Joel Webbin, Wesley Todd, and Antonio Griffith debate Ruslan and Avery on whether interracial marriage violates God's normative design. While hosts argue such unions disrupt distinct peoples created by geography and diet, guests counter that Scripture condemns idolatry, not ethnicity, citing Ruth and Boaz. The discussion distinguishes between biological lineage and cultural identity, noting that while biblically permissible, these marriages lack explicit New Testament endorsement compared to monogamy. Ultimately, the dialogue suggests maintaining ethnic continuity preserves nations for Revelation's final gathering, framing the issue as a matter of divine design rather than mere sin. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Live Informal Debate Announcement00:07:13
Welcome to NXR Studios.
If you're new to this channel, our schedule is as follows.
We broadcast both on X and Rumble and YouTube live on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
Three broadcasts a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, all at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.
Now, we're making an exception.
Today is Thursday.
We're doing an extra broadcast, an extra live stream, because there has been a week long controversy back and forth, back and forth between many Christians on social media over the topic of interracial marriage.
And so we are going to have today an informal debate.
On that topic, it's going to be myself and my two co hosts, Wesley and Antonio, on one side of the aisle.
And then we will be debating against Ruslan and Avery on the other side of the aisle.
My side, me, Wesley, and Antonio are going to be affirming the prompt or the thesis, which is from my tweet that kicked off this whole controversy about a week ago.
We are going to be affirming this thesis for the debate, and Avery and Ruslan will be the denying side of the table.
They will be denying.
This thesis.
This is the thesis.
Let me go ahead and read it right now.
Interracial marriage, while biblically permissible, no one's saying that it's a sin, not inherently.
Interracial marriage, while biblically permissible, generally or ordinarily, goes against God's normative design for humanity, nations, and cultures.
I'll read it again.
This is the formal thesis for today's debate.
I am in the affirmative.
Wes and Antonio affirming with me.
Ruslan and Avery denying.
Here's the statement Interracial marriage, while biblically permissible, generally or ordinarily goes against God's normative design for humanity, nations, and cultures.
Now, I say that this is an informal debate.
Let me give you the structure.
It's formal in the sense that we're all going to have opening timed statements.
So, we're going to kick off in our first segment with the opening statements.
I'm going to go first with a 10 minute opening statement, then, Ruslan, one of my opponents, he will read.
A 10 minute opening statement.
Then one of the guys on my side, my team, Antonio, is going to do a five minute opening statement.
Then Avery on Ruslan's side of the aisle, he's going to give a 10 minute opening statement.
And then we'll finish off with Wes, who again is affirming on my side a five minute statement.
So Wes and Antonio, both on my side affirming the thesis, they each get five minutes.
And then Avery and Ruslan and myself, we get 10 minutes so that both sides get a total of 20 minutes, which means it's going to be 40 minutes of opening statements.
That's going to be the first segment of today's show.
Then we'll go to a quick commercial break and then come back.
And the informal portion of this debate will be the cross examination.
We're going to do that in a discussion format rather than timed cross examination.
So that'll be anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half.
The second segment, informal cross examination, lively discussion.
Then we'll go to a final commercial break and we will come back for the third and final segment, which will be super chats.
If you have a question or a comment, send it in as a super chat and start sending them in now because this is going to be in order.
As we receive them, first come, first serve.
If you have a comment or a question and it's not a super chat, then it's not going to get read on the air because we're going to have a lot of comments and a lot of questions for this topic.
And so we want to prioritize the people who are being generous and supporting this channel.
We appreciate you very much.
And so the last thing with super chats, it's important.
You got to stay on topic.
If you are not staying on topic, even if it's a super chat, if it's a question or comment that's not on topic, we'll have to address it another time because we only have so much time.
We're going to have to end the stream.
It's going to be a long one, but eventually we have to end the stream because Avery and Ruslan are flying back today.
It's a quick turnaround.
They came out this morning, they're going back this evening.
And so, if you have a super chat, you want it to get read, it needs to be on topic, and you need to get it in sooner rather than later because we're going to go in order that we receive the super chats.
Last thing that I want to say is a big thank you for our Patreon supporters.
These are guys who are financially, generously supporting us in XR Studios on a monthly basis.
And we constantly are thinking of ways to provide special, tangible, substance value for you.
And so, we spent Over two hours, myself, Wes, and Antonio, recording a two hour episode exclusively only for our Patreon supporters on this topic of interracial marriage, giving the science, the biology, the scripture, the theology, giving some of the cultural aspects, breaking down what is ethnicity?
What is race?
Is race a biblical term?
Where do you root that in the scripture?
What's the difference between race and ethnicity?
If you want to watch that episode, then join us on Patreon.
You can go to patreon.com forward slash NXR Studios, patreon.com forward slash NXR Studios.
All right, here's a quick couple of announcements, then we'll get to our first segment with the opening statements.
Hey guys, in case you haven't heard, right now we have a 10 part series with one of the most controversial and significant voices in American politics.
That is none other than Nicholas J. Fuentes, the man, the myth, the legend.
And you did hear me correctly.
It's not a singular interview.
This is a 10 part series, 10 episodes, each approximately an hour in length.
And we are dripping out this series to the public, but you have to wait.
It's coming out one episode per week on Wednesdays at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.
However, if you want to get all 10 episodes today, ad free, early access, they are exclusively available on patreon.com.
And as a special limited time offer, you can also get two hardcover copies, signed copies, of our brand new book, The Hyphenated Heresy Judeo Christianity.
Christianity.
Go over to patreon.com forward slash NXR studios today to take advantage of these offers.
In 1979, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin gifted Jerry Falwell a luxurious Learjet 25, worth millions of dollars.
Officially, it was a token of gratitude for his support, but the truth?
It was a transaction.
Falwell was now Israel's valuable ally, flying high as a lobbyist in the skies, and from that moment on, Falwell's allegiance soared.
His moral majority made backing Israel a core platform, preaching American prosperity hinged upon blessing the Jewish state, or else face God's wrath.
Genesis 12 3 was twisted into foreign policy.
Now explore the full account in the hyphenated heresy, Judeo Christianity.
Learn how the faith was hijacked and rediscover Christianity on its own historic terms.
Pick up your copy today at Amazon.com.
Godly Ambition and Israel's Alliance00:06:07
Radical Christian nationalist pastor, Joel Webbin.
Joel Webbin.
I want to talk about Joel Webbin.
All right, we are here.
This is going to be a live informal debate.
You already saw the cold open, so I won't expose it all again.
But we're going to be formal in the sense that we actually do opening statements, and those will be timed.
We'll take turns and leave the raucous out of it.
We'll all be on our best behaviors, let the other guy speak.
The discussion portion that's kind of the informal portion of it.
It will be cross examination, but it's going to be in a discussion format instead of a timed, you say this, then you say that, going back and forth.
So we'll do our best not to interrupt each other, but you know how it is.
Like there might be a moment where it's like, dude, wait.
Wait, let me finish what I'm saying.
And that's allowed in the discussion portion, not during the opening statements.
And then, as we've already said, we'll take super chats at the end.
So we don't want to waste time because we've got 40 minutes of opening statements.
We'd like to have at least an hour, I'm thinking, of discussion and then probably an hour on super chats.
So we're going to be here for a little while.
We've got a couple commercial breaks.
So we built in some bathroom access into this live stream because it's going to be a while.
But let's start by doing this.
Let's just introduce ourselves.
People from all over.
We've got guys from your channels, guys from our channels.
So I don't want to assume that everybody knows who everybody is.
So you are the guest.
So let's start over on this side of the table.
Hi, I'm Ruslan.
Hey, Ruslan.
Hi.
What do you do, real quick?
So that's your name.
What do you do?
What's your vocation?
What, like?
YouTube podcaster, former artist slash current artist, and yeah, author, bestselling author now.
Yeah, USA Today.
Really?
What's the book?
Godly Ambition.
Godly Ambition.
That's good, man, dude.
It's been like 20 years of gospelly centered, centered gospel guys ragging on ambition.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
So good for you.
That's awesome.
That's good.
How do you feel about interracial marriage?
I love it.
Your wife is black, right?
My wife is black.
Okay.
All right.
What's going on, Avery?
I'm Avery from God Logic Apologetics.
I'm a Christian who does, you know, apologetics against Islam, Hebrew Israelism, Jehovah's Witnesses, LDS, you know, things of that nature.
I like to debate the Trinity, the deity of Christ, biblical reliability, and all kinds of stuff.
So, you can find me on YouTube at GodLogicApologetics.
You can find me on Instagram, GodLogicGL.
Same thing with Twitter and TikTok.
I stream every Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
So, it's like a consistent stream schedule.
So, you want to catch us live, see the fun, you can come on in and see what we do.
What time?
See what we do live.
Usually around 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
That's perfect.
So, we're Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
So, you can watch us first at 12 p.m. Eastern Time and then you can go watch.
That's right.
That's right.
Yep, I'm Antonio Griffith.
I'm a contributor here at NXR.
I'm a father, three children, a churchman, and you can see me Monday, Friday, NXR Live at 12 Eastern.
12 Eastern, yep.
Perfect.
Yep, and I also help co host as well here at NXR Studios, also Write Response Ministries, our theological side.
Husband, father to two children, and a churchman as well.
What's your name?
Wesley Todd.
Wesley Todd.
All right, and I'm Joel Webbin.
My primary vocation is I have the privilege of being a local pastor.
So I pastor a church in Georgetown, Texas.
We're about Hour north or so of Austin, Texas.
So close enough to have guys commute for work, things like that.
Ministry opportunity, but far enough away to hopefully have our police not be defunded.
So we're right there in the sweet spot.
And then I am husband to one and father of six, one in glory.
So five children with us that we adore.
And then I am CEO of NXR Studios and then also get to be president with Right Response Ministries.
And that's it.
Nice.
All right.
Anything you guys want to cover before we go into opening statements?
Are we ready?
Oh, I thought we were going to play some more commercials.
Yes.
Oh, no, that's it.
Oh, okay.
Do you need quick?
Okay.
So let's.
Sorry, hold on real quick.
I do want to let God Logic be at the Blessed God Summit debating Jacob Hansen on the Trinity.
Jacob Hansen's a leading LDS apologist, so plug for that.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I don't want you to miss any of the opening statements.
Do you need to do something real quick?
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
Why don't you go do something?
It's all right.
It's all right.
And talk to us a little bit about the God Summit.
Go ahead and take this opportunity to plug.
Yeah, sure.
So, man, so this is actually kind of the second year in a row that he's doing like this God Summit.
He's bringing in a bunch of everyone from all types of backgrounds and works within the Christian sphere, internet sphere, and bringing them on to do talks, bringing them on to give discussions, tips, and inspiration.
You got fitness, you got apologetics, you got just Christian living.
It's really good.
So, yeah, so I'll be debating Jacob Hansen.
Who is an LDS apologist?
We're going to be debating on whether or not the God of the Bible is a trinity.
And so that's going to be fun.
That's going to be a good time.
That's cool.
That was impressive.
I feel like he should be in the military.
I feel safer knowing that this guy.
All right, that was impressive.
That was fast.
All right, here we go.
Opening statement.
So it'll be me, then Ruslan, then Antonio, then Avery, and then Wes.
All right, here we go.
Let's put 10 minutes on the clock, and we're going to keep to the time.
Ready?
Trinity Debate with Jacob Hansen00:15:28
I'm going to wait till it counts.
There we go.
Public discussion of interracial marriage routinely collapses multiple moral and theological categories into a single accusation.
To say one is against interracial marriage is treated as equivalent to declaring it inherently sinful, perpetually immoral, criminally punishable, or worthy of social expulsion.
This is a category error.
Christian theology has always distinguished between normative design and absolute prohibition.
Between what God ordinarily orders and what He may nevertheless permit, bless, or redeem under Providence.
My statement argues that interracial marriage is not God's normative design for humanity, nations, and cultures, while rejecting the claim that it is inherently sinful in all cases, or constitutes an ongoing state of sin, or should be criminalized by the civil magistrate.
The argument is theological and prudential.
Not punitive.
Scripture routinely affirms realities that are not ideal while still permitting them under God's providence.
Polygamy, divorce, and even slavery are regulated in Scripture without being presented as creational ideals.
Permission is not endorsement, regulation is not normativity.
To say that something is not normative is to say that it is not the pattern God established at creation or the ordinary arrangement He blesses for long term stability.
It is not to say that God cannot work good through exceptions, nor that individuals involved are somehow outside of grace.
The question, therefore, is not whether interracial marriage can occur without immediate divine judgment, but whether it reflects God's ordinary ordering of human life, as revealed in creation, providence, and history.
Any Christian account must begin with creation.
Scripture affirms monogenesis.
All humanity descends from Adam and shares equal dignity before God.
This unity of origin, however, is not a mandate for historical sameness.
From Genesis onward, Scripture moves immediately from unity to descent, lineage, and inheritance.
Genesis 10, the Table of Nations, presents humanity divided into families, clans, languages, lands, and nations.
These divisions are not accidents, nor merely punishments for sin.
They are the means by which God orders humanity in history.
Babel does not create distinct peoples as different species.
It restrains an artificial, coercive unity that would have erased organic development.
Throughout Scripture, God deals with humanity not only as individuals, but as peoples.
He sets their boundaries, Deuteronomy 32, verse 8, determines their dwelling places, Acts 17, verse 26, judges them corporately, Amos chapter 1 and 2, and redeems them without erasing their identity, Revelation chapter 7, verse 9.
The biblical vision is unity without homogenization.
This framework undercuts the modern claim that peoplehood is either illusionary or morally suspect.
Scripture treats descent, kinship, and inheritance as real meaningful features of the created order.
For most of Christian history, race functioned as a descriptive term for peoplehood, extended kinship embodied in history through ancestry, marriage, language, custom, religion, and land.
It was not a claim about biological hierarchy or immutable genetic essence.
The biblical problem is not that humanity has distinct peoples, but rather that peoples rebel, forget God, and oppress one another.
When race is understood biblically and as extended kinship rather than superficial skin tone taxonomy, the theological relevance of marriage becomes clearer.
Marriage is not merely a private romantic arrangement, it is the primary mechanism by which peoples perpetuate themselves across generations.
Marriage in Scripture is oriented towards posterity, inheritance, and continuity.
From Genesis chapter 2 onward, marriage joins man and woman not only emotionally but genealogically.
Be fruitful and multiply is a command tied to lineage and dominion.
Because marriage produces children, it necessarily participates in the preservation or dissolution of peoples.
This is morally neutral in the micro sense.
No child is less human or less image bearing.
But it is not neutral in the macro sense.
Over time, patterns of marriage determine whether a people continues, assimilates, Or disappears.
Across scripture and history, people overwhelmingly marry within their own extended kinship groups.
This is not the product of hatred, but of proximity, shared language, shared norms, and shared inheritance.
God ordinarily works through families that become clans, clans that become peoples, and peoples that persist through homogeneous marriages.
Interracial marriage, by definition, disrupts that continuity.
Again, disruption is not always sinful.
Scripture allows for exceptions, conversions, adoptions, and incorporations.
But exceptions do not define the rule.
To say that interracial marriage is not normative is to say that God's ordinary means of preserving peoples is intra group marriage.
That is true empirically, historically, and biblically.
A further distinction must be made between permissibility and engineering.
Something may be morally permissible in isolation while still being promoted systematically for destructive ends.
In the modern West, interracial marriage, particularly for white Europeans, has been relentlessly promoted through media, Advertising and institutional messaging.
The pattern is not organic representation of demographic reality.
It is asymmetrical and targeted.
White heterosexual couples, the only arrangement that produces white children, are conspicuously minimized.
Against the backdrop of abortion access, mass immigration, and the normalization of gay marriage, the promotion of interracial marriage functions not merely as representation, but as demographic strategy.
One need not believe in conspiracies to observe.
The incentives, patterns, and outcomes.
In this context, it is reasonable to say that interracial marriage, while morally permissible in individual cases, is being used instrumentally at the macro level to accelerate the dissolution of a particular people.
To deny this is not charity, it is willful blindness.
It is critical to restate what my position does not claim.
First, it does not claim that interracial marriage is inherently sinful in every instance.
Scripture does not provide warrant for such absolutism.
Second, it does not claim that entering an interracial marriage places individuals in a perpetual state of sin.
Marriage creates real obligations.
Once formed, it is to be honored, not undone.
Third, it does not claim that interracial marriage should be criminalized or punished by the civil magistrate.
The distance between moral norm and civil sanction is vast, and Scripture recognizes this.
Fourth, it does not claim that Christians who disagree are heretics.
There is no ecumenical council, confessional standard, or universal patristic witness.
That condemns the opposing view as outside the faith.
Disagreement here is real, but not church dividing.
The reflexive charge that my position is racist depends on collapsing biblical peoplehood into modern racial ideology.
Once that collapse is rejected, the accusation loses its force.
Affirming that God ordinarily orders humanity into distinct peoples is not hatred.
Acknowledging that marriage sustains those peoples is not malice.
Arguing that normativity matters is not violence.
What is dishonest is pretending that every preference is morally equivalent, every pattern accidental, and every outcome inexplicable.
Scripture does not treat history that way, and neither should Christians.
This framework undercuts the modern claim that peoplehood is either illusionary or morally suspect.
Scripture treats.
Whoops, sorry.
Almost done here.
A theology that cannot account for peoplehood will eventually spiritualize away everything concrete.
Borders, inheritance, authority, and even accountability.
The result is not unity, but fragmentation and confusion.
Interracial marriage, understood rightly, fits within this framework.
It is an exception God may bless, but not the pattern that he ordinarily establishes.
Recognizing that distinction is not cruelty, but fidelity to the created order.
To assert that interracial marriage is not God's normative design is to affirm creation, history, and prudence without denying grace, dignity, or redemption.
It is to distinguish norm from exception and permission from promotion.
This position neither condemns individuals nor criminalizes relationships.
It simply insists that God's ordering of humanity into real peoples is meaningful, that marriage perpetuates those peoples, and that modern efforts to erase this reality are neither biblical nor benign.
Christ is king over nations as nations, and faithfulness requires speaking plainly about what he has made, even when doing so is unpopular.
Okay, that's my opening statement.
Rusan.
All right, go.
Thank you so much for having me.
We had you at my space, and I'm glad to be back with your space.
So, initially, this was supposed to be a three versus one.
So, I'm glad I was able to bring God logic.
Now it's a three versus two, but then I discovered Antonio is half black, half white.
It's two and a half versus two and a half.
As I told you privately, it is very impressive.
You got a mixed race brother to argue against interracial marriage.
Yeah, well, it's very impressive.
Or, or, we'll see.
We're just right.
So listen, I'm here not because I necessarily see you guys as my adversary, though I think some of the positions can be adversarial to scripture, which I think hopefully we get to clarify those things and get to the bottom of those things.
And ultimately, like I care about you, Joel.
You came by, we had a great time, we hung out, we went to get sushi together.
I discovered some things about you that I liked, and then some other things that we disagreed on a little bit.
But so I care about you, broader speaking.
I care about the audience, I care about the conversation, I care about where the country's going.
So this is about what we tell Christians God disapproves of, right?
I wouldn't be here if this was just a disagreement over preferences.
I'm here because when we say God's design, we were talking about moral.
Authority.
So to be clear, we're talking about pro scripture, pro church, and anti careless doctrine.
I think when we examine the scriptures, we see a pretty strong record of inter ethnic marriages without any condemnation.
We see Moses and his wife, which in Numbers 12, we see Goddamn rebuke Miriam, not Moses.
We see Ruth and Boaz.
We see Rahab.
And these are not fringe stories, they're redemptive history moments.
And some of these people make it into Jesus's very own.
Lineage.
Okay, so if these were the exception to the rule, it would be reasonable to see that laid out clearly in Scripture.
We don't see any such argument.
And so, therefore, the burden of proof is on you guys.
The burden of proof is to show how there's a condemnation of this or denial of this or this is the exception to the rule.
It is not on us to provide the permission of it.
If we look at the New Testament, we see multiple epistles written to mixed.
Ethnic churches.
We see Corinth, we see Ephesus, Galatia, Colossia.
These churches were ethnically and culturally mixed.
We even see Paul writing to Timothy, who was culturally and ethnically mixed.
And what we see in scripture, clear as day, a clear rebuke of sexual immorality.
We see a clear rebuke of idolatry.
We see a clear rebuke of partiality.
And of course, a clear rebuke of false gospels.
But we never, ever, not once do we see any rebuke of inner ethnic marriage.
Not one.
Okay, so if it is generally against God's design, the silence of scripture and the apostles is inexplicable.
It absolutely makes no sense.
And we see this evident in Ephesians chapter 2, verse 14 through 16.
As Paul is oddly writing a mixed ethnic church, he says in verse 14, and this is a beautiful passage right after talking about how we're saved by grace through faith and to God's good work, we are his handiwork.
And then in verse 14, Paul says, For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations.
His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity, one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace.
And in one body, to reconcile both of them to God through the cross by which he put to death their hostility.
He came and preached peace to you.
Who were far away and peace to those who were near.
So, we see this very clear description that a mixed ethnic church is being made into one new humanity.
And again, we see no prohibitions.
We don't even see any slight pushback on this in any New Testament epistles at all.
And he's writing to an audience that this would clearly matter to.
So, I think this is huge to break down and just get to the basics that God is not returning for a mono ethnic.
Bride, which I know you guys believe, but he is in real time right now redeeming a multi ethnic people.
This matters because design points forward, not backward.
And that leads me to my next point, which is I think we would all agree here that God is a God of order, that God does not contradict himself, that theology requires the theology that requires semantic gymnastic is sus.
God is not a God of confusion, as we see in 1 Corinthians 14 13.
