying. I'm sorry. I just figured I should

No, no, no, that's there. And so again, I'm okay with them criticizing. I'm okay if they determined to say, hey, we're not going to publish him anymore. It's within their rights. I think we always have, I believe in freedom of association in one sense.

So I believe in that. And I believe as pastors, we have to be willing to critique even those that are close to us. All that said though, believing that, recognizing that, the point I want to make is this statement is in the midst of all that personal junk and it's dealing with that stuff.

And I think it's somewhat passive-aggressively.

Dealing with it.

And they don't want to acknowledge that it's dealing and that's there. But my signing it is me like joining in that conflict between them.

And I'm

That's how I felt.

I'm not, you know, it's not that I don't want to take sides. It's that I don't want to be the guy that grabs the two dogs, you know, that they're fighting, right? I don't want to be the, I just don't want to be in the middle of that.

There's a lot of, there's more than the theological issue at hand here. In this, there's interpersonal things. And I believe there's sin that's been done against Joe Webbin that needs to be repented of.

I think, I love James White. I think he has spoken out of turn at times and in ways that have almost become comical. There's this whole little clip that I actually, I save and I love James White, but it's him saying, sit down and shut up.

And I, my kids laugh at that cause I play it when they're getting crazy. I'm like, don't let me get James White out.

You don't?

You do that?

Yeah, yeah, I do. And we laugh at it. It's kind of funny. They all laugh, sit down and shut up. I even sent it to my elders saying, this is our new thing when we're in a counseling situation that's going bad.

Hey, you want to be counseled by James White? Here it comes. And so I love James White. That's not to destroy him or mock him, but it is funny that some of this stuff has led to over the top type statements that are sanctimonious and mockable.

And so I think before I would ever want to sign a statement like this, I need to work through those issues. It's very simple as acknowledging the actual timeline. They keep lying about the timeline a little bit, which we all saw and we all kind of know.

And so there's a lot of stuff. And that doesn't mean that I agree with Joe Webb and have his back on every single thing there is. It's simply to say, this statement that they put out has all that context.

And while they want to deny it, it's in the statement itself with the quibs about Aristotle or left and right. And that is the background for it.

After the podcast I did last week on this, I'm talking to someone who's, we'll just say on the other side of this issue, they signed the Antioch Declaration and they very much have opinions about Joel and Stephen and all of these guys, strong opinions that I don't necessarily line up with completely.

I can see, I understand where the guy's coming from. But anyway, we were talking a little bit about this and that was one of my things is like, why didn't, like, this would have been so simple if that was dealt with first, if the issue between Stephen and Tobias and now it's been James White, Joe Boot and Doug Wilson have been roped in because they all shared Tobias' podcast that contained things that I've told Tobias directly that I think were very inaccurate about Joel.

If they would have dealt with that first and then had this statement, then you might've even been able to get those guys to work with you, at least some of them. And you could have had a better statement, you could have had broader support, you wouldn't have had the distraction.

Instead, it's released at the worst possible time. And it's like if you had two friends and one of them's fighting with the other and say that your friend's a liar, and then without resolving it, they come to you and say, would you sign my petition against lying?

It's like, well, I'm against lying, and there's little jabs in it that make you think, well, you're talking about my friend, who would sign that, right? You would wanna get the situation resolved first and then let's come together against lying.

And I think that's still the appropriate thing here. I don't know. I mean, I don't have any advice for the guys at the top who decided this was a good idea. I don't know what they could do. I don't think they will do anything I say anyway.

My advice is this. Retract the statement. Put everybody out and say, hey, we wanna go back to work on this thing. Let's put a better thing out that's more clear. And we acknowledge that there were things said.

This whole issue was brought to light, which shouldn't have been brought to light. There's no reason that we should have a million podcasts, and we're a part of it now, but on this conversation with Joe Webben and his appreciator, there shouldn't be all this stuff.

So they should just simply acknowledge, hey, we screwed the pooch on it. We messed this up. We ask your forgiveness and we're gonna work things through and we're gonna come back. We're gonna build back better.

We're gonna

We're in this together.

