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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnzen wishing you all a happy Friday on this ninth day of October 2015 and we are supposed to be joined by Jeff Durbin today, although Jeff has not yet called into our studio, so please join me in prayer about this.
Jeff Durbin who is the pastor of Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona and has worked for many years as a hospital chaplain. He is a popular speaker for camps, conferences, churches, and schools across the nation and he has participated in outreach to various different religions across the nation and has even engaged in public debate against atheism.
Jeff was featured on a series for the History Channel called The Stoned Age, that's s-t-o-n-e-d age, about the Christian approach to drugs and alcohol. Jeff hosts a weekly program heard on KPXQ in Arizona called Apologia Radio and he is heard internationally via podcast at ApologiaRadio .com and Jeff is a world champion martial artist with five black belts and has starred in popular video games and even played Michelangelo and Donatello for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle franchise, as well as Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat the World Tour.
And Jeff has been married to his bride Candy for over 14 years and Candy and Jeff have four children, Sage, Imagine, Sailor, and Stellar. Two more children are in heaven with Jesus because they went home to be with the Lord during pregnancy.
And today we are going to be discussing, God willing, if Jeff indeed does call us, we are going to be discussing martial arts and the Christian. Should a Christian participate in martial arts? There is much controversy over this subject especially because the martial arts are born or were born out of the mystic eastern religions in the orient and so on and there is paganism mixed in with these religions.
Obviously these are false religions, therefore should a Christian participate in these kinds of things that came out of such a background? Now obviously I've already told you that Jeff has five black belts and hopefully we'll find out specifically in a minute or so what kind of martial arts these black belts are in.
But he also, we will find out after this break, if he is still as a Christian actively involved in the martial arts. But we're going to be going to a station break right now and hopefully, God willing, Jeff Durbin will be on the line by the time we return.
So don't go away, hopefully we'll be right back with Jeff Durbin and our discussion on the Christian and martial arts.
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I've interviewed Ravi Zacharias and some of the most world-renowned Christians that you could even think of, but I think that I am most of all excited about interviewing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens.
Iron, Jeff Durbin. Hey, brother. Thank you so much. Sorry about the little bump there as a pastor. I had two big emergencies pop up this morning, so I was rushing to get to the phone,.
And I'm here now, so praise God. Amen. I already announced at the beginning that you have five black belts. I have about seven black belts, three brown, two tan, and seven pairs of suspenders. Very good.
What specifically are your black belts in?
Well, I started martial arts when I was four years old, and I started in Holland. My dad was military, and so he retired actually from the Air Force, but I started in Holland. Judo was really big in Holland, so I started with that style.
Then, as time went by, we moved to Japan, and I grew up in northern Honshu in Misawa Air Force Base. I grew up in doing two different styles in Japan. I did a combat taekwondo system and a karate system.
When I got back to the United States, I stayed in those two styles, and I have four black belts in a combat taekwondo system, which is very different than, say, an Olympic style or sports style. I have a first-degree black belt in a combat Japanese karate system.
It's basically shore and roof.
Were you a Christian when you developed these gifts?
Well, I grew up in a home that was not a Christian home, and so I heard the gospel for the first time when I was about 16 years old, and that was by watching television and seeing, when I got home from teaching karate one night, Billy Graham's Crusade.
No, I grew up in a non-Christian home, not under the hearing of the gospel, doing martial arts. My whole life was dedicated to martial arts. It was day and night. No, I wasn't a Christian, but I was, I think, from 13 years old until 22 years old.
I was competing on an international level, really, and competing across the country every weekend. It was my whole entire life, training every single day, full-time professional. I went pro, actually, at, I think, about 13 or 14 years old.
Wow.
And so it was my whole life and my career, and ultimately, yeah. It led to, as you mentioned, Ninja Turtles. It led to a lot of stuff. I was a world champion, a national champion, and that led to stuff where people would see me and pick me up for things, so I ended up doing Ninja Turtles.
I played Michelangelo in Donatello in stuff for the Ninja Turtles franchise for the TV show stuff they had done, and I also did the stunt choreography for that, the fight scene choreography for that, and I did a bunch of other stuff, but I did also Mortal Kombat.
I played Johnny Cage in Nightwolf in the World Tour, which is like a multi-million-dollar stage production that went around the world and across the United States. I did the World Tour like a vet.
Now, how did they discover you and your gifts in martial arts to hire you for those unique roles and so on?
Yeah, it was interesting. High school is really interesting in my own mind, because I don't remember doing a lot of it.
Neither do I, for different reasons.
We all know why, Chris. For high school for me, I came home every day from school. I would usually get a snack to eat, and I would just literally throw my gear on, and I would go for a run. We had to run five miles a day because I was competing professionally, and then I would go, and I would train with my instructor, who to this day is one of the most respected instructors in terms of competition for forms, which is my specialty.
I also love to do fighting, but the forms, which is like the open floor gymnastics routine with karate, that was my specialty. So I would go train with him, and so I would leave every weekend to a different state.
I was on planes virtually every weekend across the nation, but when I would do these tournaments, I would usually up on stage for the nighttime final. The way that martial arts competitions work was you would go to a national tournament, and you would compete in the division in the daytime, and maybe you might have upwards of 40, 50 people in that division from across the nation competing black belt level, and the winner of that competition goes and has to run off against the other black belts that day to see who basically are like a top three to five people that would be on stage for the finals that night.
So the people who go to the finals in the nighttime finals for a martial arts competition that I was involved in are the ones that not only won their division, but they won the runoff, and now they're on stage.
So it's essentially trying to pull together the best of the best from that competition in that day, and what would happen is sometimes in these tournaments, you would have talent scouts, casting agents, or whatever for different productions, and they would go and they would watch, and for Mortal Kombat, it was really interesting.
I was in Boston at these national karate championships, and I went up and I did my forearm, and as I'm walking out of the ring, a stranger walks up to me with a clipboard, and he says, what size is your waist?
And I was like, excuse me? He says, your waist size. What size pants do you wear? I was like, sorry, who are you? And he said, I'm such a David Fishoff production. We've managed the tour of stones, and he mentions all these famous fans in all these different shows.
He says, we're doing Mortal Kombat, and we would like you to play the part of Johnny Cage. And so that's how that came up, is they would come up to me and they'd say, hey, I saw you doing your stuff, and we'd like you to do this or that.
And so sometimes things would happen like that for people. For Ninja Turtles, it was a local studio that has done a lot of really big things for a lot of video games and television, and I had a relationship with them.
I had done some work for them and some choreography for them, and they called me one day. It was cool. I'll never forget it. They called me one day, and they said, hey, we need you to come in, and we can't tell you for what, but we need you to come in right away and sign some contracts.
And so I walk into the studio, and I'm signing all this paperwork from Hasbro, Tonka, Toys, and all these different things, basically promising secrecy. And I don't even know what I'm doing yet. It's just promising I won't talk about it.
And then I go into a boardroom with all director and producers, and they said, we're working on Ninja Turtles, and we want you to do the stunt work and the choreography for what we're doing. And so that's how I got Ninja Turtles.
Wow. And how long did that career last for you?
Well, I did competition, I think, from about 13 years old to 22 is what I can remember. And so I was competing most of that time full time, and teaching at the same time and doing all these other things, but then some video game work for Mission Impossible, the video game for Age of Empires 2, which is a very famous Microsoft game, and just a bunch of other stuff.
What, Marcus, you didn't know I did that? Age of Empires 2? Yeah, I did some work for that. Marcus is in the back, I guess, tripping out over that. So yeah, I did that full time. I forget where the question was going, but I did all that kind of full time.
And what I ended up doing was opening my own martial arts school after I had basically accomplished everything I wanted to in the martial arts. I wanted to win all of these major martial arts championships.
It was a dream of mine. I mean, these were like tournaments that Chuck Norris competed at. They're very famous tournaments. I wanted to win all those. I wanted to do some TV stuff and some movie stuff.
And I basically accomplished in the martial arts everything that I wanted to accomplish. I opened my own martial arts school, and it was very successful. We had at one point about 300 families in attendance at my school.
That's kind of how I moved my way out of it. It ended up being basically God called me into ministry, and he used me owning my own martial arts business and being the boss there and the owner there to be able to have time to do ministry.
And it got to the point many years ago that God made it very, very clear to me that it was time to let go of the martial arts school, and it was time to let go of all that because he was calling me at that point to focus only on ministry.
And the last thing that I've done that was like a big thing for martial arts was in, I think, 2005 MTV was doing a fight series called The Final Foo. And they had auditioned 30 ,000 martial artists from across the country, but they had a consultant that had told them, you need to have some world champions in this to really raise the level of it and get it some respect.
And so he had told MTV, here's five world champions that you need to get a hold of and get on the show. And so MTV contacted my manager at the time and said, we want to get Jeff on the fight series. And I went out, I talked to the producers and the director, I liked it.
And that's a long story in itself. It ended up not being really a fight series, full contact, like I had thought. But that was the last thing I did for.