The Logos theme, God is rational.
Communitive and consistent, which leads me to this entire premise.
Oddly enough, completely breaking the very second rule of logic a moral claim must be morally permissible or morally impermissible.
And the second rule of logic is the law of the excluded middle.
There is no third moral category called generally against God's design but not sinful.
The entire premise of this once you say God's against this design, you've crossed from preference into moral territory.
Race, Ethnicity, and Biblical Anthropology00:06:53
The entire premise becomes incoherent.
So, if it's not sinful, it cannot be morally disproved by God.
At most, at most, it's preference for situational, not normative.
This claim, this entire claim debate, interracial marriage, while biblically permissible, generally orderly, goes against God's design, is incoherent.
And so, I find all this telling and interesting.
And in a broader context, like I'm more interested in your own.
Evolution, Joel, because I don't know if I'm disagreeing with you as much as you seem to be disagreeing with you.
And so I got a couple clips I'd love to play of you from 2022, where it sure does sound like you are co signing everything I'm co signing.
Because we don't bring people home.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's just.
Yeah, I hear you.
Racism, my point is, if race is a big deal, racism is the necessary wall of defense to preserve.
The big deal of race.
You can't continue to emphasize race multiple generations from now without dividing walls of hostility to protect the purity of the race.
And I feel like even with Israel, ethnic Israel.
So we see if race is a big deal, quote, if race is a big deal, I don't see racism not being the logical conclusion.
Here's more on interracial marriage.
I know for a fact if I could sit them down, strap them to a chair, give them some truth serum, and hear what they really thought.
I don't think that they would be a fan of interracial marriage because it's all about your identity coming from your ethnicity.
And you don't want to water that down.
You don't want to lose that.
You don't want to mix that.
So, Joe, this is you railing against Hebrew Israelites.
And I got one more clip.
It's my favorite one.
Articulate or not, the natural thought process is that that skin, that blood needs to be preserved.
And so you have to turn inward rather than outward and embracing people from every tribe, tongue, and nation.
And I've got three girls, and if one of them brings some Hispanic guy home one day when she's older and the guy loves the Lord, then I wanna say, praise God, marry my daughter, or black guy, praise God, marry my daughter.
But I feel like if race is such a big deal, you can't say that.
If race is such a big deal, you can't say that.
So I don't know.
I think at best, Joel, you've clearly flip flopped on his position really bad.
At worst, this is a part of a bigger play for partnerships with other Christian nationalists.
But if race is a big deal, racism is a necessary wall of defense to preserve the big deal.
Now, you guys have said race isn't everything, but it's not nothing.
So I'm just more curious on how you, just a couple years ago, went from that to where you are today.
And really, my frustration is in you saying I'm against interracial marriage.
You can say I have preferences.
I wouldn't even be mad if you said, hey, I want my grandkids to look like me, I want my kids to marry folks.
But when you go out and say I am against something as a pastor, I think I have some issues with that.
Because I just don't see it in scripture.
And so, in this conversation, we're going to have some fun today.
Again, I think God Logic is going to have some interesting points, but I want to make sure that the goalpost is not moved and that we're not going back and forth over different prompts.
We have a very clear prompt that you guys have to prove.
I'm sure we're going to have some conflation of race and ethnicity and culture and faith.
Joe is probably going to call our perspective wooden because we're going to keep taking you guys right back to scripture.
You're probably going to call us autistic and retarded.
That's fine.
For demanding that we make a case from logic and scripture.
And I'm guessing there will be, oh, I would love to hear your fifth commandment argument to honor your mother and father.
That's going to be interesting if you bring that one up.
There'll be appeals to emotion, social anxiety, gish galloping, filibustering.
But what won't happen is they will not be able to prove this with scripture.
Even if I sat here and I granted every race realist claim and every statistic, every sociological concern, every fear, every They're trying to take out the white men and take our jobs because the immigrants are coming.
Even if I did all of that, none of it would overwrite what scripture clearly permits.
So that's it.
That's my time.
All right.
We will do our best to respond in the discussion portion.
So I'm going to hold off.
It's your turn.
Wait, no.
It's your turn.
Yep.
Antonio, it's now.
Great.
Well, as I jump in, I think it will be helpful to deal with race.
So we'll start there.
And I want to just be clear when we talk about race, we don't mean to import.
Caricatures or any moral hierarchies, nor do we even mean to refer to any discrete biological boundaries.
In my view, race refers to a large, historically stable gene sharing population that has developed under distinct geographic and ecological conditions, and therefore they exhibit these different peoples' pattern differences in genetic variations and phenotypical traits.
This is one of the reasons, for example, we can refer to white or black or Asian people and it have any linguistic utility, because we all know that this is true.
In terms of a biblical anthropology, my position is pretty simple that this human variation is not random.
It was actually a consequence of the dominion mandate given by God to man at creation that they would be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth in Genesis 1, verse 28.
As a consequence of filling the earth, by God's design, these people, exposed to different environments and diets and patterns of living, developed distinct and varied physical and biological attributes.
And these variations, which, when classified broadly, can be described as what we call Colloquially, race, and they cluster primarily at the continental scale.
For this reason, we can use the word European and white interchangeably.
These clusters are detectable and predictive, and they are obviously not absolutes.
I think race is better understood statistically as a fuzzy set of data with real structure, much like dialect regions or ecosystems.
You can blur the borders, but the underlying realities remain.
For example, you might ask an ecologist, where does the Amazon rainforest end?
The borders are ecological gradients and thus quasi arbitrary, but the lack of natural borders does not erase the existence of the rainforest altogether.
In this way, you can understand the way in which race is a linguistic, or as you might say, a social construct that refers to a real.
Non pattern, non random pattern, I should say, of human biology.
And to deny this is to insist that reality conforms to a modern liberal consensus and its flattening of nature and its biological variations by way of race.
Marriage Laws for Strangers and Natives00:13:46
And to quickly explicate, going back to the prompt, what is meant by God's normative design, this refers to the purposes and patterns God intentionally built into creation that define how things ought to function, not merely how they function in the fallen world.
Normative refers to a divinely established standard, discerned through creation's telos, that is, its ends, but also its stable and recurring patterns, and Scripture's authoritative interpretation of both.
Deviations from these patterns do not redefine the norm, just as disease does not redefine health.
And so, given this structured human variation, we can properly assess on theological grounds the way in which distinct human populations or races correspond with one another, and more specifically than that, How do these distinct groups correspond with one another within the context of marriage?
So, what is the purpose of marriage, and what kind of unity does God intend to establish?
This is where scripture and specifically case law is helpful.
In Deuteronomy chapter 22, verse 10, Israel was commanded not to plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together.
And scripture itself teaches us how to read such laws.
They are case laws, specific applications of broader moral principles.
The unequal yoke is not merely about animals, it's about mismatched.
Types bound together in a task that requires unity, both of spirit, that is faith, and nature, that is in their physical essence.
This principle of unity is explicitly applied in Scripture to faith, but it does not originate there.
Religion, faith, is simply the highest and most explicit expression of it.
Man is created in the image of God.
Woman is created as his helpmeet, not an assistant, but a mirror, corresponding reflection, formed from him and for him.
As Genesis and Paul both affirm, she is of the man and for the man.
Sharing in his calling, his culture, and his covenantal identity.
A helpmeet is intended to have something religiously and culturally in common with her husband, or else she cannot truly help him fulfill his God given task.
This necessity for unity and correspondence is why scripture clearly places the burden of the law against unequal marriages, not merely interreligious marriages, though those are explicitly condemned, but unequal unions more broadly, unions that fracture the very community that marriage is meant to establish.
Further, at the societal or civilizational level, marriage is not merely a private affection.
It's the foundation of peoplehood.
It creates continuity of worship, of language, of norms, of inheritance.
When marriages routinely cross deep religious, racial, and cultural boundaries, they tend not to strengthen community.
In fact, they ordinarily dissolve it.
The biblical vision of marriage is ordered and communal.
It assumes that what is joined together shares not only affection, but a common life rooted in a shared belief, shared culture, and yes, a shared identity.
And it is on that foundation, biological reality, creational order, and the covenantal purpose of marriage that we can conclude that interracial marriage ordinarily goes against God's normative design for nations, cultures, and humanity more broadly.
Next one is going to be Avery, 10 minutes.
Yes, sir.
Can you set that clock?
Yeah, clock helps.
I was looking at it during your time.
All right, it's coming, just a second.
It's coming, it's coming.
One job, man.
All right.
All right.
All right, man.
Thank you for having us, man.
Enjoying the perspectives that I'm hearing.
Ruslan, I want to piggyback off of you because you set a foundation here scripturally and you were quoting scripture.
And so I think that that is extremely important in this conversation that we, if we're talking about, like you said, if we're talking about whether or not this goes against God's normative design, Well, we find God's design within Scripture, not what we make up, not with our own preference or position, arbitrary, you know, thoughts.
It's with Scripture.
So I think that we should start off with one how does God view the foreigner?
How does He view someone who is not a native?
And this is what we have in Leviticus chapter 19, verse 33 and 34.
It says, If a stranger lives as a foreigner with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.
The stranger who lives as a foreigner with you shall be to you as the native born among you, and you shall love him.
As yourself.
Let's go to Leviticus chapter 24, verse 22.
It says, You shall have one kind of law for the foreigner as well as the native born.
So, what we're seeing with the scripture is that one, with God's intent, with God's narrative, the foreigner, the one who clings to him, the one who loves him, is the same as a natural born Israelite who he gave the covenants to in the first place.
They're the same, they're one and the same.
Even though there are physical and cultural distinctions, but they are one and the same.
In God's eyes, one law.
We got Numbers chapter 15, verses 15 to 16.
It says, For the assembly, there shall be one statute for you and the stranger who lives as a foreigner, a statute forever throughout your generations.
As you are, so the foreigner shall be before Yahweh.
One law, one ordinance shall be for you and for the stranger who lives as a foreigner with you.
That is Numbers chapter 15.
Verses 15 to 16.
So again, we see this isn't just a temporary thing, this is forever.
It says, This is what there's one statute between that that is shared with the stranger and the native born throughout your generations forever.
God says, This looks like God is establishing how He feels and how He cares about the foreigner, those who have physically distinct traits with Israel.
Let's see again, we got Ezekiel chapter 47, verse 22 to 23.
It says, You shall divide it by lot.
Talking about the land, you shall divide it by lot for an inheritance to you and to the aliens who live among you, who will father children among you.
Then they shall be to you as the native born among the children of Israel.
They shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel.
In whatever tribe the stranger lives, there shall you give him his inheritance, says the Lord Yahweh.
So we see that even the stranger is able to get an inheritance among Israel.
Even though they are of, I guess, what we would say, a different race.
But yet, before the eyes of God, they are seen as one in the same despite the cultural and even genetic differences, right?
So, what do we see here then?
In 1 Kings 11, we see what is the type of condemnation against intermarriage that God displays, that God condemns.
We see that Solomon falls to this because he marries foreign women, and as a result of this, the foreign women.
Lead him astray.
They lead him away from God.
So, what kind of intermarriages does God not allow?
He does not allow the ones that will lead you to idolatry, the ones who are not in the same spiritual position as you, that are going after different gods and idols.
But if they go after Yahweh, if they believe in Yahweh, then it's permissible.
It's okay.
It's not a sin, and it's actually part of God's design.
It doesn't go against it.
So let's see here.
So we have a few examples of this.
We have in Ezekiel, I'm sorry, not in Ezekiel, we have in Ezra.
In Ezra chapter 10, we have Ezra going against the intermarriage of the Israelites.
And this is what we have to say.
Hold on just one second.
This is what we have in Ezra.
Ezra chapter 9, and we have Ezra chapter 9, verse 1.
It says, And now, O our God, what shall we say after this?
For we have forsaken your commandments.
Which commandment was this?
Which you commanded by your servants the prophets, saying, The land that you are entering to take possession of it is a land impure with the impurity of the peoples of the lands.
Why?
Is it because of their genetic traits?
No, he says it with their abominations.
They have filled it from end to end with their uncleanliness.
Therefore, so here's what it is this is the reason why.
Therefore, Do not give your daughters to their sons, neither take their daughters for your sons, and never seek their peace or prosperity, that you may be strong and eat the good of the land and leave it for an inheritance for your children forever.
Skipping down to the 13th and 14th verse, it says, Shall we break your commandments again and intermarry with the peoples who practice these abominations?
So you see what it is?
It has to do with their spiritual posture.
Not their genetic traits.
It has nothing to do with that.
The condemnation of intermarriage that God has in his scripture goes against the foreigners who will lead you away from the worship of the true God.
Let's see again.
We have Exodus chapter 34, where we see the original commandment.
It says, Be sure to keep what I am commanding you this day.
Behold, I am going to drive out the Amorite before you, the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Perizzite.
You guys know what I'm talking about.
Sorry to say these words.
But all these nations, y'all know what I'm saying.
But what does he say?
He says, He says, For God is a jealous God, lest you cut a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they play the harlot with their gods and sacrifice to their gods, and one of them invites you to eat of the sacrifice, and you take some of their daughters for your sons, and his daughters play the harlot with their gods, and cause your sons also to play the harlot with their gods.
You shall make for yourself no molten gods.
That's Exodus chapter 34, verses 11 to 17.
Deuteronomy 7, verse 6.
Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them.
You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons, because they will turn your sons away from following me, and they will serve other gods.
Then the anger of Yahweh will be kindled against you, and he will quickly destroy you.
What do we see here again?
Every time we see a condemnation with an intermarriage with a foreigner, it has to do with the spiritual posture of the foreigner.
It has nothing to do with their genetics.
It has nothing to do with the way they look.
It has nothing to do with their background and culture.
It has to do with their spiritual posture.
Will they lead you away from the true God or not?
Which is why we have examples of foreigners of intermarriage where it's not condemned.
And these aren't exceptions.
This is just God's command be fruitful and multiply.
Male and female, He has made them.
Not a particular race, He's made them for a particular race.
It's male and female.
He created them in his image, gave them the command to be fruitful and multiply.
We got, we gave examples of Ruth, we got Rahab, we got the Moabite woman that Moses married.
We got, oh, a beautiful example in 1 Chronicles chapter 2, we have Shashan, who the context is counting the line of Judah.
In order to preserve the line of Judah, Shashan, unfortunately, he didn't have any sons.
However, he had an Egyptian slave and he only had daughters.
So what did he do?
He married his Egyptian male slave to one of the daughters, and the line continued.
If this goes against God's normative plan, then there's no way that the line of Judah, which our Messiah, our Lord, our great God and King, comes from in the flesh, there's no way that this will be able to continue.
It will be diluted because there's somebody who is of a different race in the line.
So, what do we see then?
With all of these examples, we have explicit examples where God condemns it because of the spiritual posture, not because of culture and race.
And what does the Bible say on this?
The Bible says this in Galatians chapter 3, verse 26.
It says, There is neither Jew nor Greek.
There is neither slave nor free man.
There is neither male nor female, but for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
And if you belong to Christ, then you are of Abraham's seed, heirs according to the promise, not according to your flesh.
Right?
We got Colossians chapter 3, verse 8 to 11.
We'll just read 11.
A renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian.
Slave and free man, but Christ is all and in all.
And then last but not least, 1 Corinthians 7 39.
It says, A wife is bound as long as her husband lives, but if her husband has fallen asleep, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord.
All right.
Come on.
That's 10 minutes.
Thank you.
Last one is five minutes on the clock for Wesley.
All right.
I'll watch for that clock to be set and I'll jump right in.
Yeah, we're going to wait for a sec.
Unique Peoples and God's Design00:04:47
I got 10.
We can count it down to five.
We know math.
I'm going to go ahead.
And start.
So, for the ending here, I'd like to lay down a foundation for what it is specifically we mean by race.
The thesis statement specifies interracial marriage.
What is interracial marriage?
Race, in its simplest definition, simply means common descent.
People of a given race share a common ancestor at a relatively recent point, as distinguished from other lineages that do not share that same ancestry.
We all share Adam as the ultimate head of humanity, the first human, and Eve, the mother of all living.
Thus, there is a sense in which one can say Adam is the head of the human race.
But just because there is one ultimate common lineage does not mean that there are not additional, meaningful, more recent shared ancestries.
Thousands of years more recently from Adam, every individual in the world, every human being, is a descendant of one of Noah's sons, Shem, Ham, or Japheth, or they are a mix of two or three of them.
Europeans, for example, they are the offsprings of Japheth, who migrated north to the coastland.
Asians and Middle Eastern peoples descended from Shem.
Africans descended from Ham, who went south.
It is important to understand that within each broad lineage, those big three buckets, there can be further specificity.
Within Europeans, for example, there are the Germanics, French, the Scottish, the Spanish, the Southeastern, and the Slavic influenced Europeans.
These are people with different languages, cultures, diets, habits, and occupying different geography that have been shaped to be biologically unique.
They are not just distinct in practice or culture, they are distinct inherently.
Traits such as height, bone structure, intelligence, skin tone, body fat, and muscle composition, immune systems, and more have all been shaped by the geography, the culture, the diet, climate, and religion.
And so, race is our shorthand way of speaking of groups of people.
That are biologically related.
They've been shaped by the same factors over time.
I imagine at some point the crux of this debate will come down to this question If all other factors, culture, religion, were made equal, there's no unequal yoking between unbelievers or between individuals that share little in common, would it still be our position that interracial marriage is not God's normative design?
To which we would answer yes.
God ordered the descendants of Adam to be fruitful, multiply, and spread over the face of the world.
In doing so, God knew.
That those families would eventually come to look, act, and talk in very different ways, even if sin never entered the world.
After the flood, God repeats the order to man to spread out and to fill the earth.
Shortly after, man rebels at Babel, gathering together to build a tower to the sky, insisting, We will not be distinct, unique, we will not disperse.
God judges them with the confusion of language, making them spread out and become unique.
The unique traits that human beings acquire are God's design.
He designed blonde hair, high cheekbones, blue eyes, red heads.
And thousands of other unique variations, and the mechanism that is lineage that passes them down generation after generation.
He made a world that optimized Kenyans for endurance, Arctic peoples for cold survival, and equator populations for the relentless sun.
I, for one, I'd like to go on the record and say I think that God's design is very good.
None of us here want to see the distinctiveness of any people erased.
If God did not want geography and diet and religion to make people unique, He would not have designed the world that way.
He would not have made traits from parents to children.
But he did, and he required that men spread out so that they would form those unique peoples, languages, and races.
The only way I know how to defend the distinctiveness of the peoples God has shaped on the face of the earth is by asserting that God did not design interracial marriage to be normative.
If interracial marriage was normative, by this time in the Gospel age, all differences between peoples would be flattened.
We would resemble Babel more than Revelation 7 9.
For there to be every tribe, tongue, and nation in heaven on the final day, they have to actually still exist.
Here on earth, first.
At a large enough scale, interracial marriage would destroy the uniqueness of the Europeans, the South Americans, the Japanese, the Inuit Eskimos, and every other people group that practiced it at large enough scale, which is why, coincidentally, many peoples don't.
White people, which are as low as 10% of the world's population after two world wars, would be practically extinct in a few generations if interracial marriage was adopted at scale.
Thus, we take the affirmative, arguing that interracial marriage, while permissible, is not God's ordinary design for humanity.
And that it is good and right for people to maintain their uniqueness by ordinarily marrying within their own ethnicity, nation, and race.
All right, there you have it.
There's all the opening statements.
Interracial Marriage Is Not Normative00:15:26
That's about 40 minutes.
We did it.
Everybody stuck to their time.
I'm impressed by that.
So, that is all the opening statements.
Wes and Antonio were five minutes each because we've got three guys on our side.
But I didn't want to, it's like a father having to pick which one of his kids that he has to shoot in the back.
I've got two co hosts, and I didn't want to tell one of them, sorry, you can't be on the show.
So, they each did five minutes, and then Ruslan and Avery got to do 10.
So, it's 20 minutes each.
What we're going to do now is go to a quick commercial break, and then we'll go into the discussion portion.
Of this informal debate.
It is a debate, but it's not completely Lincoln Douglas style debate.
So it's going to be an informal discussion going back and forth.
But first, we're going to go to a commercial break, and then we'll see you right after that.
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All right, we are back.
Okay, so we're going to discuss going off of what was said in the opening statements and those kind of things.
I would like To, if you guys will allow me, I would like to respond to two things first.
So, first, you brought up the old clips.
I feel like I've got to get that out of the way, right?
It's kind of an elephant in the room.
So, everything that I said in those clips is exactly what I'm saying now.
It's not.
It's not.
No, it's not.
And I'm not going to treat people like they're stupid.
That's not true.
What Ruslan is showing, that was from 2022.
And then he just reminded me during that commercial break.
And it's not a public record, but I'm a Christian pastor.
I'm not a liar.
So, He said in 2023, that's when I came out and he was gracious and had me on his show to talk about Theonomy, talk about Post Mill, and not on the air, but afterwards we got sushi together, which was awesome.
And I reaffirmed the basic tenets of the same thing I was talking about.
Because I told him my wife was black and that's what we were having.
Yeah, well, and I met her when we walked up in your driveway.
I think she came out and said hi.
So, anyways, so as recent as 2023, but I'll strengthen your argument.
Do you want better?
Because I know me.
I thought what you just heard with those clips that Ruslan played during his opening statement.
That was basically, you know, there's some nuances and developments, evolution, you know, which we deny macro evolution.
But over, you know, some nuances and developments over the last few years.
But I would say that the position I'm articulating today is a recent development.
This is something that I've come to the conviction of, I would say, probably in the last year.
And so I'm willing to admit that.
