Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Dr. Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items.
I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is another edition of the Director's Bag.
Camden from the United Kingdom writes, thank you for taking us back to the basics. It's a good and helpful to be reminded about how we think about things, how we know them to be real and true, and then how to act. This is a reference, of course, for our readers who know about the most recent dicta that has come out.
Camden then writes, to say an issue that has come up in my church with some of the younger folks is the talk about the James White debate with the ex Lutheran chap.
Will Truth Exchange do a segment or podcast to discuss at least some of the following items? Race, realism. What is it?
The retrievalism, thank you for that term, of older Reformed and Puritan writers who spoke about inferiors and superiors.
This I've seen news about race and should Christians see race or ethnicities? What terms should we use as egalitarian, complementarian, hierarchical or complex?
Love what you guys are doing and I am praying for you all.
So quite a quite a load of questions there. Let's start off for our listeners who may not be familiar, there was a debate with James White, who's an apologist and a former Lutheran. Corey Mahler. Dr. Ventrella, did you watch that debate?
[00:01:56] Speaker A: You know, I have not watched it. I've only seen some small excerpts for a number of reasons. And let's, let's also provide a little more clarity here. Corey Mahler is not just a former Lutheran, he is an excommunicated Lutheran. And he was specifically excommunicated not only for his divisiveness, but for holding pernicious, racialist, white supremacist sorts of views. So we're talking here, and he's stirred a lot of things. He's got a podcast that unfortunately has widespread followers. I can't remember the name of it. Circle something. I don't know.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Yeah, there was a debate and it was, I believe, on the subject of can God sanctify black people? Or, or something to that effect, to.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: The same extent that he sanctifies, quote, white people. Yeah.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: So, Dr. White, I would never, I, I, I enjoy engaging in exchange of ideas.
I would never platform Corey Mahler because his views are just so deficient and wretched and vile. I think that James did this really just to expose him further and that Sort of thing because there's no real ideas to debate.
What you ought to do, any listeners are our mutual co laborer Doug Wilson wrote a very fine blog post describing the debate and the so called arguments Mahler was making. And it's a very good piece. It's kind of dug at his best and I would commend that because it's not worth to me listening to this venom spew out by Mahler in any event. So that's, that's just a little more context for our listeners. Now of course everyone's going to go try to find it and listen to it.
I hope, I hope that's not the case. Just take our word for it. But James did a great job.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Race realism, are you familiar with that term and what is it? What's the Christian worldview on race realism?
[00:03:57] Speaker A: Realism? My understanding is that that term has been appropriated by a white supremacist former orthodox Presbyterian pastor named Michael Spangler, and he runs a platform where he spews this sort of stuff. There's a number of things wrong with that whole conception because it presupposes that there is a multitude of races.
And of course that's not the biblical worldview whatsoever.
Scripture is very clear that the human race, if we could call it that, that humanity came from one man, that is to say Adam, and consequently we are one blood. With respect to that, unless you're going to adopt some weird Darwinian view, it's not a Christian view to say there are multiple races. And we also know that the term race did not come into being until, I don't know, 150 years ago. It just was not a category that that happened. And it was actually the progressive left that came up with this idea of race and racialism. So what, what these folks want to claim is that you've got to be real about, you know, who's committing crimes or who's not committing crimes. And of course, in their simplistic reductionism, they only say one factors involve that with respect to that and that's the pigmentation of one's skin, which is just fallacious as well as just empirically false. So we have to be just very solid in understanding it from a worldview perspective. There's only one race. And so this idea which is capturing unfortunately a lot of young men who are not very well read and who may have legitimate gripes about pernicious, how should we call it, things like partiality that's codified, such as affirmative action, you know, the Bible says we ought not to do that sort of thing. Well, you can, you can have people who feel bad about being discriminated against because of the codification of sin, like partiality. So I, I understand the temptation.