Martial arts was in 2005 for MTV. Yeah, my friend, Buzz Taylor, his daughter, Tiffany, has at least two black belts. I don't know if she has more than that. And I believe they are in Taekwondo, in either Judo or Jiu Jitsu.
But and she's also, I don't know what you call a female marksman, do you call marks persons or marks women? But she's, she's, I'm sorry, a marks lady, a marks lady. Well, she should she should be in James Bond movies, this girl.
I mean, she's not not to be rescued by James Bond, but to rescue him. But and she is a devout Christian, and which is going to lead to our topic. Should a Christian participate in these things in a moment?
What can you tell us, if anything, about the origins of the martial.
Arts that you participated in? Well, the martial arts styles that I did, were, were combat systems. And so that the the form of Taekwondo that I did was Chundokwon Taekwondo. And it was basically a combat system of Taekwondo that was meant for battlefields.
It was meant for self-defense, for defending land, property, it was a military combat system of Taekwondo. And the karate system that I did was essentially the same. It was a combat form of karate. And so there's this discussion that needs to be had when you're talking about martial arts and the Christian.
And that is that there are systems of martial arts that in their origin, when they began, they began as a self-defense system. They were, they were people developing weapons and fighting styles that were meant for the defense of land, property, or person.
And so that's what it was made for. And now there may have been religious beliefs held by those practitioners and those developing the system. That's true. There were, they came from a particular context.
They may not have been Christian. They may have have had Eastern beliefs and all the rest, but the system itself was developed as a martial science, a fighting science. It was essentially, here's how the body works.
This is what it can do. This is what it can't do. And so if you were developing, say, arm bars and locks, you were saying, okay, the body's designed to do this. We need to make it do this. So we incapacitate the attacker and all the rest.
Here's how we can deliver a deadly blow to an attacker. So they basically developed a martial science, a fighting science, on how do we actually defend ourselves in a way that's effective. And they used all the physics, they used essentially math, they used everything they could to figure out what's the most effective way to defend yourself against an attacker.
And so again, that's a system developed as a martial science. And whatever the personal religious beliefs were of the person developing it, they really ultimately had no bearing on the science itself of how do you actually develop a system to be effective in self-defense.
Now, there are martial arts systems that began because of the spiritual belief of the practitioner or the person developing the system. So for example, you've got Tai Chi. That's a system that was developed from the bottom, based upon a worldview.
And so that becomes the foundation of the system itself. So I'll give you an example that might be easier for people. Yoga. Yoga has, these are actual positions of worship. This is a pagan system of worship that has become for people, stretches, and this is a good way to develop muscle coordination and flexibility.
And so people say, we know it can be detached. Well, not really, because the system itself was actually started out of a pagan worship system. And these are actual worship positions that have within them an attachment to a core.
That core cannot be really taken away from its religious beliefs. And so you can do these moves and maybe they're beneficial for you in stretching and everything else, but there's no way ultimately to detach it from its foundation.
So there are two ways, at least two different kinds of martial arts. There are martial arts systems that are martial science. They are about combat. They are about self-defense. And the other one is a system that might be attached to a particular religious philosophy.
And again, that would be a system like Tai Chi. It's built upon the idea of energy within the earth and the energy and meridians in the body. And we draw from this through meditation and deep focus energy.
And now they may also have within those systems, the ability to properly coordinate an attack or defense to be able to move, maneuver around an attacker and use their energy against them, of course. But the system itself, you'll watch when you watch those classes and the instruction, it really cannot be divorced from its spiritual foundations.
And so Qi Gong, you've got Tai Chi, you have systems that cannot be divorced, but you have combat systems that really have nothing to do with the spiritual beliefs of any practitioners. You could be a Christian who practices combat Taekwondo or a Buddhist who practices combat Taekwondo or a Mormon who practices combat Taekwondo because your spiritual beliefs really have no impact on the science itself of, this is how you put an armbar on somebody, or this is how you choke out an attacker.
This is how you lock somebody up on the ground. You can be a Christian, a Buddhist or whatever, and that system itself is just how the body works. And so when someone says, I don't think Christians should practice martial arts, um, that's difficult for me to accept because knowing what I know about the martial arts and the system, when I taught martial arts as the master level instructor, as a certified master in the martial arts, I taught it.
Um, now I, by the way, I did take opportunities to preach the gospel to get them in class and things like that and on the side and create relationships with people to preach the gospel to them. But in class, I was teaching women how to eye gouge a man, how to, um, trap their arm and to get in a position to be able to incapacitate the attacker.
And that didn't matter if I was a Christian or they were a Christian. It was just about, this is how the human body works. This is the leads to the laws of physics. This is how you throw the person. And, uh, you're able to divorce, um, that system from the spiritual beliefs of any.
Practitioner. We're going to be going to work. We're going to be going to a break right now and picking up where you left off when we return from the break. Uh, if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Jeff Durbin, uh, on the issue of should a Christian participate in martial arts?
Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. And if you send in an email, please include at least your first name, your city and state of residence and your country of residence.
If you live outside of the USA, that's chrisarnson at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with ninja mutant turtle, teenage mutant ninja turtle, Jeff Durbin.
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Welcome back. This is Chris Lawrence and if you just tuned us in, our guest today is Jeff Durbin who is a pastor of Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona and he is also a host on Apologia Radio and Apologia Television and he has five black belts in various martial arts.
In fact, he's a world champion martial artist and we are discussing today whether or not a Christian can participate in martial arts and obviously by now you've already guessed where our guest stands on that issue.
And if you have any questions of your own, whether you agree or disagree with them, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Before I return to our discussion, I just want to thank another one of our sponsors, Providence Baptist Church of Norfolk, Massachusetts, for making Iron Sharpens Iron possible.
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Earlier I announced your children's names. I love the friend Joe Ignacio who has a son named Sage. Is Sage your daughter or son?
Son. He's my oldest. He's 16 years old. Sage Imogen and Sailor and Stellar is my youngest boy and we call him Turtle. I wonder how long he'll be happy about that. I don't think I don't ever call him Stellar and I would feel weird to call him that.
I just call.
Him Turtle. We all heard Olympic. Was it a snowboarder or a skier who was named Sage? Not long ago. Won some medals. I think it was a snowboarder. Yeah, that's a cool name. You were talking about the different martial arts and how some actually came out of Asian religions, occultic religions and so on.
Some are not separable from that type of thought and yet there are other types of martial arts that can be participated in without any inclusion of those eastern religions. The Israeli martial arts, the Krav Maga, our mutual friend James White's son.
Is involved in that. What do you know about that martial art? It's awesome and I think it's an excellent example. That particular style is an excellent example of what I'm talking about in terms of you have a martial art system that is focusing upon the combat aspect devoid of any spiritual practices within it versus the kind of system that was just formed on the basis of initially at least the spiritual practices, the religious practices.
Again, yoga would be a great example of that. I think it's good to think about it in terms of yoga because yoga has as its foundation a religious practice and the positions are even based upon the religious philosophy.
Krav Maga, excellent system. It's very effective. Again, it's a martial science. It's a fighting science. This is the quickest way to get from point A to point B. Here's how you take your opponent off of balance.
These are the places that you can strike where they're most vulnerable. This is where you can hit somebody where they can't see again. This is where you can hit somebody so they fall asleep. Those sorts of things.
The system itself is based upon combat. It's a great system. I will say that this is a really important thing I think for people to hear. I'm very passionate about this. I think I'm always going to remain passionate about this.
Quality of martial arts is very, very important. I think if a Christian is going to go to a martial arts school, they need to understand that... I think I have insight here that it would be very, very important for people to hear there are martial arts schools everywhere.
Those can be Chinese Kung Fu. They can be Korean Taekwondo. They could be Japanese Karate. They could be Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. They're everywhere. But quality is very, very important because I can tell you in my experience there were people that have martial arts schools opened up around me that I have personal knowledge that the person who had opened the martial arts school had never taken a day of martial arts in their life.
They thought it was a good business opportunity and they opened a school based upon the fact that it would make money and they would find somebody who was able to maybe teach and they would pay this person.
That person maybe wasn't even a black belt. They were maybe a green belt or a purple belt, which is an intermediate level at another school. I saw those sorts of things happening, believe it or not, at least a dozen times in Arizona where I'm at.
Those kinds of scenarios. The quality is very important, but that quality question needs to go alongside the question of where is this instructor coming from? Is he going to teach a religious philosophy alongside or with the martial arts program?
So, for example, there was an excellent school in town here that was a Wing Chun program. Wing Chun is an awesome system in terms of the science of being able to trap another person. It's an excellent system for the hands.
Bruce Lee, his core system for the hands was Wing Chun. He traded with my instructor. He made a deal with my instructor. He would teach my instructor, my grandmaster, Jun Ri. He would teach him how to punch and trap if Jun Ri would teach him how to kick.
And when you see Bruce Lee's kicks, those are the kicks from my system that my grandmaster taught Bruce Lee. They had a friendship with each other. But Wing Chun is an awesome system. Well, this local school was an excellent Wing Chun school that taught a very, very traditional combat-oriented style of Wing Chun.
However, the instructor himself had an attachment to the spiritual philosophies of the Chinese and that system and some of the practitioners. What he would do is he would blend them together and he would not allow them to be divorced.