So what I would say with those past things is I'll say what I've said, our audience knows this because I've said it several times, because they've Picked up, you know, like, hey, this isn't always what you believe.
You know, how do you account for that?
You believed one thing, now you believe another.
I find it strange.
I think it's like a curious, it's an interesting brag when someone says, you know what, for the last 20 years, I haven't changed on anything.
I've been consistent.
I've held the exact same positions for two decades.
To which my response would be, for the last two decades, you haven't grown at all.
You haven't improved at all.
You haven't learned anything at all.
You haven't been sanctified at all.
You haven't grown at all.
Why are we bragging about that?
So, you know, Matt Walsh, somebody got him on this recently and he was like, Yeah, I learned.
I grew.
I changed.
So I'll admit that right out of the gate.
So that's my answer.
That's all I got for that.
That's all I can explain.
But you're absolutely right.
There's an inconsistency.
So, can I just go for it?
So, today, if a young black brother, maybe your half brother, pulls up, loves Jesus, loves the Lord, loves your local church, I don't know, how old are your daughters?
I don't want to make it weird.
They're very young.
Okay.
So, let's just say, fast forward 10 years down the road.
You got a cousin that loves Jesus.
Man, he loves the Lord.
He's a post mill Christian nationalist, theophilist, natural law, all those things.
Doesn't like Israel.
Doesn't like Israel.
He hates the Jews.
Checking all the boxes.
All the things.
And your cousin and your brother, your half brother, he's full black.
He shows up 10 years, 15 years in order.
He starts dating your daughter.
Are you now saying, hey, I don't think you guys should get married?
And they love each other and they love the Lord and have culture in common and they're very similar.
Are you now, like, did your position change in that regard?
Because you said if your wife, your daughter brings home a black man, You're like, praise the Lord, he loves Jesus.
Awesome.
Right.
Great question.
So, this is how we respond.
First, just to make it just clear for our audience, that would never happen.
And the reason that would never happen is no young man will date any of my daughters without first coming through me.
We don't do dating in the Webb and household.
So, it would be courtship.
They would have to talk to me first.
So, it's not like, oh, I'd find out six months in, oh, my daughter's dating someone.
I didn't even know.
So, we're not libs.
So, we don't do that.
So, that would never happen.
Number two, this is my wife and I were talking about this, you know, because I've had to disciple my wife and, you know, like for her to know.
Okay, what are some of these developments?
Can you walk me through it?
You know, because these are new things.
This is not what we were taught.
Like a couple of years ago, when you hear me espousing those things, you play those clips, you know who I'm thinking of in my mind as I'm saying that?
Who I still respect greatly.
But who I'm thinking of, Vodi Bakum.
I love Vodi Bakum, right?
I got to have, I was honored to have one public conversation with him, an episode on Christian nationalism, and one private phone call.
And I'm not going to talk about the private phone call because we have enough people saying, well, Charlie Kirk texted me privately, you know, or I had a private phone call.
I'm sick of that crap with all the stuff online right now.
You know how many people are saying, like, oh, well, he personally told me this right before he died.
So, no, I had one private phone call.
It was great.
And we did not talk about interracial marriage.
So, I'm not going to talk about that.
But here's the deal I'm thinking of Vodi Bakum.
I'm thinking of him saying, one race, the human race.
And a few years ago, I would have been like, yeah, one race, the human race.
You get them, Vodi, get those racists.
And that would have been my position.
And I've developed since then.
So, in this scenario, if a young black man came to me first, because we do courting, he'd have to go through me, and he wants to date my daughter, I'm always going to consider her interests.
If she's not interested, we're not doing that.
So, I'm going to talk to her.
I would consider those interests, those kinds of things.
But in terms of would I give the green light, as I was walking my wife through this, and she brought up the same kind of question.
And she said, Vodi, that's who she used in this analogy.
She was like, what if it was one of Vodi's sons?
And then it's one of our daughters.
And I said, see, that's, and this is important for the debate the distinction between two different categories, ethnicity and race.
And I believe they overlap, but we're going to use them as two different terms.
Ethnicity, I would say, is it contains the racial components, but it's much broader because ethnicity is not just biological, it's not just ancestry and lineage, but it also encompasses language, liturgy.
So I do L's like loves, language, liturgy, being worship, religion, those kinds of things, you know, customs, culture, traditions, all these things come in law.
Yeah, all these things come into play with ethnicity.
And in the case of Votie Bakum's son, It would be, and this is just the reality.
I'm not excited about it.
It makes me sad, but it is the reality.
Vodi Bakum's son in these United States of America in the year of our Lord 2026 would be one of the rare black men, young black men, who actually shares, for the most part, virtually to a T, the same ethnicity as my white daughters, right?
Meaning same religion, same worldview, same traditions, both celebrate Thanksgiving, both like Christmas, all that traditions.
Customs, heritage being like he's not a black Nigerian who came here 15 minutes ago, but like has been in America, heritage black American that has been here tracing his ancestry back for a couple centuries.
So, in that regard, and they're Reformed Baptist, I'm Reformed Baptist, the doctrinal things would be aligned, all those kind of things.
So, that would be one of the rare individuals.
The reality is, and I don't think you guys are going to push back on this, the reality is, I would say that about 90 to 95% of the black church in America is heretical.
Has terrible doctrinal views.
So, what you're.
So, are you conceding that you would let your daughter marry Vodafone's son 10 years in the future?
Is that what you're saying?
What I'm saying is that that would be permissible.
I would not encourage it, though.
You would not encourage it?
Would you discourage it?
It depends.
On what?
Well, because.
So, here's the scenario for every young black man that meets that mold, the ethnic, not racial, but ethnic mold, they have the same religion, the same traditions, the same customs, the same language, all that kind of stuff.
For every one of those, Currently, right now, in not just America, but in my local church, there would be several young white men who would also meet those exact standards.
That's not what we're asking.
Would you discourage the black man who meets those standards?
Would you discourage your daughter or that relationship?
What I'm saying is that if all things are equal, black man, white man, with my daughter being white, if all things are equal, I would encourage her towards a white young man.
Would you discourage her from the black man?
It's a simple yes or no.
Yeah.
So you would discourage her.
Yeah, as opposed to marrying a young white.
No, no, no.
You're creating a false binary.
I'm saying in a vacuum, man, there's only one.
A black man goes to your church, loves Jesus, voted Bach himself.
In a vacuum, that black man is the only suitor that there is.
I would want my daughter to get married.
I would prefer marriage to my daughter being alone.
Okay, age is a huge factor as I think about it for my children as well.
If you're a 40 year old man, you came to Christ just a couple years ago.
And to be honest, there's not a lot of gals lining up, and you say, hey, here's this gal.
We're not closely related, but she's a Christian.
She's lovely.
She wants to marry me and have a family.
That is very much so different than, say, a man who's 22, who's upwardly socially mobile, saying, I'm interested in this for these reasons.
Sure, sure, sure.
So age as well also comes in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't want to get into weeds of it.
I think it's important to say just at the outset, as we think about even the premise of the debate, is we use this word ordinarily, and it's an important word because we actually, there's two levels of analysis.
There's the universal, and you could say, Principle or something that's normative, it happens generally speaking, and then you can get into the particulars, right?
Look at individual contexts, and um, and what I think it's more helpful to stay at the frame of the universal or the principle because what we'll do if we just keep pulling up examples of like what if there was this and this, and then and then it doesn't just just default totally.
I understand.
There's also a lot in that word generally.
You guys are sneaking in a lot in that word generally.
That's why I actually said that.
But I put it there intentionally.
I understand you're wrong.
Not to be sneaky, but just to say there are general principles.
Yes.
Fair enough.
General principles are not necessarily universal principles.
Reaching evidence.
I think you have something, but just a point of clarity.
I think we're using our words a little different.
Okay.
So when you say ethnicity, I think ancestry, like 23andMe DNA.
So when you're saying ethnicity, are you using it more like nationality, like American ethnicity is American, like a black man who loves Jesus is American?
American ethnicity?
Is that what you're saying?
So, biblically, I would say, you know, nation, nation, that that would actually be more in line with what we think of as race.
When I say ethnicity, I'm using like Stephen Wolfe's definition of ethnicity.
So, I would argue that, you know, that like I want America as a Christian nationalist to be mono ethnic.
This is what I mean by that.
I want everyone in America, that doesn't mean mono racial, although I would like America to be predominantly white.
I would.
Because that's the history, that's the heritage.
Sounds boring.
It's currently.
Those are our people.
There are people.
They're pioneers who came and they spread out.
They endured the hardship.
They created the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen.
Those are my people.
And to say, and then the future looks nothing like them.
It has no continuity, no resemblance.
I wouldn't say that.
Is the Sudan boring?
I'm not going against this.
Is Japan boring?
I'm just saying.
I'm not going against this idea of, you know, or the great work that's.
You know, a particular people have done or put in, right?
But you're saying that you would want America to be majority white.
You want them to be majority white if you had, and this was what was interesting if you had a black person who met your criteria standard wise and character wise and spiritually, that you would discourage your daughter from marrying this individual.
If we're not in a vacuum, if we're not in isolation.
Then, ordinarily, for every black man who would fit my criteria, currently, right now, let's just be honest, for every black man who would meet my theological criteria, heritage criteria, all those kind of things, moral criteria, behavioral criteria, he's upstanding, for every black man like that, there would be at least 20 white men.
So, but why would you discourage against the black one who meets your standards?
Because if both options are viable, there are 20 white men who fit the bill and one black man who fits the bill, then all things being equal, I would prefer.
For my grandchildren to look like me.
Okay.
So it's a preference.
It's a preference.
Let me just chime in.
We further deny that sovereign nations must only be composed of mono ethnic populations.
Therefore, as Christian nationalists, we utterly repudiate sinful ethnic partiality in all its forms.
So you signed this statement denying a country being a mono ethnic population.
It must be.
But you signed this Christian nationalist statement.
This sounds like a clear contradiction, which you just said, which you would prefer to be mono ethnic.
Prefer must.
Yeah.
Those are two different words.
Okay.
So you don't think that's a bit of a contradiction in the statement you've You've signed here?
No, I don't.
We want America to be mono ethnic.
Again, that does not mean mono racial or mono color.
So when I say mono ethnic, I'm thinking of someone like Clarence Thomas, who is a Christian American man.
He's a Christian American man.
I don't want people who are from Haiti and got here two weeks ago.
But if America was not mono racial, right?
Distinctiveness vs. Modern Confusion00:11:57
There are some black people, there's Hispanic people, there's some Asian people, and majority white people, but they're all.
Christian.
They all speak English.
I don't walk into stores and see seven different languages.
I understand your position.
That's what I mean by mono ethnic.
Okay, so you would prefer it, but it must not be.
I wouldn't say it has to be in order for it to be a Christian nation.
Okay.
You don't think that's incongruent and incoherent?
No.
Okay.
No.
You have, when you get to the empire status, I think of Russia, for example, you're going to be the composition of a number of different people from different geographies.
And your challenge is to have enough of a shared identity, but you also don't want to destroy the distinctives.
And so America's pretty big.
It's a lot different than a nation like Georgia, for example.
Georgia will probably be mostly monoracial and monoethnic.
America, if people could identify as America, that would be great.
But we do recognize you have parts of, like I said, the heritage blacks in the South, the Hispanics, mostly in Texas and California.
You're going to have some differences in there.
And you don't have to, as a Christian nation, come in and say, and now all these distinctions have to be flattened.
There will be no more soccer.
You can say, no, we recognize 350 million people.
There's going to be little Italy and there's going to be little Chinatown.
And you don't have to say those things can't exist.
I would like to get rid of soccer.
They call it football.
Soccer is a deceitful tactic to get people to just run long distances for no reason.
Go ahead.
I want to ask you the same question.
Because you are a more unique.
You know, side of this team.
Yeah.
You know, so when it comes to how you're viewing this, what would you, I don't know what to present to you.
What's, because you're interracial, you're black and white.
Yeah.
So how would you handle a black or white person trying to come and let's say you had a daughter or vice versa, a son, and they're trying to come into your family?
Yeah, it's a good question.
And one actually that is, it's really important for the purpose of this conversation because people like me are the product of kind of what we're going back and forth over.
And I, yeah.
It presents a bunch of quandaries, I think, being biracial, being mixed race, whatever you want to call it.
I would say, I would get back to the sort of the core theme of the position.
It's this idea, and we, you know, in my opening statement, I rooted it in creational order, but it's this idea that marriage is founded on this idea of compatibility, or more specific word could be correspondence.
So I have three children.
My children are 70%, I'm married to a white woman.
My children are 75% white.
I believe a shared identity, a component of your identity, is your race.
I think you would probably admit that as well, right?
Like when you talk to people and you say, yeah, I'm black.
And that blackness carries some significance, it carries some meaning when you say it.
And so having race as a component of shared identity, I have children who are 75% white.
They certainly, if you saw them, you would believe they presented as white.
You'd be hard pressed to think they were 25% black, for example.
I would encourage my children to find a spouse that is compatible with them.
That is not only culturally, and we think about ethnos, and I think my definition of ethnos encapsulates basically language, culture, exactly what sort of Joel was describing.
But not only that, I think the shared identity as well is a part of that.
And I think, in the same way that black people can have a sort of a blackness, a black element to their identity, white people should have a black element, or sorry, a white element to their identity.
There's some whites that got a black element to their identity.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
So my position would be to encourage my child to marry a white woman on the basis of that.
Really?
Yeah.
Even if, because it sounds like they have both.
No?
Well, his kids look very white for black.
His kids are, I mean, they're.
Two of my children have blue eyes.
Yeah.
They're very white.
They're very white.
I'll just say that.
They're like, the phenotype is white.
And their mother is white.
Their father is half white.
I mean, you can do the math on that.
They're 75.
I have a question for you, right?
So I want to ask you this question because I've, you know, being mixed race, I've spent my time around within the black community and black culture, and I'm pretty familiar with it in that sense.
Do you believe that, I guess, your black American culture is distinct from the white American culture?
In a way, yeah.
Would you say, would it be safe to say that predominantly the average black person you meet on the street is going to, you're going to be able to pick up in their sort of how they articulate, how they talk, we're using our hands, that person comes from a distinct culture from, say, like suburban Westchester, Connecticut or something?
Yeah, 100%.
And so I think there's an element of that that, in the way of like race actually serves as a proxy.
Like, we can talk about all these examples like, here's all the elements of compatibility, tradition, custom, where you grew up, which is important for compatibility and certainly an element.
And then you have race.
And the idea that you like solve for all of these, all things being equal, in the Vodi Bakum situation, but like race is the only distinctive.
And I would just say experientially is a very, very rare thing.
Like, I've rarely met a black person who was like, who had like no sort of, Ties, if you will, to a distinct culture from white culture.
He's wearing turtlenecks.
Right.
I mean, they just wear turtlenecks.
I would just ask, like, man, are you guys, this is like a Texas thing?
Because I think you go to other parts of the country and you'll discover that there's a way more cultural overlap.
Meaning, if you come to Oceanside Vista, California, you're going to have way more in common with a person that went to the same high school group in the same community, listened to the same music, comes from a similar family, comes from the same service.
That would be what you're describing as like a micro ethnicity, even more particular than you're right.
So, if people have both grown up, not just in the same nation, but they've both grown up in the same county, you know, or some kind of bondage, they're going to have way more in common.
And I only use that as a proxy.
Overlap can be extreme, like a lot of that.
But do you see my point, though?
I'm saying that those two people are going to have substantially more in common if they're from the same region than marrying a white woman from Nebraska.
Well, sure.
So, if we zoom into, what did you say, Oceanside, for example, and then you have like a.
I remember Oceanside.
I've never been there, so forgive me for a visit.
Well, maybe I might.
It's nice.
But anyway, so.
It was nice.
It's not as nice.
It's not as nice.
So, doing the Lord's Word now.
All right.
Yeah, so I say that because I think the, again, the disconnect is very broad definitions of the word race.
When you meet a lot of people and travel a lot and experience a lot, you'll start discovering that, man, Ethiopian second generation evangelicals are very different than descendants of slaves in America.
Yeah, I'm not.
You'll discover that Ghanaian people are very different than Ethiopian people.
You'll discover I'm Armenian.
My mother is adopted by an Armenian family, but she's Russian.
You'll discover there's a lot of difference between Armenians and Russians.
You'll discover there's a lot of difference between Armenians and Armenians living in Azerbaijan.
And then there's a lot of difference between Armenians from there versus Armenians in Glendale.
I have nothing in common with an Armenian woman that grew up in Glendale.
We have virtually zero in common culturally, even though we might both be Christian, right?
So I think what I'm saying is we're using these really broad definitions for race, which, like, you guys familiar when the word race even made it into the English language, approximately?
16th century?
Yeah, 16th century.
That's relatively modern, right?
So, if we're going to rail against the leftists and the liberals for their definitions of gender and all this nonsense that we're seeing from the left, this is a relatively modern innovation for this broad cast of, hey, there's blacks and there's whites and there's Asians and then maybe a couple of others, but we don't know.
Again, it falls apart because it's way more based on ethnicity.
This is why we see tribes warring in parts of Africa.
This is why you tell a Persian they're Arab and they're going to be very upset at you.
You tell an Arab they're Persian or Turk, they're going to be very upset at you.
So, I think the distinctions is way more cultural and nuanced than just these very broad categories.
You guys understand what I'm saying?
Yes.
Part of the reason I would say that race has, at least the word, the concept I think is old, but at least the word has come into more regular use in language in recent times is partly because of the radical changes that we've made in the world.
Like back in the day, when you say this person is of this nation, it tended to mean that he's of the same biological characteristics, cultural characteristics.
But now, because people have moved and we have tons of people over here and tons of people over there, now, if somebody says, Well, I'm American, then the natural question is, Well, what kind of American are you?
What kind of American?
If I can't see them and I can't detect an accent in their voice, and they're just saying, I'm an American and I can't see them, I wouldn't really have a clue.
Right.
So, do you see how it's arbitrary then?
Saying I'm an American is no different than someone saying I'm white.
What does that even mean?
Which white?
Irish, Scottish, Italian?
There were hierarchies within white folks when they came over, okay?
So, what does that even mean?
Are Armenians white?
I don't know.
It depends on who you ask, right?
So, are Armenians like these categories are way more divided when you travel outside of the United States and you start discovering that people are actually very Japanese folks don't want to marry Chinese folks?
It has nothing to do with race.
Zero to do with race.
Well, no, it is because they're distinct people occupying two different spaces.
That's not race.
That's not race.
That's ethnicity and nationality.
They're biologically different.
From one another, whether it be in bone structure.
But there's white folks that are biologically different.
If you go northern, the white folks there love milk.
You go south, Europe, the white folks are lactose intolerant.
There's all sorts of disparities within races.
Sure, but.
Did you do?
But you understand that point.
The genetic disparities within races, oftentimes, there's more disparities between white people, right, than there are between a black and a white person.
There are more differences between the groups in general.
Yeah, so like I come from Armenia, right?
I'm from the Caucasus Mountains.
I am an Armenian from the Caucasus Mountains.
Right.
I'm Caucasian.
Yeah?
So I'm an original Caucasian.
You guys are all frauds as far as I'm concerned, right?
So, but you talk to some people, and Armenians aren't viewed as white, depending on who you're talking to.
That's the confusing part about all this stuff.
And again, if God is a God of order, if God is a God of not making stuff confusing, we're now getting into creating restrictions that scripture does not clearly lay out.
And we can get back into the scripture.
I'm glad you're emphasizing the distinctiveness and the lack of confusion because my position, as I laid it out, interracial marriage, if it was normative, let's say 50, 60%, It would destroy those distinctions in a matter of generations.
If you brought the people, you said Armenia, I know there's Georgia kind of to the north of Iran.
If you took all of those people and they said, you know what, we're going to do it.
It's going to be normative, it's going to be ordinary.
If they went ahead and did that, much of the distinctions, all of those distinctions that you're talking about, would actually be flattened.
You would just kind of then have this group of Eastern Europeans that all didn't really have an identity or something shared from the past.
Your parents would go back to the homeland and say, this doesn't look like anything I recognize.
But this already doesn't look like anything we recognize because we were.
Ethnically cleansed from Azerbaijan because they're Armenians.
Exactly.
Ethnically cleansing, not just say.
Not just say.
It's a terrible thing that people's undergoing.
So you're saying there's ethnic cleansing happening through interbreeding?
Yes, through third world migration into Europe, the rape of white women all across Northern Europe.
Yes.
Yes, you are having it's traumatic, it's psychological terror for white girls.
It shouldn't be laughed at.
To think that they're going to be raped on the way to school.
Like we all agree, I'm not going to paint you guys badly, you all would agree that that's bad.
And we recognize it's especially bad because these people.
That have nothing in common are coming in, they're from a different religion, perpetuating terror on the native population.
Leadership Prescriptions and Polygamy00:15:19
But again, you're conflating what we're saying, and you can jump in, I don't want to keep going.
You're conflating that you think we're arguing for mass migration.
I never said you were.
I know you're not.
You're pointing to these fringe examples that are awful.
What's happening in Europe is terrible.
What's happening with the Muslims coming over there that do not assimilate to the culture is not good.
That is not what we're talking about.
That is not the conversation that's being had.
We are talking about making hard lines where the scripture doesn't have any based on arbitrary standards that we don't see played out in any sort of society throughout history up until 500 years ago.
I want to go to Avery, but I would just say what I'm arguing I know you're not for mass migration, but to say interracial marriage should be normative would have the same effect long term as short term.
I didn't say it should be normative.
I, if you're, I'm, you're making the case that you're against it.
I said, so I'm against it being normative because that would be, yeah.
So, what I'm saying is, people can have preferences.
