Tag Archives: Eric Metaxas

If the church was the conscience of the state, then we must call it to account

Letter to the American Church, by Eric Metaxas

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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Bonhoeffer Scholars, Relatives missing the point when they warn Eric Metaxas not to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a symbol of Christian political movement

Eric Metaxas speaking

Important Takeaways:

  • In recent years, author and radio host Eric Metaxas and other conservative Christian supporters of Donald Trump have compared themselves to the famed German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer — who was put to death, in part, for participating in a plan to assassinate Adolph Hitler.
  • In a recent interview on Flashpoint, a Christian television talk show on the Victory network, both Metaxas — author of a bestselling biography of Bonhoeffer — and the show’s host called the current election a “Bonhoeffer moment” and urged Christians to rise up and oppose evil.
  • That evil, in Metaxas’ eyes, is the Democrats, who, he has argued, stole the 2020 election and whom he often compares to Nazis. For him, if Democrats win the next election, it could mean the end of America as we know it. Metaxas has argued and has claimed in the past that Trump is God’s chosen candidate and that those who oppose him oppose God.
  • His newest book, “Religionless Christianity” — a phrase used by Bonhoeffer — describes America’s current politics as a spiritual war and sign of the end times.
  • A group of Bonhoeffer scholars — and the theologian’s descendants — have had enough. In a statement issued Friday (Oct. 18) members of the International Bonhoeffer Society called on Metaxas and others to stop comparing the current election to the rise of the Nazis. The statement, in particular, called out Metaxas for social media posts featuring a gun and a Bible and his support of Jan. 6 rioters.
  • “This portrayal glorifies violence and draws inappropriate analogies between our political system and that of Nazi Germany,” the scholars said in a statement, which has been signed by more than 800 Bonhoeffer scholars and other Christian leaders. “It is a dangerous misuse of Bonhoeffer’s life and lessons, particularly in this election season in the United States.”
  • The statement from the Bonhoeffer Society makes a similar point.
  • “Any attempt to invoke Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his resistance against Hitler as a reason to engage in political violence in our contemporary context must be strongly opposed,” it says. “Moreover, while Bonhoeffer supported the coup, he refused to offer a Christian or theological justification for it. He understood the dangers of such a rationale.”

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Approaching the Tipping Point: Eric Metaxas; Urgent Wake Up Call to the American Church

Author and radio talk show host Eric Metaxas warns that America is fast approaching a dangerous cultural tipping point, although he says it’s not too late to reverse course. In his new book, Letter to the American Church, Metaxas writes of parallels between today’s America and pre-World War II Germany.

“It is the silence of the American church on a host of issues today that many people say, ‘Oh, that’s not a gospel related issue. I don’t want to be divisive. I don’t want to be political.’ It is that silence which directly parallels the silence of German Christians.
in the early thirties, and it led to the satanic evil of the Nazi takeover of that culture where they crushed the church.”

He believes if only another few thousand Protestant pastors had spoken out, the Nazis would not have succeeded. Instead, their silence doomed the German church and nation while leading to the Holocaust.

“This was not biblical. This was not what God was calling them to do,” Metaxas explained. “But the church hesitated enough and kept silent enough, for long enough for the Nazis to utterly take over and really do things so evil that we look back and
we think, ‘well, that can never happen again.’ And what I am saying in this book is that exactly the same thing is happening again today because of the silence of the American church.”

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Eric Metaxas warns of the future of a Silent Church

Matthew 5:10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

Important Takeaways:

  • Eric Metaxas: ‘Silence’ of American churches echoes 1930s Nazi Germany
  • About 3,000 of the approximately 18,000 Protestant pastors in Germany in the 1930s openly supported Adolf Hitler, and about the same number ended up opposing his tyrannical rule.
  • But it was the vast majority of ministers, about 12,000, who chose to remain silent – arguing it wasn’t their place to engage in politics
  • Metaxas contends the American church today mirrors the silence of the German church before the Holocaust.
  • Without question, he said, that silence will lead the nation “to horror unimaginable, unless we repent, unless we cease being silent.”

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