April 13, 2026 Show with Joe Owen on “The Gospel According to Marx: Stripping Political Rhetoric from the Kingship of Jesus”

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 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 Monday on this 13th day of April, 2026.

I'm absolutely thrilled to have a first-time guest today, and we're not only going to be promoting a fascinating book he has written, but we'll also be promoting two speaking engagements that he is involved in in Pasadena, Texas, coming up in the very near future, in May, in fact.

But, first of all, let me introduce to you Joe Owen, a third-generation missionary and the Spanish missionary—I am really tongue-tied today—and the Spanish ministry manager—say that a hundred times fast—for the ministry of creationist apologist Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, where he is also the Associate of Biblical Cosmology for Answers in Genesis worldwide.

He teaches at various Bible institutes, seminaries, and universities, speaking throughout Latin America and Europe, and today we're going to be addressing his book, The Gospel According to Marx, Stripping Political Rhetoric from the Kingship of Jesus.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Joe Owen.

Greetings, and it is a great privilege to be here and actually speak in my native tongue as well. Thank you for this opportunity.

Praise God. Well, first of all, before we even go into the theme of your book, The Gospel According to Marx, Stripping Political Rhetoric from the Kingship of Jesus, I'd like to have you explain the Cantera Institute and also Answers in Genesis, the latter of which many more of our Iron Trip and Zion Radio listeners will have great familiarity due to not only Ken Ham's decades of apologetic ministry, proclaiming the truths of young earth creationism, but also because of the more recent development of the Ark Encounter and Museum.

But please tell us about Cantera Institute, where you are also involved.

Yes, Cantera Institute. I've been involved on kind of an associate level. I think they can challenge me on this, but I think it's been about 10 years now on this side, and this institute is in Ontario, Canada, has a Spanish side, but the English side is the stronger, producing books on the Reformation being more holistic into our thinking and into the way we think about society, raising our children in church, and they produce great works forming a biblical epistemology or like on the Reformational philosophy instead of trying to use more rationalist Aristotelian thinking in the West.

So a biblical way of thinking in every area. And it's kind of lay-friendly, not as lay-friendly as Answers in Genesis. Answers in Genesis is more of like biblical sufficiency, biblical authority from the very first verse of the Bible, whether, you know, speaking on history, what everything the Bible speaks on, it holds authority on that.

And so full-time traveling, I now head up all the international languages, Worldwide Languages Department, Answers in Genesis, anything that's not English. And for Quintaro, you know, helping editing books, doing some speaking and looking at working more in their World View Campus in Ontario.

Well, the website for the Quintaro Institute, and forgive me for mispronouncing it earlier, is.

C-A-N-T-A-R-O Institute .org.

That's C-A-N-T-A-R-O Institute .org. And of course, the website for Answers in Genesis is Answers in Genesis .org. Answers in Genesis .org. In fact, we have Ken Ham returning to Iron Trip and Zion Radio in a couple of weeks.

Ken is going to be paying tribute to our mutual dear friend, Charlie Liebert, Charlie, who used to put on conferences and seminars for Answers in Genesis on creation and has known Ken for many years, a lot longer than he has known me.

I just met Charlie somewhere in the neighborhood of 2015 after I moved to Pennsylvania from New York, and Charlie eventually founded his own ministry, 6daycreation .org, and Charlie went home to be with Jesus several weeks ago, and I went to his memorial service at Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Charlie was a member after moving here himself from Greensboro, North Carolina.

And he is, interestingly, or should I say was, originally from Amityville, Long Island, my hometown where I was born and raised, although I never met him there. He is 21 years my senior. So, Charlie was a wonderful brother, and Ken and a colleague of his at, it was Mark Loy, I believe, his co-founder of Answers in Genesis, both were kind and gracious enough to record a brief video in tribute to Charlie Liebert that was played at the very beginning of the memorial service.

So, I was doubly thrilled that Ken has carved out time from his busy schedule to come back on my show. He's been a guest a number of times on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, and we'll be paying a more lengthy tribute to Charlie when he returns, and I'll keep all of you updated on the exact date of that, but it's in approximately two weeks.

The issue that we are addressing today is being born out of the very, extremely disturbing revelations of the past few years that the youth of America, many of them, are viewing the communist tyrants, the brutal, sadistic, murderous communist tyrants of past history as their heroes.

They believe that Marxism is the answer to the ills plaguing the United States and the world. Whether they really believe that is questionable, whether they even understand what they claim to be talking about is questionable, but it is a very important reason why a conversation like today is very important to discuss the book that has been written by my guest, Joe Owen, The Gospel According to Marx, Stripping Political Rhetoric from the Kingship of Jesus.

