Category: Apologetics

Answering Rev. Jeff Stivasonn’s Silly Accusations Against Rev. Sam Ketcham

Kinism, and by extension Race Realism, fails to understand something vital. Genetics are not the source of blessing. The gospel is the source of blessing. Samuel Ketcham illustrates this error in a Substack article titled “Race and Nature,” stating, “When the white man took the true religion around the world, the Holy Spirit made their mission effectual. But to deny that their superior culture, language, and race had anything to do with it—is foolish.” In this statement, Mr. Ketcham has undermined the Reformed gospel.”

Jeff Stivason
A Word to Kinists; The biblical error of ‘race realism’ and related beliefs
RP Witness

1.) It is true that “Genetics are not the source of blessing,” but it is equally true, and Stivason misses this, that genetics are the product of God’s blessing. Ketcham captures this distinction when he writes (and Sitvason quotes) “the Holy Spirit made their mission effectual.” Ketcham clearly ascribes all glory to God while at the same time recognizing that glorifying God is inclusive of the fact that God’s grace alone accounts for a superior culture, language, and race. Stivason is thus seeking to divide what Ketcham would never separate and Stivason is doing so in order to make heresy out of that which is reflective of the Christian confession and faith.

2.) It is Stivason who is the one who is undermining the Reformed Gospel by insisting that it is Gnostic man who spreads a Gnostic gospel. God, by His grace alone, and for reasons known only to Him, chose the WASP, inclusive of all God made the WASP to be according to His race, culture and language, to be His tool for taking the Gospel across the globe. Is Rev. Stivason really arguing that superior culture, language, and race of the white man, all as inherited by grace alone, had nothing to do with their missionary effort? If Stivason is arguing that then Stivason is indeed a thorough-going Gnostic and ought to be brought up on charges.

Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Brito, Lusk & McAtee

The quote by Bultmann below defines the kind of Christianity that Dietrich Bonhoeffer embraced.

“It is impossible to use electrical light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.”

Rudolf Bultmann

Kerygma and Myth

And yet, Rev. Uri Brito and Rev. Rich Lusk of the CREC are both out there championing that Bonhoeffer was not so bad and was even a conservative theologian.

What Bultmann gives in this quote is the essence of Neo-Orthodox (Barthian) theology. The Neo-Orthodox theologians would argue and quibble among themselves, but make no mistake, not one of them were Christian in any historic sense. Neither were any of them conservative in any historic sense. Because that is true for “men” like Brito and Lusk to argue the way they are arguing is sheer madness.

Here is a quote from the Bonhoeffer himself on Scripture,

“There may be some difficulties about preaching from a text whose authenticity has been destroyed by historical research. Verbal inspiration is a poor substitute for the resurrection! It amounts to a denial of the unique presence of the risen one. It gives history an eternal value instead of seeing history and knowing it from the point of view of God’s eternity. It is wrecked in its attempt to level the rough ground. The Bible remains a book like other books. One must be ready to accept the concealment within history and therefore let historical criticism run its course. But it is through the Bible, with all its flaws, that the risen one encounters us. We must get into the troubled waters of historical criticism.” 

 [Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Edwin H. Robertson (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 73-74.]

1.) The authenticity of the text of Scripture has been destroyed by historical research.

2.) When Bonhoeffer bitches about “Verbal inspiration is a poor substitute for the resurrection,” what he is saying is that it is the subjective encounter with the resurrected Christ we must be looking for in order to arrive at “truth” and not some kind of reliance on the fact that the only Christ we know of is the Christ revealed in a propositionally true and inspired text. Bonhoeffer, like all neo-Orthodox “theologians” presupposes that the objectively supernatural cannot be true and so what must be pursued is an individual personal subjective mystical encounter with a Christ who may or may not be reflective of the Christ found in the verbally inerrant scripture.

3.) When Bonhoeffer says, “But it is through the Bible, with all its flaws, that the risen one encounters us,” he does not bother to tell you that the risen one that one is encountering is not necessarily the risen one who walks through the pages of Scripture. In point of fact that Bible is a flawed book and so the only encounter one can have is with a Jesus that is unrelated to the flawed Bible because the Jesus of the flawed Bible is a flawed Jesus.

Neo-orthodoxy has always been contradictory subjective excrement, and neo-orthodox theologians have always been contradictory subjective excrement eaters. They take their subjective experiences, call it encounter, and then like filling their subjective balloons with a kind of experiential helium they call their subjective balloons “objective reality.”