You want your kids to look white, you want your kids to, you know, you're gonna have a bunch of Mariah Carey's.
I'm not mad at you, okay?
If you want that, Joe, you want your daughter to, no one's mad at preference.
There's a lot of black folks that want their kids to be black.
No one's mad at preference.
And we haven't said you're mad at us for preference, yeah.
No, no, no, I'm mad at you for preference, yeah.
Dang it, this shit is weird.
When we take preference and we make it prescription, that's the fundamental flaw in your argument, yeah.
But, real quick, that's on both sides of the table.
So, first, the context, the way that it came up against, because you're right.
I use that word against.
That's what started the whole thing.
And had you not said against, Joel, I wouldn't have said anything, bro.
Did you say it was my preference?
So, let me say that.
You crashed out.
You crashed out by saying against.
Oh, no.
I didn't crash out.
You called her retarded.
You crashed out, bro.
Oh, she is retarded.
Okay.
But you crashed out.
No.
Okay.
The average woman on social media is retarded.
Okay.
Next time, we'll have you come back and we'll debate that thesis.
No, I don't care to debate that thesis.
Okay.
I might agree with it.
Never mind.
All right.
So here's the point.
She, there was a tweet, under Christian nationalism, interracial marriage will merit capital punishment.
She responds, this woman who is behaving retardedly, she responds, or somebody says, I wish Elon would show us who liked this, this tweet.
Interracial marriage under Christian nationalism will receive the death sentence.
I wish Elon would show us who likes it.
And then she responds and says, Definitely Joel Webbett.
And I say, Nope.
And then she says, Are you, and this is verbatim, are you for or against?
Yes, yes, I said.
So, given those two choices for, encouraging, promoting, advancing, or against, discouraging, not normative, given those two options, then yes, I would be more against than I am for.
But you could have just said, Hey, my preference is this.
Now, let me just add this to the thing.
You said that you will lock arms or you see brothers in Christ that think it's a sin and a perpetual sin.
Not a perpetual sin, but it's a one time sin.
But, and just to be clear, but you, would you, would you call brothers in Christ folks who think it should, it is a crime and should be punished by the death penalty?
Would you call them brothers in Christ?
It depends.
So, because you know, when you were going back and forth with Samuel Say, there were people actually posting that.
And again, I don't, I don't want to assume these are your buddies.
These aren't people that I know.
Okay.
But they're saying, hey, there's always people posting this.
This would be, you know, punishable by death in a Christian nationalist nation.
Right.
Now, I'm aware.
Yeah, there are guys who think that.
Are you brothers, those are your brothers in Christ?
The only guys that I have.
Any kind of relationship with, friendship with, even acquaintance, interaction with, and partnering with in this mission.
And it is my mission to achieve Christian nationalism here in these United States of America.
All the guys on my team would either be in our category, it's not a sin at all, but it's not normative.
It shouldn't be encouraged at the macro level, but it's not a sin.
It is permissible.
Or they would hold the view, it is a sin likened to unbiblical divorce and then remarriage.
Okay.
So that is a sin.
But then we would.
But once that new marriage has been established, we would say that is a valid marriage.
Would you rebuke or condemn anyone who's pushing for the death of people that are in an interracial marriage?
Would you not call them a marriage?
I'm not going to police the internet.
I'm not going to, you know, just be comfortable with it.
Deez Nuts, Groyper447.
I'm not going to be in the chat.
Like, I'm not James White.
I'm not James White.
Okay.
You know what I mean?
So, like, he has time to do a dividing line over people with 15 followers on Twitter and call them out.
I don't have time for that.
No, but would you categorically condemn it?
Yes.
Like, you're not condemning it.
The idea that I should be executed as a Christian nationalist, I would condemn that.
Yes.
Okay, thank you.
But that wasn't the original question.
The first question was is that person a Christian?
That was your first question.
What do you think?
So, I would condemn it in the same way I would condemn sexual immorality, any sin.
I condemn any sin.
But not every sin makes someone an unbeliever.
And so, what you're asking is whether or not I believe anybody could hold that position and still be regenerate.
I said if you would call him a brother in Christ.
That's what you said.
Regenerate, brother in Christ.
I feel like that's pretty much the same.
And so, that's why I was hesitant.
Let the record state.
I wasn't hesitant because I'm trying to carve out allowances.
I meant condemning the mindset.
Yes, I would say.
Thank you.
I would say, brother, that's not helpful.
I think that's immoral.
I don't support that.
I don't think you should be saying that.
But would I say for sure that person who just said that?
I, the Protestant Pope, have ruled.
No, that's fair.
Go ahead.
That's what I'm saying.
No, I want to get into some of the scriptural things that we were talking about.
So, because again, like we were talking about God's normative original design, whether or not interracial marriages goes against that.
Right.
I would like to hear a scriptural basis for what God's original design is.
Do we have a verse that tells us, you know, that?
That's a great question.
Yeah.
So here's how I would respond Are you pro polygamy?
Am I pro polygamy?
No, I'm not.
No.
Would you be against?
Yeah, I'm against.
Are you that strong of language?
Yeah, I would say I'm against.
He would say against.
Who says against?
Oh, I do.
So you would say against.
Now, I love the scriptures that you brought up because it's perfect for our argument.
So you said Solomon, for instance, he had.
Many wives and many concubines, and you were emphasizing, and rightly so, I agree with your argument, that the big problem with Solomon and all these wives was that they were foreign and had a different skin color.
No, they worshiped foreign gods, and they turned his heart away.
The big problem that made it actually sinful in the case of Solomon was that he was not, even as king, permitted to marry foreign wives who were pagans who worshiped foreign gods.
So it was a spiritual problem, a spiritual adultery, and it ultimately turned his heart away.
But here's the point.
So, we could point to, for instance, now going to like Ezra, right?
Because then you like, there's a polygamous example, but then you gave interracial examples Ezra 9, Ezra 10, Nehemiah 13.
And what you were saying is, look, it's not about the fact that they're a different race.
It's the fact, right?
What is actually being condemned here?
And you did a good job.
I agree with you.
What's really being condemned here is that these people of a foreign race are not Christian.
They worship foreign gods.
It's their spiritual idolatry.
So, this is what I would say.
If we're logical, if we're being consistent, we can say, well, what's Expressly condemned in scripture is marrying someone of another race only in the instance that they actually are worshiping a false god.
It's idolatry, marrying not in the Lord, marrying someone who's not a Christian.
So then I would use that and I can make the same argument and say polygamy is permissible.
Because only what's condemned in scripture, there's no scripture that condemns polygamy inherently outright.
But what's condemned is someone like Solomon who, in his many marriages, that's not inherently condemned.
What's specifically condemned is that some of those marriages, in his case many of them, were to foreign wives who worship foreign gods.
So, I would use that same logic, and I would say, just like I said, interracial marriage is biblically permissible, but that it generally goes against God's ordinary or normative design for cultures, peoples, and nations.
I could say the same thing.
You could say the same thing about polygamy.
Polygamy is biblically permissible, but it ordinarily goes against, right?
So, if I'm in a Muslim nation, a guy comes to the Lord, I'm not going to tell him, if he has five wives, that he has to divorce four of them.
What I will tell him, per scripture, right?
We're getting to something that is.
Explicit in scripture, per 1 Timothy chapter 3, Titus chapter 1, I'll say, I'm sorry, you can't be an elder.
Yeah, so an elder must be.
But I actually would not say polygamy is inherently sinful.
Yeah, so here is the thing.
So we're categorizing polygamy as the exception to the rule in the same way that we're categorizing interracial marriage as the exception to the rule.
The issue with this, Joe, is when you look at the New Testament scripture, there are prescriptions for someone in leadership, yes, but those are prescriptions for anybody that's an elder or deacon.
That's how all Christians should be.
All Christians should be.
An elder must be.
Yes, yes.
And so they should be one woman men.
So now what you're doing is with polygamy, it is permitted, but then it's clearly clarified in the New Testament that this is not a prescription.
This is not okay because we see evidence of that.
The same thing for Rahab's lying.
We're not going to say, well, lying is permitted because Rahab lied and therefore lying.
No, no, no.
We're going to see that generally speaking, Old and New Testament, there's prohibitions against lying.
So we see something that's here.
You don't then do that.
So the epistles would have to then be clear, in the same way they're clear about polygamy, to not allow mixed race or mixed ethnic or whatever you want to call it.
Marriage, we don't see that when he's writing to mixed ethnic churches.
Absolutely.
The scripture would have to be clear in its condemnation of interracial marriage if we were to take a position of saying that it's sin.
Yeah, of course.
No, no, no, no.
In saying that's against God's design.
Because polygamy is against God's design.
And we see the standard of prescription for polygamy not being within God's design.
But the scripture does not ever condemn polygamy.
It doesn't have to.
Because it prescribes polygamy.
Because it prescribes polygamy.
It goes against the normative design.
Yes, because it prescribes.
Go ahead.
So when it says that an elder should be a man of one wife, You're saying that that's not a direct, explicit standard that the Bible is setting, that it's supposed to be.
For all of them?
Yeah, for all of them.
I'm saying that that is a standard that is reserved for elders.
An elder must be.
Here's another example we can use.
You know you're going to attract a lot of polygamists at your church after this, right?
Because there's a growing movement of polygamists that are growing.
Yeah, there is a growing movement.
What's the verse about that?
And I've engaged with those people.
What, 1 Timothy 3?
1 Timothy 3 and Titus.
Here's another one that we could use, and we can put it in the same mold that we're using.
Right?
The same thesis statement, our prompt for today's debate.
You can do it with interracial marriage.
You can do it with polygamy.
Here's another one slavery.
Do you think that slavery is good, positive, should be promoted, should be encouraged, that you are for slavery, that it should be normative?
Well, that's, it depends on the type of slavery we're talking about.
If we're talking about the biblical slavery that was, you know, indentured servitude, I think that that is fine.
You can give yourself to someone and say, hey, I will, you know, give my service to you in order, in exchange for a living, food, and stuff like that.
I think that that's.
That's okay.
When it comes to like chattel slavery, I think that that is expressly condemned in scripture.
Exodus 21 16 says if a man steals somebody's property, man stealing.
Yep.
Punishable by death.
Punishable by death.
That said, though, real quick, one of the things that you use some of the verses to say you shouldn't treat the foreigner, right, the sojourner, any different.
But there are other passages of scripture that say you could charge interest to a foreigner, right?
So you have a disposition of hospitality towards a foreigner, and yet you could charge him interest on a loan, but you cannot charge your brother.
Interest.
Another thing in terms of indentured servanthood, that particularly pertained to Israel, to fellow Israelites.
You could not own them indefinitely.
You know, there was a limit of terms, these kinds of things.
Whereas the slavery that was permitted in the Old Testament for a non Hebrew brother, owning someone who was a foreigner from a different nation, it actually allowed for longer terms of slavery, those kinds of things.
So, my question is would you want that to be normative?
Because God allows for it, but I would argue that it shouldn't be normative.
I am a not normative polygamy guy, I'm a not normative slavery guy.
I want the record to clearly state.
Joel thinks ordinarily that slavery goes against God's normative design.
Ordinarily, polygamy goes against God's normative design.
Okay, so I want to get back to that, if you mind holding that off, because I wanted to talk about the verse about the elder, and then we could jump right back to the example.
Is that okay?
Yep.
So it says here that an overseer then must be above reproach.
Now, I want to stop here.
Would you agree that that would go for all believers, that all believers should be above reproach?
All believers should strive to be above reproach.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, all believers should strive to be above reproach, which means, and it kind of breaks down what that means the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, whatever that word means, but considerate, peaceable, free from the love of money, leading his own household well, having his children's mission with all dignity.
So, would you say that these are.
These would be general Christ like values that every believer should hold to and strive to have.
So, no, not.
I don't believe that the list in 1 Timothy 3 or Titus 1 is an exhaustive list, just like the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians, I don't believe is exhaustive.
I don't believe there's only nine manifestations of the Spirit loved by Jesus.
Right, right.
It's not an exhaustive list.
So, number one, I don't believe the qualifications are exhaustive.
And number two, I don't believe that all the qualifications are necessarily put forward as moral standards.
Moral standards that all men should be, all Christian men should be, but an elder must be.
I would say that that's generally true about most of the things that Paul lists or that he names in this list of qualifications, but I don't feel like there's a way to definitively say that every single one of them exhaustively falls in the mind of the Spirit inspiring the Apostle Paul in writing this.
It could be that he's saying, well, in the case of a man who is an elder, the reason why he should have one wife is because it is permissible.
To have multiple wives, but it best displays the marriage between Christ and the church and Christ having one bride, or also just practically speaking, if he's going to care for the house of God, in a sense, he's married to the church, not in the ultimate sense that Christ is married to the church, but he's taking the church as kind of a friend of the bridegroom and caring for her diligently and all these things.
For him to have, on top of those immense duties and responsibilities to the church, to have also multiple wives that he needs to care for, also is simply practically imprudent.
So, No, I don't think that you can look at that and say every single one of these equally or even inclusively are should be for Christian men.
Character Requirements for Household Heads00:10:22
The term pugnacious, also, too, in the text, it's closer to like a brawler.
So some of the translations render it like striving or argumentative.
What it most closely means is someone who kind of just punches his way out of things.
But you can imagine a Christian who is in the military, for example.
He's not qualified to be an elder, he's not reserved for that calling.
But he himself, like that man gets in there, he establishes order.
Same thing, hey, this man was Muslim, he converted, he has four wives.
So, I think there are multiple qualifications in there that are not necessarily the moral standard that's upheld, but for this specific office, an overseer and a caretaker of Christ's sheep, it says, in this one, some may have it, and that's understandable, but this one he can't have.
So, you don't think that it's describing a moral character of an overseer?
Like these are moral characteristics that he should uphold?
Yeah, like I just said, I think that it is describing.
That list is those qualifications, I would say that.
The vast majority of them are pointing towards moral indicators, character, character.
But I don't think it's only character.
I would agree.
So I would agree that it's included, and that's the big picture of it.
So I'm asking, in regards to the character that it's presenting, should Christians strive to be what this is describing an overseer should be?
Again, like I said, I think that to steamroll the list and to say that they're all exactly the same, they're all.
They're all moral goals to be strived after.
I think you can't really prove that from the facts.
So, which one of these would you say is not a moral goal to strive after?
A husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, considerate people.
Well, able to teach, for instance.
So, I think every man should pursue knowledge of Christ, knowledge of the word, as much as he's able to.
But there are some men who simply will not have the mental capacity.
To be able to teach others.
And it doesn't mean that they're in a moral failure.
It doesn't mean that they're in sin because they're not qualified.
Just a skill they don't have.
Yeah, right.
But would you agree that every man should at least strive to be a teacher of their household?
Yeah, every man should be a resident theologian if he's a married man.
Yeah.
So notice, like, and that's.
To the best of his ability.
And that's going to vary greatly.
Of course.
So he's not going to be the best, maybe, but he should strive to be able.
He ain't going to be no Joe Webman.
Yeah, he ain't going to be no Joe Webman.
But he can strive to be a teacher in his household.
Right?
And that is him upholding the moral character as the man and the head of the household that God has ordained him to be.
Amen.
Right?
Okay.
So we're going through these.
All of these are moral characteristics that God requires all of us to have, especially as men.
He requires all of us to, you know, he doesn't demand it like you have to be the best in every category.
But these are things that every Christian ought to exemplify, especially Christian men with their household, with their peers, whatever.
And so I would say that.
Being the husband of one wife is included in that category.
That exemplifies a moral character that you have.
Should every Christian ought to be against slavery?
You're talking about chattel slavery?
Well, I think there's a lot of distance, just for the record.
I'm against chattel slavery, let the record stay.
But I think there's a lot of distance in between black people kidnapping and man stealing black people and then lining them up on the coast and selling them to white people and some Jews.
Transporting them and they're slaves for life, and their children are slaves, and separating families, and those kinds of things.
Um, how there's a lot of difference between that, if we're using that as chattel slavery, and a six year indentured servanthood, right?
So, there's a lot of distance.
So, I agree.
Uh, what about another form of slavery which I believe was permissible for the Israelites that the Bible teaches when it came to not owning their own Hebrew brother but owning someone from a foreign nation who was in their camp?
Yes, yeah, go ahead.
I would just say.
Scripture has to interpret scripture.
I would say we see polygamy, we see negative descriptions of polygamy, and then we see one woman man.
We see slavery, we see the slave Bible, which was what was given to African Americans, removing the story of Exodus, removing a lot of passages.
And then we see Fileman, which is Fileman, I think I said that right.
Chapter one, Paul is saying, If you consider me a partner, welcome him as you would welcome me.
And Paul is writing to release a slave that was a brother in Christ, right?
So what do we see?
We see a narrative of slavery in Egypt, and then we see a New Testament recontextualization of slavery, of polygamy.
Of line, you fill in the thing, you these little mixed areas that I think are incoherent.
We see these things clarified in the New Testament.
We also see the same Paul in Ephesians who doesn't say, Masters, release your slaves, but tells masters to rule righteously over their slaves.
Yeah, so we also see that.
Yeah, yeah, we see that.
So, again, what do we mean by slaves?
You were talking about a very specific type of slavery.
I responded to the broader context around slavery with this book, which again, slave Bible that was given to black folks took out a lot of these passages intentionally so folks wouldn't be.
Fully aware of these things.
So I think this entire premise of slavery doesn't square up because you're talking about different types of slavery and all this sort of stuff.
And again, we're saying there's enough in here in the New Testament to say it seems like this is generally against the type of chattel slavery we've seen.
And a lot of the folks that fought for the abolishing of slavery were Christian.
It says enslavers.
And so if you're going to put a restriction on interracial marriage, interethnic marriage, whatever you want to call it, To make this case from the scripture, Joel, and you just haven't been able to do that, brother.
Not New Testament.
I would just say that with slavery, again, I'm saying it shouldn't be normative.
I am not pro slavery, so I don't think that it should be encouraged, promoted, those kinds of things.
But I am saying that it is biblically permissible.
It is.
Which Avery already granted.
Now, same thing, let's apply it to interracial marriage.
So you're saying, well, interracial marriage, because you said, well, in the case of slavery, there's these bad examples, or you said polygamy, there's a lot of the polygamist cases.
There's descriptive passages, and then there's New Testament.
Prescriptive passages saying one woman man.
We don't have anything like that for an internet.
Not just that anymore.
Not just for an LDA.
You conceded that that's good moral character for every single person.
No, I did not concede that.
What?
I did not concede that.
Joe.
Come on.
I thought I worked hard for that, man.
Rewind the tape, guys.
I said multiple times I don't believe it's an exhaustive list, and no, I don't believe that every single one of the qualifications listed there is a should be.
I believe that on the whole, on the whole, that many of those qualifications do refer to character.
Good Christian character, and therefore, an elder must be, and a Christian man should be.
I can't let you have this.
I'm sorry, Joe.
So, every man has to be able to teach.
If he needs every other qualification, you should strive to be of your household.
He needs to quit his construction, not quit his job.
No, that's not what I'm saying.
He needs to come home from his construction job with four kids, and at night, he needs to be learning to teach.
Okay, if all of those are good moral character, and he has every other one, and that is the last one, and he is a bubbling idiot when he gets up in front of people, then if those are all moral qualifications, Then he would need to apply himself to develop that moral character.
Which you would say he's not made to teach.
What is a man's priority?
Is it his family or his construction job?
Well, the construction job is a means to feeding his family.
That's not what I asked.
Yeah, you posed a false dichotomy between those two things.
No, he brought this up.
One is a means to fulfilling his duties for the other.
And he did not find others.
They're not in conflict.
Family and then the job.
There's a hierarchy over family.
So which is the priority?
Is it your family or is it your.
Or your job.
It's not an or.
It is.
No, it's not.
So, is a man in sin if he spends 10 hours, five days a week at work, but only an average of two to three hours with his children?
Which one's the priority?
If he's suffering, he needs to figure out to pivot and learn to do something else.
The vast majority of men throughout history had to work long days, hard labor to provide for their family.
Were they all in sin?
They spent more time at work than they did with their children.
Let me ask this, okay?
Let's switch the roles a little bit.
Let's say at work, he's doing just fine.
His hours and everything, his funds are good enough to meet the means.
They're doing just fine.
However, he's choosing to stay at work even more when he doesn't have to and not pouring into his family.
Is he in sin then?
That's different.
I know.
That's different.
So, okay.
So, how, why is that different though?
Because we agree with that, but why is that?
Because then the job is no longer, now it actually is a dichotomy, not a false one.
The job is no longer a means to serving and providing for his family, but now he's going beyond.
The job has served its means for the family.
Yeah.
And now I'm just staying for the fun of it.
It's three hours at home.
Nope.
I'm staying three hours more at work.
Exactly.
So, will we agree that a man who, let's see, he's working hard, making ends meet, you know, but so he's doing that.
And also, when he comes home, he should be able to spiritually guide the family.
That's his job, right?
Are you the priest of your home or you're not?
I don't care if you work construction, I don't care if you stream.
Are you the priest and the pastor of your home?
You are positionally, every husband/slash father is the priest.
So he ought to be able to sit in the house.
By office, not every man, so every man by office formally is in that position as pastor of his home, priest of his home.
However, not every man is inherently in sin.
With a moral culpability, if he's not particularly good in his ability to theologically teach, we're not, I agree.
We already did this.
So, we're not talking about skill level, we're talking about the striving of achieving this character that God has laid out for the man of the household.
So, if he doesn't have the skill to teach, right, let's say he's not even a great speaker like that, but he should strive to be doctrinally and theologically sound and guide his family.
Natural Law and Moral Culpability00:07:32
In God's character and in God's teachings and His word, right?
