Eric Metaxas

Special note to readers from WND’s David Kupelian: Eric Metaxas’ two most recent books – “Letter to the American Church” and its just-released sequel, “Religionless Christianity: God’s Answer to Evil” – are, in my view, so important to the future of America that I wanted to share them with WND’s readers. At my request, the author has graciously allowed WND to publish the following exclusive excerpt from “Religionless Christianity.”

The earlier book, “Letter to the American Church,” shows how, just as the vast majority of German pastors and churches during the 1930s witnessed the rise of Hitler and Nazism, yet did nothing to oppose it – and their passivity ended up allowing the unimaginable horrors that followed – today’s American churches and pastors are, with a few notable exceptions, following in the German churches’ disastrous footsteps.

“Religionless Christianity” takes off where the first book ends, exploring more intimately what living a truly Christian life – including standing up to ever-expanding evil when it rises all around us, as in America today – looks like. The message is summarized at the top of the book’s front cover: “There is only one hope left to save America and the world: active, robust, and public faith in God.” I heartily recommend both books.

Following is the “Introduction” to “Religionless Christianity: God's Answer to Evil”:

We are in a war. Of course, at its heart, it’s a spiritual war. We who call ourselves Christians are called by God to fight in that spiritual war, which expresses itself in innumerable ways all around us, so that what is fought in the heavenlies by angels fallen and unfallen is also fought in our own world, by us, in time and space. God gives us who are made in His image the wonderful and terrible privilege of taking part in eternal things within the context of human history.

Which raises the question: Where are we in human history?

In America we are experiencing our third – and likely our final – existential crisis. The first was our Revolution, when the threat was from without; the second was our Civil War, when the threat was from within. But now we face a third trial, whereby evil forces aim to steal our freedoms and national sovereignty via a globalist world system dedicatedly at war with the God from Whom we derive our principles of “liberty and justice for all,” as well as with the principles themselves. And the threat to us now is from both within and without.

This book is a sequel to my previous book, “Letter to the American Church,” which draws the unavoidably chilling parallels between German Christians’ silence and inaction in the 1930s and the silence and inaction of American Christians in our own time. Both are the result of a drift away from the biblical idea of a muscular faith that expresses itself in all spheres of life and toward a dead and “religious” faith that is merely theological and ecclesiastical. Dietrich Bonhoeffer sought to awaken the church of his day to action, but as we know, they did not heed God’s voice through him and invited the judgment they couldn’t have dreamt would come. So the question for us now is whether we in the American church will heed the prophetic warnings
of Bonhoeffer for our own time and avert the unfathomable horrors of our own silence and inaction.

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Near the end of World War II, an imprisoned Bonhoeffer was ruminating about why the German church had failed, and suggested that they had needed a bold and “religionless Christianity” – but had instead opted for mere “religion.” That is at the heart of what we will discuss: whether we might rise to that kind of faith and thereby avert the judgment Germany did not. In this book, I ultimately mean to sketch a vision of hope, that if we are now willing to pay the price God asks us to pay, we might not only avert or delay the coming judgment, but might launch a new era in history.

Among the reasons I have hope is that I am convinced God called me to write “Letter to the American Church” – and not merely to warn us of what lies ahead if we continue to fail to obey Him, but actually to call us to repent, which is His will for us. There is therefore a positive message at the heart of this book, just as there is a positive message at the heart of every one of God’s warnings. We do not serve a peevish and fatalistic God who enjoins us to do His will merely so that He can say, “I told you so.”

I am also hopeful because the response to “Letter to the American Church” has been extraordinarily positive. Many in the American church are clearly eager to repent of their failings and to find churches that understand where we are; they wish to be in the fight to which God now calls us. Countless people have written saying they have personally given scores of copies of the book to pastors, and several large conferences have been held to put the book’s message in front of further hundreds of pastors. Finally, my preaching on the book at Pastor Rob McCoy’s church in California led two Hollywood veterans in the congregation to make an extraordinary documentary film of the book, greatly multiplying the reach of this most urgent message.

Another reason that I am hopeful is rooted in Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.” Is it not possible that God has allowed us to see how quickly evil can overtake us in these last four years precisely to wake up those who might still be awakened? Are the evils that we see on every front not perhaps God’s tender mercies to us, just as a parent’s chastisement of a child is ultimately in the hope that that child will change his behavior in the right direction and thereby avert the far greater chastisements to come if he does not?

It is a fact that because of the evils all around, many in our nation are finally waking up and seeing the evilness of evil – and realizing that they must shake off their inertia and take action. Many who would not even have used the term “evil” now see there is no other way to frame the things we are seeing, which seem to make no human or otherwise natural sense – and if one sees real evil and knows it to be evil, one is likely to turn to God.

Many across our country are waking up to see that freedom is not free, and that they must become involved in their communities, whether politically or otherwise. Many see that we have come to this awful pass precisely because we have not been living out our faith heroically and in every sphere. Therefore, this endless litany of evils that have befallen us – the nightmare of transgender madness, critical race theory, cultural Marxism, and the increasing corruption in all of our institutions, from increasingly authoritarian government to the propagandistic journalistic establishment and the complicity and groupthink of corporate America and beyond – need not be God’s final and inevitable judgment. If we take action now, all of these things that have happened can be seen as God’s merciful wake-up call to a slumbering church, specifically so that we might repent and do all in our power to live for God in a new way.

So we must wonder whether the present difficulties might indeed lead us toward something like a Second Reformation, one of which we have hardly dreamt. Martin Luther, in standing against the corruptions of his day, could not foresee the Reformation that would follow, but it was dramatically more far-reaching than mere church reformation, with ramifications throughout Europe that ultimately led to the ideas enshrined in the American Founding.

Who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer?

For any unfamiliar with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s story, we may say that he was a German pastor and theologian who heroically opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and attempted to wake up the German church to stand strongly against them. I write about him at length in my 2010 biography, “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.” When Bonhoeffer saw the church fail in its duty to God and the German people, he eventually went outside the church and became involved in the assassination plots against Hitler, as we shall see. He became engaged to be married in 1942 and was imprisoned in 1943, where he continued to write. He was murdered by the Nazis in 1945, three weeks before the end of the war. He was thirty-nine years old.

Bonhoeffer was a theological genius, as well as a man of profound Christian faith. Perhaps what sets him apart most of all is that he knew that the goal of Christian faith was not merely to have good theology but actually to live out one’s faith. He also knew that pretending faith is a merely “religious” exercise, or an exercise of intellectual theology, is not only a mistake, but an offense against God. Jesus did not come to Earth so that people would become theologians, attend church once a week, and hold to some doctrines. Bonhoeffer knew that God demanded everything of us, and when one doesn’t live out one’s faith, it only proves that one had no faith to begin with.

Finally, as we will say at the end of this book, we need to think of Bonhoeffer’s use of the phrase “religionless Christianity” not merely as a lament for what might have been, but perhaps as a promise to us today of an extraordinarily hopeful way forward in which we really might live out our faith in a way unprecedented in human history.

Eric Metaxas’ books, including “Religionless Christianity” and “Letter to the American Church,” are available at his website, EricMetaxas.com.

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