Now, you could have divorced it, the combat element from the spiritual beliefs of some of the original practitioners, but he had sort of an affinity to these early practitioners and he loved their philosophies.
And so when I went to go meet this man and see how he taught his classes, I saw that he was unwilling to divorce. And so that's something people need to think about, if you're a Christian and you're going to either get involved yourself or get your child involved, it's vitally important to go and do some research.
The person that's teaching, do they have any experience, say, in competition and putting their system to the test? Are they good at what they do? Who are they certified by? Where'd they get their belt from?
How long have they been practicing? How long have they been teaching? And it's okay to say, if somebody says, well, I've been doing martial arts for two or three years and I'm not quite a black belt yet or to have the ability to teach, but people really enjoy the classes, I would say still not a good idea to invest your time or money in that school.
But I would also, I would ask direct questions to the instructor. I would say, do you teach any kind of Eastern philosophy or religious belief system in your system? Because I'm unwilling to do that. I will not participate in that sort of a thing as a Christian.
And if that's a part of the program that I have to acknowledge particular truths or practice certain things that are spiritual in their foundations, I can't participate in that and won't. And so you've got to ask these hard questions.
And it really comes down, I hate to seem mean-spirited, but are you any good? That's a good question. Are you any good at all? And prove it. I mean, not with me on the spot, like don't punch me in the mouth or anything, but like, you know, prove it.
Like, you know, are you, do you have any kind of a history in competition? And where are your certificates? And who authorized you to be able to teach? Those are questions that need to be asked because just going to a karate program could be a grand waste of time and money going to a person that has no right really teaching.
And as a Christian, it's really important to be able to ask the hard questions. Are you going to require me to believe in and practice any kind of these, of this Eastern mysticism or these philosophies?
Yeah, and.
Obviously an even greater concern is that your child could get hurt if somebody who's not experienced as they should be are teaching your child or children. And of course, and if the person is really unskilled or untrained, your child might wind up hurting them very seriously.
Well, yeah, and it's, you know, I have so many stories, I could tell about this, but, you know, I would, and this is not in any way opposed, just in the sense of like, this is a, I think, gift to me to be able to have such great instructors my whole life.
But I would have people come into my school that were second and third degree black belts in other martial arts programs. They would come into my school and they would be depressed for a while. I mean, I distinctly remember people saying that they were so upset.
And when I would ask them, well, why are you so upset? They would say, because they feel like I don't know anything. And they would be at the level of some of my intermediate belts coming from a school where they were a second or third degree black belt.
And they were just really catching up to the quality of some of my greener purple belts, which is an intermediate level. And so that's something. I'd have people say, hey, I got in a fight and I got beat up bad by somebody that I shouldn't have got beat up by.
The person jumped me, attacked me, and I couldn't defend myself. And I've been in martial arts my whole life. I mean, that stuff really counts. That really matters. I mean, if you're going to invest time and money into something, it ought to be good.
It ought to be quality. And you should know that if I've been training in the system for a long time, I can defend myself really against anybody. I may not be able to beat them, but I can get away. I can incapacitate the person for at least a moment to where I could escape.
You know, this system, and I've been taught to such a level that I know that I can defend myself against really any attacker and at least get away and be safe.
And you were mentioning Tai Chi before. Is Tai Chi where you'll see very often even elderly people doing these poses and frozen in time and moving very slowly in the park and so on?
Yes.
So that's actually a martial art, like a fighting technique?
Well, the interesting thing is, yes, because there's a system of being able to use your opponent's energy and transfer energy and throw them off balance and things like that. So they do a martial aspect to it, a fighting aspect to it.
But it's beginnings, it's root beliefs and foundations as to how, why are you moving this way? And how do you become good at this? All of that stuff is really rooted in Eastern philosophy about the world.
In the world, you get packed into the actual training. Now, I know, listen, people might say, there's a little contradiction there. Jeff's always talking about no neutrality, this myth of neutrality. Well, that's in terms of ultimate worldview stuff, but you can do science as a Christian in a sense of observation or an atheist and perform with certain tools that the tool itself is just a tool.
But when it comes to the issue of martial arts, the martial science aspect, it can be divorced from the worldview of the practitioner that started it because it's just a martial science. But Tai Chi is just one of those systems that you really can't.
I taught in a school for a period of about two years with a guy who is a master in Tai Chi as well. And I can tell you, this man spent, I mean, I'm not kidding you when I say that he spent hours every day trying to pull energy from the earth and to be able to send that energy out.
And he would sit in trances and meditation for hours a day as a master of Tai Chi. And he believed in all of these really strange aspects and philosophies. And it was really at the root of what he taught in Tai Chi.
And so I was able to see there's really no divorcing that from its foundation. But when I would teach, it was just about, here's your attacker's weaknesses. Here's how you're able to maneuver away from them and angle.
This is the best way to strike with your hands. Here's where you need to hit them. Here's how you fight multiple attackers. Anything that I would speak as a Christian outside of that, they understood.
This is not the karate speaking now. This is the Christian. And so they understood the difference. And so, yes, you can divorce some martial arts systems from the beginning and the.
Combat aspects. But some, it's just not possible. Now, I've gone to tournaments and even just regular martial arts classes that I've witnessed when parents have taken their children, their Christian parents have taken their children there.
And you're watching the kids do their thing. And I have seen what appears to be the group bowing to an idol during, I don't know which martial art it was, whether it was karate or what it was. But is that the kind of thing that your child can appropriately do and just not view it in the same way as perhaps the more serious person involved in Eastern religion is doing this?
Can a kid or should a parent allow a kid to do that kind of a thing when, you know, we're obviously commanded not to bow to idols?
No. I mean, the answer is no. I mean, I think fundamentally no. And that's what I meant by when you are finding a martial arts school, you need to look for things like that. Is the instructor going to have us all bow and kneel to an idol?
And that sort of thing does take place. I know there's some local Aikido schools that you can separate Aikido from the spiritual beliefs of the original practitioners, but there's an Aikido school locally that before class starts, they turn and they face and they bow towards this idol.
And so those are the sorts of things you're looking for, because God says in his law, you shall have no other gods before me. And so that doesn't mean, like, in priority, like, you know, don't put them ahead of me.
God's saying, don't have any other gods in my sight. And you should not make a graven image, you should not have an idol that even looks like God, and that would certainly mean you're not to bow to any idol.
And so I think as a Christian, no. There's just no, you cannot separate that. And I don't think there's any way for a Christian to bow and respect any idol. Those are idols that people have gone to hell worshiping, and you can show any respect to an idol or bow towards an idol, I think, fundamentally goes against all that we're to be and what we're to do.
And so no, and so those are the sorts of things that I'm talking about. You need to find a school, again, that is quality and that is committed to the martial science aspect, to the physical benefits, that come along with martial arts, and they're not trying to teach you any kind of Eastern philosophy.
It's really about the science itself and the art. You know, a good system, I think that this can be said. A great system that displays that today would be, say, great Jiu-Jitsu. It's a ground fighting, Jiu-Jitsu fighting system that I think I've never even seen personally.
Now, there might be schools that do it, because that's just what the instructor does, but I've never even seen in any Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu schools myself any of that spiritual element or, you know, you bow to this idol, you believe this philosophy.
It's about the science of how to lock the body up, how to maneuver on the ground. That's another style thing, modern style, very popular today, where you wouldn't see those sorts of things. You would just see the martial science aspect of it there.
That would be a very, I think, safe system. But again, it's very important to go to the school, to talk to the instructor, to ask those questions, and I think it's possible to go to a school and just say to the instructor, look, I really love what you do.
I think you're worth what you're asking for in terms of financially, and I'm willing to pay that, but I just want you to know ahead of time, as a Christian, I can't practice any of the spiritual aspects that come alongside this art, and make sure you express that to the instructor so there's no conflict in the future.
A Christian in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, asks, is there a website where you can weed out charlatans who are posing as martial arts instructors? And even more important, is there a Christian website or organization you can go to to determine which of the martial arts instructors are actually incorporating Eastern religions into their classes?
You know, I personally am not aware of a Christian website that shows that somebody really is qualified to teach and that sort of thing. I'm not personally aware of that. It's been a long time since I've been teaching.
There are some websites, not necessarily run by Christians, that do talk about these things. There's a website called BULSHIDO, it's B-U-L-L-S-H-I-D-O, and they do a lot of exposure of people who don't really have qualifications and things like that, and I would do a little looking around.
It's acceptable to Google search your instructor, look at their website. I would go and find out what organizations are they attached to. This is a particularly important thing, too. I can show you my certificate of who certified me, who qualified me, the national organization that still exists with respected, qualified martial artists who are part of the board of those organizations.
I can show you those documents, I can show you that paperwork. You need to be able to have an instructor that can do the same, that can say, listen, we're not necessarily run by that organization, but that is the organization I've got my belt through, and these are people that recognize me.
If you think about it, it's not exactly apples to apples here, but in terms of ministry, where the elders lay hands on a person, and they're qualifying that person, saying, we acknowledge within this person these gifts, and they're laying hands on that person.