For thousands of years, the church was sustained by men who couldn't read and couldn't write prior to the Reformation, who went to church on Sunday.
They had no Bible, they had no doctrine.
They were sustained by the preaching of the word on Sunday.
So we can't take something that is required of elders, able to teach, and say all men across all times and all contexts must possess this quality as a moral character.
In the same way with polygamy, because it's not condemned elsewhere in the New Testament, we would also say, okay.
Ultimately, this one, you shouldn't willingly enter it.
In America, it's even illegal.
So, contextually, this is against the law.
Obey the authorities.
But we can't go so far as to say, and here's a New Testament verse condemning all occasions, no matter what.
So, put one more.
Real quick polygamy is not condemned anywhere in the New Testament.
And that's the point that I'm trying to make.
The point that I'm trying to make is that you guys are saying, well, the burden of proof is on you, Joel and company, because there's no clear condemnation passages of interracial marriage.
Right?
And so I'm saying, So, then there's no clear condemnation passages in the Old or New Testament of polygamy.
So, I feel like your position is that you guys, you're not against, I'm saying generally against, and you're like, we're generally for, right?
That's the only other option when it comes to interracial marriage.
Well, I think you have to apply that, and you're saying the reason you take your position is because the burden of proof is on us.
There's no clear condemnation of interracial marriage in the New Testament or the Old Testament.
Well, there's also no clear condemnation of polygamy in the Old Testament or the New Testament.
So, you should be consistent and take the same position.
Right, that you're taking on interracial marriage, saying we're generally for.
I think you should generally be for polygamy.
There's positive examples, Abraham, David.
I mean, I know what created tension, but like multiple men had these multiple wives, and it just and they were wrong.
Yeah, but if we're giving positive examples, think about this in terms of numbers, not just instances in scripture, like a chapter, right?
But think of just raw numeric numbers.
Okay, so there are positive examples.
Ruth, right?
Moses' wife, Rahab.
But you brought up Ezra chapter 9 and 10 and Nehemiah 13.
In that case, it's like, well, it's only one case.
Over here, we have Ruth, we have Rahab, we have Moses' three cases.
Okay, but this one case over here was thousands of women and children being sent away.
I think it was like 150.
It wasn't thousands.
It was way less than that, Joel.
You're exaggerating.
Okay, it's a lot.
Okay, it's a lot.
A lot of the population is tens of thousands in that population, not thousands.
I want to respond to this really quick, man, because This, this, I feel like you guys are missing our point.
It's not simply that, um, the scripture doesn't uh explicitly or directly condemn interracial marriage, and so therefore, and see, we have examples, so therefore, this doesn't go against God.
No, we have explicit examples, we have explicit verses that go that that support interracial marriage, or uh, like, for example, we gave the verse um, where in first Corinthians seven, where it says that a woman can marry whoever she wants.
And the only stipulation is that as long as it's in the Lord.
And he's writing to a mixed ethnic church.
And so, wait, just let me say this and then I'll shut up, I promise.
So, and in that chapter, you have in 1 Corinthians 7, it's saying that every man should have his own wife, singular, and every woman should have her own husband, singular.
That's in verse 2 and 3.
So we're having explicit verses, Deuteronomy 17 17, that a king should not have many wives, right?
So we got Old Testament, we got the New Testament that's given different passages.
This is why a man leaves his mother and father, cleaves to his wife, singular, and the two shall be one flesh.
We have these verses that are supporting that.
This is why, and that goes against a husband of one wife, the overseer of whatever, and every Christian should reflect this.
This is our point, where we have verses that clearly show what we're saying.
There's not a single verse that shows what you guys are saying.
Not even close in the New Testament.
Oh, oh.
I want to.
I want to.
We can stay on this topic of, I think, 1 Corinthians 7, Mary as in the Lord.
I have a question for you, which is Would you discourage or encourage your daughter to marry, when she's, let's say, 18, 20, pick some age, to marry a 60 year old man?
A 60 year old man?
Yeah.
There's no standard in scripture for it.
She's free to marry anyone of the Lord.
You're absolutely right.
I wouldn't say that she's wrong in doing that.
I would just.
Would you discourage her or encourage her?
I would discourage.
On what basis?
Based on no objective basis, just my preference.
Well, no, natural law has revealed that that pairing is unsuited, that it's a man so far advanced and experienced and all of these different things.
No, no, no.
And a girl so young.
He could actually.
You would.
What's your preference?
You said based on your preference.
What's your preference based on?
Yeah, so I would think that normally a 60 year old and a 25 year old wouldn't really have much in common.
They wouldn't really be.
Normally?
One might say ordinarily?
Yeah, sure, yeah.
But notice this.
Notice, I'm not saying that this necessarily goes against God's design because this is my own preference.
I don't have a scripture backing up what I'm saying.
So, if she insists, I can't say, Well, daughter, you're going against God's natural normative design.
I can't say that.
But we're Christians, we should.
You can.
You can.
Because God has written two books, not merely one.
He has special revelation, that which is inscripturated, but we also have natural revelation.
God has given us reason.
He has not made us witless beasts, He has made us intelligent.
We're able to exercise rationale.
And we know that there are, it's not mere preference.
It's not arbitrary.
It's not capricious.
We know that there is actually a natural logical reason why we would not encourage our 18 year old daughter to marry a 60 year old man, even if he's Christian.
So we would actually discourage it.
We would discourage it based on reason, based on natural law.
We shouldn't be arbitrary in our prayer as Christians.
Yes.
So the dude that coined all of this, Thomas Aquinas, this is what he said Difference of race or nation does not impede marriage, for such difference does not belong to the law.
Of nature.
So the guy that you're quoting, natural law, natural this, you know, maybe there's some distinction in theomany in your version of natural law.
But the guy that coined it, Thomas Aquinas, made no reservations on this.
And I can go quote after quote.
We have Martin Luther, marriage is a worldly thing.
Christians are free to marry wherever there is faith and love.
And I can give you a ton of quotes from churches.
Aquinas over and over again also emphasized that similarity was the bedrock of societal organization.
So I agree that he said that.
Similarly, I think he's a little bit wrong.
Same city.
Same background.
They share.
Same socioeconomic experience, same faith in Jesus as a primary priority.
They look the same as well.
Those basis is.
No, no, no.
You snuck that in.
No one's talking about it.
Thomas Aquinas said they have to look the same?
Not that they have to look the same, but all of these things as a constellation form a shared unity.
One of the reasons, and you can see this in different studies about when kids are adopted, one of the reasons that I'm so drawn to my children and I love them is there's a similarity to me in them that I see in them.
A similarity to you and your kids.
Absolutely.
But at scale.
No.
Bodie Bacham even said this.
People ask him, do you love your natural biological children, which he had two more than your adopted seven boys?
And he said, no, I don't love my natural born children more.
Ethnogenesis and Group Cohesion00:03:11
He said, but I have to work harder.
Okay, so you just conflated adoption with biological children.
My children are biologically mine.
Your children are biologically yours.
They don't look exactly like you.
They look more white, but you still love them.
But zoom out at the corporate level and with people that are bound together by all these different things we share and appearance and semblance and This shared identity is one of those things.
So, the same guy that said that, we would have some distinctions or nuances.
We distinguish, as Turriton would kind of say in his institutes, we distinguish with that quote that Aquinas has on marriage and nature.
We would say he's also the one that said, very much so, a people that are similar in all these ways is the bedrock of a people that have cohesion, that love their land, that love the fathers, that are patriotic.
So, I don't think he's just full blown saying that.
You could have cohesion without looking the same.
And no one's talking about flat.
You can.
You can have cohesion without looking.
Looking the same issue, but at a certain level, if all of a sudden you through interracial marriage over time, there's just a bunch of people that share this space, and then because these have a different group of ancestors and these have married into the peoples that immigrated from the north, you would start to end up with disparity in history.
But you have that, you have that in Europe, dude.
That's you have different aspects of the problem.
It's part of the problem that white people, people you would generalize as white, all have disparities within their own uh ethnic backgrounds and their own DNA.
Well, I was speaking about third world immigration that.
People have come in the world.
I'm just saying there's disparities and differences within white people.
There's disparity and differences.
There's tribes in Africa where everyone's super tall, and there's tribes in Africa where everyone's super short.
There's disparities amongst the same race.
Yes, I understand that there is a big argument that's often made that there's more variation within the group than there is between the group.
But I just would simply say that defeats common sense.
And also, we see the French generally, they've developed everything characteristic of themselves, and it's over and against and unique from the Germans that are right there and the English that are above them.
All these peoples eventually develop.
Their own distinct identity.
Yeah, but you're conflating all of them as the same race.
That's the issue.
They all are the J-Friends and the J-Friends.
But they're all different.
And they have very little in common.
Yeah, different ethnicities.
Yes.
Right.
Different ethnicities.
And interracial marriage at scale would destroy those differences.
So you're against a German dude and a French girl getting married?
At scale is what I'm talking about.
At scale.
So if that happened, yeah, you would have kind of a French, German.
They would lose.
I don't want to see the flags and the habits and the language.
But what is your guy's DNA?
Have you guys done your ancestry?
You're 23 and me.
What is your guy's DNA?
I can trace my family line all the way back on my dad's side to about the 1200s in Britain and then mostly German on my mom's side.
So you're mixed, dude, based on your arbitrary standard of saying German and English.
In a process called ethnogenesis, in which the British and the Germans.
Came to the United States and formed a new ethnicity under the hardship, under the pioneer conditions of the American frontier.
Yes, that was called ethnogenesis, and it took the European peoples.
John Jay talks about this.
So they spread out, and then they separate, and then they come back together.
But notice the difference.
They didn't mix all of that, the Irish crossed over to Germany and the English came down to France.
No, they came here to the frontier, and ethnogenesis, a new people, a new American race, is in the process of being formed.
Biblical Categories Without Age Limits00:11:03
So I'm not mixed in the same way of, well, India came to Ireland with millions and millions of people, and now they carry no characteristics of either.
Red hair is gone.
No, I'm an offspring of a European ethnogenesis that came to America and settled there.
And that's all fine, man, but I just see Ephesians 2 15 that says, By setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations, his purpose was to create in himself one new humanity.
Is what?
His flesh.
His purpose?
Yeah, his purpose.
His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace.
So Jesus is going against God's original?
No, that's just a category error.
We're not talking about salvation, guys.
We're not talking about having salvation.
I'd have to say salvation.
About those things which are spiritual and ultimate.
We're talking about temporal categories here that are temporal, arbitrary categories.
Everybody loves Revelation chapter 7, verse 9.
Every tribe, tongue, and nation that's going to be around, right?
The Lamb worshiping Him together.
Guess what?
We love that too.
You will not have diversity in heaven if you mix everything here on earth.
No one's arguing for mixing everything here on earth.
What?
If it's normative, that's what happens.
If it's normative, that's what happens.
You're saying it's not normative.
I'm saying people.
Can choose and have their preferences.
It doesn't go against God's design.
We're saying it doesn't go against God's design.
You're saying it does.
I'm saying people can marry whoever they want to.
And if you want your kids to look like you and grandkids and white babies, I'm not mad at you at that.
The issue is when you go the extra mile and say, I'm against.
This is the Martin Bailey fallacy.
It's like you're arguing like an atheist.
A God doesn't exist.
And then you press and you go, well, I just lack faith in God.
I'm a non combative non believer.
Okay, so you're backdooring a harsher premise than just saying, if you have a preference, just say you have a preference.
If you want to nuance it to that, just nuance it to that.
I'm not doing a Martin Bailey.
I'm sticking to the tweet that.
Kicked off this whole controversy.
That you're against it.
That's right.
Yes.
You have no basis of that on scripture.
You've repeatedly failed to give us one New Testament example to churches that have been written to mixed ethnic churches.
You haven't given us one New Testament example.
Which is why I don't condemn it.
The Bible does not condemn it.
It is biblically permissible.
It is biblically permissible.
That is incoherent, Joel.
No, it's not.
That is incoherent.
That breaks the second law of logic.
No, 1 Corinthians chapter 6.
All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial.
There is in God's word.
A category.
So, you guys have done this several times now.
You've said, oh, this third category doesn't exist.
It breaks the laws of logic.
Well, no.
God gives this category.
All things are permissible, not all things are beneficial.
So, right there, under apostolic authority inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, the third person in the Trinity, we have a third category something that's permissible, but it's not beneficial.
My whole thesis that kicked off this whole thing where everybody got mad at me thousands of people, Christians, calling me a racist, saying that I hate people.
These are people who have been saying it for years.
They haven't even taken the time to watch the show to see that one of my co hosts is interracial.
These are deceitful, mean spirited people.
They're being mean.
It's wrong, right?
Whether or not interracial marriage, whether or not my position is permissible to have, that's debatable.
Slander is not debatable.
Agreed.
Slander is objectively immoral.
And all I'm saying is that this category is not a category that I invented in my mind.
It's a category that I read in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 as a young boy.
I realized that this was a category that has biblical merit.
God.
Sees this as it's permissible but not beneficial.
So I'm allowed to make that argument.
Okay, but that's not the argument.
The argument isn't today if it's beneficial or not.
The argument is does it go against God's normative design?
And that's what Ruslan is saying.
I will spread the people out.
Hold on, let me see.
Let them cook.
Cook, my man.
Just saying that that's what Ruslan is emphasizing is that you guys have not been able to scripturally give a basis.
For interracial marriage going against God's original design when we have verses that show the opposite, so that's what has been lacking.
On the other hand, if you're, I'll use another example similar to the last one.
If your daughter wanted to get married at 15, would you let her?
If my daughter wanted to get married at 15, would you let her?
Uh, no, why not?
Uh, I would deduce that she's not ready for that.
Why on what basis?
On the basis of her mentality, no, notice.
Notice the difference.
I'm giving you what I ascertain and my knowledge and my observation, right?
I'm not saying, even necessarily, that if a 15 year old in the scripture who got married to another 17 year old or a 21 year old, whatever, that that goes against God's design.
I'm not saying that.
But aren't you a Christian?
Shouldn't you be thinking it not arbitrarily or capriciously?
Shouldn't you be thinking in terms of what does God say, not only in his scripture, special revelation?
But also in nature, natural revelation, you have two different ways that God's speaking to you.
Yeah, so God talks about the maturity and the mindset of people ready for marriage.
It talks about their relationship.
So, should the age of consent be 14?
Not for your daughter specifically.
Would you be okay with the age of consent being 15?
No, I don't think so because I think that generally 14 year olds are not mature physically or mentally or spiritually for a marriage or relationships.
Do you think that's a valid argument, biblical argument to make?
I think that.
To argue that.
Well, so you just made it.
You said that's biblical.
Hold on.
You said that's biblical.
And you made an argument.
You just said what you just said is biblical.
You said that's biblical.
You said, I don't believe that 14 or 15 year old girls are mature.
And then you said that's biblical.
No, what?
No.
See, that's why I say, like, you got to let me finish that.
I'm not saying that there's an age biblically, because there's not.
There's not an age biblically.
But biblically, it talks about maturity, spiritual maturity, physical maturity.
Where does it talk about maturity?
Like maturity, not spiritual, but physical.
First question.
1 Corinthians 7, verse 36.
You got Ezekiel, where it talks about the maturity of, like, this is God's giving a hyperbolic example with him and his relationship with Israel and how they've grown physically and matured for relationship and stuff like that.
So, but like, that's just, you know, given the description of physical growth.
But there's a stretching a little bit, but we'll get there.
There's no age, though.
There's no age.
I agree.
That's why I said I wouldn't put an age on it and say biblically, a 14 year old.
12?
So I would say a 12 year old is a little girl.
Okay.
On what basis?
What if she's gone through puberty?
What if she's gone through puberty?
That is the process by which, normatively in culture, men and women were able to marry.
I don't care about that.
I said physical, spiritual, and mental maturity.
A 12 year old does not require that.
And even if you're going through puberty, if you've bled, that doesn't mean that you're grown yet.
You're beginning to grow.
13?
Same.
14?
Same.
15?
Same.
So, where should.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
What about 17?
Well, that's a little dicey, I think.
I think that, but again, this is going on preference.
I think that a 17 year old.
Well, no, you're citing scripture.
At least when I was 17, I, you know, I was born.
You just said physical maturity, spiritual maturity from the Bible.
Yeah, I wouldn't condemn.
If somebody allowed their 17 year old to get married to another 18 year old, 19 year old, I wouldn't condemn that, say that goes against scripture.
I wouldn't say that.
If you asked me, would I want my 17 year old to get married, I'd be like, my preference would be no.
But it wouldn't be a.
But this is what I'm trying to pin you down on.
If a father wanted to marry his daughter at 14, would you say that's wrong?
Yeah, I would say that that's wrong because she would not be ready.
She wouldn't meet the scriptural requirements.
You're not a father.
I don't have to be her father to say that.
How do you know that she's of spirit?
What were the categories?
Mental, physical, spiritual?
Yeah, I don't know.
Is a 14 year old.
Have you ever met a 14 year old that is physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Many women at 14 were historically.
I'm asking you right now.
Mary.
Mary was 14?
It's debatable.
14 to 16.
Yeah.
So we can't put her in there.
Historically, we know that women after puberty, that's when generally they were considered eligible to be married.
That's just a matter of historical.
So look, all in all, this is what we're saying.
Notice.
I didn't give an age on it or anything like that.
I gave biblical description, right?
What you guys haven't been able to do is do that for us, where the Bible is condemning, or not necessarily because you said it's not condemning.
Exactly.
Let me correct that.
That it goes against God's normative, original design for folks to intermarry.
You guys have not demonstrated that biblically.
Can I try?
Sure.
Okay.
I'll try.
And then we're probably going to need to go to a commercial break, partly because.
Ruslan has, he's had some very important business in another room.
And I now have some very important business in another room.
So we're going to need to go to the next one.
I do want to come back to this Corinthians chapter, if you don't mind.
Should you do that first and then me?
Or me first and then me?
Let me just hit it real quick.
Go ahead.
So you quoted 1 Corinthians 6.
I have the right to do anything you say, but not.
That's not what I said.
Oh, you're just reading that passage for you.
Hold on, Joe.
Is that the message translation?
Yeah, this is a weird one because I'm used to ESV.
It says, all things are permissible, but not all.
He is the way that worded it.
I thought you were trying to trap.
No, no, no, no.
I have the right to do anything, or I have everything is permissible.
What translation?
This is the NIV.
I'm sorry.
NIV.
No wonder.
It's science fired.
No wonder.
You say not everything is beneficial.
I have the right to do anything, but I will tell you not to be mastered by anything.
You say food for stomach and the stomach for food, and God would destroy them both.
The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body.
Joel, you made a massive error here.
This is a quote.
And we can find scholars to back this up.
Paul is quoting back to them everything is permissible.
He's quoting this back to them, and then he's using it to segue into I will not be mastered by anything, and then going into layout how sexual immorality is not what we're designed for.
So, this is not a cosign for this arbitrary third category of how something could be not natural but still permissible.
And we don't see that in scripture, we don't see that in church history.
Romans 14 would be another example of what we're talking about is liberty of.
Conscience.
We're talking about this category where something that it may not be best, it may not be the ideal, but it is still permissible nonetheless.
This is a category in Scripture.
Yeah, you're talking about wisdom issues.
Right?
You're talking about wisdom issues.
So, if we're talking about wisdom issues, you're conflating, again, ethnos and race with culture and faith.
That's the huge distinction.
Framing Race, Culture, and Faith00:15:36
I think it's unwise to genocide the entire European.
That's an emotional argument.
You're backdooring emotionally charged language to make the white kids who watch this feel like their job is to be genocidated.
You could just say, I think it would be tragic if white people parachute.
From the face of the earth.
Like, that's not an emotional decision.
I would also say the same thing that it would be horrible if white people perished from the face of the earth.
That's different.
We know you don't take that position.
But if interracial marriage was normative, came to the point, if you guys, it grew and grew and grew in popularity, and you guys said, hey, there's nothing in the Bible against this, if it grew to 50, 60%, European people would perish from the face of the earth over generations.
They just would.
So we're saying that's a logical problem.
None of us would be here, bro.
You don't want it.
I don't want it.
So let's walk back a couple of years.
None of us would be here.
Go ahead.
Wait, wait, hold on.
But my question is, like if it would take multiple generations, so your offspring, all the offspring, if they look exactly like you, that's like a Hezekiah move.
Hezekiah hears that bad things will happen after his lifetime.
This is the Hezekiah's the original.
No, no, no, I'm saying I don't think it happened in my lifetime, so I don't care.
Respectfully, if we're being honest, I don't think either of you are going to care if your grandkids or your great grandkids are mixed.
I really don't think this is going to be an issue.
They didn't possess the nation that was gifted to them by God.
Yeah, but that's an arbitrary definition of nation.
We already agree that there's nations that are mixed ethnic, that exists.
So you guys being down the road, your grandkids, your great grandkids, And one of them is white, and one of them is mixed, and one of them married a Spanish guy, and one of them married.
You guys aren't gonna care.
Like, be honest, you're not gonna care.
You're gonna love those grandkids.
You're gonna see the image of God.
You're gonna see yourself in them.
You're gonna celebrate what God is doing through them.
You're gonna celebrate the Christian heritage that you laid out for them as the primary identity markers.
This stuff's not gonna matter in generations and generations.
Yeah, so one of these new ethnicities, whether it's the American ethnicity, this is what Teddy Roosevelt said about, you know, 1900, 1900 to 1910, 1920.
He said that you know there were multiple different ingredients.
Let's use this analogy of like a furnace multiple different ingredients.
You have the French, you have the Celtics, you have that, you know, this, that, and the other.
And they come, the Brits, they come in, Germanics, they come in.
And what you have is time.