And if you could tell our listeners, in case they are some of the young people that I just mentioned, or maybe it's their friends who are listening who don't really know who Karl Marx was, and there may be other people ignorant of the facts of this brutal, well, actually, he was the philosopher that led to the brutality in Russia.

But if you could tell our listeners about Karl Marx and why you were compelled to write this book.

Yeah, so this is going to be a very interesting kind of angle maybe I'll have on this, because I teach in even public universities in Latin America and do some formal debating. And some of the largest ones, one of them is one of the oldest in Latin America, 80 ,000 students is in Lima, Peru.

And this has been historically much more prevalent in Latin America. And it's kind of like looking at a Latin American universities, it's kind of like looking through an eye or a little glass into about 15 years, 20 years into the United States, where it's going to go because I can see that progression happening.

And so I'm very happy that this book that Quintaro Institute Publications put it out. I wrote it in Spanish, actually, for HarperCollins, a title of HarperCollins for Latin America. And I'm very happy that it's in English.

So let me just kind of explain in broad terms what's happening and maybe some of the confusion on this. And it is that, Karl, there are kind of two, if you allow me, two kind of classes of Marxism. And there is the classical Marxism that failed in the early 20th century for the Western world, but has had some reach in Latin America.

And there is, based on Karl Marx, what we can call his philosophy of history, there is a kind of a newer Marxism that has been mixed with what we call Latin American liberation theology that we're seeing, and critical theory from starting in Frankfurt, Germany, the Frankfurt School, that's been mixed in the 80s and 90s.

And that's what we're mostly seeing today. And so some people will say what we're seeing today is not Marxist. Well, it's just Marxism that's just opened up the gates to include more than the original.

So about what Karl Marx taught in the 19th century, about mid -19th century, I think it's 1848, with the pamphlet on the Communist Manifesto, what we call the Communist Manifesto that he co-wrote. It's this idea, his philosophy of history is that we come from, it's what's called a deterministic system, where the world is going from chaos to utopia in a deterministic way.

Imagine the universe that's kind of like a clock, and it has a bunch of gears. And no matter what you do, it's going in this certain direction. And society is, so think of the theory of evolution from, as a contemporary of Marx, Charles Darwin, that you have these species that are becoming more apt and more apt as the ones who can pass their genes are the ones with the better survival in that kind of perverted theory.

Think of that now society under that same grid, a society as going through the steps of evolution until we get to a part where we don't need a state anymore, because all the evils of society, if you could even use that word, are produced from the system.

And that was just totally contradictory to the Word of God. It says that sin comes from the human heart. And so you go from chaos to utopia, and each societal group that forms, there ends up these classes, and there are the oppressed class and the oppressors, and class warfare comes out of that.

And then finally, the class that is oppressed joins together, has a revolution, tumbles whoever's in charge, and forms a new one, but they still have some of that oppression in their system left a vestige of it.

And so that's going to finally bring them to a point where there's need for another revolution. And we're finally going to get to a part, according to Marx's system, in a deterministic way, where we need a totalitarian kind of a dictatorship that takes control of all production and private property until the classes don't bring equality among them, but they actually disappear themselves, where there's no more binaries, if you use today's term, and I'll show you why I'm using that term right now.

So a classless society, and once this classless society forms, there's no more system that produces evil, imposing that on the people, and then there's no more crime, there's no more greed, because the system produces crime and greed.

And so once this classless society forms, then this state can collapse because you don't need it anymore, and we're all going to be singing kumbaya, holding hands, because there's no more evil society to impose evil upon us.

Now, think about that kind of philosophy of history, present and future, on the telos. Think about if you mix that with the Christian faith, with what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches a good creation, the fall, promise of redemption, new heavens, new earth.

And if you take out the biblical worldview and replace it with that kind of philosophy, well, then the church's job should be to come along and bring this classless society to bring us to utopia, that's salvation.

And then the newer Marxism, well, that Marxism failed, we can go into that if you have any questions, but the newer Marxism is saying not just the economic side, but any distinctions, whether it's gender.

So you need a genderless society where it can be as fluid, marriage, and it cannot be heteronormative. There should be no normal, natural man and woman, because anytime you have a binary, that produces the oppressor and the oppressed.

