November 25, 2024 Show with Dr. Joe Boot & Jacob Tanner on “The Antioch Declaration”

The Purpose of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and the Day’s Guest Introductions

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

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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 Monday on this 25th day of November, 2024.

And we have one of the most important programs that I have conducted in quite a while. It's a very timely and vital issue that has been broiling in the body of Christ. What makes the disagreements behind the scenes in this issue more grievous is that it primarily involves brethren of otherwise like-minded faith, brethren from Reformed Baptist and conservative Presbyterian Reformed backgrounds, and this required, this issue that has been broiling, required a response, and I'm glad that we have one, called the Antioch Declaration.

And to discuss this new declaration are, first of all, one of the primary people involved in framing it, Dr. Joseph Boot, who is the founder and president of the Ezra Institute, and we also have joining us a dear friend of mine, a pastor, Jacob Tanner, who I'll be introducing to you more formally in a second.

But first of all, welcome back to Iron Trap and Zion Radio, Dr. Joseph Boot.

Thank you, Chris. Great to be with you. Thanks for inviting us on the show to.

Talk about the Antioch Declaration. And please, if you would, describe or explain.

The Ezra Institute. The Ezra Institute is a Christian World and Life View think tank and cultural apologetics training organization, so we seek to speak to skeptics about the faith and train Christians to think Christianly about every area of life, and that involves print and digital resources of various sorts and in-person training and conferences.

Well, please share with our.

Listeners your website so that they can look up at their leisure everything they.

Need to know about the Ezra Institute. Yeah, thanks, Chris. So our website is EzraInstitute .com, and we have offices in Canada, where it was founded in 2009, in the USA and in the United Kingdom. And our podcast is the Podcast for Cultural Reformation.

It comes out every Wednesday. You can get that wherever.

People get their podcasts from. Great. And we also have joining us, as I said moments ago, my friend, Pastor Jacob Tanner, who is pastor of Christ Keystone Church in Middleburg, Pennsylvania. He is also a signer of the document we are addressing today, the Antioch Declaration, and he is an author, and I've had the privilege of interviewing him a number of times.

Welcome back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio,.

Pastor Jacob Tanner. Yeah, thanks, Chris, for having me on again. I appreciate it.

And please let our listeners know something about Christ Keystone Church.

In Middleburg, Pennsylvania. Sure. So we are a Reformed and confessional church in Middleburg. If anybody is looking for a Reformed confessional church, you are more than welcome to come and join us. We do have members that hold to both the 1689 and the Westminster Confessions.

So we are welcoming to anybody like that. Or if you're listening and you don't know what Reformed theology is, come on out, and we would love to talk to you about that. One of the things that we're really engaged in is cultural apologetics, but also engaging the culture for Christ and trying to shape the culture as much as possible.

And so with that in mind, I'm also an administrator at a Christian school nearby. Oh, and I believe your website is christkeystonechurch .org? That is correct. I think we have almost all of the domains.

We try to anyway. So anything like adjacent to Christ Keystone should be us, theoretically.

Well, I also want to quickly let our listeners know, because early on, over a week ago when I first started planning today's interview, we had originally thought that Tobias Riemenschneider, pastor of the Evangelical Reformed Baptist Church of Frankfurt, Germany, who is at the core of this controversy that necessitated the Antioch Declaration, he was supposed to be on today, and we have purposely moved his interview to give him time to give his own presentation publicly in defense of his positions.

And he will also obviously give our listeners the reasons why he shares the opinion that the Antioch Declaration was a needed declaration in our modern church. We will let you know when Tobias will be on this program.

We're hoping that it's this week. But tomorrow, we have a very dear friend of his who's going to be broadcasting live from Aberdeen, Scotland with us tomorrow, and his name is Pastor John William Noble, and he is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Aberdeen, Scotland.

And he is going to be seeking to vindicate Tobias Riemenschneider and sharing with many of you information that a large number of you do not have at this moment. So he is definitely what would be called an insider into this whole controversy.

Why the Antioch Declaration Was Needed

But first of all, tell us why. I'll start with Dr. Boot. Why another declaration? It seems like there are declarations coming out several times a year these days. And why the Antioch Declaration? Yeah.

Well, you're right. There have been.

A number of different declarations over the past few years. In fact, I was involved in drafting one in Canada a few years ago called the Niagara Declaration, which was about the liberties and freedoms of the church in the face of lockdown.

