This week’s episode is a crossover with the Renaissance of Men podcast from Will Spencer. In a wide-ranging discussion (over more than six hours), we covered everything from the reasons we started the Stone Choir podcast and the state of the LCMS to (in the second part) World War II and conspiracy theories. This will be all you are ever likely to hear. Within hours of publication, Will pulled the content and disavowed us after coming under pressure from within the church. So it goes.
Love and duty are matters of concentric circles — to the closer is the greater duty and the greater love owed. In the previous episode in this series, we covered the facets of self-sacrifice love (agape) and charity (caritas); in this episode, we cover familial and brotherly or fraternal love, emotional (amor) and intellectual (dilectio) love, and piety (the historical, proper sense) and paternal love — three pairs, as it were. We call these facets, because it is not that love can be dissected and broken down into constituent parts; rather, it is that love is expressed in different ways between different people at different times. The love a husband has for his wife is not the same as the love a man has for his nation.
If we are commanded to love, then we must certainly understand what it means to love. We must know whom (and what) we must love and what is the nature and scope of that love. The world would deceive us by calling that which is not — and often even that which cannot be — love ‘love’. As Christians, we are commanded to be wise, and love — to whom it is owed and how it must or must not be expressed — is assuredly a matter of wisdom.
“Homosexual fornication” and “sodomy” are used as descriptors for an example around the 40:00 mark, but the matter is not discussed in detail or explicitly.
Leadership is a natural aspect of the interrelationships of men. Any given group of men, left to its own devices, will form into a hierarchy, with a leader at the top. The modern world would have us deny this reality, because it runs directly counter to Egalitarianism.
To men, God has given many gifts, but He has given them unequally — this is part of His design, and we are not permitted to deny or to ignore it. The husband is the head of his wife — he must lead, and she must submit. The leader is the head of his group, of his organization, of his church, of his nation — he must lead, and those under him must support and follow. It is not a mindless, slavish following of orders that is commanded or in sight; rather, it is a right recognition of the existence of hierarchy and one’s place within it.
We are endeavoring to rebuild from the wreckage of a shipwrecked world, and the reestablishment of hierarchy and of leadership is no small part of that task.
Galatians 3:28 is, perhaps, the most abused verse in modern churches (a term that should, arguably, be in quotes), and this is not without reason. Satan attacks where he knows there is purchase to be found or headway to be made. In entirely unambiguous terms, Galatians 3:28 affirms the very real existence of race, hierarchy, and sex (i.e., that we are created either male or female) — the very things that the modern world constantly attacks and denies.
We must be careful readers when it comes to Scripture. God does not choose His words idly and we should not skim over them. We do not usually focus on a single verse to this extent, but it is incumbent on faithful Christians to defend where the battle is joined. In today’s episode, we will arm you to detect abuses of this verse, to defend yourself against those abuses, and to understand the wealth of what God has transmitted to us in a mere twenty-three words).
The State is the left hand of Christ; it is that final prepositional phrase — that imports so much of the meaning — that is often ignored. As Christians, the ‘political’ realm is not a realm of indifference or adiaphora — and this is particularly true for Christian men. We are not called to separate ourselves from the world (except with regard to righteous behavior), but to be engaged in the world — put another way: to be in the world but not of the world.
Where Christians retreat, Satan advances. The times are evil and the Church must respond accordingly. It is incumbent on the Christian man to do his duty, and such duty most certainly includes a political dimension.
So what may Christians do with regard to the kingdom of the left hand? What must we refrain from doing? What is merely permissible? In this episode, we lay the foundation for a series on government, on the political, on the left-hand kingdom.
The modern world contends that slavery is incompatible with Christianity and that Christians must oppose slavery. Is this what Scripture teaches? The Christian must always turn to Scripture, not to the Enlightenment or to the secular oracles who proclaim newfound morality and a progressive revelation.
Scripture actually deals with slavery at length and in detail. In this episode, we go through the Scriptural teaching on slavery. The world may believe whatever it likes, but the Christian must hold firm to the Word of God — and Scripture does not oppose slavery.
Racism is not a sin. The modern-day ‘sin’ of racism was invented in the 19th century and then imported into the churches from the decadent and decaying culture. If you think that racism is a sin, then you have been misled.
