Bestselling Christian author and broadcaster Eric Metaxas is urging the all-encompassing American Church to work out their faith by standing up against the rising evil in modern culture, which he warns threatens to incur God’s judgment.
“It’s up to believers to speak up for what is right and good and true, and to bring our faith into the public square; not to be afraid of politics — but to get involved in politics — because this is one of the ways God has given us to effect change,” he told The Christian Post.
“I think a lot of people are more worried about being liked. They think that being a Christian means I don’t argue with people; I’m winsome all the time. And sometimes you have to battle,” the author explained while promoting a documentary adaptation of his 2022 book Letter to the American Church which premiered on US streaming service Epoch-TV last week.
The Christian Post reports: “The book and film draw sobering parallels between the American Church today and the passivity of the German Church in the 1930s. Metaxas warned that just as Christian leaders in Germany largely failed to stand against the rise of the Nazi regime that unleashed worldwide horrors, many American Christians are not sufficiently resisting the rising evil in the culture now.”
The author noted that German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prophetic warnings to Germans about idolatry in the German Church and the evils of National Socialism fell on deaf ears until it was too late. Pastor Bonhoeffer was accused of being involved in the July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and he was ultimately martyred at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945 just three weeks before Adolf Hitler took his own life .. and a month before the war in Europe ended.
Mr. Metaxas who wrote the bestselling 2011 biography Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, said he fears that the United States could face similar judgments if American Christians do not stand up. That Germans suffered because they didn’t listen to Pastor Bonhoeffer and similar voices “is precisely God’s message to the American Church today, to stand against the evil,” he said.
The fundamental message of Letter to the American Church is the idea that “we’ve got some theology wrong,” Mr. Metaxas asserted, adding that many have seemingly forgotten “that faith without works is dead, that we’ve got to bring our faith into action.” He told The Christian Post he believes many Evangelical churches in the US have drifted into a “fundamental misunderstanding of what the Scripture says” regarding the duty of Christians to have an impact on their culture, which he opines poses a danger in the face of rising cultural evil.
Eric Metaxas also dismissed the flashpoint term Christian Nationalist which he suggested is a phrase concocted by the devil to “shut people up.” He believes Satan wants Christians to be silent, but [God] “sent His Holy Spirit down and deputised His Church to be His voice in history. And when you have people come up with a term like Christian Nationalist and then [have] Christians who are so thin-skinned, or so really shallow in their faith, that’s all it takes to silence them.”
The author warned that “a culturally Marxist-atheistic worldview — an inhuman, cruel worldview — is being brought in. Open borders, transgender madness, rampant crime, a two-tiered justice system, parents being divided from their kids, insane trans ideology being forced, drag queen story hour. No matter where you look, you see this kind of madness.”
“If the Church does not rise against it to bring God’s eyes into the cultural sphere, then evil wins. And evil does win when the Church steps back. It happened in Germany,” he concluded.
Photo: Billy Graham Evangelistic Association