And of course, there have been others dealing with the questions of sexuality and identity and so forth. And usually declarations come about when a segment of the church, church leaders, theologians, pastors, and so forth, become concerned about a particular issue that they believe is a potential threat to the church.

Obviously, the Niagara Declaration, which is not the subject of today's show, there was a very real and evident threat to the church. And declarations usually come about when those sorts of threats are perceived and Christian leaders want to draw some lines in the sand.

And especially if there are concerns within their own networks, within their own denominations and so forth, where there's something that is potentially dangerous for the Christian church. And so, in fact, the way Doug Wilson put it recently is that there are times if you're on a submarine where you've got no choice but to batten down the hatch and close the door, despite the yelling, and leave the door shut, because otherwise the whole sub is going to go down.

I think that's quite an interesting illustration. And so the Antioch Declaration came about because for about a year now, leaders, certainly in my networks, have been concerned about and reflecting on a sort of emergent trend on the edges of some reform circles that seems to be pushing a kind of primordial nationalism or a kind of ethno-nationalism.

And with it has come shades of anti-Semitism, a certain amount of conspiratorial thinking, and sort of pseudo-racial doctrines being discussed. And some of it people don't spot if they're not heavily engaged in social media.

Certainly, I was not really aware of this until the beginning of this year was when I first started to really see it or be alerted to it by others. And so actually, a few months ago, somebody proposed actually that we look at developing a declaration on the issue so that we could ward off the risk of ideas sort of creeping into the commitment that we have actually as Christian leaders and pastors to Christian culture, to Christian nations, and the potential for that to get distorted and perverted into something we don't mean by Christian nations and by Christian culture, by which we do not mean a homogeneous ethnic concept of nationhood built into the idea of Christianity.

And so a number of these ideas were circulating. Some of those things have come to a head more recently with controversies that have been swirling around. And so we believe that now is actually the time to release a clear statement on it to sort of batten down that hatch of the submarine, as it were.

We knew there would be some yelling and shouting and stomping and banging on the door. But unless that hatch was closed, there's a real risk to the whole. I mean, the Ezra Institute has been talking, Chris, about Christian culture, the importance of biblical world and life you apply to every sphere of life, including the state, the importance of Christendom or of Christian nations.

And we've been really surprised, at times even shocked, to see how deep the rabbit hole appears to go of people on the edge of that who have a very, very different view of the matter than we have. And that is why.

We believe that the Antioch Declaration has become necessary. Now, one of the things I think that we should make clear immediately, because there have been false accusations about the purpose of this declaration, people have publicly said on podcasts and other places that this is nothing more than the airing of dirty laundry that involved a private dispute between two pastors and two churches.

This is not the case. This issue or these issues that you have included in the Antioch Declaration, they transcend any kind of private and personal conflicts. These are things that demand the attention of the church globally due to their seriousness and their danger and even the evil that is involved in some of the worldviews here.

Am I right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mentioned that the idea of this declaration was proposed several months ago. I actually recorded a podcast in January for the Ezra Institute addressing and attacking anti-Semitism because I was aware that in some circles it was starting to rear its head.

And so this has been a concern for some time. There's been a book available for a couple of years by Stephen Wolf, The Case for Christian Nationalism, which has elements in it that I think are highly problematic.

There have been various responses to that. I've got a new book coming out next year called Think Christianly, which has a whole chapter section on the idea of racism and ethno-nationalism. I intend to spend a bit more time writing on that subject.

So no, this is not something that just arose to address a present controversy between pastors. This is something that is of significant interest. We've been contacted by evangelicals and reform people in Canada and in Europe and in the US who are seeing this on the edge of their churches, seeing young men in particular being caught up in some of this.

And that's been going on not for a few weeks, but for many, many months. And in some cases, I think a few years. And that's why it needed to be addressed. And it needed to be spoken about clearly and articulated clearly.

We're not suggesting, of course, that the Antioch Declaration is the declaration to end all declarations. We're not saying it covers everything. We're not saying it's perfect. There's no perfect document.

Some people would prefer a different style. Other people prefer it to be longer or more qualified. Other people want it shorter and so on. We understand all of that. But what I would say is this, we prefer our way of saying something than their way of saying nothing.

We've said something and we felt it needed to be said. And that is distinct from other issues. Look, at the end of the day, nobody needs a PhD in history to understand that the churches in Europe were affected by these kinds of ideas.

And it divided the whole church in a time of war and conflict. And before actually, it began dividing the church before World War II broke out. So these are not new ideas. Certainly, antisemitism, of course, is nothing new about antisemitism.