Paul tells us not to lay hands on anybody too quickly, right? And that's, I think, because there's an authority there where you see, here's people who are qualified that are recognizing qualifications in another.
Their qualifications are either there or not there, and when you have a governing body of a martial arts organization with respected martial artists who essentially are laying hands on a person, saying, we see these gifts there, we see these qualifications, this person's a good martial artist, they have mastered the advanced level, and they're qualified to teach.
Those are things that I think are important, and I think if Christians can think in those terms, it is important to go to a school with instructors that have the qualifications and have people that have said over his life, he's qualified to teach, and he's qualified as a martial artist.
Have you ever, I'm assuming unintentionally, seriously injured somebody during a professional.
Competition? Wow. Seriously injured, no. When I was in the final foo, and I'm thinking back to competition, when I was in the final foo, one of the fights that I had on the final foo, a lot of it you didn't get to see on the air, but that fight got pretty rough.
I was told it was going to be full contact, so I agreed to do the fight series because it was full contact and knockout, and so that's the kind of fighting I wanted to do, because I don't like point fighting where you don't really, I mean, judges can see or not see particular points, and full contact is good because whoever's left standing wins, and so I agreed to do MTV because it was full contact, and when I got to LA to start filming, we discovered that there was no hitting to the head, and it was light contact to the body, and so they just changed it.
MTV, believe it or not, lied, and there was a fight on that series where it got pretty brutal. They didn't show a lot of it on television, but there was a lot of stuff behind the scenes where the person that I was firing wouldn't let up in his contact, and so I said, listen, if this is light contact, it's light contact, but if he wants to go heavy, I'm going on heavy, and this wasn't on the air, but the person, one of the judges said, just go heavy, and so that fight got pretty brutal, because at some point, I felt like I was just defending myself in a fight, and so he walked away limping and with bruises all over his body, and I ended up getting in a lot of trouble because I knocked him out of the ring and things like that, so that fight got a little aggressive.
That's not common. Usually, there's a lot of control and things like that. I have had to use martial arts in my life outside of the dojo and outside of the ring to defend myself, and I thank God. I truly thank God for my experience in martial arts, because, and this is, we haven't talked about this yet, but this is vitally important.
Martial arts, I'm so passionate about because of what it teaches a person. It teaches them self-awareness. It teaches them control of their own. It teaches them a level of confidence that they know, I know how to defend myself, and so those things that I learned in a martial art have become part of the core of really who I am as a person and a sense of my self-awareness and those sorts of things, and so I can tell you this without any question.
My martial arts training has saved my life. When I got back from Japan to the States, I grew up in Washington, D .C., right outside of D .C., and I can tell you that there were numerous instances where I had to defend myself in and around Washington, D .C., and I don't know that I would have ever survived those encounters if I didn't know the martial art.
It absolutely saved my life, and so, yeah, I think that those, there have been times where I have used martial arts to severely injure people, and thank God for my training because I was able to determine when enough was enough and control myself and not be overrun by fear in those moments, but to be able to think clearly.
I'll give you an example. This happened about three years ago. I was at nighttime going into a parking lot to a grocery store in Arizona, and there was a group of young adults real late at night, around midnight, outside of this store, and I could, and my self-awareness kicks in as a martial artist.
I noticed these men, and I noticed that they were looking at me, and they were talking to each other about me, and they were up to something, and as I started to walk past them, one of the larger ones walked over to me, and he immediately tried to get my attention.
He said, hey, man, look over there real fast. Look over there. Look, look, look, look, look, and he starts pointing away down the road, and I could tell that he was balling up his right hand to swing at me to get me to look the other way so he can hit me, and so I'm looking right at him, and I'm not looking where he's going, and his friends are giddy waiting for him to hit me, and so his left hand was up near his chest while his right hand was getting ready to swing at me, and immediately before he took a swing at me, I grabbed his hand, and I locked it against his chest and put him into a wrist lock and pushed it into his stomach, and he squatted over with his hand now locked into his chest, and he said, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, all right, man, okay, and I walked around him, but he was getting ready to take a swing at me, and I didn't have to hit him.
I didn't have to take him down to the ground. I just put my hand on his wrist and locked it against his body so that his wrist was locked, and so he knew to not swing at me, but there was an instance where, again, I was getting ready to get attacked by them.
I don't know what ever happened to me if I didn't see it coming, and I got knocked down to the ground, but I was able to use a wrist lock on somebody, which is essentially pain compliance. Police officers use it all the time to get somebody to comply with you without doing, like, real damage to them, so, again, that's an important aspect of martial arts as well is being able to know where's the line, where do I not cross, and how do I actually control myself so that I'm not run by fear in this moment so I can't respond.
Those are all wonderful elements of the martial arts and what they teach you, and I, for one, want my children to know that. I teach my boys and my daughter. My oldest daughter doesn't really care, and so I'm working on her, but my other kids, they are training, and they are learning, and for me, it's important to learn at least how to defend themselves.
Yeah, I once rendered three men unconscious with a clipboard at a church business meeting, so it's kind of a fun experience. We do have CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York wants to know, is there something innately sinful in learning an activity such as a martial art where you are intentionally trying to cause someone physical pain or harm even when they pose no real threat to you?
I am speaking here of inside of a professional ring, of course, or in a martial arts classroom. That's an interesting question because that question even comes up with professional boxing, that comes up with all kinds of contact sports.
There are some even religious groups that prohibit their members from being involved in things where you're intentionally trying to hurt somebody. Obviously, we know that in professional prize fighting, you are trying to knock somebody unconscious, so is that an appropriate Christian intention.
When you're involved in an activity like that? I would start with the bottom of that, and that needs to be said. In terms of training and in practice and those sorts of things, the Bible does give us clear indication that God is perfectly okay with us developing systems of self-defense and even warfare.
There's a verse in the Bible that says, Blessed be the Lord my rock who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle. That's the God we worship. That's pretty powerful. In terms of training and self-defense, that's awesome.
You also have Exodus 22. You can kill a thief without breaking and entering. Judges 15, Samson killing many Philistines with a jawbone of an ass. You also have Luke 11. Jesus mentioning a strong man armed keeps his palace of desert in peace.
Nehemiah 4, the builders of the wall will arm themselves. Luke 22. Jesus tells the disciples to buy a sword. By the way, reading off of a page from Contra-Mundum .org in reference to Dr. Bonson's debate on gun control.
But that's the self-defense aspect. But then you get to the great question of, what about the actual contact sport with this? I would say this. I understand the sensitivities of the person who says that I don't like to see another image bearer of God being beat up and those sorts of things.
I would say this. If you had an instance where it was sort of like, picture Rome for a moment, where people were being thrown into a ring, maybe against their will. They're just murdering each other, killing each other.
You know, it's just for sport and fun. The destruction of another human being, maybe death. And, you know, there's that aspect, the brutality aspect. And then there's the aspect of professional fighting with control that demonstrates skill that both practitioners agree to, submit to, and volunteer for.
There is a difference between those two worlds. Now, when you have, say, a fighting organization that is just about simple brutality and not skill and control and professionalism, I would be against that.
But if you have a fighting organization that's about self-control, the ability to control the body, the ability to master your opponent's balance, and to show the actual skill while demonstrating respect, professionalism, control for your opponent, I think that that's a very good thing.
So, for example, the martial arts competitions that I engaged in, it was about control. It was about respect for one another. We hugged each other before, after. We had great relationships with each other and ate with each other afterward.
We did not hate each other. There was no violence towards one another in a sense of personal relationship. It was about professionalism and the actual sport. So there's that aspect. And so, I think as Christians, we need to recognize we live in a fallen world.
We have systems of warfare because of that. God actually has positive things to say about it in his word. And when we look in terms of, okay, how do we sharpen these skills through competition? I think there's a way to do it professionally that's not simply about brutality.
It's not simply about blood and gore, but it's about skill. Now, again, if there's an organization that is just about the brutality and it's simple, just people just have a fetish about seeing other people hurt, I think that that's a problem.
And that's obviously from a corrupt heart that we would love that sort of a thing. But if you have an organization that's about professionalism, skill, self-control, and the abilities themselves, I think that's a good thing.
Don't forget, when two practitioners that are experts walk into that ring, they're submitting to this. They're trying to show respect for one another. They are volunteering for this. And it's not about the brutality, but it's about the skill.
I think that that's a good thing as Christians. I think we can get behind that. Someone might just be very sensitive and they might say, I just don't like violence. I would say, well, let's have a good cry and let's recognize we live in a fallen world.
There are systems of warfare that are okay to develop. God is said to be blessed because he trains our hands for battle, our fingers for war, or however it's what I'm going to quote it incorrectly there.
But look, the scriptures are filled with examples of self-defense is a good thing. Warfare even being seen with God's blessing upon it. We live in a fallen world, I believe with all my heart, we're moving to a place one day where through the gospel and God's redemption, we put away our weapons of warfare and those sorts of things.
We're not there yet. We still live in a world that there's what is hostilities, where there are people who attack one another, where we have people who lie in wait for others. And I think it's good for us to develop systems that develop equalizers against those sort of attackers.
