Billy Hallowell interviews Eric Metaxas on Christians and politics. Watch:
OK, let’s break this down:
00:50: I think Metaxas really believes he is a prophet from God. He seems to know the will of the God. This makes sense, because he likes to hang out with charismatic “prophets.” While Metaxas likes to tout his Yale degree, he is at heart part of the Seven Mountain Dominionist crowd. His Yale degree offers intellectual cover for his anti-intellectual beliefs.
0:53: Metaxas continues to get mileage out of his biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a book that was panned by just about every Bonhoeffer scholar on the face of the earth.
1:00: Metaxas is right when he says that there were many Lutheran pastors in Germany who did not condemn Hitler. He is also right that Bonhoeffer opposed Hitler. But Metaxas’s attempt at a historical analogy only makes sense if one believes that Joe Biden and the Democrats are the equivalent of Hitler and the Nazis. They are not. Moreover, Metaxas has no clue about how to think seriously about the relationship between the past and present. History cannot predict the future. Metaxas thinks it does. Again, this sounds more like charismatic “prophecy” than history.
1:17: Metaxas says that pastors and other evangelicals who do not speak-out on political issues are being unbiblical. The debate over whether pastors should preach politics from the pulpit is an interesting one, but Metaxas isn’t interested in it. When he talks about pastors violating scriptural principles by not preaching politics from the pulpit, he is really saying that pastors should preach his politics from the pulpit. I would love to hear what Metaxas would think about a left-leaning biblical preacher who uses his pulpit to preach against racism, champion social justice and care for the environment, and/or defend the role government might play a role in advancing God’s kingdom.
2:00: Metaxas comes back to Bonhoeffer. He says that while all the Lutheran pastors in Germany in the 1930s were bowing to Hitler, Bonhoeffer stood up in resistance. Today’s evangelicals, he says, are just like those Lutheran pastors. Metaxas is a Bonhoeffer. But what if the opposite were true? What if Metaxas is the one bowing down to evil and those opposing the former president are the true prophets of God? Again, the only way of knowing the answer to this question is to know the mind of God. And Metaxas is pretty sure that he has a direct hotline.
3:40: Metaxas says that “Christian nationalism” is the “devil’s term for actual Christians who live out their faith in all spheres.” Really? I actually know a lot of people who live out their faith “in all spheres” and do not end up in MAGA land or endorse the idea that the United States is a Christian nation that must be reclaimed for Christ.
6:20: Metaxas says that Christians are commanded to love their neighbors in the same breath that he calls anyone who disagrees with him “wicked” and “diabolical.”
6:30: Metaxas makes multiple plugs for his books. Let’s not forget that he is probably making a lot of money peddling this stuff.
8:00: Metaxas, one of the kings of cancel culture, says that cancel culture is a “demonic spirit.” He says the French Revolution, the Mao Revolution in China, and the Russian Revolution were also demonic. Metaxas is the kind of “historian” many on the Christian Right love. This is probably why he sells so many books. He is offering a “providential history” driven by a hubris. Eric Metaxas does not “see through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12), he instead claims to understand the secret things of God. He fails to recognize that while God is indeed “the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords,” he also ‘lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see (1 Tim. 6:15-16).
As St. Augustine wrote: “There are good men who suffer evils and evil men who enjoy good things, which seems unjust, and there are bad men who come to a bad end, and good men who arrive at a good one. Thus the judgments of God are all the more inscrutable, and His ways past finding out. We do not know, therefore, by what judgment God causes or allows these things to pass.”
Listen to the rest here.
The single most depressing thing about American religion is how utterly predictable it is that manipulative hucksterism works so well. One of the reasons I had to put some distance between the field and myself, or I was going to go mad.