You have, so you have one, you have not a thousand ingredients, you have, you know, five, six, seven, and they're not distantly related, but much more closely related.
They then come into this furnace, and the furnace is providence, it's adversity, it's the hardships of settling a new continent, a new country, all these things.
So, you have high heat, adversity, providence.
You have long periods of time, right?
There's decades that go by, a couple centuries if you're going all the way back to the 1600s, all the way up to the 1900s.
And the ingredients are few rather than many and more closely related.
What we're doing today with globalism is not that.
It's not like part of the French and part of the Nordics, they went and they settled and they became a new.
That's not what we're doing.
We're taking people from opposite ends of the earth in mass, wave after wave, with no pause in between.
And putting them in the same place and then encouraging same sex marriage, encouraging abortion, encouraging intermarriage, encouraging all these different things, saying, well, you know what, if this forms a new ethnicity, and I don't think that's normative.
I don't think that that's the way that nations developed historically.
You're railing against globalism.
I'm saying there are nations here today that this has already happened to.
If you look at Brazil, if you look at Puerto Rico, if you look at Mexico, if you look at America, all of these exist.
So say there's a group of white folks that come to a country and they say, hey, we want to have.
A inter ethnic community.
Do you have an issue against that?
Say it again.
A group of white folks, they come, they start a new nation, and they say, We want to have inter ethnic people.
We want to have inter ethnic community.
Do you have an issue with that?
Like little Czechoslovakia?
Is that kind of what you're saying?
Yeah, they want to be an American.
Yeah, they're a bunch of people and they decide they want to be a mixed people.
Should they be allowed to preserve that?
A small group?
It's irrelevant.
Just a group of people.
Here in the United States?
A country make believe.
A country of make believe.
So you're saying some white people from America, they go to a new place and they say, we want to start a new ethnicity.
I would say that it is biblically permissible, but should not be normative.
You also do see how that, in time, all of that would synthesize into one single ethnicity.
You see how that would occur.
And then, by the way, would they still bring people in?
I think Brazil and all these countries that are mixed ethnic, creating a new ethnicity, I think are, as a people group, distinct.
And I think, generally speaking, I don't think they have an issue with their countries.
Yes, you can point to whatever corruption is going on there.
I think the broader conversation is if God is provident.
If God is sovereign over all of this, these places already exist, and America is already.
You could argue whether America was intended to be a white only nation or a mixed nation, a melting pot, depending on which people you want to cite and source mine.
But these places already exist, and God's providence is already going to be nations and revelations.
That's the end.
So, whatever God is, whatever's going to happen in between then, that's already predicted.
And we already have these nations of mixed ethnicities.
They're here now.
I have a question.
If that little segment is done, and I won't push back, and I'm just curious.
So, you said you have, you know, your pastor got all these members right, interracial members and all that kind of stuff.
And are there interracial couples in your church as well?
Okay, so let's say that there's an interracial couple that's coming to you for marriage counseling.
They're not married yet, but they're seeking to get married.
Right, right.
That's a great question.
How would you handle that?
Would you discourage that or what?
How would you deal with that?
Yeah, so I've done this in my premarital counseling.
If I have, you know, two individuals and there's, Not just different racial, but also different, it's different racially, but also different ethnicity, meaning some language barriers, right?
Or like obviously, you know, like they probably wouldn't be dating if they couldn't speak at all.
But for this gal, she's from Brazil and English is her second language.
And this guy, you know, is white as the driven snow, you know, and English is the only thing he knows.
Then, yes, I've said this is going to add extra difficulties.
It's going to be more challenging.
Marriage is already sanctifying.
So, my view of marriage in the sanctification category.
Is that in marriage, God takes two sinners, locks them into close proximity so that they are, whether intentionally or inadvertently, constantly stomping on one another's idols?
Marriage is sanctifying.
Period.
And it's good.
Praise God.
That's one of the purposes of marriage procreation, sanctification, gospel proclamation, picture of Christ in the church, the eternal marriage, also a hedge against temptation.
If anyone burns with lust, let him marry.
Marriage actually is a solution.
Not the only, but a solution.
One of the ways a young man beats, wins the fight against lust is to take a wife.
Right.
So, because my whole story has been published on the internet, yeah, I failed sexually because I waited too long to take a wife.
Once I took a wife, by the grace of God, now well over a decade, I have been a faithful man.
Praise God for that.
My wife helped me tremendously.
So, all that being said, yes, I have counseled and I've officiated interracial marriages because it is biblically permissible.
And so, but in my counseling, that would be one of the things that we would cover.
It wouldn't be The main thing, it wouldn't be the chief thing, but it also would not be nothing.
It would be a thing.
And I would say, this is challenging.
Like, we have a young man in our church, and he knows that this debate was coming up.
And, you know, he's online and has seen the controversy over the last week on Twitter and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, he said, please don't use my name because I'd like to keep my job.
You know, don't dox me because I'm a bit of a lightning rod.
But great guy.
And he's married to a Brazilian wife.
And he ends up spending, you know, some years, not always, but he was like, Joel, he was like, Joel, you think I like spending three months out of the year in Brazil?
It's like, it sucks.
And his parents, or in laws, her parents, he's like, I can't talk.
I can't even talk to them.
They don't speak English.
He's like, dude, he was like, tell them in the debate, tell them, I love my wife as Christ loves the church.
I don't regret my marriage.
I wouldn't undo it.
I love my children.
And his children are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God as interracial children.
He's like, but yeah, it's way harder.
Yeah, it's way harder.
And I wish that someone hadn't been a lib and in, I wish I had had a pastor like you.
Like you are now, because I didn't always think this way.
You're right, Ruzlan.
But at the time, doing my premarital counseling and saying, you know what, this is permissible.
I will officiate the marriage, but I would be remiss if at some point in our premarital counseling, I did not bring up the fact that marriage is already sanctifying enough.
This is going to make it really hard.
You might want to prayerfully reconsider.
So, Joel, this is what I would add to that.
I think you would say the same thing if you had a family that was an upper class white family that loved Jesus and a Trailer park biker gang family.
A little different because they could still speak the same language.
Okay, they could still speak the same language.
But you're talking about massive cultural disconnect.
If you're talking about an upper middle class Christian family that loves Jesus and a biker gang, Hell's Angel family from a trailer park.
That massive distance, you're right, that massive distance still pales in comparison to the distance I just described.
Joel, I strongly agree with you.
The distance I just described includes the distance of even language.
Yeah, the language of in laws.
Her learning English and him.
Right, but when you marry a woman, you marry her family.
Those families are united.
So let me add to this.
Marriage is a sanctifying process.
And so, if you're marrying someone and you're deciding to potentially learn their language, potentially learn the things, these are all awesome potential adventures.
So, to me, this is all in how you're framing this.
Like, oh man, our in laws can't speak.
I got friends that their in laws can't speak English and they get along just fine and they're able to communicate and things are great.
And so, I think you're pointing to challenges, but these same challenges can be in real existence in the same race.
That's what I'm pointing to.
Not quite the same.
No, I don't think so.
And let me just add this as someone that is in an interracial.
Marriage, I have never had any of these challenges.
I've never had, like, literally, my challenges in my marriage have so little to do with culture.
Why?
Because my wife is black.
She grew up in the same city, going to the same type of church, holding the same type of theology.
And I also grew around a bunch of black people.
So I, and I'm Armenian.
Honestly, I was going to say.
But let me just finish.
The biggest identity issues I had, Joel, was not in my interracial marriage.
The biggest identity issues I had was being Armenian from Azerbaijan, hanging with a bunch of Glendales and being super confused, and I'm white.
But I'm Armenian and ethnically, that was a way bigger identity issue than my black wife and her amazing family and my beautiful mixed kids.
So I'm just laying that out for you.
Like you're talking about an example, and that's a fair example.
I'm saying I've seen the same thing with white couples that are coming from massive disparity and upbringing.
This dude's dad is a hell angel.
He gets drunk and smashes beers.
They come from an amazing family that loves Jesus.
That creates just as much tension.
So I understand.
I think this is the problem, though.
I think what we have done, especially as Westerners and especially as Americans, Is we continue to point out that there are exceptions, and there are exceptions, but we point them out ad nauseum and we elevate them as though they're the norm.
There are some, there are some, let me finish.
There are certainly plenty of cases where two white individuals would still have culturally enough differences that it would be, there would be challenges in the marriage.
But if we emphasize that as like, so it exists everywhere, the impression that we give people who, like me, who would have made those arguments, one race, the human race, the impression that we're giving people is that, so because that exists, two white individuals with cultural differences and it produces challenges in the marriage, Because of that, there's really no difference if you marry a Haitian.
No, there really is a difference.
Well, it depends on how many generations she has been here.
Do her parents love Jesus?
All Haitians aren't monolithic, Joel.
Well, if we've never met any Christian Haitians, yeah, are we talking about Christian Haitians?
Then we know how many generations they've been here.
Hold on, slow down, slow down, slow down.
If we're talking about Christian Haitians that love Jesus and are evangelical, post mill, we'll just say your camp, those do exist and they're not all monolithic.
And there are Christian Haitians that are gone.
Yes, I do.
One of my closest friends is Haitian.
Yes, I know.
He's post mill.
No, I'm messing with you and giving you your theology.
I'm saying he's an evangelical second, third generation Haitian.
We all know on average what the typical Haitian culture is like.
They congregate around the culture.
You should really meet more Haitians, brother.
I know these people.
Haitians are not a monolith.
My best friend was Haitian that came in early on.
I know these people, and I know also they congregate around the food and the culture.
They maintain that sense of identity.
We know 90% of Haitians generally identify not with American culture like we're talking about, they identify with parts of Haiti, and that actually is good and natural.
I identify with parts of Armenia.
Yeah, that's awesome.
People should love their fatherland, love where they came from, and assimilate into America.
Patriotic fatherland.
And assimilate into Christian America.
When you assimilate, like Ruth, you do leave behind.
And there is, and I've talked to the people, some of them coming from Ukraine.
There's a painful process where they're leaving behind the language, they're leaving behind the customs to become American.
So you actually don't get both ways.
Oh, we're honoring Haiti, and we love the food, and we fly the flag, and we watch the World Cup, and also we're completely American at this stage.
Ruth forsook her fathers, her people, and her false Moabite gods.
And that's what people keep pointing to Ruth.
You guys haven't actually done this.
You've been, I think, really respectful.
But Samuel Say, for instance, was pointing that out.
The difference, I would say, is that Ruth was leaving Moab, she was leaving a place where there was no Christian subset population in Moab at the time.
She was leaving a place, a people that was 100% pagan, it was 100% idolatrous.
So she forsook her people, and the Bible.
It's not prescriptive, it's descriptive, but in that descriptive passage, it does esteem it.
It elevates it as a good.
Look at this virtuous thing that Ruth did.
And it was virtuous, not because dishonoring and severing relations from your parents is universally virtuous, but in her particular case, she was leaving for all the right reasons.
Her parents, she, to say goodbye, Father, and I will never see you again, was honorable because her father worshiped sand demons.
Her father was a pagan, you know?
But what we have today, like Samuel says, Ghana is 73% Christian.
So, in forsaking his people and coming here, it's not I'm forsaking them because they're all pagans or because they're all non Christians, right?
That's different.
And so then the question is well, being here, are you going to preserve your Ghanaian heritage and love that and try to preserve it and cherish it?
Pass it down to your children.
And if so, how are you going to do that but also assimilate here in America?
I think you go walk and chew gum at the same time, Joel, respectfully.
So do I.
I talk about it all the time, but not here.
But you have Mexican protesters flying the Mexican flag as they pelt ICE officers and police.
That's all bad, and I've condemned all of that publicly.
But do you see the difference between allegiance?
Tower of Babel and Human Diversity00:09:56
But you're trying to get, it's the is to ought fallacy.
Like just because it is hard or just because these people are doing, that doesn't mean you ought not to get married to an interracial person.
This is a breakdown in the logic of the law.
We allowed it as permissible.
Yeah, but we already looked at how that's not a formidable category.
I went to the text for you.
So you still haven't made the point, whether from scripture, and again, if these things were the exceptions to the rule, when we see them in church history, when we see John Wolfe marrying Pocahontas, who became Rebecca, and there's an entire thing laid out in an Anglican church in 1614, Citing the historical significance.
It should have been an asterisk there.
Because when there's a, hey, this guy is an asterisk, there should be an asterisk.
There's an exception to the rule.
When we see polygamy, it's an exception to the rule because it was some Muslim that had four wives and he heard your sermon, he came to Jesus, and there's an asterisk there.
But you don't see this in church history.
And I can go through missionary after missionary.
Miguel Rodriguez, a Spanish creator, a Christian soldier, married Luisa Delgo, the free black woman in St. Augustine.
Like we see this over and over, and there's never an asterisk next to them, but this is not normative.
If there was a dude in your church that Was polygamous, and you're like, Man, I don't know.
Do you get rid of these vibes?
There would be an asterisk.
It's clearly not normative.
It's clearly not in God's design.
And that, again, you guys have not been able to establish this from scripture.
We don't see any prohibition on it.
And I don't see it from scripture or church history.
I don't know if you want to chime in.
No, I think that's.
I was going to say, Do you want to maybe make one final closing statement?
I know you had one more thing to say.
We're getting close to fives.
We've got to hit the super chats.
Sure, sure.
But if you wanted to take it and maybe lay on the plane.
Yeah, sure, sure.
Yeah, so, yeah, from what we, our position is, whether or not.
Intermarriage goes against God's natural design.
The answer from that we see from scripture is a resounding no.
The only type of reservation and condemnation that we see in the scripture in regards to intermarriage is with those who would lead you astray from the true worship of the true God.
That's it.
We do not see any prohibition from intermarriage in general, it's only to those who would lead you away from God.
And we have examples of this where marrying these women and the Canaanites and all this kind of stuff led the Israelites away, integrating with them and messing with them.
The Midianites led them astray into worship of false gods.
What we have is in 1 Corinthians, it says that a woman who is free to marry is free to marry whoever she wishes.
And the only stipulation it gives is only in the Lord.
So as long as the spouse is in the Lord, That is it.
That is the only stipulation.
Otherwise, you would be unequally yoked.
A believer being unequally yoked with a disbeliever.
We see this throughout the lineage of Jesus.
He has mixed people within his lineage Rahab, who was a Canaanite woman, obviously Ruth, the Moabite woman.
We're seeing that this is even in the line of our Messiah.
How can we say that?
This is not for ordained and planned by God, you know what I'm saying?
Um, so does this go against God's normative design according to scripture?
No, it does not.
We see the opposite.
Okay, um, I'll give just a little bit of uh, I wanted to talk about the Tower of Babel and also uh, creation, but just uh, one response to that, I would just say, um, a woman, a single Christian woman, is free to marry whom she wishes in the Lord, and that would include, I just want the record to state, that would include a five year old boy, so long as he's made a credible profession and been baptized.
Correct.
Okay.
So when I. Gosh!
Come on, man.
This is a lot of restrictions.
That was terrible.
Listen, listen, Joe.
You were very upset about folks calling you racist and all this.
We haven't came here calling you racist.
We haven't came here strawmaning you.
We genuinely came here trying to understand your guys' position.
I thought it'd be a bit better demonstrated from scripture.
It hasn't.
And so let's not strawman.
That's silly.
It's not a strawman.
That is a strawman.
Anyone she wishes, and yet we all five agree that there actually would still be some forbearance.
We all agree.
Although it's not explicitly stated in the text.
So I'm just pointing that out.
That exists.
Okay.
So this is what I was going to say in terms of creation in the Tower of Babel.
So a lot of people use the Tower of Babel and say, look, this is God's judgment.
And it is.
Babel was a judgment.
But what's important, I think, for people to realize is that there's two sins, not merely one.
So one is the sin of arrogance, blatant, unbridled arrogance and pride.
They wanted to build a tower that stretched to the heavens so that they could be as God, right?
So there's the arrogance factor, and God sends a judgment because of that.
But there's a second sin, and it's actually listed.
In the text.
The second sin is it says, Let us build a tower that stretches to the heavens so that we might be as God, so that we will not, and make a great name for ourselves, so that we will not be scattered over the face of the earth.
And I would tie that into the dominion mandate.
So I believe in a prelapsarian world, even if sin never entered the world in Genesis chapter 3, that the natural fulfillment and obedience to the cultural mandate that was given by God to Adam, that it actually would have naturally developed over time different races and also different, multiple, different, some different races and many different ethnicities.
That the dominion mandate was to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth.
So it was that God would have many image bearing creatures to worship him and that they would also fill the whole temple, that the garden, I think that this is implicit in scripture, that the garden was, Adam was to work and keep.
Work is to tend and I would say to grow the garden, to actually cultivate and advance the garden, that that garden that was a geographic locale, that with his stewardship, good stewardship over the garden, over the earth, That he would expand its borders, that even before sin entered the world, there were still deserted wilderness type places.
Adam was actually created in such a place.
He was made in the wilderness, the text says, and then placed by God in the garden.
And then Eve was made from Adam from his flank as a suitable helpmate to him in the garden.
So there were desolate places.
I believe that the dominion mandate would be that Adam and Eve would be fruitful and multiply.
There would be many triune worshipers.
And these triune worshipers would not just be congregated and isolated in one place, but in working and keeping.
Advancing and defending his role in the garden.
The garden would actually advance and increase and fill the whole earth.
So you would have an all earth encompassing garden, and the whole earth would be filled with these image bearing creatures worshiping the Lord.
And that over time, going across seas and mountain ranges and rivers and desolate climates, more hot climates, more cold climates, all these different things, that you would naturally develop through nature.
You would develop different peoples that would have distinctions.
At first, it would be just different accents and dialects, eventually devolving into different.
Languages and these kinds of things, and depending if they live closer to the equator or further, different pigment and skin, and all these different things.
So, I think that different races was always God's intended thing, even in a prelapsarian world if sin never entered.
If sin entered, which it did in Genesis chapter 3, if man, having sinned, still committed himself to the Lord and wanted to be obedient thereafter, then I believe the same thing.
People would spread out and fill the earth, and you would get different races.
In the Tower of Babel, what you have is now you have disobedience in the garden, sin enters the world, and through sin, death, but also you have Further doubling down, tripling down, quadrupling down of rebellion against God.
And one of those, a heightened descriptive passage of that rebellion reaching a culmination is at Babel, where there's unbridled arrogance.
Let's rival God, build a tower that stretches to the heavens so that we may be as God and make a great name for ourselves.
But then a second sin so that we won't do exactly what Adam was commanded to do in the cultural mandate.
We will not spread out and fill the earth, but rather we can congregate.
We're going to do this so that we can rival God in terms of our name, but also so that we can rebel against God in terms of his mandate to fill the earth.
We want to.
Congregate.
And so, Babel, I believe that what God does when He goes and divides their languages is a judgment for their sin, two sins, but it's a judgment wrapped in mercy.
Babel serves as a catalyst of God actually supernaturally quick starting what would have happened naturally over time had they obeyed.
It produced different peoples.
The different languages caused them then to split up.
And as they split up over generations, over time, centuries, in different climates, in different places, speaking different languages with different diets, it created different.
Peoples.
And so I believe that different races were always God's idea.
It would have happened if sin never entered the world.
It would have happened if people obeyed after sin entered the world.
And He made it happen, even with people disobeying after sin entered the world through Babel kickstarting the supernatural catalyst.
All that said, Revelation 7 9, the end game is that we would actually celebrate diversity, different peoples around the throne of God in heaven for eternity.
But that scenario does not play out if diversity is not at some level preserved here on earth.
You don't get Eternal diversity, if you steamroll diversity temporally.
So, we believe that nations are good, they're God's normative plan, and that if anyone is encouraging or promoting at scale in the macro as a positive, virtuous, universal good mass interracial marriage, that that actually goes against God's normative plan.
Nations Unified by Worship Not Distance00:05:13
It is permissible in the micro, might even be ideal.
In a micro situation, and a pastor or a father can counsel accordingly with his congregant, with his daughter, with his son.
But in the macro, if I'm presented with only two choices after being called a racist, after being publicly slandered, saying that Joel is for capital punishment for interracial marriage, and then right now before everyone tell us, are you for or against those two options?
Then I would say, yes, I would be generally against.
For, you're encouraging, promoting, advancing against.
You're warning, counseling, saying, I think that in general, biblically permissible in the micro, but in general in the macro, this goes against the normative plan of God for peoples, nations, and cultures.
That's my argument.
That's how I would describe it from the Bible in a macro view using descriptive text.
There's no prescriptive verse that says, do not intermarry racially.
We recognize that, which is why we don't condemn it as a sin.
But I do think that there are enough descriptive texts in the whole narrative of Scripture to say, yeah, this is the norm.
This is the norm.
So, you guys asked for my Bible.
That's my Bible.
It's a macro descriptive argument from scripture and nature.
Now, I know you guys obviously disagree and don't think it's a good argument, but I said I would give you one, and that's what I got.
Let's go to a commercial break.
I don't get to make a statement.
I thought we just did that.
We did you.
No, you go ahead.
Yeah.
I mean, we won't have a ton of time.
I really want to be able to do super chat.
Our flight's not so late.
What time is it right now?
It's 5.
It's 5.
So, you got to leave when?
6 30.
Yeah, and we gotta eat two too.
Yeah.
We don't need one.
Go ahead.
I would say you leave at six, so do it quick.
Let's go to commercial break and we can at least give like 50 minutes of Super Chat.
I'll do my very best.
Okay.
That Dominion Mandate was an amazing argument from Silence Joel.
I have never heard anything that exhaustive from that little scripture, respectfully.
I think you kind of conceded a debate and you said there's no prescriptive text.