And Brito and Lusk are calling this “Conservative.”

Matthew Poole; “The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church Are Infidels”

Here is the ARP defining Kinism which they inveigh against and condemn;

“The belief that God has not ordained the existence of distinct ethnic and racial groups and that these groups should not be preserved and protected . . . It is the conviction that the love of one’s own kind is not a natural and biblical duty, and that the modern drive for ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘universalism’ is not a rebellion against the created order.”

By the way here is Matthew Poole on 1 Tim. 5:8 insisting that the ARP clergy are idiots. Perhaps someone has denied the gospel, but it is not the Kinists by the definition the ARP provided.

“‘But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house: here is a manifest distinction between his own, idiwn, and his own household, oikeiwn, they are distinguished by terms in the Greek, and as to the care which men and women ought to extend to them. By his own he means his relations, all of a man’s family or stock; by his own household, he seemeth to mean those who cohabit with him. The apostle saith that he who is careless of providing for the former, (so far as he is able), but especially for the latter, hath denied the Christian faith, that is, in the practice of it, though in words he professeth it; he liveth not up to the rule of the gospel, which directeth other things. And is worse than an infidel; and is worse than a heathen, that believeth not; because many good-natured heathens do this by the light of nature, and those who do it not, yet are more excusable, being strangers to the obligation of the revealed law of God in the case.”

Matthew Poole

Any fair reading of Poole finds Poole insisting that the ARP clergy and elders who drafted the Kinist document are worse than infidels.

You might belong to the ARP if….

1.) You think an assertion is the same as an argument.
2.) You think the Ordo Amoris is a kind of salad dressing.
3.) You think that Drew Poplin is a heavyweight intellectual.
4.) You think that the church in the US needs more Brits like Andy Webb.
5.) You want your grandchildren to look like foreigners.
6.) It bothers you that Jesus had to be born of the tribe of Judah.
7.) You have never lived around or had to work with minorities.
8.) You’ve a poster in your study that reads “We be all the same.”
9.) John Lennon’s “Imagine” is you’re all time favorite song.
10.) You spend every night thinking, “If only I’d married outside my race.”
11.) Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, and Marcuse are your beau idéal.
12.) You spell “Exegesis” as “E – I – S – G – E – S – I – S.”
13.) You refuse to deal with Church history.
14.) You refuse to read the books “Who is My Neighbor,” and “A Survey of Racialism In The Sacred Christian Tradition,” for fear it will convict you.
15.) You think “Jacobin” is a brand name of blue-jeans
16.) You willfully misinterpret and twist what your conversation partner says.
17.) You think “Nuh-Uh” provides a serious rebuttal to a reasoned argument.
18.) Erskine Seminary is the only one that would accept your application.
19.) You assign sinister motives to people you disagree with … after all, they must be wicked if they disagree with you.
20.) You think you’re smarter than nearly all the Church fathers who preceded you.

ARP Gives Nothing but Bare Assertions on Kinism … Where’s the Beef?

“Kinism is backwards theology; it is man trying to justify his own prejudices with the Bible, rather than letting his prejudices be transformed by it.”

2026 ARP Study Committee Report

1.) Note, there is no definition of Kinism in this report that a Kinist would recognize as Kinist since the definition originally given is contradicted later in the study. Therefore what is being reported against is a straw man, since the report embraces the contrary contradiction from the original statement as the definition they are working from.

2.) If Kinism is a backwards theology then all our fathers were backwards theologians since, as the anthologies, “Who Is My Neighbor,” and “A Survey of Racialism in Sacred History,” both demonstrate with quote after quote from the centuries of the Christian faith that Kinism is what the church has believed in all times and in all places where it has been orthodox. The ARP and other NAPARC churches are seeking to overturn the Christian faith in the name of Cultural Marxis egalitarianism

3.) Kinism has demonstrated that it is in keeping w/ the prejudices of the Bible. In point of fact, to be anti=Kinist is to be worse than an infidel we are told by Scripture.

4.) Only someone with prejudices against what the Bible teaches on Kinism could conclude that men who teach what is consistent with the Bible on Kinism are men “trying to justify their own prejudices with the Bible, rather than letting their prejudices be transformed by it.”

5.) Men who say what the ARP has said are Anathematizing the Christian faith and are serving the interests of Cultural Marxist egalitarianism.