It's the favorite, at least the most common conspiracy theory, as well as prejudice that exists. And it's common, interestingly enough, to both the radical left, the Marxist left. Just look at the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel protests throughout Europe and much of North America for months and months, in fact, over a year now.

It's common to Islam and it's common to the alt-right or what one of our friends has recently called the dank right, which I like to call actually the fragile right, because they are very fragile when it comes to any sort of criticism.

And often react like the Marxist radical left. But that thread of antisemitism is very, very common. We don't accept, I certainly don't accept the lexicon of race in any case. I mean, racism in many respects is an unfortunate term because biblically, there is only one race.

That's the human race. We're all in Adam. We're all sons of Noah and his children and his family. That was the new sort of bottle, genetic bottleneck. And, you know, as the people of God, we are a royal priesthood, a holy nation.

And actually there are people groups. Yes, of course. But the idea of race and certainly the modern concept of race was really a Darwinian development and not a Christian idea. And of course, all of the details of that need teasing out, but I prefer to talk about ethnic hatred and prejudice and resentment than racism, which is sort of a battering ram of the left, of the radical left to sort of crush the Christian consensus of the West.

Really, we're dealing with a radical ethnic prejudice in these things. And we need to recover actually a biblical view of the unity of the human race.

In our first parents. Yes. And of course, the term is likely to pop out of our mouths, sometimes unintentionally racism, just because it's so much a part of the modern vernacular. And there are the things that we say in our common speech that are not technically biblically correct, that are just so absorbed in the consciences of modern humans that we repeat them for better or worse.

And by the way, I have interviewed recently along with my friend, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, I've interviewed Dr. Boot specifically on the sin of racism. So you could hear more about that.

That actually occurred prior to my awareness, I think, of this current controversy that was a part of the catalyst of the Antioch Declaration coming into existence. But also I want to let our listeners know that I've interviewed a fascinating individual in the past.

You could look up his interviews. His name is Lowell Ivey, I-V-E-Y. He is a former white supremacist gang leader in prison and has become a born-again believer. And he is even an Orthodox Presbyterian Christian, actually, I think, most recently entering into the Presbyterian Church in America denomination.

Fascinating testimony, fascinating brother who has a prison ministry. And he makes it clear that we who are Bible-believing Christians are not mimicking the nonsense of the left where everything is racism.

You know, according to the left, you could be a black individual and if you are conservative in your worldview, you're a white supremacist. So, I mean, the left is just filled with nonsense and lies when it comes to nearly every single issue, but it obviously would include their discussions on racism and bigotry and all that kind of thing.

So, we're not just spewing that. And it is kind of interesting, isn't it? And I'll be with you in a moment, Pastor Tanner. But it is interesting, Dr. Boot, that we have this phenomenon that we see in the media every day of leftists who are openly anti-Semite.

It is remarkable that that particular issue is a bizarre unifier of, well, of course, in many respects, national socialism, which is deemed to be misunderstood by some people today, or what was sometimes called the far right was really just the other side of the coin of the far left.

Anyway, they were both totalitarian ideologies, Marxism and fascism, as well as national socialism. And they both involved socialism. They just absolutized different things. In one case, the nation, you know, the blood and soil myth of the Aryan on the one hand, and the absolutization of the party on the other.

They had different ways of, slightly different ways of tackling the issue. And we often forget they had a non-aggression pact that Stalin and Hitler engulfed up Poland. And in many respects, it's my understanding that Stalin had particular plans for the Jews himself to send them to Siberia.

So, you know, these things are bizarre. The anti-Semitism is a bizarre unifier of so-called alt-right and the Marxist left. It's not the only thing, and you're absolutely right, of course, to say that the nonsense spouted by the Marxists on the issue of race has been actually to people.

The purpose of it has been to divide people. And one of my concerns in all of this at the minute is that it seems to have done its work on a lot of white professing Christian people, like this perpetual effort of the left to divide people along racial lines, you know, white guilt, white privilege, all of these things.

It feels as though some jaded and exhausted people have said to themselves, okay, all right then, if that's what we are and that's what you want us to be, so be it. And they've sort of leaned into it, but actually themselves are allowing themselves to be victims of the Marxist rhetoric.

They've been victimized by it. You know, we've been victimized by it for so long as, you know, the three of us on this call, white Christian men, you know, with families. And we've been told for a long time by the radical left that we are the cause of all the world's problems, that we are the source of all the cultural and global conflict, that our civilization is the worst there's ever been, that the only answer is to, you know, inverse this oppression, as it were, and the oppressor must become the oppressed.