In this episode, we go over the history of the term “racism” — where it originated and how it entered our modern culture — and take a look at how Satan is using it to destroy the Church. This is the culmination of our series on race and the most important episode in the series. This episode may make you uncomfortable, but the truth is worth the price.
If you want to read the resolution from the second half of this episode, it can be found in the proceedings of the 2019 convention, which can be found here.
God has given to men many attributes, and these attributes are not evenly or equally distributed. Some men are taller than others; some men are faster than others; and some men are more intelligent than others. The subject to human intelligence — IQ — makes many uncomfortable for a number of reasons, but it is no less real and no less a part of God’s good ordering of Creation than is height or any other attribute.
Intelligence is largely genetic — overwhelmingly so, in fact. If your parents are or were intelligent, then it is very likely that you will be so as well. This holds even more true for human populations (e.g., races), as they share a common genetic pool. Some races are more intelligent than others. IQ is not the same from one nation to the next.
Now, the issue of human intelligence can certainly be, in and of itself, a fascinating area of study or research, but that is not our primary concern; rather, we are concerned with how human intelligence interacts with the Church. Is there a minimum intelligence for the preservation of the Church and her treasury of God’s Word and truth? Can the Western Church survive if all her members are replaced with foreign souls? Can the Church survive the ongoing replacement of Europeans by alien peoples?
These are not idle questions and the answers are not so much a matter of life and death, but of eternal life and eternal death. We have been given a sacred trust — the Word of God and His bride, the Church. Whether we will be faithful or flounder remains to be seen, but the present trajectory is most certainly grim.
Some of the terms used in this episode are considered offensive in modern speech, but are all used in their technical sense.
The show notes include an image and video clip with a number of expletives.
Errata
When discussing the four-sigma numbers at ~00:07:21–00:07:38, I (Mahler) failed to note that I was working with a decimal chart and did not convert from decimal to percentage (which I should have done) and so stated — twice — that the four-sigma portion of the population is “point one percent”, when, in fact, I should have said that it is 0.001%. Point one percent of one when working in decimal (1.0 being 100) is, in fact, 0.001%, but it is decidedly unhelpful not to mention that one is working with a decimal chart, and thus implying 0.1%. (It is actually 0.000892201505099236%, but I suspect I can be forgiven for rounding.)
Race is a biological and a theological reality. The God Who created the Universe also created the races of men. The differences between and among the races of men have very real consequences for society, for neither the individual nor the average member of a given race is identical to or interchangeable with members of another race.
Scripture is not silent on these matters — God is not silent on these matters. Society would simultaneously have you deny the reality of human race and focus on a (deliberate) misconception of it in detrimental ways. In this episode, we ground our five-part series on race in the Word of God. There is truth in Creation, for it was written by the Author of all truth, but God did not leave these matters to ‘chance’ or simply to the discernment of men. From Genesis to Revelation, Scripture speaks of the reality and the importance of human race.
What God has created, let not man deny or destroy.
We are all sons of Adam — no Christian can deny this. However, we are not all sons of Japheth, nor are we all sons of Ham, and nor are we all sons of Shem. The descent of the nations (i.e., races) of man are given in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10). Nature is entirely in accord with Scripture. The nations can be seen in a number of ways — geographically, genotypically, behaviorally.
In this episode, we will be covering the fundamentals of human race. In a future episode, we will cover the theological import of these facts (if you are looking for Galatians 3:28, please wait for that future episode). This topic makes many Christians uncomfortable, but discomfort is not the standard — truth is. Test what we say against Scripture and against the natural facts.
Nothing we say in this episode (except some of the scientific matters) would sound at all out of place to the overwhelming majority of your ancestors — yes, even the Christian ones. So you must ask yourself: Was the Church and every Christian wrong for thousands of years or has the modern world drifted away from the truth? We can give you the information, but you must make that decision for yourself.
As we will cover in the episode, there are four categories of men when it comes to understanding and accepting the reality of race:
the Atheist/Evolutionist (who can prove race from the science, but often denies it nonetheless);
the Marxist (who once affirmed the reality of race, but now denies it for political purposes);
the naïve Christian or otherwise (who holds ‘one race, the human race’, parroting the second category, perhaps unwittingly); and
the Christian who affirms the reality of God’s created order, which includes race.
We are firmly in the fourth category. Listen carefully, and join us. God’s truth is always better than whatever anyone else can promise.