You're just weaving together stuff from descriptive passages and a little bit of natural law, reformed theology.
I don't know how you come to these conclusions, but I think it's just, I'm really impressed with how you were able to weave all this together.
I want to go to John 7.
I'm impressed by the sarcasm.
Okay.
Because you're laying it on pretty thick.
I am.
I want to go to John because I think John in Romans, excuse me, John speaking in Revelation 7 9.
We have the Greek.
We have nation, which means ethos, people group.
This is not a race.
In any modern biological sense, which again, that word didn't pop in until about 500 years ago, this is just as modern as a lot of the gender theory nonsense.
We have tribe, clan, which is about a Kinship, lineage, family lines, Israel's use.
And then we have people, a covenant word used to describe God's people.
John is not collapsing humanity into a single flattened category.
So it's okay, all you white men, it's going to be fine.
Nor is he freezing them into a permanent segregated order.
He's doing something much more dangerous to ethnic purity.
He preserves distinction without hierarchy.
Why all of this undermines this entire natural law equals separation, even though we have no scripture and we're breaking the rules of logic.
If natural law demands ethnic separation as normative, Revelation 7 9 becomes a problem.
There's these distinctions that survive into the very end, but they survive inside a single redeemed multitude.
No hint of boundary enforcement, no hint of ethnic preservation as a moral duty, no hierarchy of any tribes, nations, or peoples.
And nations and peoples evolve over time as boundaries move and nations sprout up, and all these things change.
So, John gives us a different redeemed world.
Gospel.
He gives us a different redeemed people, not difference guarded.
And that's where, in my opinion, this idea of natural law from creation to natural order, distinct people, moral obligation, Revelation flips that creation, fall, redemption, unified worship with real diversity.
If separation were really normative, why does the final vision not separate these nations?
They are together, they are worshiping, they are visibly diverse, and heaven doesn't rush to correct it.
And church history doesn't rush to.
To correct it, and all the church fathers don't rush to correct it.
There's no asterisks next to these names.
So, John uses four different Greek words in Revelation 7 9 not to enforce separation but to show that redemption doesn't erase difference or moralize it.
The nations aren't purified by distance, they're unified by worship.
That's not liberal theology, that's not Marxism, that's not critical theory, that's biblical eschatology doing violence to ethnic purity and natural law claims.
Awesome opponents who I really did enjoy failed to demonstrate this in the New Testament.
They failed to demonstrate it with logic and reason.
And I think the whole idea that there's no prescriptions, in my opinion, there's no prescriptive text on this, concedes the entire premise that it was incoherent to begin with.
Church History Does Not Rush to Correct00:02:38
So that's my final slide.
I'm going to add a 30 second phone a friend.
We had Avery, we had Joel, we had Ruslan.
We did get just a helpful distinction as it relates to permissibility and permissibility.
30 seconds.
We'll go to Super Chat.
He said, This excluded middle permissible, impermissible argument is wrong.
The kind of act as permissible.
Is different than an act in concrete circumstances.
An act can be morally permissible in its genus as a generic kind of act, but illicit in its species when, in concrete circumstances, the act is an improper means to what is good.
It is morally permissible for an 18 year old to marry a 65 year old, but isn't ordinarily prudent.
I think it was fair.
Take 30 seconds at the end there.
All right.
Let's go to a commercial break.
This is the final commercial break.
Then we're coming back and we're doing super chats.
If you have a super chat, get it in now.
We'll do our best to do every single super chat.
We've got about 45 minutes, which means we're going to have to, and I'm talking to myself, but we're going to have to go quick.
Four of us.
Yeah.
Four of us will do just fine.
We'll let you figure out who's the guy who's going to struggle.
So we're going to have to do quick responses so that we can get to all the super chats.
All right.
Here we go.
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All right, welcome back.
We're going to go ahead and dive right in.
First super chat from Dakota Davis.
He sent in $5.
We appreciate you watching and giving.
Evolution Arguments and Prudence00:09:55
He asked this Wouldn't the law of liberty permit Christians to hold The new Christian right view, that would be our view, without it being a sin?
And wouldn't the Ruslan and God logic view be binding the conscience?
God bless.
Avery, I'm going to give that right back to you because that's kind of a question for you guys.
Is this binding the conscience to say that someone can't affirm what we affirmed?
In other words, are you binding the conscience to say that a Christian must promote or be for interracial marriage?
If you can have your preference in regards to interracial marriage, like if you are, if you want that for yourself or not, or you know, it's your cup of tea or not.
However, what you cannot do is say that this goes against the Bible, that this goes against God's design.
That's what we're saying that you cannot do.
Yeah, I just reiterate no problem with anyone having their preferences and also preferences in the other direction.
If your daughters all of a sudden want to marry a black man, I don't have a problem with that either.
Right.
So I think the issue is when we're taking preference and we're making prescription.
And I don't see any evidence of that in scripture.
So, no, we're not saying you got to go promote interracial marriage.
That was never my position.
And I don't think that that, I don't even think that's a tenable debate topic.
Yeah.
All right.
Moving right on, I'm going to kind of just go around the table.
And that's the question is specifically to one of the debaters.
Drew Petty, 8293, sent in a super chat.
Does it fall into Kant's, I'm going to have this for you, Antonio, Kant's categorical imperative?
The categorical imperative is only do something if you could reasonably want everyone else to do the same thing in the same situation.
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
I guess I would more think this is a question for Ruslan and Avery in the sense of okay, so your position is that interracial marriage is good, that you're generally for it, although you sort of allow for preference.
And so there's this idea of it's a Kantian idea, it's not necessarily a Christian idea, but the idea that you shouldn't do something if you wouldn't want everyone to do it.
How do you sort of reconcile that perspective, that Kantian perspective, with your view on it?
Yeah, I don't follow cons.
I don't think that's a tenable position.
I follow a Christian virtue ethic.
And so I think this is one of those things where if people want to get married, I'm not speaking out against it because the scriptures don't speak out against it.
I just think it's weird that we're talking Kant and Darwin, Kant, I know, excuse me, Kant and the moral imperative, and we're backdooring everyone from Darwin to Kant to these conversations.
I just don't see any merit to that.
There's a Christian virtue ethic laid out in scripture, and I'm going to follow scripture over Kant, respectfully.
Let the record state we never cited Kant or Kant.
I know you didn't.
I'm just saying this is what I mean by weird backdoors.
I want to be really clear with that, not even for you guys.
Some of our followers would say, I've seen guys, these aren't necessarily followers, but your argument would be a lot better if you just embraced evolution.
To which I say, no, I'm not dumb.
No, I believe that the earth is somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 years old, that God created the earth in six literal 24 hour days.
He made man on the sixth day, and everyone is descended from Adam.
And then the second go around, everyone's descended from Noah and one of his three sons.
But kind of like a Ken Ham argument.
So we don't need Darwin.
I say all that to say, we're not bringing in Kant, we're not bringing in Darwin.
We don't need Darwin.
Here's the funny thing.
So, we all like evangelicals are like, Ken Ham's the man.
You know, I've taken my kids to the ark encounter.
You know, we love it.
You know, I'd like to see like a Nephilim display of them drowning to be more accurate, but Ken Ham won't allow it.
And so, anyways, I like all that.
But one of the big arguments that we're all like, yeah, get him, Ken Ham, and he's debating, you know, Bill Nye or something like that, is he says, you know, well, here's what the atheist would say.
How could you have all these species?
We have, you know, millions of species on the ark.
You know, the Bible gives the measurements.
The ark's only this big.
There's no way you could do it.
And Ken Ham says, you know, Well, you don't have to have multiple thousand species of dogs.
All you need is two dogs.
And from those dogs, each producing to its kind, so you don't have macroevolution, not Darwinianism, but there is micro adaption, and you get all the way to Great Danes to poodles and chihuahuas.
And so, my point is, I think you can biologically have all human beings, all the same species, all made in the image of God, all descended from Adam and descended from Noah, but you can still have biological distinctions in peoples.
And I think that we see that.
So it's not just a social construct, and I don't need Darwin.
To prove that, I think that we can prove that as Ken Him proves with dogs from the Bible.
I feel like I can prove a similar concept from the Bible as well.
Okay.
All right.
I'm going to take this one.
This next one is, so actually, Ben's next comment.
That's more for you, Ruslan and Avery.
And so I'm going to take this first, Ben MP7, then I'll pass it to you.
That's that one.
And then we'll hit Let's Talk God.
All right.
He sent in two super chats.
The first one is Do you feel differently about your sons taking a wife from a different ethnicity than giving your daughters to the man?
Of a different ethnicity?
I would say generally, yes.
You think of the Israelites, for example, when they go into Jericho and conquered, they were allowed to take, for example, war brides.
There was a sense in which they're brought in, they adopt, they bring their gods.
But in giving a daughter in marriage, especially in the old sense, there was a sense where she would take over.
She would go to his father's house, she would go to their culture, she would go even sometimes to their gods.
We see Leah stealing the gods from her father.
And so generally, I would say there's a little bit of a difference, and bringing in is typically more the way it goes than going out.
Okay.
So then I'll pass it to you guys for this next one.
For those who opposed, or is this one for us, do you think?
I don't know.
All right, let's give it to the next one.
Let's talk God.
What is the issue with Boaz and Ruth's interracial marriage, Hebrews and Moabite?
I'm sorry, guys, most of these are for us.
What is the issue?
Right, so they're saying, like, since you are generally opposed, what would be the issue with that?
They're Hebrew and Midianite.
Isn't that interracial and that's a problem?
There's not an issue.
But I will point this out, Wes, you and I have talked about this, that it is a little bit different than someone coming from the other side of the planet.
Thousands of, and here's the deal like the Ken Ham argument that I just made with one female and one male dog on the ark, and then over time you get different, not species, but subspecies, or whatever types of dog still within its kind.
I would say there's a couple things.
Today we are further removed, there's been more time for different distinctions, even at a biological level, to develop.
There's more time than in biblical times, like Ruth being a Moabite.
And two, Because of planes, trains, and automobiles, and you know, technological innovation, and these kinds of things, as well as pretty funky that I don't like political policies that have eroded borders and mass immigration, these kinds of things.
Um, it's very different than in biblical times.
A lot of what you're looking at is, um, and I'm not saying there aren't any exceptions to this, but a lot of the examples, um, from this tribe over here to the Israelite tribe, these are like 60, 80 mile distances, New Jersey to Connecticut, yeah.
And and you're talking about maybe a thousand years removed from Noah.
Right, or 1500 years removed from Noah, so you're Noah functioning as a second Adam.
I know Christ is spiritually speaking the true final second Adam, but Noah, in the sense of creationally and physically, is a second Adam.
It all starts over with him.
So you're talking about everyone descending from one man the second time, Adam or Noah, and 1500 years removed instead of more like 4500 years.
That's a big time difference.
And you know, we're migrating 60 miles instead of 6,000.
Miles.
There are some big differences.
That's just at the, you know, talking about the physical side.
Spiritually, the moral component, I would say that there is no issue.
It was a full fledged rejection.
When she says, Your God will be my God and your people will be my people, what that implies is to fully embrace the God of Israel and the people of Israel, there's a full rejection of the Moabite gods and the Moabite peoples.
And so this is what we call true assimilation.
She's assimilating.
Religiously, linguistically, culturally, at every level.
But here's the thing, and this is, I don't think it's a coincidence.
I understand it's descriptive, not prescriptive, but it's still there, and I think there's something there.
Ruth doesn't become queen of Israel, and I understand patriarchy, I'm patriarchal.
But even her first son, right?
It's Ruth and Boaz, they have beget Obed.
And then Obed, he begets Jesse, and Jesse begets David.
My answer to heritage what is a heritage American and how it gets into multiple generations.
By the time you get to David, he is 87.5% Hebrew.
And he's a man after God's own heart, and he is fit to be the second king in Israel, seceding Saul.
And so my point is even in the case of Ruth, number one, you have full rejection, full assimilation.
Number two, only centuries removed from Noah and not 4,500 years removed from Noah.
Number three, Also, a much smaller distance.
And number four, it's not until the fourth generation that God sees fit that one of her descendants would be a true Israelite in every sense of the word, fit to sit on the throne.
That would be my answer.
You guys have any response to that before we just get to the next question?
Any thoughts?
Okay.
All right.
We'll get to Ben MP7's second question.
Antonio, I'll give this to you.
For those that are opposed, I think it's to our side.
Where do you draw the line?
Swedes and Italians are different people, but have more in common with each other than with Africans.
What is a biblical principle for this?
Genetic Compatibility in Racial Marriage00:15:04
Well, hopefully, we've tried to demonstrate that the whole conversation around interracial marriage is a matter of not prescription, but a matter of prudence and wisdom.
And so when we think about this, for example, there's this.
Concept of compatibility, we referenced several times the idea or the principle that when a man and a woman come together, they ought to be more compatible on all of the dimensions that we've talked about, from language to custom and tradition.
I think Ruzlan raised the point of geography, even.
And so we believe that, in line with that principle, the idea that you should be more compatible and not less, that is the basis with which you could judge, in a particular sense or at the individual level, whether something is better or not.
Worse or more ideal or less ideal?
So that's how I'd answer that.
This idea that you can make a moral claim on the basis of a gradient, you can make a moral claim on the basis of something being better or worse.
Can you make a moral claim in that culture is often the most important aspect?
And yes, not all culture is the same.
And my concern is that oftentimes there's an inflation of race and culture.
I've heard it with the constant rhetoric against black people and conflating all black culture as monolithic.
I've heard it consistently, right?
So, Christian culture, black folks raised in an upper middle class, dual family household are going to be way different than folks raised in Chicago.
Totally different cultures, both race are black, right?
You see my concern there?
Do you believe, just a quick follow up, do you believe that upper class, suburban, black, you know, a black family would have any distinctions culturally from an upper suburban, sort of upper class white family?
They'd have minor distinctions, but I think there's families that live in the same neighborhood, celebrate.
The same holidays.
Yeah, certainly they can be.
And you got a lot of white kids that use black slang.
I mean, how many times have we said, what is it, banger, OG?
We used a lot of black slang today.
Like, if we're going to be honest, right?
So I think there's overlaps of culture, and there's stuff that white culture borrows from black people and black culture assimilates to white culture.
Yeah, it's so.
And again, these are very broad shifts.
Yeah, yeah.
And we didn't really get into this, but I do think it should be said that there's different levels of analysis.
Like, you might agree that race is more of a blunt at the higher level or broader level of analysis, and then Course, we would, I think, both agree that you can sort of double click into that and say, okay, of this race, you know, for the black race, we'll take that example.
And you have within the continent of Africa, you have a lot of people that are a part of the black race at that level of analysis.
But then, of course, you can go in and see West Africans and East Africans.
Yeah.
See the distinction.
I think the hard part is that Africans don't identify like that.
Like when I'm talking to Ethiopians, they don't identify very different from Ghanians and Nigerians.
So they don't even see themselves like that.
They don't see themselves as black?
No, not generally.
I've sat down with Ethiopians recently, evangelical Ethiopians.
In second, third generation, had a beautiful conversation in America today, and they said, Yeah, our parents never really identified as black.
This is fairly common within certain pockets of black people.
So that's what I'm saying.
So I think a lot of the conflation that's often happening is a hasty generalization fallacy where you're pulling out 0.5% of black men that commit all the violent crime, and then you're saying, Well, black men are more violent.
And it's like, Yes, I understand proportionality, but this is going back to the correlation, is not causation aspect of things.
Black men, a very small percentage of black men commit a lot of crime.
That doesn't mean the average black man is going to commit a crime when you factor in culture, upbringing, household, dual parent.
Like your experience as a black man is going to be very different coming from a dual parent Christian household than someone that's brought up, you know, with one parent growing up in poverty.
Very stark contrasts, right?
Yeah.
So I just wanted to make that distinction between culture and race because I think it's often conflated.
And I think, if I'm going to be honest, if I'm going to just like give you guys the most charitable view, I think what we really agree on is culture as the ultimate, culture and faith, the intertwining of culture and faith.
And I think faith as the North Star and the highest priority than culture.
Yeah, I actually, I completely agree.
I think that's where, if I had to synthesize what's Where we're sort of disagreeing, it's that of all of the dimensions in marriage that you would say, hey, you would agree that it's better to be more compatible with your wife.
You're not going to make like a yin and yang approach.
But me and my wife are very opposites.
Yes, right.
But in terms of geography, all these different elements you can imagine.
And we're simply saying race is also an element of your identity, which I think, which I made the point, I think black people understand.
I think a lot of different people understand that around the world.
And I'm saying that's one more sort of element of identity that ought to be considered with respect to compatibility.
And I would have no problem with anything you just said.
Until you go, I'm against interracial marriage or the scriptures, this is not God's normative design for interracial marriage.
Does that make sense?
Do you think it's better or worse to be more compatible with your wife?
I think it depends on what we're talking about being compatible.
I just listed some of the dimensions language, customs, culture, identity.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm saying you could have all of those things and be of different races.
You could be more compatible.
I agree that it occurs.
My question, I'll ask it again.
So therefore, it is not against God's design.
I'll ask it again.
Do you think it's better or worse to be more compatible with your wife?
You would say, yes, I do.
Do you think race is an element of identity?
I think race is a junk drawer term that we've created that means that is used way broader today than it has been historically, that has been inscription that is used worldwide today.
So I think they can call themselves black in America.
I think they can call themselves whatever they want.
If they want to call themselves Haitian, if they want to call themselves Ghanaian, Nigerian, whatever they want to call themselves, descendants of slaves, whatever they want to call themselves.
So the idea, what I'm trying to lay out is that you acquiesce in the idea you should be more compatible with your wife.
You recognize that race, though conflated, I think that's the term you used.
Though conflated, race is an element of identity.
And basically, in the syllogism, we're putting those two things together and saying, okay, race is an element of identity that should be considered with respect and prudence to compatibility with your spouse.
That's the point.
That's literally our whole argument.
Mott and Bailey fallacy, yet again.
That all sounds sensible.
Hey, you should consider race.
You should consider culture.
You should consider upbringing.
You should consider accountability.
Then I'm against interracial marriage and it is incompatible with the marriage.
Given two choices, are you for promoting, encouraging, advancing, or against?
Yes.
And then me immediately clarifying it by saying, I. Ordinary, normally, or generally, believe that it goes against God's ordinary or normal.
I think it's a false binary that you allowed yourself to be pushed into, Joel.
I don't think you even needed to entertain that big way of binary.
Let's move.
Nathan, can you scroll down to the $99 super chat?
I want to honor this person that wrote in the question they had.
I'll give it to whichever party it is for.
It's highlighted in yellow.
You can't miss it.
I see green.
All right.
Dr. John sent in a $99 super chat.
Very generous and said, Do not be unequally yoked applies to more than salvation?
If yes, applies to ethnicity and culture more than vague term race, which does seem to map onto ethnicity to some degree.
If any of this is correct, then there seems to be arguing degrees of being unyoked, right?
I actually think that's a good assessment.
That would be the position you're arguing.
Ethnicity and race, there's a disconnect.
And so we're arguing degrees of disconnect where they matter, what we can argue is God's normative design.
So thank you again for that generous super chat.
We'll go to the top and keep taking them.
All right.
This dude rocks.
He says it's for the opposition.
I think that's us, though.
We're in the affirmative.
He says this is for the opposition, but I think he's asking this to us.
You guys can tell me what you think.
He said this opposition, what is the biblical exegetical reason for it being inherently wrong for one race or another to be eventually diluted away from a current DNA?
Are we relying on the table of Babel?
And that would be an argument I made in my opening statement that it would be generally sad to see any number of groups of people lose their distinctiveness, lose their identity.
And I would root that in scripture.
So he's asking for scripture.
One of the greatest judgments that can come across individuals and even nations is that they would have no posterity, that Abraham and Sarah, that infertility was the greatest curse on their life.
And later on, we see.
Different judgments and they relate to having no posterity.
So, if you look at a people and you say, and then their posterity in many ways, either they don't have any or the ones that resemble them go so far away that they keep none of the customs and habits and religions of the people, I think all through the Bible they recognized, no, it's important.
I understand that interracial marriage still produces offspring, valid offspring, children made in the image of God, but I think that's what he's getting at.
That's how from the Bible I would argue it.
Okay, next.
So, this dude rocks again.
He said, To in favor, which is probably to Ruslan and Avery.
What can we draw from scripture that God forced cultural differences by language in Babel and encourages it through genetic advantages to racial kin and creates difficulties otherwise?
Genetic advantages?
What are they saying?
I don't know.
What do you think, Wes?
Genetic advantages?
Yeah, I didn't bring them up, the literature on this, and just.
For the record, I have a degree in neuroscience and behavior from Columbia University, my master's in public health from the University of Texas, so I've authored peer reviewed papers.
When you look at the peer reviewed literature, there's some literature suggesting that children that are the product of two races coming together, as far as lifespan goes, as far as depression, anxiety, other elements of identity, and behavioral problems, that they experience more of those.
You could also think of organ and bone marrow donation, that when someone is mixed race, it's much harder to find someone to be a donor.
And so what he might be saying is he's asking you guys, what do you make of those biological realities that objectively, Someone that is mixed race, the offspring of two races, that they will not be able to receive bone marrow from their father or their mother.
And they're going to have to look, and there's stories about this far and wide to find a match.
Yeah, again, is a fallacy.
Two, we need more registries for interracial people.
So I would put yourself on a bone marrow transplant, the more registries.
Three, have more families, have bigger families, excuse me.
Interracial people have great, that's how you fix it.
If you have kids, your kids are 25% connected on bone marrow.
The more kids you have, the more likely you are to have more options for bone marrow transplant.
I think we would all champion bigger families.
Amen?
I think that's how we fix that.