And you can understand how many younger people in Western nations feel, have felt deeply jaded by all of this. And our concern with the Antioch Declaration is that, you know, this inevitable, it was inevitable that this was going to happen eventually, that there would be a kickback and a pushback, that where the pendulum would swing too far and it would go through the six and way up the other side, because eventually this kind of action produces a reaction.

And our concern is that Christians make sure that we don't, we are proactive, not reactive. We prophetically propose with the word of God, with the scriptures, with the gospel of the kingdom, we don't simply react.

And we proactively address wickedness and evil wherever it's found. We've always addressed the radical left in terms of the word of God. The work of the Ezra Institute is testament to that. We mustn't be cowards and shy away when we see a wicked reaction that goes well beyond what the word of God would permit.

That's why this.

Has become important to us. Well, Pastor Jacob Tanner, why were you drawn into exploring, reading, signing this document and being a part of its promotion?

Sure. So my interest in all of this actually dates back a couple of years. Again, so Dr. Boot and I have actually talked about this and I'm not sure if it's just where my area is, but for whatever reason, and Chris, you're actually not far from me, so I don't know if you've dealt with any of this as well, but I have dealt personally with white supremacist, neo-Nazi type groups coming to me.

In fact, we were just talking the other day, we don't know if this was a joke or not, but I actually received an invitation to join the local KKK. Wow. And we're not sure if it actually exists or if this was a joke, you know, because of.

Everything happening now. Well, I do know before I moved here, just about a year before I moved here or a year or less to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Ku Klux Klan had a small rally right on the.

Steps of the courthouse here in Carlisle. Right. I heard something similar to that. And we have that where I am as well. So it was a couple of years ago. It was actually 2019 when I started to hear about kinists and the kinist movement.

And I have a theory behind this. I think what happened was in 2020, it really began to explode. Two reasons. We had the publication of Stephen Wolff's The Case for Christian Nationalism, which I would argue is not entirely a neo-Nazi book or anything like that.

I'm not saying that, but I think that it had enough little droplets here and there of different ethno-ideologies that people were able to be more easily swayed.

Into these directions. Even a critic of Wolff, Dr. James White, at least he used to say that he did not believe Wolff was a kinist as much as he criticizes what he writes. Right. I don't know.

If that's still the issue. I'm not entirely sure either to say one way or another. But what I will say is I don't believe he was when he wrote the book. I don't believe the book was really advocating for that, but it had enough droplets of it to convince people.

The other thing, 2020, of course, is COVID. And we experience in COVID the shutdowns, the lockdowns, the masking up, the jabbing, all of these different things. And it totally changes a lot of people's worldviews.

So you have guys that have believed in, you know, post-millennialism for a while. They believed in being culturally engaged. They believed in orthodox Christianity, reformed theology. But what happens in 2020 is you have a lot of guys suddenly discovering people like Doug Wilson.

They're discovering Bode Bauckham. They're discovering Joe Boot. And they're taking this theology that's totally new to them. And praise the Lord that they're able to see the truth in it. Right. But they're taking it and they're, you know, they're turning it up to 11.

So they're taking their disillusionment that they already have with the government and with a lot of other things. And they're now beginning to say, now, wait a second, everything we taught must now be questioned.

It's almost an anarchist mindset, right? We have to question everything, tear down everything and reconstruct everything. And it's not even that that's necessarily a bad thing. Reformation is good when it's done biblically.

But what we see happen from 2020 onwards to today is this adopting of the mentality that, first of all, older men are not to be honored, but they're to be dishonored because they have boomer mindset or boomer mentalities.

And then secondly, and by the way, let me just throw out here, age wise, I fall into the millennial bracket. So I think it's really funny that anybody that says, if I believe what I believe, I'm also...

I think I'm the only boomer.

On the show right now, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I'm Gen X. I'm a Gen X, not a boomer.

There you go. We've only got one boomer here. So we've got that going on. But then we have this disillusionment too with history, right? So this idea of a post-war consensus is suddenly introduced. And what concerned me right away when I started seeing a lot, and I've been concerned about it, I've been dealing with a lot of the ethno-hatred within our area, you know, with white supremacists and what have you.

So I've been dealing with it. But then I started seeing on X where I really don't post that much, and maybe I should post more. But I started seeing on X these different phrases like no more brother wars and other things like white boy summer.

And if you look into the origin of these phrases, they are white supremacist phrases. For example, the hashtag no more brothers wars, that actually comes from neo-Nazi propaganda. It's a white supremacist slogan.

