Important Takeaways:

• So, what does Metaxas say? He says North American Christianity is too much the same as that found in the German Church of the 1930s. In his view, that’s a bad thing.
• “So the only question,” he writes, “is whether we might understand those parallels, and thereby avoid the fatal mistakes the German Church made during that time.”
• What fatal mistakes did the German Church make? We don’t have to guess because Bonhoeffer, as Metaxas makes clear, identified those mistakes for us. The German Church’s first mistake was the failure to recognize with the coming to power of Hitler and the Nazis, the world changed and not for the better. As Metaxas puts it, “They seemed to think what might have worked in 1915 or 1925 would work in 1935… They refused to see the new situation and to act accordingly.”
• Metaxas then gives details to show the same situation prevails in North America today. We don’t face Nazis but “the emergence of ideas and forces that ultimately are at war with God Himself.”
• All of them, Metaxas says, spring from a central source, “atheistic Marxist ideology,” as expressed in Critical Race Theory’s many guises, and “radical transgender and pro-abortion ideologies” that are “inescapably anti-God and anti-human.”
• To summarize, “These ideas have over many decades infiltrated our own culture in such a way they touch everything, and part of what makes them so wicked is that they smilingly pretend to share the biblical values that champion the underdog against the oppressor.”
• What, then, are we to do? Bonhoeffer spelled out his position in an April 1933 essay, The Church and the Jewish Question. In the essay, written on behalf of the “Emergency Pastors League,” Bonhoeffer argued “the church was the conscience of the state and must call it to account,” and “that it must loudly object if the state was doing wrong.”
• Churches must not, as Metaxas denounces in scathing terms, retreat to a focus on “the gospel” as though God has nothing to say about public evil.
• “This is not just nonsense,” Metaxas writes, “but is a supremely deceptive and satanic lie, designed only to silence those who would genuinely speak for truth.”
• But more from Bonhoeffer as Metaxas reports it: “… the Christian Church was obligated to help any victims of the state,” he wrote. Then he really bore down, “… if the state refused to change course and do the right thing, but rather continued in its sins — which in this case were principally focused on persecuting the Jews — it was the solemn obligation of Christians to take action. They were not merely to protest verbally and to help the victims, but were also to become actively political — to ‘shove a stick in the spokes’ of the wheel of the rumbling machine of the state.”

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