Well, if I could, I think the question is so it's treating the story of Babel and then the genetic element separately.
But I think the question is more of what do you actually make of that with respect to the genetic advantages in terms of God's design, if you will?
You're saying because mixed race people have a harder time getting bone marrow, therefore they don't have the same genetic advantage?
What's God saying in that?
What is that thing?
Like, how can we interpret nature to better understand the character of God and God's purpose in creation?
I don't think that that's telling anything about God's design when it comes to humans getting together interracially.
I don't think that has anything to do with what God has ordered.
I mean, like, we're fallen and have genetic problems as just human beings, period.
Would that mean that God, you know, is God saying something and that we bleed and, you know, we get diseases?
We're in a fallen world.
So, Jeff.
It starts sounding like eugenics, if I'm going to be honest.
Like, Only maintain people because they have a specific leader.
Mean, like it's like, well, to be fair with incest, God says not to do it, and it destroys people, it produces individuals that are severely retarded.
There's a genetic not reason of that degree in a racial marriage, but we surmise from that God's also telling us he didn't just write it in scripture, he wrote it in nature don't marry your sister to a lesser degree, a much lesser degree.
To a lesser degree, I think what they're asking is, well, in a racial marriage, we see some of these also disadvantages to which you would say, I don't view that as the evidence being strong enough to say that's revealing anything.
Yeah, there's all kinds of anomalies, and there's people that have genetic diseases for all sorts of random stuff, right?
So, yeah.
Yeah, some of it can't be helped.
But like you were saying, get diseases or bleed or something.
Like, I feel like often, often God is telling us something.
But like, if you bleed every time you cut yourself with a knife, I think God through nature is saying, stop cutting yourself.
What about the families that have, like, you know, let's say, you know, the mother and grandmother and, you know, have a history of getting cancer through the family?
Does that mean that God is saying, is God saying something there within that same family?
The same culture, same race.
They smoke a pack a day, maybe.
In terms of your diet and you exercise.
I mean, there could be things that.
Maybe.
So I wouldn't say inherently, but maybe.
It depends.
All right.
All right.
Next.
James Strong sent in $5.
He said this.
I think this is a silly comment.
I think it's for us.
He said, I'm 50% Mexican and my wife is 25% Italian.
Do we have enough shared whiteness for our marriage to be in God's normative environment?
Yes, you do.
So in that scenario, I think what you're implying by saying your wife is 25% Italian is you're implying that the other 75% is.
You know, European, and then with you being 50% Mexican, you're implying that the other 50% is European.
So, in that scenario, you have 75% white, you have 50% white, and so what you're going to end up having in that scenario is whatever it is, it's 67.5, I think, right, would be the makeup.
Yeah, I think that that is a great match.
Again, remember our position.
The position is that we're not drawing a harsh condemnation on interracial marriage, period.
But if you, you're obviously being sarcastic, but if you were actually asking me and saying, look, I'm mixed, I have a mixed makeup, and this woman has a mixed makeup, but we're both interracial to some extent.
And the Mexican thing, honestly, even that's debatable whether or not that's actually mixed race.
We could get into that.
But the point is, you're looking at 50% and 75% are like the two greatest compositions.
For her being 75% and you 50%.
Yeah, I think that's great.
I know you don't mean this as a serious question, but yeah.
All right.
God Logic, I'm going to toss this to you so you guys get a chance to go.
God Logic, how does this from Luke?
A bunch of letters.
All right.
He says, How does Leviticus 25, 44 through 46 relate to 1934?
I'll read it for you quick.
Leviticus 25, 44 through 46 says, As for your male and female slaves whom you have, you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you.
You may also buy them from the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have been born in your land, and they may be your property.
You may bequeath them to your sons after you inherit them as a possession forever.
You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers, the people of Israel, you shall not rule over one another ruthlessly.
And Leviticus 19?
Leviticus 19, I think you cited it in your opening statement.
It's the one that you were citing, saying you treat them exactly the same.
Jewish Identity and Interbreeding Concerns00:15:15
And so he's just pointing out that you actually don't.
Yeah, okay.
So, not fully.
Yeah, in context, the ones that they take as slaves and the ones that they keep as slaves would be the ones who they battled and captured and the ones they contended against for the land.
So that would be different from a foreigner who's coming from a far off land, which Leviticus 19 talks about, Exodus 12 talks about, where a foreigner comes and clings to Israel and joins to Israel and converts and turns to Yahweh.
They weren't in battle or opposition against Yahweh, so therefore they weren't captive and taken captured as slaves.
So those are two different contexts of slavery.
Foreigners, sorry.
Okay.
All right.
Next.
My eyes are going Bree Bree Cruz.
Sent a super chat and said, What biblical evidence do they hold to suggest that interracial marriage is wrong?
I think that's on our side.
First of all, we're not saying it's always wrong or a sin.
We're saying it is not normative.
And see the last three hours for our argument.
And favored said, When you talk about the sons of Noah and their spread to different regions of the earth, where does it say their offspring should not marry?
Antonio, Joel?
It doesn't.
I mean, that's what we've argued the whole time.
So there's no explicit condemnation against interracial marriage.
And hence, we do not explicitly condemn.
Correct.
All right.
All right.
Next.
All right.
Tanner Davis sent a $10 super chat and said if distinct nations are part of God's good design, then naturally raises the question of whether and how they should be preserved with their distinctions.
How do you answer, or are nations not good?
That's probably for Ruslan and Avery.
Can you reread that for me?
I'm sorry.
That was kind of mouthy.
Distinct nations are part of God's good design.
This naturally raises the question of whether and how they should be preserved with their distinctions.
How do you answer, or are nations not good?
I think the Bible presupposes borders, but I think borders evolve and change, and people grow, and new nations get formed, and people come together.
I think you have, if we're talking about nations in Revelation, again, we're seeing the end of Revelation, and yet there's a beautiful tapestry weaved together, and God's providence knows all this.
He knew that the people of Brazil were going to be mixed race.
He knew the people of Puerto Rico, well, Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, you know, feeling like Mexico.
So I think we see this already happening in God's providence.
That's it.
In my opinion, that's a Calvinistic answer.
You see the same thing within the nation of Israel itself.
The tribes have their own borders, but that doesn't mean that they're separated from each other.
So I wouldn't say that borders equal separation.
You can have distinction.
There's distinction even within Israel, yet there's unity.
So just because there are distinct races or cultures and stuff like that with their borders and their lands and their boundaries doesn't mean that they're separate from the others and can't intermingle and mix and share and come together.
That's not what that means.
All right.
Another question from Brie Brie Cruz.
This is for you, Antonio.
The biracial panelist will never have a child who is one pure race.
So, who will his children marry that will be acceptable?
Yeah, I mean, I think I felt like I laid out the position.
I think there's a consideration of prudence and wisdom and compatibility.
And it's not about racial purity.
We're not race essentialists.
So, I'm not saying if you're not 100% white, then you're not white.
And so, yeah, I would say my.
Biracial, can you say that still?
I guess about a 25% black.
Yeah, you can.
There's still 25% in there, baby.
Mariah Carey's black.
Your kid's black.
Right.
Yeah.
So, my biracial children will make the determination along with my help on the sort of dimension of wisdom, on the dimension of prudence.
Who is the best spouse for you?
How do they relate to you, et cetera?
All right.
Super chat.
From James Strong, they said if interracial marriage is against God's design, quotes, that would be the position that we took.
Why does mixing ancestries predictably boost genetic diversity and reduce recessive disease risk?
Does that suggest it's within creation's design?
And so, what's referred to here is called in group, out group depression.
So, you can marry too close.
That, like Tay Sachs disease, which is common in Ashkenazi Jews.
You marry close, you're likely going to have it.
It's fatal, it's terrible to have.
We already talked about some of the reasons too far might not be ideal either.
The ideal is actually kind of about the tribal level.
So, it's not super far away and it's not super close either.
I think genetically, some of that is communicating.
Yeah, don't marry your first cousin, don't marry your sister.
Also, don't go halfway across the world and marry someone very biologically distinct.
I do want to give you guys a chance to chime in on that question.
So, mixing ancestries, it boosts genetic diversity, reduces recessive disease risk.
Do you think that suggests that's creationist design?
I think that's a great argument.
I went pretty deep in the rabbit hole of the genetic aspect of this in case it were to come up.
The interesting part about this is Andrew Wilson made the argument that the reason why this is thrown out, standard deviation IQ lower in sub Saharan Africa, is because of cousin marriage in Islam and Islam spreading all over.
Africa, right?
So that is an interbreeding issue of what you're just describing, right?
Too close.
In group.
Yeah, in group, too close, in group, marrying your cousin, very common in Islam, according to Andrew Wilson.
And that is why there's a standard deviation IQ test lower in Sub Saharan Africa.
When you look at all the other studies, at the transracial studies, you start seeing that the disparity when accounting for environment are not as huge as standard deviation.
Talking about a couple of IQ points between white folks, black folks, Asian folks, and mixed race folks.
I think that's a great argument.
And I think, yeah, again, if folks want to intermarry, I think that's awesome.
Praise God for that.
All right.
The other Paul sent in an Australian $10 super chat.
We'll see what it converts to in US dollars.
He said, Question for the racial egalitarians.
I'm just reading it, not my words.
He said, You assume biblicism that moral norms only exist if they are clearly laid out in Scripture.
How did Abraham or any pre Scripture man like Job know homosexuality was evil?
I think that we can.
Look at what it said in Genesis that God lays this principle that a man should leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two should become one flesh.
And I think that that was a principle that has been, that was probably passed down even all the way to Abraham.
So that would be my take on that.
I think it was a principle already laid there in the beginning.
Yeah, I just went down the rabbit hole of how did Moses write Genesis and how did he have this information to write it way later?
So, I would agree with that.
And I would also add, like, I think if you're going to conflate sex distinctions, which are clear as day, to race distinctions, I think you're really in some dicey water.
Because I think it's very.
I think he's making a more principled argument of how can we discern things outside of scripture?
Like, that's kind of what he's getting at how would you know, in absence of scripture, that something's good or bad for you?
Yeah.
Can you be fruitful and multiply?
Right?
There's parts that go together and they create offspring.
I think it's pretty straightforward.
Which was a command, nature tells us, because they fit together.
Yeah.
There's nothing in nature that says don't.
Do that.
You know what I mean?
And that was a command from God.
So I think that that passed down.
All right.
Jake, for you, sending a $20 super chance, got a pound, funny European logo before it.
Not good.
Don't love it.
All right.
He said, You, the letter U, we're not off to a good start here.
He said, You claim race is real because it's visible, measurable, and useful in medicine.
That's like saying counterfeit money is real currency because you can hold it and detect features.
Does race counterfeit the true division ethnicity?
There's a lot going on there.
I think he's saying, okay, sure, you can see race, but the real division is ethnicity, which to some degree we would agree.
But that ethnicity, oh, we're all from Japheth.
Well, you're Eastern European and you're British.
There's going to be a wide divide between the two that still should be taken into account as you consider marriage.
Go ahead, you have something to say?
Yeah, I think denying race as a factor is silly.
There is some degree of it, right?
As whether you call it a social construct or whatever.
But again, I tend to see this, and forgive me if I'm not answering the question, but I tend to see race as just a placeholder for the broader conversation.
Do you think it's more like a rule of thumb, like a heuristic?
It's like you can see sort of visually or phenotypically someone's black, but then it's like.
Yes, yes.
So I could see that you're black.
Right.
Right.
But you're in a suit.
And if you weren't in a suit and you had on, I don't know, you had dreadlocks, you would probably pass as more black.
It would communicate something.
It would communicate something.
Yes.
So again, so that's why I keep going back to culture versus race because some people just say you're a black man.
Yeah.
I don't know how you would identify if you're mixed race, black.
I identify as Indian, actually.
Well, I mean, like, not to open a can of worms, but like Sean King identifies as a black man.
Right.
But what?
There's a man alive.
Yeah, right.
So it's like, you know, so yeah, go ahead.
So this is for you guys.
Super chat again from the other Paul.
More Australian dollars.
We'll see what happens.
Another question Did God not intend the beautiful aesthetics of distinct races?
The red hair of the Celts, the ebony skin of the Ugandans.
Is this not a good reason for general discouragement of intermixing?
So I think he's taking the same position, not saying it's sin, but generally he's asking if for you guys this poses an argument worth considering.
No, I wouldn't say that.
I mean, When you get, let's say for example, you get certain groups that come together and they have a mixed baby that would have texturally different hair than there, and it's really beautiful and different and unique,
then can I say that, okay, is this God's design then because of the beauty and the artistry and the uniqueness of this new type of texture of hair that's different from each parent?
Take that stance.
So, no, but it does show that God is an artist and he is unique in his design of people.
And people are unique, people are different.
That has nothing to do with whether or not they can intermarry.
All right.
The Technician TV, Ruslan, this is for you.
He asked, Ruslan, do you, I think the word think is supposed to be in there, do you think Jews and Christians worship the same God?
And if so, is it okay for them?
He's, I guess, Jews and Christians.
Is it okay for them to prohibit interracial marriage?
He's probably mostly speaking of Jews that have typically only married within a Jewish ethnic group and so maintained their identity over time.
Yeah, no, Jews and Christians do not worship the same God.
I think Jews need to be converted and they need to be told about Jesus and they need to be evangelized.
We're specifically speaking of Orthodox and Rabbinic Jews.
Yeah.
Right, Halmutic Judaism.
Right, right, right.
If we're talking about Jews that became Christian, that's different, right?
So I got friends that are Jewish that follow Jesus.
And if so, is it okay for them to prohibit interracial marriage?
Racial marriage, yeah.
I would never advise a Christian woman to marry a Jewish man if he's not following Jesus.
I think he's asking about Jews themselves have always married within their own group to maintain their Jewish identity, so they're kind of two disjointed questions.
But with the second one, let's take the example you just gave.
So, for the Jews that you are friends with, ethnic Jews, but they've actually converted to Christianity religiously, if they said, I don't want my son or daughter to marry another Christian who's not ethnically Jewish, like it, you know.
What do you think?
Sorry.
They're Jewish, but they're now following Jesus.
And their children are following Jesus.
And their children are following Jesus.
And there's another couple, their children are following Jesus, but this couple's not ethnically Jewish.
And they say, look, we want to preserve our Jewish identity.
Our now Jewish Christian identity.
Yeah, I think if they say that's their destiny.
You'd say it's preference.
I'd say it's preference.
Yeah.
Yeah, just like I got my black homies that want to have black kids and wanted to marry a black woman.
And I'm like, cool, man.
That is an interesting.
It's very common in a black culture.
It's very interesting for you to say that.
But I guess what you're saying is if a person said, I just want my children to be white like me, you would have no problem.
I would have no problem with that.
I think if someone then goes out of their way to say, like, okay, I had a buddy who was very particular about the type of woman he wanted.
I'm not even talking about race, right?
And then the more we talked and the more we examined what you wanted, I was like, what you want is not who you are.
You want this petite, skinny girl, and there's this other girl that really likes you, and she's not your type.
Hey, but she loves Jesus.
She has great moral character.
You're aligned.
You're compatible.
Maybe you should consider dating her, right?
And then they ended up getting married and having an amazing family.
I would say that's a delusion in his mindset of his own self worth.
He was 30, 40 pounds overweight.
You know what I mean?
And so, like, yeah, I challenged him in that and saying, yeah, you're wilding in this whole, I want this type of woman, but you're not that type of man.
I'm not sure if that connects to that.
No, yeah, yeah.
It's just the idea that someone can actually express just an in group.
Racial in group preference and not be racist.
So let me just say this.
And if there's an amazing woman that loves Jesus and he's saying, well, she's not black, I would just, I would probably, I'd maybe say, well, maybe you want to reevaluate that, right?
Like I would say, be open to it, but I wouldn't press him either way.
If he goes, nope, I'm not marrying, I don't want to marry a white woman or whatever, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, it wouldn't be a big deal for me.
I'd be like, cool.
What do you think about Jews?
I was really trying not to talk about Jews, but ethnically, gosh, ethnic Jews who would say, not just for their own children in terms of their preference, but they would say that, Ethnically Jewish people have a moral obligation to marry other Jews.
Because they're such a small minority population?
Is that kind of what you're doing?
To preserve, yeah, the Jewish race.
How they practice it.
Yeah, I would say that's a preference.
I'll say that because it.
The moral obligation.
That's an ought.
Yeah.
Oh, sorry, I missed the moral obligation.
Ethnic Jews who say they have a moral obligation to marry other Jews, and how do I feel about it?
Yeah, what do you think?
I mean, we're not even talking about kingdom people.
They're not Christians.
Yeah, I know, but so do you think that's wrong?
That's a great question.
I am not even orienting that conversation because they don't follow the same God I follow.
Does that make sense?
It is, right.
I'm not trying to weasel my way out of the conversation.
It's such a category error.
That category error.
Exactly.
I won't even make it about you because I don't know your position on this.
I haven't heard you talk about it.
But there are a lot of Christians who are, you know, they're dispensational Zionists.
They're pretty gung ho about Israel.
Maybe their pastor is one of the thousand pastors that went on the sponsored Israel trip, you know, for three days and got their talking points and came back, you know.
They're really big on Israel.
And even as Christians and non ethnically Jewish people, they still feel strongly that Israel should not be diversified.
Israel shouldn't have a bunch of immigration and that Jewish people should marry within their race because we need Jews to preserve.
Category Errors Regarding Israel00:03:33
These pastors have said this?
There's documentation of this?
Yeah, pastors have.
Yeah.
Oh, gosh.
I'm so sorry.
Have you been to Israel, Joel?
No.
Have any of you guys been to Israel?
No.
You guys know the majority of Israelis are Sephardic Jews, and there's a lot of black Jews and all types of Jews.
Yeah, there's Sephardic, there's Ashkenazi.
Yeah, I'm aware there's some diversity in Israel.
Some diversity.
I mean, it's like 60% Sephardic Jews, and then there's like 20% Arabs.
The Ashkenazi Jews, where the Tarantarans are like the very small minority that actually practice all that stuff.
So, yeah, that to me is just weird because when I go to Israel, I mean, I'm not trying to be this guy.
When I go to Israel, it looks a lot like America.
Like I see black Ethiopian Jews, I see Sephardic Jews.
Israel is very progressive.
It's very diverse.
They're secular.
Yeah, they're secular.
Yeah.
This is a good question to end on.
Thank you to everyone else who put super chats in for the sake of time and also staying on topic.
We weren't able to handle all of them, but we did our best.
Hopefully, we covered the best ones.
This is for both parties.
So I think we'll start with ourselves.
Joel, you can take it for yourself as a pastor, and then we'll hand it to you guys for the final word.
Michael Skogans, $10 said, For both parties, I know that when you mix two different cultures together, friction can happen.
In light of that, how can the church help young couples navigate that friction?
Great question.
In a marriage, I know that when you mix two different cultures together, friction can happen.
In light of that, how can the church help young couples navigate that friction?
So, I take this as once the marriage has already been established.
I think so.
Yeah.
So, in the case of a married couple, husband and wife, they're already married.
They've already entered into that marriage and they come from two very distinct cultures.
Then, yeah, like counseling them through that as best you can, rooting it in whatever is inherently sinful.
Sin is always the biggest problem, it's just not the only problem.
So, trying to get down to sin issues and encouraging from the scripture repentance.
Wherever necessary, with anything that's actually objectively sinful.
And then with everything else that might be a language barrier or different preferences or different customs or traditions, and he celebrates Christmas and she doesn't or whatever.
I think with that, encouraging patience, and they're just going to have an extra set of extra homework than the average couple that's more homogenous.
They might have to study up on language.
They might have to study up on this, study up on that.
So they're just, they're going to have to work harder.
So encouraging diligence, encouraging vigilance, you know, those kinds of things.
I agree with you.
I'm not going to lie to you.
What was the last thing you said?
I said, I'm not going to lie to you.
We did it.
I have to say, as the middle of the table, half black, half white, I get to decide who wins.
I think, I remember this Paul Washer sermon a long time ago, and I don't know if you guys were.
Beginning with Paul Washer, but he talks about, he remembers what he's saying when he's talking about marriage.
When you get married, it's like, it's like, when you become a Christian, it's like walking into a tomb and dying to a part of yourself.
And then when you get married, it's like walking inside of another tomb and dying to another part of yourself.
And then when you have kids, it's like walking into a tomb of a tomb of a tomb and dying to a part of yourself, right?
And he's talking about, like, hey man, like when you get home, the real work begins.
When you get home, that's when you're really on call.
Closing Thoughts on Marriage Expectations00:02:57
And when I think of that, I think maybe some of this is, Maybe expectations, man.
Like, marriage can be hard, but it could also be the most glorious, amazing thing.
And so, setting these expectations for young couples, they're like, it is hard, and there's practical things you got to adjust to, personality things you got to adjust to.
Sometimes it's cultural, sometimes it's all sorts of things, ideologies, but working towards that and just having healthy expectations that you can work through it.
And the scriptures, the main things are the plain things, and you can work towards having a great marriage.
But it's going to be hard.
I think we need to tell people that, yo, marriage is not always going to be easy, it's not always to make you happy.
It's to make you holy.
It's a sanctifying process.
Yeah, duty is a duty.
That's right, I emphasize it.
We're going to hit this last question from the McGlone Code from Rumble.
We love our Rumble super chatters.
So we'll hit this last one here.
Do you agree that, all else being equal, it is a concerning sign when someone cannot find a godly spouse among their own people that doesn't sound ideal to me?
I agree.
That is concerning.
Yep.
All right.
Thank you guys for tuning in.
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And then again, March 5th, 6th, and 7th, Bless God Summit.
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Yep.
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