Somebody wants to read an example of that, thinking that I'm not over, that I'm not stretching this, just read Shulamith Firestone's book, The Dialectic of Sex, a very important feminist taking the work of Simone de Beauvoir at the end of last century, and she takes the Marxist idea in this book, that everything I just explained to you, and then puts it right by the feminist movement.

Just like in Marxism, the state needs to take control of production, women in the feminist movement should take control of reproduction and men should have no more say over it. And then finally, she goes through every step and then Shulamith Firestone at the end says, so just like in the socialist system, the goal is not to bring equality among the classes, but to dissolve the classes, the classless society, so the feminist movement should not bring equality between men and women, but should dissolve any distinctions between them.

And that's what we call gender ideology, and now it's what we have today called queer theory with Judith Butler. But it's this idea, and then when you look at Scripture, Scripture's full of binaries. You have the creator and the created, God created the heavens and the earth, another binary.

You have the light and the dark, binary. You have the dry land and the seas, another binary. Then you have the animals, male and female, binary. The man and woman, binary. And then finally, Ephesians 5, the marriage covenant pointing to the binary, the hetero-relational aspect of grace and the covenant of grace between Christ and his church, the man and woman representing that.

You can see this has a very spiritual, demonic side, as well as it does have a philosophical Western side. And I'm sorry, I kind of went kind of long on that. It's probably more than you wanted at the beginning, but that's kind of a summary just to begin with.

Well, if you could backpedal a little bit.

And go back to Karl Marx, the man, and what led this 19th century nominal Jew to develop his theories, in your opinion, from what you've learned through your study. I have even heard him described, and I don't know if it's accurate, but as a self-loathing Jew, he, from what I understand, even though that's where his own heritage was, he despised Judaism and so on.

But if you could just tell us more about the man, Karl Marx, this 19th century figure, which led 34 years after his death, if I'm not mistaken, to the communist revolution.

Yeah, so I'm going to be very careful at first just to say there are experts on his biography out there, and I don't want to put myself as one. I do more of his philosophy of history, that is the underlying assumption in all postmodern ideologies today.

But that said, there are some really interesting things about his life. One thing is that the moving away from Judaism into kind of first a Protestant identity because of anti-Semitism, not because of any convictions.

There are some political, social, political things going on in his life, but I don't believe any real conviction to those roots at all. That's interesting that you say Protestant.

Wouldn't Russian Orthodox have been the dominant religion?

Yeah, he's in Germany and did a lot of work. He did a lot of work also in England and France, but what we call Germany today is the Prussian Empire. And he was being kind of chased after by the Prussian Empire because of his very revolutionary mindsets.

And it's just kind of interesting thing is that if religion is to survive in his system, it has to be what they call today progressive. Let me use today's terms. Progressive, it has to come alongside this deterministic direction into utopia because any convictions that it has is what Marx would call ideology, is using information, using convictions as if they're universal to impose them on the values of the oppressed.

And so everything about the Christian faith doesn't work with this system. And that's what you can see. Classical Marxism is very atheistic unless you wed some kind of a church with the state, like we can see in the East, that actually ends up persecuting the true church.

But this newer Marxism, I think it's much more successful and it maybe has a longer stay because it's not atheistic. It just reinterprets the gospel because it's wed with liberation theology from mostly Paulo Freire from Brazil and other folks like that.

And now it's finally into the evangelical church,.

Just more recently. And when you say Marxism has made its way into the evangelical church, are you saying consciously or has this crept in without the realization, the full-blown realization of evangelicals who, according to what you just said, have either tolerated or accepted it?

Yes, I would doubt it's consciously as probably we would think. That's why I try to reason with people at first. Many people think they're just showing charity. And that's why it's so popular among evangelicals today to talk so bad about the church and to almost apologize to the world.

And I know the church has not been perfect, but the problem is that what are we apologizing for most of the time? And I understand the church wants to be relevant. I can understand it, even though it's wrong, because the gospel is relevant.

And the gospel is what makes us relevant. We don't make the gospel relevant. But seeing the suffering and then so bundling suffering and injustice in the world, I guess, which that's a whole other subject really, with...

So let's say this. It's no longer about abortion. It's about women's health, reproduction, reproductive health. And so now I am not a loving Christian or we're not a loving church if we don't stand for women's reproductive health.

And that's what it is. And there's where the Marxist... Many people don't realize that. There's where the Marxist philosophy of history comes in. How can a Caucasian, white, blue-eyed colonialist tell a woman who is part of the oppressed, why I'm going to impose my subjective values that bring me privilege on this woman's values?