And I believe it's good for us to develop competition because listen, those competitions actually escalate that sport or that system. They may, in terms of making it better through competition, we get better at things.
We see what doesn't work, what does, what is efficient and what's inefficient. So competition is necessary to really make a style of what it is to make it better. I can tell you this, just I'll say this briefly.
When I was in the 90s, I was competing. Me and a bunch of other guys were innovators in our sport in terms of bringing it to where it was. We were doing things in the 90s that people that were like superstars, like Chuck Norris in the 70s and 80s and guys like that.
They were nowhere near on the level of some of the guys that were competing in the 90s. I mean, the sport leapt up to a whole different level. But now when I look at guys competing today in the competition circuit that I was on, I look at them and I'm like, whoa, that wasn't even possible.
Humanly speaking, when I was competing, we thought we had tapped it out. We thought we got to like, this is as far as we can go with our bodies and with the sport. It was pretty good. Now I see these guys through competition that are just light years ahead of where we were in.
Competition just in the 90s. We're going to go to a station break right now. Dan in Arizona, if you could hold on, we will get to your question, God willing, right after these messages from our sponsors.
If anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question for Jeff Durbin on martial arts and when they are appropriate for a Christian and when they are not, our email address is chrizarnsen at gmail .com.
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Welcome back. This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in for the last hour, we have been interviewing Jeff Durbin, who is the pastor of Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona. And we have been discussing the Christian and martial arts.
And Jeff himself has earned five black belts and is a world champion martial artist. And in addition to being one of the, or two of the, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the TV franchise. I just want to quickly announce our lineup for next week on Iron Sharpens Iron.
This Monday, the 12th of October, we have Peter Hubbard is going to discuss his book, Love Into Light, the Gospel, the Homosexual, and the Church. On Tuesday, the 13th of October, we've got Pastor Scott Meadows addressing, introducing the doctrines of sovereign grace to anti-Calvinist fundamentalists.
We have on Wednesday, October 14th, world-renowned creationist apologist Ken Ham is going to be on our program. And on Thursday, October 15th, we have Bjorn Storm. Sounds like a Norwegian professional wrestler.
Bjorn Storm, who is actually from Norway. And he's going to be giving us an update and a description of how Christianity is thriving in Scandinavia and Norway in particular. Why am I addressing that? Because I'm half Norwegian and it's because it's my talk show.
I can do whatever I want to do. And on Friday, we have someone I know that our guest, Jeff Durbin, is familiar with. On Friday, the 16th of October, we have Sam Frost. And he is going to be addressing something that our guest today has already addressed on this program.
Sam Frost is going to be discussing his own personal journey out of hyper-preterism. So mark your calendars for all of those exciting programs, and we hope that you tune in and listen to those. We do have a listener who has a question for Jeff Durbin.
Pastor Dan at Trinity Baptist Church in Globe, Arizona. And Pastor Dan says, I have had my son in Taekwondo since he was four. He is now nine. He achieved a black belt at an ATA school. We've since moved to Globe, Arizona, you know where that is, and are sending him off to WTF school.
He had to start over again. He is he is starting to lose interest in the martial arts and becoming interested in soccer. How hard should I push him toward the martial arts, or should I just let him go his own way?
How hard will it be for him to pick it up again later in life?
Wow, good question. Yeah, I think, and this goes back to what I said about a combat system of Taekwondo. There are styles of Taekwondo that are more for sport, like Olympic style. There's ITF, there's WTF, there's a combat version, more of a sport version.
They are very, very different. So when someone says, I do Taekwondo, why does Taekwondo do it? It doesn't necessarily mean you're doing the same thing, because they're very, very different. And so, yeah, if you were to have a black belt in an ITF school and then move over to a WTF school, it would look very different.
It would be like learning a new style in many respects. And so I could see why that would be a jolt to a young person, because you really are learning a new system. And that's okay, but that's a good thing to learn different styles and to get the best of all these different systems.
But it might be a jolt, and I can see why it'd be frustrating for a young person to experience that kind of a jolt. If he's already got his black belt, and he feels like, you know, I've got what I've wanted out of this, and I'm good with that, I wouldn't push that hard.
And personally, I would not fight for it and say, this is what you must do. I would want my kids to do what they're passionate about, what they love, and to do what they do for the glory of God, whatever it is, if it's Taekwondo, if it's soccer, if it's piano, whatever it is, for the glory of God.
And I think the last part of the question was, what was the last part of the question?
How easy or hard will it be for him to pick it up the martial arts again later in life if he realizes soccer isn't for him and he wants to go back?
Yeah, okay. This is the really cool thing about martial arts, is that when you get to a level like a black belt, and this is important, you've essentially mastered the fundamentals of that art. You've mastered the basics and the intermediate skills, advanced skills.
And so you have the fundamentals of the art down. If you've gotten a black belt in a good school, you have to have gotten to the point where you've understood your own body, what you can do, what you can't do, facial awareness, self-awareness, and you have a basic understanding of what it's like for someone to throw a punch at you, a kick at you.
And it all has to be there in order for you to get your black belt, if you're at a good quality school with a good instructor. So the great thing about being a black belt or a martial artist is that you don't lose these skills.
These are skills that they stay with you for life. They really do. Now I think that you might say, well, like, well, what changes? I think the thing is, is you get heavier and you get out of shape and you lose your breath.
And so you might not be as fast as you were before. You might not be as quick as you were before, but those skills remain there because of muscle memory. It's a really great thing in martial arts is that you are training your muscles to respond a certain way.
And so you're having your muscles memorize certain movements and that memory really stays locked in. And so for, you know, for me as an example, like I'm a pastor now, I'm spending all my time not training, but ministering with my, you know, that's what I do.
And so I'm not in as good a shape as I was before, but these skills don't go away. And so it's not hard to pick it up again. Really the hard part getting into it again is just really getting in shape again.
That's really what it is. It's just about staying in shape. And so the great thing about being say a black belt is the muscle memory that stays with you for life. And I would just encourage my kids to stay in shape and, you know, make sure you're stretching all the time and those sorts of things, because your flexibility can decrease over time, just not, you know, keeping your stretches going.
But you do get it again though. Like it's an interesting thing is that if you were to be out of martial arts, say for two years and you weren't stretching all the time, it would take you a good two or three months just to get it back.
It wouldn't take you four or five years to get the flexibility back. It would take you about two or three months to get it back. It would still be there. If you have trained your muscles and your ligaments and everything to stretch apart and to get to a certain level, they're there.
It just takes time to get it back to, you know, exactly where it was. And so I wouldn't get too upset over my son who's a black belt not wanting to really, you know, invest in a whole new style. And I would just really, personally, I would try to encourage my kids to do what you do for the glory of God.
Whatever you do, do it the best and do it in a way that you are delighting God and that you're seeking God's pleasure and you do it to his glory,.
Whatever that might be. Forgive me if you already described the difference, but what is the difference between an ATA school and a WTF school?
Okay. So ATA is a popular style of taekwondo in the United States right now. There's ATA taekwondo centers. That's more of the sport aspect. So if you were to see an Olympic style of taekwondo where the guys, their hands are typically down, they may not even hold their hands by their face.
Their hands are typically down. They're throwing their feet almost in swinging motion underneath the opponent. A lot of really cool spinning. It's a lot of legs. No, almost virtually, I mean, no hands.
I mean, it's a lot of legs, a lot of kicking, and it's more for the point. It's more for like tagging the opponent. It's not really a system that was developed for combat. And so it's not necessarily a combat oriented system.
It's more of a sport system, more of like Olympic style taekwondo versus another style of taekwondo that would be more of the hard style for combat. It would just look very different and there would be more hands involved.
But taekwondo is just, it's known as a kicking art primarily. And so I would say to somebody that's like, I want to like be a fully shaped martial artist. I would say you definitely want like, the taekwondo, as far as I'm concerned, from the Kwon Taekwondo, I think Bruce Lee bears this out, has the best kicks in the sense of high kicks to the body and to the head.
It's the, I think most scientifically accurate way to use the full hip and maintain balance and control and throw multiple kicks to an attacker. I think that it's one of the best systems. And when you see Bruce Lee's sidekick, that was, he utilizes the full hip.
I think Wing Chun has the best trapping skills for hands out of any art. I think Muay Thai Taekwondo has the best lower body kicks. And as a matter of fact, the Navy SEAL, Frank Cucci, who actually developed the Navy SEAL fighting system from SEAL Team 6, I think he was on, when he developed their system and began to teach it to them, the kick he taught to the lower body was a Muay Thai round kick.
And that's a devastating kick. I don't think any art has as good of a low kick to the legs as Muay Thai. Most systems have adopted that kick for the leg kick. And so, you know, you do want to get sort of a well-rounded, you know, fit to you in terms of like learning the full system.
I will say this though, and I'm passionate about this. A lot of guys in like the UFC now, the MMA fighters, the cage fighters, these guys, I mean, sometimes it irks me. A lot of times it's like, you know, adult men that want to get into the ring and just sort of like, you know, they're cage fighters.
