December 4, 2018 Show with Vocab Malone on “Black Hebrew Israelites: A Cult of Racial Hatred”

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, quote, 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 listeners, with your own questions. Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this fourth day of December 2018 and I am very delighted to have a first-time guest today at the very strong urging of my longtime friend David Wood, who is an apologist to primarily the Muslims and also to atheists.

The guest that we have on today is Vocab Malone and Vocab is a contributing author to Our God is Triune, Essays in Biblical Theology and he is also the author of Barack Obama versus the Black Hebrew Israelites.

Sounds like one of those B science fiction movies. And it is an introduction to the history and beliefs of One West Hebrew Israelism. And we are going to be discussing today Black Hebrew Israelites, a cult of racial hatred and it is my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Vocab Malone.

Thank you very much, Chris. I am a long-time listener, first-time guest.

Well, it is always great to hear when I have folks that have been listening for a long time and I am totally unaware of it and I am delighted that now you are both a listener and a guest. And Vocab, what we normally do on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, as you know since you are a long-time listener, is that when we have a first-time guest, we have them give a summary of their salvation testimony, what kind of religious atmosphere, if any, you were raised in and what providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and saved you.

So if you could give us that summary of your testimony.

I was raised by some authentic Wesleyan Assemblies of God attending parents. They had roots in the South and roots in the Midwest and came together and I saw a Christian face lived out in a very real way and from a relatively young age, perhaps even before, understood my need for a Savior because of my sin.

And it wasn't too long before I was imitating, you know, preaching with upside-down Bible poking at it saying the devil is a lie, the devil is a lie, God is good. And really I haven't advanced much since then.

I hope you have the Bible right side up, at least.

Yeah, that's the one mark of sanctification I can point to, actually. But no, over time what happened is, like many people, you go up, you go down, I don't necessarily have super dramatic story to tell, to the point where I said, wait a minute, I've got to make career steps.

I'm no longer a kid, oh no, what happened? And I realized if I was going to be serious about the Lord that I didn't want to just kind of go to church and dump my money in type of thing. And I really dove into a college headache.

My senior year in high school and sort of my first year of junior college there, just dove deep, kind of by myself really, just dove deep into it. Really it was like a last check to make sure I wasn't going to be throwing my life away.

And at the end of the process, instead of going to a business school like I was in the middle of, I transferred to a non-accredited Bible college, moved up to Phoenix, Arizona. God had me stay there ever since.

And somehow I ended up years later with a master's degree and a part-time career in apologetics.

Well, praise God. And tell us about how you got, first of all, included to be a writer in that book on the Trinity that I mentioned earlier.

Well, Michael had put out an excellent, excellent book, Against Oneness Pentecostal. I'm sorry, Michael Burdash Jr., he's the author of the book I'm referring to and he's the editor and contributor to the book you mentioned.

And he had asked me to endorse it because he enjoyed an urban apologetics radio show that I was doing at the time called Urban Theologian Radio. So I read through the book, I thought it was a wonderful treatment of the issues related to Oneness Pentecostalism, gave it a hearty endorsement, and then we just kind of kept on Twitter and whatnot.

And then he said, hey guys, I'm putting together a book and half the people he asked to contribute were my friends, like people like Anthony Rogers and Eddie Alcor. So I think he knew I'd feel left out if he didn't invite me to.

So I contributed one chapter to the book, Our God is Triune, and he let me deviate, meaning I did tackle an urban apologetic issue, so he did let me go off sort of the beaten path. But it still is an issue related to church history and the Trinity.

Mainly, you may not believe this, Chris, but there's a lot of urban cults out there that actually accuse the Trinity of being a white or European doctrine. So my chapter worked to show that that was not the case, and that was my contribution to the book, to show that the biblical doctrine is not an ethnically derived type of thing.

But you'd be surprised that that's not in the church, so that's what I worked on.