We're in this together now.

We're in this together.

Yes.

But that's what they need to do. Now, I think that there are real issues with anti-Jewish sentiment out there. I think I've dealt with people claiming that Hitler was a Christian prince and Nazi stuff.

And so I'm actually cool and wanna deal with that issue.

Same.

I was telling somebody else the other day at my church, help me navigate this whole thing. And I think there are, I said, I think there were like four camps around this whole issue out there, four groups, if I will.

And I'm talking about the issue of ethnicity and race and all this stuff. There's the woke thing, which we all are opposed to the kind of, we'll just substitute Matt Chandler for that now and just say that kind of woke Russell Morris type stuff.

And so there's that group. And everybody

It raises a social construct, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

And also you're never gonna get, you can never be set free from it. You're white, you got white privilege, you suck. And so there's that. And the other three groups are all opposed to that. But out of that, there was a reaction to that.

I wanna call the, there is no such thing as race, no such thing, everything. It's colorblind.

It's

Liberalism, essentially. Neutralist.

Yeah, yeah.

Multicultural, yeah.

But it's not liberal. It's liberalism, but not what we call liberalists. Our political things get all messed up, right? We think liberal, you think Nancy Pelosi. But in this case, you can be a conservative liberal and that's what you're getting at, right?

Yeah, so it's conservative liberalism like, and I would

Sorry, no, this is what a lot of guys when they're saying post-war consensus, that's what they're talking about, right? They're talking about those guys. They're saying they have this idea of the world that you shouldn't have nations, that nations are, there's no rooted, tangible element to it.

It's really just, it's worldview. Everything's worldview, I guess. And so anyone can be incorporated based upon acknowledging, as it were, a cultural statement of faith. And normally that statement of faith basically says, I believe in freedom.

I believe in equality. You can come here and be an American, so.

And there are various degrees of it, but I would argue that, and they will not like it, but I would argue that maybe a lot of the framers of this document would fall into that category. And so that's a reaction to the woke and that's a category.

I think there's another reaction to the woke, which is the whole Nazi guys. Well, if they're gonna call us Nazis, we're gonna become Nazis. And Hitler was this great guy, I mean, and

Christian prince.

He said positive things about positive Christianity, which when you look at what he thought was Christianity, he didn't want Jesus that died on the cross. That's too weak.

I thought that was a joke, by the way, the first time I saw someone saying positive Christianity was a good thing. I thought that like, they just, they knew what it was and they were mocking it or something.

And then I realized, no, like they think positive Christianity, which is de-Judaizing the Bible even. I mean, it went that far. I have a book on it on my show. Well, I'd have to find it now, but there's a book that I have on the German Christian movement and it's horrific the way they tried to not just gut the Bible, to take sections out that were too Jewish, but they went after Martin Luther.

For all these guys who claim Martin Luther, I mean, they took, I think Mighty Fortress is even one of the hymns they took out of the hymnal, but they were trying to take hymns out that were too Jewish.

And don't quote me on that because I can't remember quite.

Well, they were rewriting scripture too. When Jesus says, I do not think I came to abolish the law of the prophets. They abolished that verse. That verse is gone.

Why?

Yeah, I'm not,.

But the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on the German Church Life was the organization that was, I would say the primary think tank and advocate for this brand of positive Christianity.

And there was all the trying to wed Catholicism with Protestantism as part of this. So there is sort of an ecumenical-ish nature to it.

Corey Maller actually, God bless his heart, he published a translation of their confession. And this is one of the statements. It says, the dispute over whether Jesus was Jewish or Aryan does not touch the essence of Jesus at all.

Jesus is not aware of human nature that reveals to us in his person, God's nature. That actually, so somebody told me that was them trying to have a consensus, like we're not gonna say, we don't have to matter whether he's Jewish or Aryan or not.

There were people saying he was not Jewish, some was Aryan, and we're saying that that debate doesn't matter.

You had guys like Walter Grudemann saying, Jesus was not a Jew. He wasn't even a Jew. He was for the destruction of Judaism, so you can't call him a Jew. And it's bonkers.