Well, I understand few people feeling aggrieved. I don't understand the temptation to therefore, because become a racial supremacist or a kinist or anything along those lines. Yeah.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: You know, it's interesting, Jeff, I think it was you and some of our fellows actually, who are some of the first to call out some of this alt right extremists, neo Nazi kind of proclivity to use the tactics of the Woke left. And they've embraced some of these tactics and they've simply applied it now to race. And, and you were writing about this and saying this is coming. And it was interesting to see that some of the alt right were saying, oh, we're not, we're not using the tactics of the left and we're not imply using the Wokes ideology. But here actually, I was just looking on Twitter the other day and I was seeing some people who are alt right say, okay, so we are using some of these tactics.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: That's exactly right. I mean, we knew as soon as Stephen Wolf's book came out, if you read between the lines, and it was very clear there was ethnocentricity if not overt racism, and it certainly imbibed the spirit of fascism and Nazism and those sorts of things. The arguments made were not dissimilar from the arguments made in Mein Kampf. Another person who has exposed this just for our listeners is Neil Shenvi. Neil Shenvi has called out the Woke Right and said, you're just using the same tactics as a cultural Marxists. And he's taken a lot of grief for that, but he's not been proven wrong.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: All right, let's go back to Camden again. He's got a list of other questions. The other question for him is that he uses your retrievalism of older reformed and Puritan writers who spoke about inferiors and superior in discussing race. Should we use those terms rather race or ethnicities?
[00:08:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I think a couple of thoughts there. First, the notion of complementarity does not in any way imply inferior or superiority, inferiority or superiority. It applies to design and, and relationship dynamically in the relationship.
I think where he's getting the. Some of the. And he's from the uk, the Westminster standards in expanding upon the fifth Commandment, you know, honor. Father and mother talk about duties owed to equals, duties owed to inferiors, duties owed to superiors. But those are not in terms of their ontology or their metaphysics or their worth as humans. Imago Day.
What those labels refer to is where they are situationally and relationally based upon a broader social dynamic and employment situation, so on and so forth. And please understand too, that unfortunately, depending on where you go back and how far you want to retrieve things, we certainly don't want to retrieve things like the slave trade, chattel slavery and all the rest, which was certainly part and parcel of the 1600s and the 1700s until the Christian Wilberforce and his co laborers called it out. And it took almost 50 years to get that there. So if there were language and uses of those terms that spilled over into particular people groups that were. That appeared different, it would be inappropriate to utilize those kinds of concepts based upon, again, creational norms of Imago Day.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: I've kind of looked on Twitter. I've seen some of these, the alt right fellows, mostly a lot of them are anon accounts because they don't have the courage to. To really say what they say and let people know who they are. But is there something wrong with preserving your ethnic heritage?
[00:10:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question.
So preserving one's ethnic and I would say ethnicity or that heritage is actually produces cultures.
Oftentimes we talk about the culture that's really inaccurate means a shorthand. There are many cultures.
Our society teems with various cultures. And we're better for it mostly. Now some cultures are improvable, shall we say, and need to be repentant about certain things. Take an example, the Aztecs, as I think Tuck Wilson pointed out. Yeah. European culture, you know, didn't compete with the Aztecs and shedding human blood until the 20th century when you had Stalin and Hitler and so forth. So cultures can go off the rails and we need to acknowledge that.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: So is there anything wrong with preserving culture if you're talking about food and traditions and how we observe the calendar and those sorts of things? I. I think as particularly if we sanctify them. I think it's wonderful.
And we see this pictured in the com, the consummation in the book of Revelation, where we still have different languages, we still have different peoples coming together, unified. There's the one in the many unified in praising the lamb, who is the lion. And so I think it's wonderful, you know, everyone, I think, who met me for 10 seconds knows that I'm Italian. I'm actually half Italian and half Irish and I love him both. I love the Italian more because the food's A lot better.