Yes, and by the way, Eddie Alcor is going to be returning as a guest on Iron Trap and Zion Radio on, God willing, Friday the 21st of December, 4 to 6 p .m., to discuss T .D. Jakes, because there is still a lot of debate over whether or not Mr. Jakes has truly embraced Trinitarian theology.

Some are insisting that he has repented of his modalism, and others are insisting that he has not, including Eddie, and so that's going to be an interesting program. I always enjoy having Eddie on the show.

It's been a while. In fact, I think Eddie has the prestigious award, Iron Trap and Zion Radio award, for having his interview date moved more times than anybody else.

I'll let him get under that title.

By the way, brother, try to, as much as possible, keep your mouth close to whatever mouthpiece or microphone you're using, because you have a tendency, during mid-sentence, to get blurry and muffled.

Oh, boy. All right. I think I can take care of that. I gotcha.

Right now, you're sounding perfect.

I got the trick. I got the formula. My bad. Just let me know if I do it again.

Okay, and I understand that you have some affiliation with hip-hop. Is that before, during, or after, or all three your salvation experience?

Well, prior to really making a series, I can honestly say that hip-hop culture was my idol. I'd be driving on the freeway. I'd see a train that had graffiti art on it. I'd be on my way to some meeting that I was supposed to be.

I just couldn't help myself. I'd pull over to the side of the road. I'd have to take pictures of the graffiti art on the train. I know it sounds weird, but cell phones would do it. That's an example, a quick example, but hip-hop culture dominated my mind, and eventually God shook me loose of that.

But I began doing some poetry and hip-hop music for the Lord. And you know what's interesting is that's also what led me deeper into kind of a more hardcore study of apologetics, because we would go out on the street not just like the blocks in the hood, but also college campus areas, and we would actually use freestyling, so rapping Christian rap verses to people, mainly college students, to kind of get their attention and then have a conversation with them based upon the content of our verse.

Well, if you can imagine, people would have conversations and they would have objections to Christianity, you know? We're witnessing to people right during the kind of neo-atheist boom right when the God illusion dropped, and so we just had this slew of new atheists ready to take us on.

And eventually I kind of stopped the rapping part and just went out there to go have conversations, but that really drives you into apologetics, because every week there's a new objection, and if you're coming back week after week, which I was, sometimes twice a week, to evangelize on these different locations close to Arizona State University, it increases, and every time you find out more truth, you just fall in love with Jesus a little bit more and are more passionate because you realize that the Bible is true, and it's just a beautiful thing to see, so it's kind of a very beautiful cycle.

So what I'm saying by that is, Brother Chris, God even used my passion for hip-hop to drive me further into apologetics to the point where I eventually kind of put the mic down and just picked up the books permanently, you know?

Well, that's cool. Just to let you know, in fact, this is not our subject today, obviously, but I was curious what your reaction might be. I told the same thing during an interview with Dwayne Atkinson of The Bar.

Do you know Dwayne?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I was on his show a while ago. Man, probably a year and a half ago. Yeah, he's a great guy.

Yes, he is. And I actually was surprised that he agreed with me because of the fact that he loves hip-hop. That's why I was surprised he agreed with me. I happen to love some hip-hop, especially when it's performed by a really intelligent, biblically literate Christian, and sometimes the lyrics are profoundly deep and theologically accurate and so on.

But having said that, I would never want it being performed, and I use the word perform for a reason, in a worship service. I don't think that rap is appropriate for worship. I think it can be educational entertainment.

What is your response to what I said?

Well, as far as that blinks, I might have agreed, but I think I've seen it done. And so, specifically, here's what I mean. I was involved with a number of, maybe you want to call them worship experiments, where we would take hymns and rock it out all crazy.

It's just not an organ or piano-only arrangement or anything like that. In the middle of the hymn, specifically, for example, How Great Thou Art, and so there would be a rapper's lyrical component to the singing component of How Great Thou Art, and during that time, the MC's job is to exhort the people to think on the topic and the theology of the song, and encourage them to more worship, and then the music, as far as the singers goes, comes back.