They want to fight. And they learn a few parts and pieces from systems here and there, but they never master a real art. So what I would say is it's very important for somebody to learn and master a foundational art as you're learning the other parts and pieces from other systems.
So it's not good. It really isn't good to simply learn parts and pieces from other systems. That's not really good because you're not really mastering a foundation. Think of it like building a house. You can decorate it like you want.
You can paint it the way you want, but it needs a good foundation. And so I would say you definitely need a quality system that's a solid foundation that you've mastered. That whole system is a foundation so that helps you to learn the other aspects of other styles quickly.
If you don't do that, you're going to be a mess. You're not really going to be well-rounded. And so, yeah, every art has, like, it's real positive aspects. I love a combat Japanese karate system because when they developed that martial science, they developed it based upon weaponry.
They developed it based upon different terrain. They developed it based upon throwing and ground fighting. It's sort of like hands and feet. It's a really well-rounded system. If you could find a traditional combat karate system, you'd find yourself a good system.
That's a good foundation, and that'll help you learn the other aspects of other styles.
Quickly as well. So the UFC, you're saying that these are really predominantly street brawlers that aren't really trained, highly trained in any specific martial art, or is it a mixture? You have some who are and just some who are not.
I don't want to overgeneralize and say there are none, but largely a lot of these people never mastered a foundational system and really had martial arts as sort of like that was the thing. They wanted to get into cage fighting.
They wanted to, you know, fight in their brawlers, and so they learned in maybe an MMA school, different aspects of different styles, and they're thrown into the ring. I'll give you an example. When I was training for the final two, I was training full-time for three or four months, and when I was in the kickboxing school, I was training there with Rick Rufus.
He's a legendary kickboxing champion. It was his program, his school, and I was training there, getting ready for the final two, and I a few times got thrown into sparring matches with some of the local cage fighting champions.
These were guys that fought professionally. They fought as for a living. This is what they did, and I can remember distinctly there were at least two times where I fought like the number one cage fighters in Arizona.
These were guys that had a fight that weekend, and Rick would say, hey, just get in the ring with them and spar with them for a little bit, and I was sparring these guys who were like these cage fighting champions, and I was throwing just regular old intermediate-level martial arts kicks, but they weren't just one kick like the Thai kick to the leg, which is the most common kick thrown in UFC, the Thai roundhouse kick.
It's all they were throwing, and I was throwing maybe three or four different kicks. I remember one guy stopped. He had a fight that weekend, and I was just drilling him in the stomach with these kicks.
He couldn't get around it, and I was really putting a little effort in, and he just couldn't get around it. I remember he stopped in the middle of the fight, and he says, what are you doing? What is this?
What is this stuff? I've never seen this before, and I said to him, I said, this is just basic karate stuff. This is like basic, basic karate stuff, and he didn't know how to do it, but he was like one of the number one fighters in the state in the cage fighting that's out here, so that's what I mean.
That's the descriptive of the person that really learns a few moves here and there and just gets thrown into the ring, and they're really a brawler. I think it's good for someone to learn a whole system and master it, and that'll actually help you to learn the other aspects of other martial arts and be well-rounded when you get yourself a fellow fighter.
Hello, Jeff. Are you there?
Yeah.
Oh, okay. It sounded like you might have been disconnected. Now, why is it that more people who are highly trained in martial arts aren't involved in the UFC? Is it because they would consider that an insult to be involved in that, or there's not enough money in it, or what would be the reason, do you think?
There's definitely enough money in it now. I don't know that I can answer that exactly. It's a question that I've asked myself many times, although recently, and that has been the last year or two, you look at people in the UFC today.
A gentleman that just won, I think, last weekend. I think it was his premiere. It was his opening in the UFC. He came out like people were freaking out because he was really showing good distance, could control the ability to break the gap, throwing different kicks than the Thai roundhouse kick, and people were in awe of this guy.
Seth is his name, I believe. He actually comes from the same martial arts circuit that I grew up on and that I competed in. The fact that he was a champion there says a lot about him because in order to be a champion on that circuit, you have to really master the system, and you have to be well-rounded.
When he comes from the circuit that I was on, and I found that out, I was like, well, that answers as to why he did so well. People are so shocked, like, wow, look at this. He's so versatile, and he knows so many different things, and he's so fun to watch.
It's because he's mastered a system. You see someone like that gets in there and does really, really well. Ronda Rousey, you look at someone like that, she mastered judo. That's why she's so good at what she does because she mastered a traditional art and was good at it.
That's why people can't really figure her out, I think, is that she has mastered her body. She's mastered distance. She's mastered her attacker's body. She knows the whole system. She doesn't just know six really great moves, 10 good moves.
She knows the whole system. She spent her life mastering a whole system, and that's why she's doing so well there. People that have just sort of leapt into martial arts, they've leapt into the MMA and the cage fighting over the last couple of years.
They've really got a lot of time catching up with someone like Ronda Rousey that has done this her whole life and has mastered an entire system. So you have to catch up with someone like her. She's done this her whole life, and she knows the whole system.
There's a big difference between somebody who leaps into the ring and knows a couple of moves versus someone that's actually fought thousands of times in their life. Think about in a solid foundational system.
You're attending classes regularly throughout the week. You're doing sparring regularly throughout the week. You've probably fought, by the time you get into cage fighting, you've probably fought literally thousands upon thousands of times in your life in sparring matches in your dojo.
So going into a cage match against somebody that's just started and is entering the cage fighting, I mean, how many times in comparison have they fought in their life? I mean, so you see the difference is that you really, when you master a foundational system over a long period of time, you give yourself the ability to have just experienced fighting so much that you're relaxed, that you recognize things when they're coming.
You're able to distinguish between when a person's moving and they're not. You're able to see their tells. It's like poker. You can look at somebody's face and you know when they're holding something.
But when you've fought thousands of times in your life, you're able to look at somebody's body and see their tells. You know when they're moving, you see which angle they're moving at, and you're able to not be there when they get there.
And so those are important aspects of training. We have BB.
From Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Asking, is it just folklore or urban legend that if someone has a black belt, they have to announce that to their opponent or attacker before actually using.
Physical violence to defend themselves? It's just a legend. People say, you know, you need to have your hands and your feet registered. I don't even know how many times that's been asked of me in my life.
Are your hands and feet registered? That's a myth. You can't register your hands and feet. There's no such thing. I wish it were true. I would do it just for the card. But that's just, it's not true. And it's not really true that you must announce to a person attacking you that you are a trained martial artist.
However, that there can be legal issues that can arise if you attack somebody as a trained martial artist, and you injure them. That is a legal issue. Because um, if you are the aggressor, and you are a highly trained martial artist, let's say a black belt, you are, you have deadly weapons.
I mean, and the judge will see it that way. You're a trained martial artist, you're trained in combat, you attack this person, and they may hand you down a heavier sentence because of that, because you should have known better.
But I would say if you're attacked, I don't know of any instance of anybody that I've ever known who's been attacked and was a martial artist, where they got in trouble because they were defending themselves and they didn't announce.
Watch out. That's not necessary. We have gun laws. Say, for example, in Arizona, constitutional carry. If you're attacked, you're allowed to defend yourself and shoot somebody. And you don't have to announce to them anything.
You can just defend yourself. And so if you're a martial artist, and you're attacked, and you have essentially hands and feet that are deadly weapons, you don't have to necessarily announce. I would say, check out your state laws.
Maybe there's some strange state in New England, some liberal state that says something like that. I would definitely look into it. But as far as I know, I've never even seen or heard of anything like that personally.
All right, we're going to be taking our.
Final break. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Jeff Durbin on a Christian and martial arts, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. That's C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.
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Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back. This is Chris Arns and.
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This is our last half hour, so if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Jeff Durbin on the Christian and martial arts, our email address is ChrisArnsin at gmail .com. ChrisArnsin at gmail .com.
We have Harrison in Mechanicsburg. Wants to know, do you know of any statistics about children being seriously injured while taking martial arts classes?
I'm not personally aware of any statistics. However, I mean, I've been doing martial arts since I was four years old. I've traveled the world doing martial arts and I've actually taught at martial arts schools across the nation and seminars across the country.
I've taught at local karate schools. I've taught literally thousands and thousands of martial arts and I can tell you that in all my years of training and all my years of teaching, I never saw any really significant injuries in martial arts training.
Now, however, I have seen what you would expect in terms of injuries in professional competition. So as people were doing full contact competition, I've seen people get their ribs broken, their sternums cracked.
I've seen people get broken noses. I saw one guy in a black belt competition get his cup broken. You broke up there. Was it his cup? His cup was broken. But in training, I mean, typical stuff. I've seen bloody noses, a busted lip.
I've seen broken fingers, broken toes, but nothing that was really long-term damaging. I've never seen anything like that. And so I actually believe that martial arts training in a good school is one of the safest contact sports.
I mean, football, you can get really injured in. I mean, head trauma, things like that. There's constant, you know, full frontal, you know, collision and things like that in terms of like the damage it does to your brain by, you know, rocking your brain that hard.