Isn't that colonialism, as they did in the past? So how can I tell her what she can do and what she can't do in her womb? And so that's why everything becomes through a political lens interpreted that way.

And so somebody may think, well, yes, let's have more compassion for this woman and think about how we're on stolen land, as they say in the States. I keep hearing that. And we have done so much damage in the past.

We're colonialists. We need to be a lot more careful about their needs. Well, the problem is that in front of the great white throne on Judgment Day, there will be no victims. We are all sinners. But if you mind me saying one more thing about that is we are adopting without knowing it that society is what's producing sin or injustice.

It can only influence what's already in the human heart as far as sin goes. And I think that's how a lot of the gender ideology, LGBTQ feminism is coming into the church. It's because it's going through a Marxist grid of the oppressed and the oppressors.

And people are afraid to be called the oppressor. So they have to take the bottom side of majority of any binary and embrace their subjective values. Now, in my observation of modern evangelicalism.

And discussions with evangelicals and so on, I have seen the weakness of evangelicals to boldly and loudly oppose the murder of unborn children. And I have seen people thinking and expressing their apprehension over full-blown abortion abolition.

But I haven't seen the evangelical realm in to any great extent, unless I'm just blind, reaching the point of actually being pro-choice, as you seem to be describing. Tell us more about where you are seeing this influence.

In evangelicalism. Yes, I see this influence in people, Christians from the age of 25 to 30 and below. And people who are grandchildren, like me, of those who fought in World War II, a son of a boomer, those who fought in World War II.

When we think of Marxism, we think of classical Marxism in the Soviet Union, China. We think of Cuba. But when 30-year-old, 25 to 30-year-old people and below, I'm convinced now, just this experience and everything I'm reading and seeing and debating, that they're looking at something totally different.

And that is they will openly admit, that most of them, if they know about Marxism, that communism failed. The country that should have gone communism was Germany, and Germany did the opposite. Communism is a globalistic and Germany went strictly highly nationalistic and fascist.

And Soviet Union and China were agrarian. And so Marx's ideas, they failed, it failed, and so did rationalism fall. And that's where you get postmodernism coming in, Romanticism, to Hegel, and then into what we call postmodernism today.

That's why people are even saying truth is relative. But they re-adopt a Marxist understanding of everything is interpreted in that direction. So it's in Latin America, as I see it in America. If you're to do a, I'm guessing many pastors that would hear me would doubt what I'm going to say, but if you did an anonymous survey in your church, I'm not wishing this on anybody, but I want to be realistic.

I think you'll be surprised. Your 30 to 25-year-old below, you're going to find that much of them are much more feminist. If you talk about LGBTQ, they're going to say the community that has been disenfranchised by even us evangelicals.

So it's all about the oppressors against the oppressed. It has nothing to do with somebody's sin against the Lord, somebody who is enslaved to sin. And remember 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10 about do not be deceived.

And it gives a list of people who practice these sins and says they will not inherit the kingdom of God. And included in that is what was literally soft, which is a man who takes the feminine role or the passive role when two men come together.

And arsenikoit is the compound word from the subdugent of the man who takes the active role when two men come together. And so it's not seen by our youth today of us preaching, repent and be saved. It is seen as, but aren't you the same white colonial oppressors that have really disenfranchised this community?

And we just want to apologize to this community. I even saw that more recently among popular evangelical evangelists on social media, apologizing to these communities. I'm not saying the Christians have always done things right, but if you have one opportunity in front of these communities, I wouldn't apologize, I'd preach the gospel to them.

And I think we're becoming ashamed of the power of the gospel because of that. In Latin America, it's getting a lot more prevalent, but I've seen it everywhere in evangelical churches. Not as prevalent in Reformed ones, but in evangelical, yes.

Well, we have to go to our first commercial break. And when we come back, I'd like to pick up on what was the political and religious atmosphere of Russia in the early 20th century that led them to be hungry for Marx's ideas, how they became popular in Russia, where Marx was from Germany, as you mentioned, and why they were so enthusiastically adopted by a great number of the populace in Russia.

But if you have questions of your own, folks, please send us an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

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Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Joe Owen, and we are discussing his book, The Gospel According to Marx, Stripping Political Rhetoric from the Kingship of Jesus. If you have a question for Joe, give us an email at chrisarnson at gmail .com, and give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA.

Before I return to our conversation about Karl Marx, I wanted to make sure that we plug the two events that Joe Owen is participating in in Pasadena, Texas, the first in May and the second in June. I want to make sure that we do it now so I don't forget to do that and have Corey Johnson and Butch Wilmer put me on their enemy list for not promoting their events.