I was able to see that happen frequently. I'm not talking about people jumping out and doing full-out rap songs, but I have seen, and actually even been part of, and if you have the right people in place, and you have a Gospel-centered focus, and you have sort of even the right aesthetic and attitude about how everything goes down, I think it can act sort of as poetry in the middle of the congregational worship, because it's not as congregational, although we did get into some chants.

It was almost like ancient-future style, where the MC would say something, and the crowd could repeat, You are the great God Supreme. You are the great God Supreme. I am that I am, the source of all being.

I am that I am, the source of all being. Never-ending, infinite, always. Never-ending, you get the idea. So, I've seen it, done it, been part of it, so I guess I would beg to differ, but we can still be friends.

And by the way, I'm not isolating my comments to rap or hip-hop. I mean, there are many historically or typically Caucasian styles of music that I would equally not want to hear in a worship service, but what you just said comes as close to the possibility of convincing me, in that particular way that you described, of the possibility of it being included.

I just feel very uneasy about entertainment in a worship service. In fact, I get uneasy when I see even praise bands who are utilizing all different kinds of music, where the worship service becomes far more of an entertainment experience than a worship service.

But that's not what we're scheduled to talk about today. That was just a side note. How did you first become familiar with the Black Hebrew Israelites?

I had a friend in Columbus, Ohio, and we ended up running into these guys sort of in our old neighborhoods. And this was about a decade ago. And here's specifically what happened. I think people will find this intriguing.

Now, I do tell everybody that even though this happened, and sometimes still happens, it is not the norm. It's outrageous behavior, but I will be fair to the Hebrew Israelites, most of them do not do this.

However, there are some that do occasionally. Groups of Hebrew Israelites were sleeping in the middle of historically Black neighborhoods, and they would interrupt, My people, don't you know you're the true nation of Israel?

Repent of all these Roman-influenced, pagan ways you're celebrating right now, and instead turn to the Most High and keep His law, statutes, and commandments so we may rebuild this nation and reclaim our heritage.

And then when they would not, quote, accept their version of the gospel, this particular group, GMS was the name. It stands for Great Millstone Congregation Out. And when I say curse, I mean actually foul-mouth cursing, which they would justify with Paul's use of anathema in Galatians, where he says, Hey, if I preach a different gospel, let me be a curse.

I know that's bad, bad interpretation. I'm just telling you we're going to be dealing with a lot of bad interpretation today, dealing with this group. But that's actually how they would justify it. Then they timed their tirades perfectly, because they knew the cops would be called.

And so they would dip out, as the slang goes, before the cops arrived. And then the cops would be left with this description of these guys. Well, this kept on happening, and I had this friend of mine who asked me about it.

So I looked these guys up online. I was absolutely fascinated once I stumbled upon them. But I put it in my back pocket until about four or five years later when I actually saw them in my own neighborhood.

That's what happened.

Well, now we've got to find out more about the history of the Black Hebrew Israelites. In fact, I think a launch pad for that would be for you to explain the very bizarre and fascinating title for your book, Barack Obama vs. Black Hebrew Israelites, Introduction to the History and Beliefs of the One West Hebrew Israelism.

Yes, Chris, I chose that title to shake people up a little bit, to make them say, what's going on here? That certainly is true. But I'll explain it briefly. A biopic movie called Barry came out a few years back.

I've seen it advertised, although I never watched the movie.

Right. Well, I wasn't necessarily planning on watching it myself, but a bunch of Hebrew Israelite guys who I follow on social media said, hey, look, they're portraying us. They're portraying us in this Barry movie, trying to make people think we're crazy.

So I said, oh, let me watch this. So I watched Barry, which is about a young 21-year-old Barack Obama when he was at Columbia University. And there's a brief scene where he's walking along the way, and there's a group of men who are clearly acting as Hebrew Israelites with their message and mannerisms and solid dress and all that.

And they're cursing a white lady out, which they justify, by the way, in woman. Let me explain that real quick. Remember she asked for something, and he said it's not right to give to the children or to the dogs what's designed for the children.