So as I was reading through these things, looking at them, and of course, I've always been interested in World War II, and I'm a historian, theologian at heart, so I've always studied history. And I've just realized these guys are, first of all, not understanding history.

Secondly, I think they're sinfully doubting what God is actually doing in history. For example, their hatred of the Jews seems to me a denial of something like Romans chapter 11. And I know we can parse that out and we can have disagreements and agreements on Romans 9 through 11 and what's actually happening there.

But regardless, I think this hatred that is being exhibited is really an overreaction to what we saw back in 2020 with COVID. We saw the rise of critical race theory. And one other thing that really interests me with all of this, and Chris, this may have been how you and I met for the first time, but Vodie Backham back in 2020 published his book Fault Lines, and we had him over to the church.

And he preached for four hours, four different sessions on different things. He did an excellent job. And we heard him preach on Ephesians chapter 2, an absolutely beautiful sermon of how there are no longer Jews and Gentiles, but in Christ, it's not that the ethnicity goes away, but it's that barrier of separation that disappears and we're made one in Christ.

And back when he first preached that, I can remember some of these guys who today are saying, we got to have ethnic borders and you got to remain with your own race. These guys were sharing that same sermon, saying, this is great.

Praise the Lord. There are no Christian racists. And now it seems like they've gone the other corner and they're making fun of even the term racism. And maybe again, rightfully so, because like Dr. Boot was saying earlier, I think we need to talk about really more of a ethnic prejudice or an ethnic hatred.

Nonetheless, they've really jumped the gun. They've gone in a different direction. And I think that the Antioch Declaration is incredibly helpful because it speaks to so much of what I've been seeing and what I've been combating in my own ministry over the past four years.

For example, if I could just read one line here, it says at one point that we affirm that the modern neo-pagan secular project is bankrupt and desperately trying to hold the social order together by means of a fraudulent narrative and anti-Christian worldview.

As a result, the lies of secular elites in all spheres have necessarily grown increasingly evident and outrageous. We affirm that as a consequence, some young men in the West have become jaded and cynical with an element among them now rejecting or doubting the received account of virtually anything.

The great danger is that now, instead of actually acting on the basis of revealed truth in Christ, they are in the unhappy position of reacting by choosing between opposing sets of lies. So we deny that disillusionment and resentment over the lies one has been told is adequate preparation for standing in the truth and resisting a new set of lies.

And we affirm that disillusionment and resentment make a person vulnerable to deception and frequently prepare the ground for accepting new falsehoods, setting the stage for further disillusionment. If I could just add one other thing here, that is exactly what's going to happen unless we get Christians to wake up and realize that what we're dealing with is a disillusionment that is totally unprepared to fight against sin.

It is totally unprepared to meaningfully engage the culture in any way that would actually count. And it is ultimately going to eat itself alive. And I think we're even beginning to see that on Twitter because this movement is it's not Christian.

It's not even sub-Christian. It is anti-Christian and it's going to eat itself alive. One quick thing I wanted to.

Say, I'll ask both of you before we go to the commercial break, is that I'm amazed that some people that I know and respect on their podcasts and other platforms have been so easily and quickly and instantly appeased when people who are truly guilty of harboring these vile, satanic, anti-Semitic views, they're immediately appeased that they are not anti-Semites because they say, I don't believe in Jew hate, I don't believe in adoring Hitler, you know, that kind of thing.

Well, I guess none of them have ever seen an interview with David Duke, who was formerly one of the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan. I can't remember his exact rank. You will scour the internet for every recording he's ever been part of.

You'll never hear David Duke say he hates Black people or Jews. When people say things like that, and I'll go to you, Dr. Boot, and then finally, Jacob, before we go to the break, don't you have to define that statement by other things that are said and believed by the person making the disclaimer, I don't hate Jews,.

Dr. Boot? Yeah, I mean, these things are, first of all, these things are incremental. If you looked at the development of tyranny in Nazi Germany and the way anti-Semitism developed there, it didn't start with Auschwitz.

It begins much, much further back than that. Second of all, obviously, if you come out with statements like that, you're not going to get any traction. You disguise these ideas in, for example, creative conspiracies.

Well, if you look at the Hollywood, and you look at the porn industry, and you look at this, and you look at that, you will notice it's a Jewish conspiracy. That's just an observation of fact, people will say, or the notion that there's almost a global Jewish cabal running the world.

