Like the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Colossians circa 60 A.D., Metaxas’s passionate exhortation in his 139-page book is a megaphone warning to America’s churches to remember their mission to acknowledge God in all ways and not succumb to religious relativism and secular influence.
His premise draws an unapologetic parallel between Germany’s Lutheran church of the 1930s and America’s churches today. The former stood silently by while Hitler and the Nazis rose to power, and the latter are doing the same amid the maelstrom of Critical Race Theory, identity politics, and the sexualization of children swirling throughout our culture today.
The Example in Germany
Metaxas is also the author of “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy,” a biography of German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed by the Nazis. Throughout his latest book, Metaxas refers to Bonhoeffer’s courage and persistence as an example of how the American Church should act today.As Metaxas points out in Chapter 2, “Does God Ask Us to See the Future?,” the German Church of Bonhoeffer’s era did not have the benefit that churches have today. The German Church was unable to see what happens when a nation’s Christians are silent in the face of evil because, it had not happened before on such a large scale.
America’s churches don’t have that excuse. By ignoring the history of what happened in 1930s’ Germany, Christians do so at America’s peril.
“Because of the outsized role America plays in the world today, the importance of whether we learn the lesson of what happened to the German Church ninety years ago cannot be overstated,” he writes. “Though it may be a gruesome thing to consider, the monstrous evil that befell the civilized world precisely because of the German Church’s failure is likely a mere foretaste of what will befall the world if the American Church fails in a similar way at this hour.”
“And at present, we are indeed failing,” he says.
Metaxas says America is confronting a worse power than what the German Church faced in the 1930s. Rather than hyper-nationalistic forces, America is confronting anti-nationalist, global forces of evil.
Failing Their Mission
Metaxas points out, chapter and verse, four ways in which American churches are failing their mission.First, the misunderstanding of faith. Specifically, many churches today have reduced the concept of faith to what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.”
“We have relegated our faith to mere intellectual assent to some words and doctrines, and in doing so—ironically and tragically—we have proved that we do not actually believe those words or those doctrines at all. What could be more heartbreaking to God than that,” he writes in Chapter 7’s “Two Errors of Faith.”
Second is the idol of evangelism. Metaxas outlines the fallacy of churches that remain silent because they believe pushing back against cultural decline might offend and detract from what they believe is the church’s single goal of evangelizing.
“If we allow our ideological enemies to tell us what we can and cannot say and what views we can and cannot have, we have taken our eyes off God. If we honor Him in all we say and do, He will honor us,” Metaxas notes.
Third, Metaxas comments on the idea that Christians should avoid being political. He criticizes this view as wrong-headed and the primary reason why the German Church remained silent during Hitler’s ascendancy.
“In the end, we must only worry about what God thinks of what we say. We must look to Him and to Him alone—else we are in no wise free, but are in bondage to the spirit of the age in which we live,” he writes in Chapter 11, “Be Ye Not Political.”
Fourth is the pietistic attitude that Christians must place their own virtue and salvation above all else. Metaxas calls this “perfectly paralyzing” and prevents the believer from living and acting freely under God’s grace.
“To attempt to justify ourselves before God is to wish to be God ourselves, which never ends well,” Metaxas writes. “And whenever we do this we fall into the trap of behaving in a ‘religious’ way—which is to say we are actually falling into the trap of moralism.”
If America is to remain the shining city on a hill, Metaxas soberly reminds us that “silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
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