When you look at a sport like that, you know, there are a lot of risks in that sport in terms of like what can be done long-term to your body, to your knees, to your back. I'm 37 years old now. I competed in martial arts competition at the highest level.
I was on two different professional martial arts teams and my knees are perfect and my legs are fine. I don't, I think it actually helped in many ways. I had good instructors that taught me really great skills in terms of stretching and things like that.
I do have a little bit of arthritis in my back. It's not genetic, they say, and so it could be just from a lot of my activity, but I think it comes with aging. It's just mild arthritis. So I haven't caused any damage to my own body.
And I know that it's possible. I know it's possible to damage your body in martial arts. I know it is possible, especially if you have bad instructors that don't know how to properly teach you how to get your body ready for contact.
But again, I don't know that I can even remember any significant injuries in training that I ever saw. Yeah, I heard the guy that had his cup broken.
Has now got a new career ahead of him as a soprano at the Metropolitan Opera.
That's awesome.
What actually happened to the guy? I mean, even though he had a cup on, since it was hit with that force, I mean, that seems pretty devastating.
He was down, he was down for the count. And I just remember that they pulled his cup out and it was broken. So that's a pretty powerful, that's a pretty powerful hit. And yeah, I've seen in professional competition, I've seen some serious moments.
I've even seen one time I saw in Las Vegas, I was at the Las Vegas internationals and this tournament was running, it seemed like forever. I won my division and so I was waiting for the night 10 finals.
And I think it was around like four or five o 'clock in the afternoon. I mean, the thing was still going strong and it's time for the adult black belt, men's fighting, team fighting. And these are some of the best fighters on the planet.
And I saw this fight break out because somebody got hit after the break on purpose. And the one guy threw his gloves off, started going at the guy, the other guy threw his gloves off. Now the team, these are professional black belt world champion fighters are all throwing their gear off and they are fighting full on like group fight in the middle of the tournament.
And you can hear the announcer, this fight was moving with this crowd of people. I mean, I don't even know how people are fighting. All you saw was like pads flying in the air. This fight was moving from ring to ring with just like this chaos.
And you can hear the announcer over the thing going, security, ring 12, ring 13, ring 21, ring 24. It was just moving across the tournament venue. And so that was a pretty dramatic moment with some injuries.
But those are unique circumstances and you wouldn't typically.
See that in a martial arts school. Yeah. And of course, going back to the listener question about statistics about children being hurt in martial arts classes, seriously, I think that a lot of parents would have a lot more peace of mind, especially with the rampant a child abduction going on and all this horrible things that you hear on the news almost every week to have your children know how to defend themselves, even if an adult were to attack them.
Yeah. Yes. And one of the things that I really loved about teaching was teaching children self-awareness so that they understood constantly prepared to respond when necessary. So one of the children is, you know, when you walk out of your house, you're no longer in a safe zone with your family.
You're, you're in a place where something bad can happen. There are evil people out there and, you know, and this is coming from my own biblical worldview, you know, their feeders still have to shed blood.
And, you know, when you're out in public, you need to be aware of the fact that there's there, there are people that don't necessarily have your best interest in mind. They may want to hurt you and they may want to abduct you.
And so teaching children, to constantly be watching, look in your peripheral vision when you go into a parking lot, be aware of the person who's following you in the parking lot. Be ready to respond constantly and be willing to, be ready to grab an antenna off a car and use that as a weapon.
Be ready to put something between you and your attacker. Just have self-awareness. And so these are things that children under my care in training would learn is self-awareness. When you walk out of your home, you're ready to defend yourself.
And, um, I'll give you an example of something that happened to me. Um, I was in Washington, D .C. and, um, again, just right outside and it's about nine o 'clock at night. My friend called me and he was in my, he was about a mile and a half away from me in my neighborhood and he wanted me to come over and spend the night.
And so, um, I grabbed my, my stuff and I'm walking at night in my neighborhood and I'm walking on the sidewalk and I can hear a car next to me driving up next to the sidewalk, but I don't see its lights on.
And so I'm not looking because I don't want to get, set them off to know that I know they're there. But I sort of kind of glanced in the corner of my eye and I see this old beat up big car, um, just driving next to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the road at nine 30 at night or something like that.
And I realized they're up to no good, but I'm, I'm aware of all this. Immediately going, okay, what's my plan? Where am I going to go? How am I going to get out of this? What am I ready for? And so as I started to pull, I like walk around the corner on the sidewalk to the cul-de-sac, I hear a door open.
And as soon as the door opened, I didn't even look. I just darted to my left to go around the house. And I looked behind me and out of this car filled and they came out of the car and I glanced and all I could see was they had like, like a bat pipe, something in their hand and they all jump out of the car.
And I pulled around this house and something deep within me, Chris, something deep within me was like jump. And I left into the bushes in front of someone's house and laid flat on the ground. Didn't move.
I just hit the ground like bricks and just didn't even move. And as soon as I hit that ground, I see just feet boots run past those bushes past boom, boom, boom, all these guys run past. And as soon as the last boots ran past the bushes and a few seconds went by, I jumped up, went the other way, snuck across the street to the other cul-de-sac and I hid behind some cars.
And I watched these men looking under cars and around that cul-de-sac for me was like bats and pipes in their hands looking to do harm to me. And I snuck my way backwards back home, um, able to avoid, you know, being attacked by these men.
But I believe that my self-awareness as a martial artist and my ability to think fast and to move quickly helped me to avoid even that without even throwing a punch or a kick. Um, and so, you know, the moments like that, I think martial arts really just, you know, blesses me because, you know, I want children and women to be able to have these skills so that they can defend themselves and in particular women.
Being able to know martial arts is like having a weapon, like having a gun. It's an equalizer. If the attacker is attacking you,.
It's an equalizer. Now, what are the specific kinds of martial arts that you most recommend for women and children especially, specifically for the reason of defending themselves against attackers? Not necessarily because they want to get involved in competition but you want your children to be able to defend themselves.
There's also bullying that's rampant in schools today and you want your wives and your sisters and your mothers to be able and your daughters to be able to defend themselves just because men are animals.
And what do you most highly recommend as far as.
The martial arts for that? If you had time to say, I'm going to put, I'm going to invest a couple years in this. I would say a combat form of karate, jujitsu, combat form of taekwondo, not sports but combat would be a good for you.
Judo is an excellent system. I would say make sure it's blended with a hard style karate system. So a school that teaches both would be good there. Judo and karate would be very good. Long term, if you have short term, like I just want to learn over the next six months or one year a system that teaches me brutal self-defense tactics and that's going to help.
I would say a Krav Maga is an excellent system. I would say a Muay Thai kickboxing system would be good. It would teach you proper punches and kicks, low line kicks to the legs and to the body to be very helpful.
Long term, combat systems would be good to make sure you learn some Wing Chun for trapping. I would say grace in jujitsu has got to be the most superior ground fighting system that there is. Grace in jujitsu.
I think hands down a lot of people would agree with that. Now here's the thing about grace in jujitsu. It is not an adequate system in terms of overall self-defense because it's not a fighting art on its feet.
It's actually really lacking in terms of hands and feet standing up. And I think most people would acknowledge that it's a great system for on the ground. It's unbeatable on the ground, but it's not good for a street fight where you're attacked by two people.
Because if you get one person to the ground, his friend is still above beating you, punching you in the head. And so it's not good to simply focus on a ground fighting system that doesn't know how to stand up.
You need to be able to defend yourself against multiple attackers. I can tell you in my own experience in some fights that I've been in personally and defending myself, it was against more than one person.
And so it's important to be able to defend yourself standing up against multiple attackers. Muay Thai is a great system for standing up, learning low line kicks. It's a straightforward system that's fighting straight on to the attacker.
That's good for self-defense. And I would say those are great systems. If a woman, this is very important. I would say to a woman, if she said, I just want to be able to defend myself if a guy gets me to the ground.
I would say then your style is great for Jiu-Jitsu. Find a school that teaches you Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, great for Jiu-Jitsu. It's superior ground fighting art. I would say for women especially, you don't need to be strong.
It is just science and it is so effective. It's one of my favorite ground fighting systems and I think it's unbeatable. But again, it's not adequate by itself. It is not adequate by itself. It needs to be blended with another standing system.
So if somebody said, I want to be the best person to defend myself. I want one year, two years, three years to dedicate. I would say do a system that was Krav Maga and Muay Thai, great for Jiu-Jitsu.
If you wanted to dedicate yourself to mastering the system in self-defense, I would say find the traditional combat karate system that's focused on combat, Jiu-Jitsu and Judo together. So you learn how to throw,.
Grapple and stand. We do have a surprise listener. This is a nice surprise to me. Kathy Kuhl who is from Learn Differently in Hendon, Virginia. I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that city in Virginia. But she works with children that have learning disabilities and she says, I'm enjoying today's broadcast on the study of the martial arts.
Sorry, I missed the first hour. Are these shows recorded? Yes, they are, Kathy. And she says, martial arts are a great way for kids with attention difficulties to improve their focus. As we homeschooled, my son and I appreciated lessons with two godly Christian senseis who do a great job helping develop their student's character while teaching karate.