Well, this is heretical. Jesus does have a human nature. And human nature, this is the amazing thing about these guys. They want to have race realism, except for Jews, ethnic Jews. Oh, they don't exist anymore.

They didn't exist then. And they got all these convoluted arguments about they spoke Aramaic. And so they have these language arguments and it's all convoluted garbage.

Well, it's chalked through with higher criticism too, to justify it.

Well, obviously that's where Germany was the foundational bedrock of higher criticism. Christianity in Germany by the time of Nazism was so aided with liberalism.

Well, these guys too, they'll go after some of these guys, I'm assuming, who are positive about positive Christianity. They'll go after the Confessing Church. They'll go after Bonhoeffer as a heretic.

And when you read about the Confessing Church, there's two things that'll stand out if you really start digging into them, in my opinion. One is they weren't quite as against anti-Semitism as they're portrayed to be.

Because today that's the narrative, right? Like there was this strong stalwart Confessing Church and they loved the Jews and Hitler hated the Jews. That's not accurate. If you actually go back and look at the Confessing Church, that wasn't their issue primarily.

In fact, the Nuremberg laws happened and the Confessing Church didn't have much to say, except they did not want the Nazis controlling what they did inside the church. They didn't think they had ecclesiastical authority.

That was really the issue that made the conflict between Confessing Church and the Nazi party. So that's one of the things. And then the other thing is these guys are chalked through with neo-Orthodoxy, which I don't know where you stand on that, but I tend to lean towards, I think you get into heresy real quick with that stuff.

I don't see how you reconcile that with Orthodoxy, even though

Well, it was a response to the higher criticism of liberalism in Germany, that the church. So you had, that was it. You had neo-Orthodoxy and liberalism. You didn't have a whole lot of Orthodox Protestant churches.

And so

They were gone.

Yeah.

And so when we talk about, well, Germany was this hotbed of Christianity. Yeah, I'm not doubting that there were real legitimate Christians there, but I don't think Hitler had this heart to protect Christianity, rather to use Christianity.

And the positive Christianity was an example of his wanting to use the religion of the people to get to his ways. And so, anyways, we're kind of getting off track. We can keep going out if you want.

That's my fault.

Sorry.

No, it's my fault. It's my fault. But the point I was trying to make is there's a category of people that are responding to the woke who are Nazis and the way they, and they can come across very intelligent in their podcast episodes.

People always say, well, you haven't listened to their podcasts, but I have. They are very autistic sounding, very smart. But it's when they get online and the way they talk to people and they treat other people of other ethnicities that bitterness and anger and hatred comes out.

It's on display.

So you're talking about the Stone Choir podcast?

Yeah, I'm talking about them. I'm talking about that whole category of, they kind of lead that up. And so you have the woke people, you have the racism thing people, and then you have race is everything people with the Hitler people.

And then there's another category, which I think I would belong into. And is that race is real. Ethnicity is a real thing. We can have real natural affection. We don't have to give away our nation. Nations are real concrete things with real people.

And yet the gospel, the church unites people of all types of nationality, ethnicity, and race. And

Can I put a label on it or do you have one?

I don't have a label, put a label on it.

I think that what you just described with, and the labels I've used are, I think there's social justice thinking. And that's, I think also, so liberalism and social justice, I think both use the proposition nation, but they use it from different angles.

So there's the social justice guys. There's the liberal guys. There's, if you want to call it, some of the guys who want to, and I don't call them Nazi guys, just because I think the Nazi party died out.

It doesn't exist. Like the guys who are reviving some of that are, I guess you could say that they're grabbing onto some of the Nazi ideology, but it's still an ideology. And so all, everything I just described, I view as a product of modernity in some ways.

And that makes some of those guys mad that you would say that, because they think that they're being, they're the alternative or whatever. But I think what you described, which is the more, a little bit more holistic understanding of race and nationality, that's the pre-modern view.

That's the view that would have been assumed that was assumed by the biblical authors. That's the view that our Christian forefathers pretty much all had. It doesn't mean you're not gonna find statements where they say, they talk about race in very biological terms, because there is a biological component, but what you won't find is them reducing everything to DNA in a Darwinian sort of sense, where everything's nature, and it's all based upon what your DNA says.