Well, she's a woman. She's a dog. And since the Hebrew Israelites viewed her as a Gentile compared to them, because they think they're Israelites, they think that justifies calling her the B word. So anyway, they're calling this woman the B word in the scene.

Barack Obama's walking by. This is somewhere in Harlem, which he did have an apartment at. So did this encounter happen? No one knows for sure. Was it possible? Certainly. So he stops, and he hears this encounter and seems perturbed.

Are you using the King James Bible, main Hebrew Israelite, sort of as a way to deflect the heat off this lady who was getting cursed out? The Hebrew Israelite guy steps back, points to a picture he has on a poster board, and says, See that?

Does that look like a white man to you? Referring to King James. He looks like Billy Dee Williams if you ask me. Believe it or not, the Hebrew Israelites take old photocopy, micro-compressed images of King James and actually claim he was actually a black man.

And they even tell people the reason why the Dark Ages were called the Dark Ages is because it was in a time when a black aristocratic class comprised of Hebrew Israelites ruled Europe.

I'm sorry if I'm laughing. I can't help it.

And some of them even say that's why they were called knights, because they were dark as knights.

There is a K in that word, knights.

Now before anyone falls off their chair, I want everyone to understand, this is actually not a new cultic tactic. Let me give you an example from a prior generation. The Anglo or the British Israelites are one of the best examples of a group guilty, must be similar fallacy, and they would do this.

And I'll give you an example, because the Anglo Israelites, who came way before the Hebrew Israelites, they thought that Europeans and their descendants were part of the lost tribes of Israel. And one thing, the tribe of Dan trekked all through Europe, and some of the evidence is that they left their name in various places in the form of landmarks which had then been corrupted over the centuries.

And I'll give you an example. They would say Denmark originally met Dan, and the tribe of Dan went through Denmark, and they didn't know about this either. So the Anglo Israelites made the same kinds of silly errors years before, and actually if you read some of Herbert Armstrong's works, the Worldwide Church of God,.

Yes, he was a British Israel defender.

Yes, he advocated Anglo or British Israelism, and if you read his books, he does the same type of thing, where if it sounds like it, you can make some kind of strange case that there's some kind of linguistic history.

But after the King James pointing to the picture, the Obama character just simply says, Well, if you say so, brother, and moves on. But after I saw that, Chris, I said, That is a little epic showdown, because you have the future president of the United States debating Hebrew Israelites.

Who knows? Maybe he was the first apologist against the Hebrew Israelites. Now, obviously, I speak tongue-in-cheek, but I said that's a great title for a book, because I'll have a basis for it, and what I'll do is I'll use the familiar, President Obama, to explain the unfamiliar.

And so I just simply use that scene as a launching pad. The book is not about that scene, the book is not about Obama, but I just use that scene as a launching pad into a larger world that's very...

Well, yeah, even the subtitle is quite strange. An Introduction to the History and Beliefs of One West Hebrew-Israelism.

Yes, and I'll tell you exactly why we had to... Well, when I say we, why I had to do that, the Hebrew Israelites. For example, there's an Israelism in Chicago. The church, I mean the actual building, seats 6 ,000 people.

It's in Riverdale, Illinois.

Wow.

I actually got a tour there. The men were actually very courteous to me. They knew who I was, and they gave me a tour. And it is quite an extensive operation. They even have a number of businesses on site, on campus, including an adult male there as well.

And they still attract thousands of people.

Yeah, well, you know, here's the thing, and I'll explain the little moniker One West in a second, but, you know, part of the appeal of this is some of the people involved with Hebrew-Israelism feel as if they've been at anemic churches.

They feel as if they've been starving for doctrine. One day they're walking down the street or going on YouTube links, and they see someone who looks like them, who takes the Bible serious, who's bold and competent, and is able to move through the pages of the Bible to passages they have never even encountered before.

Not only is this person, who I'm, this person is a Hebrew-Israelite teacher, of course, able to wade through these passages with relative ease, they give interpretations to them on the spot. You've been going to church, and your pastor's been a holy ghost, taking three offerings per service every time, or just preaching a poem the whole time, anything like that, and yet you've had a craving for something deeper, you can be attracted to Hebrew-Israelism.