I mean, this is an insult to Christ, for a start, or this is an insult to God, as though the world is not governed by the sovereign providence and hand of God. Of course, the nations rage and the people plot in vain.

There's always been godless people plotting, but the notion that this particular group, these Jews, that they are the problem, or that Judaism in its various forms is somehow uniquely pernicious, which is another issue.

It's those sorts of things that, to my mind, disguise, that's why the qualifying questions you've just mentioned, Chris, are important, that can disguise an underlying current of anti-Semitism. Some of these people, they are often in very white enclaves of America or the West, maybe in Utah or whatever.

I pastored a church in downtown Toronto for 14 years. It was as multi-ethnic as Toronto itself, and it was a privilege to lead that church. We felt, as a people, and sometimes we had to have simultaneous translation into a language or two on a Sunday morning for those whose English wasn't yet good enough, but it was an expression of the kingdom of God and the love of God and the grace of God.

This sort of subtle notion that Jacob mentioned that, well, maybe we do need some ethnic borders, some ethnic barriers. Look how these ideas crept in in South Africa. We have to be honest. We also have to accept our own sin.

Where was the reformed church? Professing reformed church in South Africa, openly dealing with the problem of those boundaries and barriers developing, and what did that eventually lead to? I'm not saying that the situation now is much better because these pendulums swing backwards and forwards.

If we don't have a gospel-centered, if we don't have a kingdom-centered, I should say, answer in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. Those qualifying questions are important. It's not enough to say, oh, he's reformed theologically.

Well, in South Africa, they were reformed theologically, weren't they? Yes. Where was the robust criticism of the apartheid model from the reformed church? We have to admit that, of course, Abraham Kuyper was dead before apartheid was introduced, but where was the reformed critique at that time?

It was lacking. Now, we don't want to fall into that, do we? Surely, as the church in America or as the church in Europe, we're absent without leave when it comes to these sorts of developments.

Ethnic Prejudice, Christian Unity, and the Gospel of the Kingdom

Pastor Jacob Tanner, I'll go to you so you can provide your own thoughts on what I said, that we can't be so quick to believe someone that denies they're guilty of something, like, for instance, hatred of Jews just because they say, I don't hate Jews.

Mm hmm. Yeah, people really do know how to check the box and they know how to say things ever so subtly that on the surface, it seems as though they're on the same page as you. But under the surface, when you really start to parse through what they're saying, you begin to realize very quickly that actually we're not talking about the same thing.

We don't have the same ideas in mind. A prime example of this, I think, is a lot of the kinest doctrine that goes around. So most kinest will not say that they hate another ethnic group. They just won't say it.

But they do believe that their ethnic group is superior to those other ethnic groups in a variety of ways. So, for example, I actually saw and I can't remember who it was, but this was on X or Twitter or whatever, where somebody was asked the question, do you believe that your race and they were talking about whites, do you believe that the white race, which is funny because it's not whatever.

Anyway, they ask that question and they respond back, well, what do you mean by superior? Do you mean ontologically superior? Because, yes, I believe the white race is ontologically superior in their physical strength and their looks and this and that and the other thing.

I believe that they are culturally superior because they're able to build culture in meaningful ways. Or the one that's going around a lot right now is that, sure, God can save different ethnic groups.

His common grace will extend that far, but his common grace does not extend to things like IQ. So they'll say, for example, Africans or African-Americans have a lower IQ, a lower intelligence than white Americans, and therefore we are culturally superior in that way as well.

And all of that to me is incredibly concerning because they'll practice that by saying, oh, I don't hate black people. Oh, I don't hate people of different ethnicities. I just think we're superior to them in every single imaginable way.

And once we start thinking in those terms, the problem is we're no longer using Christian language. We've adapted to ourselves either Darwinian language or like the Antioch Declaration points out, some strange form of Aristotle's ideologies.

And this is where we need to be incredibly careful as Christians to make sure that our ideas are grounded and rooted in Scripture rather than the twisted and wicked philosophies of man.

Mark Bailey. And Dr. Booth, if you could start to highlight the main points in this declaration that would draw our listeners to even have the interest to begin reading it.

Well, of course, we start with the reason for it. And it's called the Antioch Declaration because of the incident in Antioch between Paul and Peter, where what was originally a religious distinction had started to become an ethnic one.

I mean, the Judaizing party, the party of the circumcision, were not fundamentally concerned about being obedient to Christ and the gospel. They were concerned about maintaining ethnic separation. And so the declaration, I mean, if you read it carefully, deals with a number of very critical points.