But. And I believe very sincerely that the marriage Supper of the lamb is serving wine from Tuscany. I just. I just know that it has to be.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: But further, Jeff, is it wrong for. For somebody, let's say. And I had this discussion a number of years ago, actually, with Mary Weller. We were discussing preserving culture and preserving race because we were starting to see some of this percolate in certain circles.
The Irish, for instance, with the. There's said that the gene of having red hair within the next couple hundred years, they say, will it will be gone. So would there be something wrong with saying, well, we need to make sure all the redheads get together and keep having children so that we could preserve that so that it can continue on?
[00:12:34] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's kind of like the same question has been said about the southern drawl in the United States.
Given the Internet and YouTube and the migration patterns of people living wherever, the southern drawl is actually beginning to dissipate and even out. And so then the question should be, well, should we just preserve all y' all and, you know, all those kinds of idioms and so forth?
Yeah, I get a little nervous when people begin talking about things that are more genetic, like facial features or hair color, because that begins to sound a bit kinnest, as if not only can we do this, we ought to do this and purify. Well, the reality is, yeah, you're never going to be able to do that. So I have to think that through a little bit. I think, again, the object would be asking the question, for what purpose, to what end? Because I think that a lot of people can hide kinnest or racist convictions in something like, oh, we're just. We really like red hair. And I think you need to ask the question, why is that those sorts of things? I mean, why not just have your children and dye their hair? Is that a problem if you're really enamored with the hair color, or is there something more going on? And so I think that we used to say in college, people tend to major on the minors.
And I think this might be something that we want to look at with respect to that, But I don't see that as a prioritist kind of an issue. What we're called to do as a priority is to seek first God's kingdom and his righteousness. I don't see preserving hair color or avoiding pattern baldness as being part of the kingdom of God's priorities.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: You know, one thing about this conversation, Jeff, that I've noticed is is your use and going back to others like Doug Wilson or James White, you're that central in your discussion and in your argumentation is the centrality of scripture.
And with the kenists and the, the, the, the ne. It's neo pagan spiritual neopagans as they argue for ethnocentrality, their lack of scripture and their argumentation more I guess you could say is more in the. The streams of naturalism or natural law versus you're going back to the bedrock, the foundation of the word.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I think that's right. Let me just say I just completed an invited article by the Hale Institute on this question of the natural law and I entitled it. But does it work natural law at the retail level?
And my answer out of 12,000 plus words, my answer is yes, sort of sometimes.
Because there's some real, there's some real obstacles to applying natural law at the retail level. If you want to claim that the work of the law is on our hearts, sure, okay, Paul says that. But let's remember what Paul says later.
In Romans chapter 7 he makes an epistemological point.
He says, I would not know what covetousness is unless the law had said do not covet.
So all his use of reasoning, all his use of observation did not get to the moral precept contained in the tenth word, the tenth commandment, do not covet. Clearly then natural law, even if you can apprehend it 100 accurately, which you can't, given the noetic effects of sin we need, as Brian Matson wrote and other people have written both books, we need creation and revelation. We need the correction of special revelation. And you're spot on. These folks are out there claiming, oh well, you know, scriptures for the ecclesiology, it's just for church. We need to use and make observations. Well guess what?
In nature, in a post lapsarian world, we have things that happen like, oh I don't know, sexual assault, polygamy, genocide. Hey, let's just be natural. Well, that's not enough.
We do need to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, as the psalmist says. And I don't want to go off on this, but in your light, do we see light?
It is the lens of scripture that allows us to see true light as true light. And so while we can know things at immediate points through the natural law, and I'm grateful for that because there's moral things we can see, it can go haywire very, very quickly. So the, the Christian nationalist would argue, well, you know, the prison is filled with people of color, therefore they're inherently inferior.
Which is like, okay, you know, did you ever take a class in logic? This is just a horrible argument and those sorts of things. But that's, that's the kind of thing we're seeing with respect to that. It's ignorant, and it's certainly devoid of scriptural integrity.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: This concludes a recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth Exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the Director's Bag. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