And there's a word I can't pronounce. It's a certain style of karate. And she says, finding the right sensei is critical. And I need to find the right pair of glasses so I can read my audience questions better.
Well, thank you very much, Kathy. And.
If you have any further comments on that, Jeff. Absolutely. I'm really glad that Kathy brought that up. I failed to mention that. It's really amazing. Martial arts classes are designed to teach quick response.
And you need quick response to defend yourself. You've got to have good self awareness, quick response, the ability to focus your mind. And so martial arts classes in a good school, they actually equip you for that.
They get you ready for that. And so one of the things that was such a joy to me as a martial arts instructor many years ago was I would have parents that put their kids in karate classes solely for the purpose to have them get better focus and attention.
Because you have to move fast. You have to obey. You have to do what you told the first time. And you have to, again, the class is constantly doing what you're told, quickly moving fast, quick attention, quick focus.
You can't get flighty in your mind and just get really mellow headed. You have to stay focused. And so the great joy for me was to see, and I can't tell you how many kids this happened with, kids that would come to me that had been on medication for attention deficit disorder issues.
And after six months or a year, they were no longer on the medication, which I think says a lot too about that disorder. I think it has a lot to do with how we teach our kids and raise them up and help them to listen and to learn to listen and to respond quickly and obey the first time.
You do as you're told. And so in a karate class, if it's an instructor, you're doing as you're told. There's a certain amount of healthy fear that the instructor has to instill in the student to obey your instructor, to do as you're told and to move quickly and to, you know, that's part of the martial arts kind of history.
It's part of its tradition. Your instructor is teaching you to respond and to do as you're told the first time. And when you're in an atmosphere that's like that, it does begin to shape the mind of a child to start focusing, to pay attention, to have eye contact, to focus on your surroundings and to respond quickly.
And all those things help with your attention.
Well, I just want to repeat Kathy Kuhl's website, LearnDifferently .com, LearnDifferently .com. And Kathy, I hope to have you as a guest again on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in the near future. And that was a nice surprise to hear from Kathy.
And how old does a child have to be and body weight and so on before you could realistically expect this child to immobilize an adult attacker?
Oh, I would say two years old, three years old. If you have a good instructor, you could teach a child to have a basic understanding of some basic techniques for self-defense. Really, I would say a child can be effective at least in distracting and momentarily incapacitating an adult with things like eye gouges, hits to the throat, to the groin, even biting.
I know that sounds strange, but this is about martial science, fighting science. If a woman is attacked and she's on the ground and she's being overcome by her attacker, it's not inappropriate for her to try to bite his ear off.
It's inappropriate for her to try to take a chunk out of his cheek. It's not inappropriate for her to bite a particular part of the body that would incapacitate the attacker. That's all part of martial science.
Things like that. It's not necessarily punching. As a matter of fact, a woman or a small child may not do any damage to a man in terms of punching him in the face. It may not have any effect at all, especially if he's angry and his adrenaline's pumping.
However, the way our bodies are designed, your eyeball can only withstand so much pressure. If a woman is able to put her or a child is able to put her fingers into a man's eyeballs and push as hard as they can, that's giving them the ability to distract or incapacitate him to a certain degree or for a certain time period so they can get away or escape.
If a man comes up behind a woman and puts her in a bear hug and is actually pinning her arms against her body, if you can picture this, he's around her from behind. He's got his arms wrapped around both arms and he's picking her up.
A lot of people think, well, how do I do this? Do I kick him? Do I try to swing my feet back? Do I throw my head back? The answer is no. None of those things work. But the answer is obvious. If he has his hands around your arms and he has his chest to your back and he's lifting you up, you can't get any ground.
You can't get any force from the ground. You can't even throw your head back and do any damage. He'll move his head. But the answer is obvious. Where are your hands? If he has his hands around your arms and he has you from behind, your hand is right next to his very special place.
It's that moment where you're able to grab and squeeze with all of your might so that his natural autonomic response is to try to grab for there and to release you. He releases his arms and that gives you the time that you need to injure him effectively and to get him to let go of you so that you can get away.
So we're teaching things to kids like striking the eyeballs, striking the throat, striking the groin. We're not teaching kids how to punch the head of an adult man. It's ineffective. Right. And by the way, Kathy Kuehl.
Just reminded me that I interviewed her on Homeschooling Your Struggling Learner. If you want to get that from Kathy at learndifferently .com. But obviously there are no rules when a woman or a child are trying to defend themselves from an attacker.
Anything goes. Even killing the person with any object that they could get their hands on is completely acceptable. Yes. As a matter of.
Fact, one of the things that gave the ninjas their initial shame is really the best way to describe it is that in that culture, there was more of an honorable way of fighting where you really faced your attacker.
You even bowed to each other first. There was a sense of appreciation for the art, even in approaching like killing one another in Japan. And so the ninjas developed a reputation where they were not so noble in fighting.
They would grab a chair from across the room and throw it at you. They would grab any object and throw it at your face. They did things in secret in the dark. And so that was one of the things that gave them their initial shame and not shame was that they were willing to do anything that worked.
And I agree with that philosophy. Right. I think that if you're attacked by somebody, you do what works. If it means grabbing a tool from around you, if it means ripping out your attacker's eyeball, if he's trying to rape you or kill you, if it means pulling their ear off their head, that's what you do.
You are not nice in a fight. I tell my kids, if you're attacked in the street, I tell my children, you punch to break something. You don't punch to injure an attacker. You punch to incapacitate them and even kill them if they're trying to take your life on the street.
I know that sounds graphic, but the truth is we're talking about life for life here. We're talking about somebody trying to take your life. And in that instance, God actually allows us to defend ourselves even to the point of actually killing the attacker.
So we have to think about the fact that if a person crosses that line with a woman, her job at that point is to end him and to end his life or even his attack.
Yeah, we've all heard like on TV, sometimes you'll hear some kind of a safety instructor saying that it's better to remain alive even if you're raped or something like that. So don't do anything that's going to get yourself killed.
Well, that's just nonsense, isn't it?
Yeah. I mean, if I'm hearing you, you're right. Absolutely. I think fundamentally, we've got to think clearly as Christians. Again, I said earlier, oh, we don't want people to get hurt and we don't like violence.
And again, have a good cry and start to put your head on right. We live in a fallen world and we've got to think in terms of self-defense that when we are being attacked and our life is on the line, we have to think about doing violence in that moment because it's about the preservation of life.
It is about the preservation of life. And if we're teaching children and women to defend themselves, I think we need to be real with it. I would be really bothered in seeing self-defense videos for women that were just really just ridiculous.
Trying to teach a woman in a self-defense video a whole martial arts system and how to master the ground and the opponent's balance, in particular, a series of techniques, they're not going to remember a series of techniques under attack.
What a woman or a child will remember is tear out their eye. What a woman or child will remember is you attack their throat so that you break it. What a woman or child will remember is a chokehold that you hold on to the person until they fall asleep.
What a woman or child will remember is if you're taken and someone grabs you to try to abduct you, you grab a hold of their groin and try to tear things off. And that's the kind of way you approach self-defense is it's about preservation of life.
And if there's a person who's near to have to shed blood and they're trying to maim you or end your life or rape you, you do what you can to inflict permanent damage upon that attacker because at that point they deserve it.
I was just wondering if you are as efficient as defending yourself against someone attacking you with a banana as John Cleese of Monty Python Flying Circus was. I'm aging myself there.
Yeah. I love Monty Python.
And if you could, I'd like you to really just unburden your heart in the next two minutes and really leave our listeners with what you most want etched in their hearts and minds.
Well, I think that's very important. I would strongly advise this. If you're looking for a martial arts program, find a program that is a quality martial arts program with a qualified instructor. That has got to be a number one priority in your mind.
Do not go to a school for the sake of going to a school. Take the time that it takes to find a qualified school, a good school, a school that is going to teach your child or yourself a full-orbed view of the martial arts and your life and time.
You're investing, listen, money and your life. Make sure that it's worth it and make sure the person is qualified and make sure you find yourself a system that is teaching you everything you need to know to master that system.
Yeah. That's what I would say. Focus on all those things. Find yourself a good school. Find a school that's very personal and relational and very much like a family because you're investing years of your life in this.
You want to make sure you go into a school where you feel.
Comfortable and the instructor cares. What is your contact information, not only because you're a pastor and want to welcome people into your church and so on, but if somebody wants to ask you another question about martial arts?
Apologyatchurch .com is our church's website.
Apologyaradio .com is where you can get a hold of all our radio programs and TV shows. I would say that if somebody wanted to get a hold of me and ask more questions regarding this, they can do so on our Facebook page at Apologearadio on Facebook or you can send a message to the website.
I think that today we have successfully created a Christian audio encyclopedia of martial arts knowledge for people to get from ironsharpensirenradio .com in the future from our archive. I really want to thank you, Jeff, for actually making that subject last for two hours in a very engaging way, and I look forward to having you back on the program very soon.
I want to thank everybody who listened. I hope you all have a safe and blessed weekend and Lord's Day, and I hope you always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.
God bless.