On The (Underwhelming) Antioch Declaration

 By Janet Mefferd - Posted at Substack:

In the days of the early church, councils gathered in response to serious heresies and responded to them with new creeds and canons. Today, it’s a parade of “declarations,” with the latest one proving that even some of the best-known enablers of “Woke Right” Christian Nationalism are finding the movement hard to defend anymore.

Enter “The Antioch Declaration,” billed by its collaborators as: “A Statement on Racial Ideologies Threatening the Church.” Among its drafters and initial signers are Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho; James White, founder of Alpha & Omega Ministries; Joe Boot, founder of the Ezra Institute; and Jeff Durbin, pastor of Apologia Church in Arizona.

The men state that they are coming together to oppose “the ideas of some contemporary leaders and influencers seeking to introduce anti-gospel racial categories into the church” and to “identify and resist a rising tide of reactionary thinking emerging on the fringes of our own circles.”

Who are these “contemporary leaders and influencers,” and what is this “reactionary thinking” of which they speak? They never name the former, but the “reactionary thinking” they reference includes blatant anti-Semitism, kinism, Holocaust denial and white nationalism. And it’s coming from a growing swath of younger “Woke Right” men -- who often are called the TheoBros -- in their churches, social-media feeds and, worst of all, personal circles.

But search the declaration in vain for any detailed explanation of why the collaborators only now feel compelled to oppose the ideas of the contemporary “Woke Right” leaders or identify the rising tide of reactionary thinking in their circles. That might require an admission that other Christians painstakingly “identified” all this rot in their circles to these men a long time ago, and they didn’t do anything meaningful to address it.

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