If you could tell us about the first one, it's on Saturday, May 30th, and it is on the theme, Godlessness in the Last Days. That's Saturday, May 30th, 9 a .m. to 4 p .m. Tell us about that.

So, I'm very excited. Again, I'm in an average of two to three countries every month for the last 14 years, but they're all mostly Spanish-speaking, and then now some in Europe. But this is some of the few opportunities I get to do something in English, and Corey Johnson's been a great friend of mine for many years.

I love his work on Benjamin Keech's theology of children. He is a pastor at Providence Baptist Church, which is in the Houston area, but it's the one that's right next to NASA. And then Butch Wilmer, he just retired as an astronaut at the end of last year.

He was the one who was kind of stuck in space for almost a year.

Yes, I interviewed him on that, and he wrote a very wonderful commendation for my show. By the way, I've also interviewed Corey several times, so our listeners can look up those interviews later on on IronTripandZionRadio .com in the PAST program archive.

If you type in Pasadena, Texas, all of those interviews will come up with Corey and Butch on the website. Go ahead, I'm sorry.

Oh, no, that's fine. And so, in this event, I'll be speaking a little bit on artificial intelligence, more of the tech community's eschatology, and I'll be explaining that, about where they're trying to go with it, and some things we should take into mind and take into thought about training in our homes and our churches, and also about identity.

The most work I do is on identity and connecting what we were just talking about, the Marxist philosophy of history, with identity in the postmodern era, and how everybody's so confused about identity today, and about a true identity in Christ, instead of one based on feelings from a very evil heart that we have.

And so I'm very excited to do that in English, and we'll have books available, some great literature. And yeah, so I've traveled even to Ecuador with Corey. I've preached even in jails with Butch, and actually, he and I travel an average of four to five times a year for the last eight or nine years now, everywhere, speaking together.

And so I really encourage people who are in the Texas area. I pray this is going to be a very thought-provoking conference, lay-friendly, and a way to discuss how can we, without being reactionary, you know, in the more fundamentalist groups that the Lord has used with inerrancy and all that in the past, but how can we not just be reactionary, but be exegetical, and then pastoral with taking that into our homes and churches.

And so I'd really like to meet some people at this conference.

And you've got to let me know, just out of curiosity, it doesn't sound like you are optimistic AMIL or post-MIL from the theme. I'm just curious if you are more pessimistic in your eschatology because of your reference to the last days, and I could be wrong.

No, I think I'm more optimistic AMIL, more like Sam Waldron. Okay. His line, yes. But the tech groups with AI, they have an eschatology of their own. And I've been reading through their material for the last three years, Life 3 .0 by Max Tegmarkt, from, you know, professor and heads up some of these societies, and reading on Elon Musk and transhumanism, et cetera, and the debate they're having even right now about what brings meaning to the universe.

And the debate is, well, humans are the first time that the universe looks back on itself because they're materialistic. And so self-awareness is what brings meaning to the universe. And so why not promote digital self-awareness and a 3 .0 kind of AI that's self-aware?

And because we are made of matter, matter cannot travel the speed of light. And so we can only get meaning to the universe as humans to a small section. But if it's digital, we can bring more meaning to the universe, even if humans have to be extinct.

Even if we go in the way, that's not what's important. And so that's the debate, especially between Elon Musk, which is transhumanist, and like Larry Page from Google, who's on the other side saying that human life is not important, and digital life may be more important, and AI should have its own rights.

You know, that's the telos, that's the eschatology that these people are working in, and we need to recognize that. That'll help us be very careful with this and have a true gospel answer for it. That's the point.

I'm not as pessimistic, though.

And once again, that's Saturday, May 30th, 9 a .m. to 4 p .m. at Providence Baptist Church of Pasadena, Texas. And then after that, on June 1st, you are going to be doing a conference with Ryan Davidson, who is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at the International Reformed Baptist Seminary in Texas.

And that conference that you're doing with Ryan is on June 1st, and that is on the theme, Guarding the Flock. It's actually a pastors' conference on Guarding the Flock. Tell us about that.

Yeah, so Corey Johnson, who we've mentioned a few times, he is kind of the one heading this up, and he will know more information about it than I am, but as far as I understand in my conversations with Corey, we're going to be dealing with gender distinctives in a relativistic world, and the importance of complementarianism, that binary, in a world that's against binaries, that now egalitarianism is creeping into even the church, and how to understand how is Christ glorified through biblical complementarianism.