And all of a sudden, the way the person is dressed, because sometimes they do wear distinctively odd garb, doesn't matter as much, because you feel they are satisfying your need for deeper biblical knowledge.

And I'll be honest, after they gave me a tour, this is the Israel of God members, we had a sit-down Bible study. It was about seven or eight men. None of the men in that room, who had this two-hour Bible study with me, none of them were leaders, as far as official paid staff, yet, I can tell you, every single one of those men knew his Bible extremely well.

They knew of each other, they were going to passage after passage, they were quick, some things I had never seen in the text, and I left thinking, man, if only our men's, some of our men's Bible studies look like these, these guys spent two hours on a Saturday, just sitting down with a stranger, because in their mind, I have some of the truth, not all the truth.

Now, someone may say, wait a minute, vocab, these guys out there in Riverdale, Illinois, sound kind of nice, and yet you're talking about these other guys who are calling people bees. That's the key, Chris.

Though, the guys out there calling people bees, those are One West style Hebrew sites. The guys in Riverdale, Illinois, yes, they're Hebrew Israelites, so-called, but they don't descend from One West.

So there's two different key main factions. Now, they're all in error.

In fact, let's pick up when we come back from our first break with the distinctives between those two and the origins of the whole movement of black Hebrew Israelites. If anybody would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please at least give us your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

In fact, I would love to hear from members of the black Hebrew Israelites if you are listening, or if you know some and you want to call them during the station break or email them or text them, have them tune in to the program at irontreppanzironradio .com.

Anywhere they live in the world, they can hear that program if they have internet access. And our email address for questions is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We're going to be right back with Vocab Malone and our discussion on black Hebrew Israelites.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnson. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Vocab Malone. We are discussing Black Hebrew Israelites, a cult of racial hatred. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

C-h-r-i-s a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the U .S .A. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal or private matter.

And if you could, Vocab, pick up where you left off, where you were comparing and contrasting the two wings of Black Hebrew Israelites and also if you could provide for us the origins of the whole movement.

Well, it goes back to 1969.

1996.

The first documented person that we're aware of to claim that he was a man named Crowdy, William Saunders Crowdy. His story is only mildly relevant. He has a smaller church, which still continues to this day.

But they've always accepted members of all different ethnicities just as long as they accept the claim that Black Americans are the true Israelites. Another key time of growth within this idea after its initial appearing that Black Americans are Israelites was shortly after World War I.

Key to that discussion is a congregation called the Commandment Keepers and really practiced a form of what could only be described as Black Judaism. They didn't even accept, however, and here's where the story really begins, as far as the guys that you'll see out on the street, as far as the internet channels, as far as the current modern day resurgence that Hebrew Israelism has experienced.

A number of men left the Commandment Keepers and started their own thing. It began as a Torah school, they called it, but over time they began to accept some New Testament doctrines. They never embraced Jesus as God, but they did embrace him as Messiah.

They accepted the New Testament with some qualifications, and they had the Apocrypha as well. Well, along with this doctrinal development also came a more exclusionist attitude because the Hebrew Israelites of old did not exclude others from their religion, they just made a claim to be the Hebrew Israelites from the Bible and thought that they should keep the law, which is problematic in itself, obviously, because the New Covenant is not taken seriously in that kind of schema for one, as well as some major historical errors have taken place, but nonetheless.

This.

1969 beginning breakaway sect marked a new era, and the people that I interact with, that I'm tangling with by and large, are ideological descendants of them. Now, what's the deal with the title One West?

Why do we call it One West Hebrew Israelism? Here's why. They moved around different rented-out spaces in New York, usually in the Harlem area, and eventually a prominent location came to be One West 125th Street, then it's become an Applebee's in that area, but what you have is One West is really the place where this doctrine was formed, and all the modern breakaway sects that we see have some kind of tie back to One West, the location One West.