And if you can do an ancestry .com match, that's the one thing. Of course, there's like that plays into it, which we acknowledge, but there is a more holistic view of this. And I think your statement captures some of that, but I think that's what you are.

I think you're thinking in more pre-modern terms. And a lot of the guys that you're disagreeing with are really grabbing onto an aspect of enlightenment rationalism, which reduces everything. That's why I've called it national reductionists or ethno reductionists.

I've tried to use the term reductionist on purpose, and that's my term. I haven't heard anyone else use that just to make that point the central thing. Like you're reducing all of this to something that there's some truth in what you're saying perhaps, but it's not just that.

And if you just see only that, you're blind to everything else. And that's a problem.

Proximity, Duty, and Natural Affection

Yeah, I think that actually can encapsulate one of the debates that constantly happens between the different groups is how, in one sense, it's simplistic. So you have the whole, who am I closer to and have more loyalty to?

Is it to my unbelieving next door neighbor or the born again Christian in Zimbabwe, right? And so there's the whole argument and everybody's very reductionistic about it when it's kind of complex, right?

And that's what I was trying to get in my statement. So one of the things I, so after I decided not to sign their statement, I just thought, well, let me see if I can throw together something. I didn't anticipate it for it to become like this.

It's not meant to be a, we're gonna put a website. Though people have asked me about doing that, I may do it. But yeah, you can bring that up and we'll read one of the things. But one of the things I

Yeah, I'll bring it up in a second.

How do I, how do I?

Yeah, I'll just pull it up. I am logged into a Twitter account. I didn't realize I was logged into somehow, but you know, whatever.

Now we all know you're anon, oh, he just.

No, no, no, it's not anon. No, TrueScript does not approve of or endorse the message that we are giving here. So I don't have time to change it though. So there we go. Ignore that.

Okay.

I thought we just outed you, dude. We just, what do they call that?

Oh, my anon account? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no.

That would be funny.

Okay, no.

Yeah, I'm one of those red, what does James White say? The red, red, I don't even know what it is. Blue eyed, red guys. Yeah, no, I'm not one of them.

You're like Hitler loves Jesus or something. That's the.

Oh gosh. Actually, you know what? I wonder, can I make this bigger? Is that, can you see that better now?

Am I?

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

Well, actually, I don't know about you. As long as, oh, I can't do it. All right, we're gonna leave it there. And do you wanna just read through it? How do you wanna do this?

Yeah, I was gonna highlight one thing with the conversation I was talking about regarding that debate, which is in the deny section. I'll just read it and then we'll come back. It says, I deny that competing loyalties and duties can be resolved without wisdom, prayer and reliance on scripture.

As the prioritization of these duties depend on the specific circumstances under God's providence. In other words, what I'm saying is that whole like, who am I more loyal to and who do I have more duty to is not a tweet.

It's a complex thing that has to be decided, right? So we have loyalties to our natural relationships and we have loyalties to the spiritual relationships and we have duties to both. And there are times when our duty to our, we'll just say our natural family overrides our duty to the visible church, spiritual.

And there are times when our duty to the spiritual overrides our duty to the natural family. And as a pastor, I have to constantly make those decisions. Like there are times when it's like, you know what'd be really cool?

If I spent this evening with my wife and kids, you know what's also cool? Is I have to go counsel this marriage that's falling apart. And okay, I have to make the decision there. At that point, my duty to the church, my responsibility there overrides that.

But there are other times when it's like, you know what? That thing can wait because I have responsibility to my family. And the whole about what am I closer to is really, in my opinion, just a stupid online thing that causes division when it's way more complex than anybody's making it out to be.

We have competing loyalties and duties and we've got connections and we gotta have wisdom to carry them out. And that's kind of the thing. That's one of the things I was getting that in my statement.

Ordo Amoris and the Limits of Proximity

Well, that's the Ordo Amoris proximity being the central defining feature of our duties and obligations, right?

Yeah.